Years ago I took a course on Tudor and Stuart England. Its primary focus was more on social and cultural aspects of British society at the time, rather than diplomatic history. Later I took an interest in the England of the Civil War era. One thing that struck me was the unquestioned acceptance of monarchy in the minds of the people, from high nobility to low commoner. Like the Romans before the Visigothic sack in the early 5th century these were a people who could not imagine a world any different than the one they had known. That is one of the things which made the execution of Charles I so shocking to many contemporaries. Myself, I was tacitly indoctrinated in American republicanism as a child. Films like the The Patriot grow in the rich soil of the same cultural environment which gave rise to the phenomenon of the antagonists in Roman era films speaking with British accents while the protagonists had robust American drawls. As I spent my formative years on the fringes of of New England there was particular pride taken in that region’s early role ...

I haven’t had these for a while. Following a request from the new year I’ve been mulling how to write up Population Structure and Eigenanalysis in an intelligible manner to the general readership. Still kind of at an impasse. On a logistical note, my email address is really getting on way too many mailing lists. If you want a prompt response from me twitter might be best, at least until I get overwhelmed by the noise on that service and move on to something else….

Over the past few days some friends have started receiving their results from 23andMe’s last sale (others have put me on notice to inform them of the next discount window). This brings me to thinking about direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and the legal and technological framework in which we live. In relation to the former thanks to Daniel Vorhaus the F.D.A. has reopened the public docket on this issue, until May 2nd. So Monday. The best way to submit is online: http://www.regulations.gov, and reference docket ID FDA-2011-N-0066. I believe this direct link to the submission page should work as well. You obviously know my opinion. Here are some sample submissions. You can also see the submissions so far at this address. Some of them are quite succinct: “FDA let people access their genetic information since it’s one of basic right of human being.”

Dr. Daniel MacArthur has more sage commentary, as usual.

Have a good weekend!

“INTRODUCTION: The average bicycle police officer spends 24 hours a week on his bicycle and previous studies have shown riding a bicycle with a traditional (nosed) saddle has been associated with urogenital paresthesia and sexual dysfunction.

AIM: The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the no-nose bicycle saddle as an ergonomic intervention and their acceptance among male bicycle police officers.

METHODS: Bicycle police officers from five U.S. metropolitan areas were recruited for this study. Officers completed: (i) the International Index of Erectile Function Questionnaire (IIEF); (ii) computerized pressure measurements at the points of contact on the bicycle; the handlebars, the pedals, and the saddle; (iii) one night of nocturnal Rigiscan assessment; (iv) penile vibrotactile sensitivity threshold assessed by computerized biothesiometery. Officers selected a no-nose saddle for their bicycles and were asked to use the intervention saddle exclusively for 6 months, at which point they were retested.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Perineal pressure, urogenital numbness, penile vibrotactile sensitivity threshold, erectile function as measure by International Index of Erectile Function Questionnaire (IIEF) and Rigiscan.

RESULTS: After 6 months, 90 men were reassessed. Only three men had returned to a traditional saddle. The results are presented for ...

In the wake of the post from earlier this week on the inbreeding within the House of Windsor (and current lack thereof), Luke Jostins, a subject of the British monarch, has a nice informative post up, Inbreeding, Genetic Disease and the Royal Wedding. This tidbit is of particular interest:

In fact, eleventh cousins is a pretty low degree of relatedness, by the standard of these things. A study of inbreeding in European populations found that couples from the UK are, on average, as genetically related as 6th cousins (the study looked at inbreeding in Scots, and in children of one Orkadian and one non-Orkadian. No English people, but I would be very suprised if we differed significantly). 6th cousins share about 0.006% of their DNA, and thus have about a 0.06% chance of developing a genetic disease via a common ancestor. Giving that the Royal Family are better than most at genealogy, we can probably conclude that the royal couple are less closely related than the average UK couple, and thus their children are less likely than most to suffer from a genetic disease. Good news for them, bad news for geneticists, perhaps?

That’s an interesting flip side of aristocratic ...

If the Air Force gets its way, it will have spying eyes hidden in the very motes on its enemies’ boots. In a wonderfully vague request this week, the Air Force called for companies to design miniature drones capable of dusting targets with signal-emitting particles. They say the technology (assuming it works) could be used to identify civilians or track wildlife, which is military-speak for “we want to track and kill terrorists, not bunnies.”

According to the request, the Air Force wants a small remotely piloted aircraft, or SRPA, that would “unobtrusively distribute taggants onto moving targets.” They describe taggants as tiny electro-magnetic-emitting devices. The key part of the request is for the tracked person to not be aware that he’s being tracked. The request makes the laughable point that a swooping SRPA or tracking-device-laden paint ball probably wouldn’t be obtrusive enough because “the target would obviously notice a swooping SRPA and likely feel the sting of the well-placed pellet.” (Either that, or you’re dealing with one very unaware terrorist.)

To be unobtrusive enough, the Air Force says that the drone should be able to deliver a ...

What’s the News: British scientists searching for signs of climate change in banded snail shells have completed one of the largest evolutionary studies ever, a massive survey across 15 European countries. Their research associates? More than 6,000 snail-hunting volunteers.

How the Heck:

Banded snails are sensitive to the sun, and lighter-colored shells reflect more sunlight than darker shells, helping them keep cool. The scientists in charge of the study, run by Open University, hypothesized that the 1.3° C climb in temperature since the 1950s would have given lighter snails an evolutionary advantage. Armed with shell color data from the ’50s through the ’90s, they set out to see if the number of light snails had grown.
To get samples from the present day, they enlisted the help of volunteers through the Evolution Megalab project, launched in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday in April 2009. Volunteers registered on the site, learned to identify the different colors of snail shell, and set out scrounging around hedges and weeds over the course of six months. They submitted data sheets online, marking where they had found the snails on Google Maps so scientists could tell what habitat they were in—grassland, hedgerow, ...

I am not an expert in gender diversity in the sciences, but through my reading and talking about it with scientists, it appears that big strides have been made in the past decade or two, but the goal of gender equity is obviously still a ways off.

One thing I do know is that all disciplines need role models, and I just found out about an interesting web site called Women in Planetary Sciences (motto: "Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?") which has a series of interviews with women planetary scientists. I know a few of these folks — like Emily Lakdawalla, Heidi Hammel, and Sara Seager, names that may be familiar to regular BA readers — and reading their stories is pretty interesting.

If you know a girl or woman interested in planetary science, or any science, then please send them that link. I think they’ll find some encouragement and support from the words of these women who have been so successful in exploring the Universe.

“Quick Black Hole Spin“, by Edward Sanders

I don’t like it—

two massive Black Holes
each twirling at the core of
                      two merging galaxies

get close enough
to fuse together

then quick as a wink
just as they are melting into a New Black Hole Blob

they undergo something called a "spin-flip"

they change the axes of their spins
and the fused-together Black Hole Blob
gets its own

          quick as a cricket’s foot

Don’t like it at all

And then the new Black Hole Blob sometimes
bounces back and forth inside
                              its mergèd Galaxy

till it settles at the center

but sometimes a "newly" up-sized Black Hole

leaves its Galaxy
to sail out munchingly on its own
                                 into the Universal It

I don’t like it

Nothing about it
in the Bhagavad Gita
the Book of Revelation
Shakespeare, Sappho, or Allen Ginsberg

Metastatic melanoma cells

What’s the News: Souped-up cells from a patient’s own immune system could one day be used to treat advanced melanoma, according to a preliminary study published in Science Translational Medicine investigating the safety of the technique. The researchers manipulated a patient’s immune system cells to better recognize cancer cells in the lab and then re-introduced those cells into the body—an approach called “adoptive T-cell therapy.”

How the Heck:

The researchers took T-cells, one of the main classes of cells the immune system uses to fight off disease, from nine patients with advanced melanoma.
Using genetically engineered cells that have some of the same antigens—the sorts of molecules that immune cells take as a signal to attack—that tumor cells do, the researchers in effect improved the T-cells’ memory for cancer cells.
They then multiplied the cells, so they’d be more numerous inside the body, and infused each patient with their own cells. This infusion of souped-up cancer-targeting cells boosts the immune system’s ability to combat the cancer.
Ten weeks later, seven of the patients had more of the specially trained T-cells than were originally re-introduced. Of the nine patients in total, the cancer stabilized in ...

Charles Darwin was the original crowd-sourced scientist. He may have reputation as a recluse who hid away on his country estate, but he actually turned Down House into the headquarters for a massive letter-writing campaign that lasted for decades. In her magisterial biography of Darwin, Janet Browne observes that he sometimes wrote over 1500 letters in a single year. Darwin was gathering biological intelligence, amassing the data he would eventually marshall in his arguments for evolution. In the letters he wrote to naturalists around the world, Darwin asked for details about all manner of natural history, from the color of horses in Jamaica to the blush that shame brought to people’s cheeks.

Given the skill with which Darwin used the nineteenth-century postal system, I always wonder what he would have done with the Internet. A new paper offers a clue: he might have enlisted thousands of citizen scientists to observe evolutionary change happening across an entire continent.

Darwin used his Victorian crowd-sourcing to collect evidence that was consistent with his evolutionary theory; he didn’t expect that he could actually document evolutionary change happening in his own ...

On MSNBC last night, Chris Hayes quoted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs:

There are no more arbiters of truth. So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.

Great quote–but why have we crossed “some Rubicon”? Last night on the air, Jonathan Kay attributed it to the Internet echo chamber effect: People are selecting their information sources based on what they believe, then getting their beliefs reaffirmed, etc. Politico makes the same attribution–following, in turn, the logic of the White House itself (as quoted in the Politico story).

This explanation is not sufficient, I say.

First, there’s been a trend over 40 years to create conservative think tanks that put out their own version of reality and their own version of expertise–so that now, “for every Ph.D. there’s an equal and opposite Ph.D.,” to quote Andy Revkin from somewhere or other. Meanwhile, Fox News has a stronger effect on unreal perceptions than blogs, I would say, and it is “old media.”

In fact, media balancing itself creates a more postmodern culture, as we know from the research. And again, we’re talking about old media, not new.

So the question is much more complicated, and you can’t just blame the Internet. What do others think? Are there other factors I’ve neglected?

I’ve spent a lot of time — a lot — observing the Moon. I include using my naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes of all sizes (including Hubble, come to think of it) over many years, since I was a kid.

And in all that time, I’ve never had the good fortune to see something like this:

Tom Guilmette took this video at Fenway Park in 2010, and I’m not jealous of his good timing at all. Really. I’m not.

Dammit.

Tip o’ the oxygen mask to Ronnie Harris.

Related posts:

- When natural and artificial moons align
- Two solar ISS transits
- Claire de lune
- Squishy Moonrise seen from space

I’m giving a talk this evening in Indianapolis, hosted by the local Center for Inquiry–details here.

I had been planning to talk about “Unscientific America,” but given the demand and the way the issue is resonating in the news (thanks to those birthers), I’ve changed topics to “The Science of Why We Deny Science.”

Never been to Indy before–this should be good. Blogging may suffer a tad, but, well, it’s Friday….

A number of Loominaries have asked if there is a Kindle version of A Planet of Viruses. As of this morning, the answer’s yes. Please infect your reading device!

The chip at the core of the Sprite
microsatellite is smaller than a dime.

What’s the News: Imagine a cloud of tiny satellites, each no larger than a postage stamp, sailing like dust on solar winds through a planet’s atmosphere and sending radio signals home, with no need for fuel. When a small patch of real estate opened up on an International Space Station experiment, researchers jumped at the chance to test the durability of such tiny “satellites on a chip,” which they hope to eventually deploy in atmospheres like Saturn’s, and three of the miniature objects are being delivered to the Space Station by Endeavor on its final flight (which was just scrubbed for today). They will allow researchers to see how well such microsatellites hold up to radiation and other rigors of space.

How the Heck:

The mini-satellites, developed by Cornell University and Sandia National Laboratories and called “Sprites,” are intended to take data about chemistry, radiation, and other properties—they could even be used to detect whether a planet’s atmosphere has any chemical signatures of possible life, such as nitrogen.
Instead of using fuel, the tiny printed squares of silicon would rely on physical ...

1) First, a post from the past: Taste & behavior genetics.

2) Weird search query of the week (#5 keyword!): “china provinces”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “What is best in life?”:

You do know that Red Sonja is the third Conan movie?

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

In the wake of yesterday’s review of a paper on heritable variance in trait preferences realized in romantic partners I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this new study out of PLoS ONE, Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices. It’s actually a pretty thin piece of work in all honesty from what I can tell. They wanted to query ancestral ranges of marriage patterns by mapping the cultural variation in customs onto a phylogenetic tree. To generate that tree they took mtDNA sequences, which to me seems kind of old school. Using the cultural patterns present in living hunter-gatherer groups they presumed they could infer the ancestral state.

So combining these two sources of data they generated this:

They conclude:

Arranged marriages are inferred to go back at least to first modern human migrations out of Africa. Reconstructions are equivocal on whether or not earlier human marriages were arranged because several African hunter-gatherers have courtship marriages. Phylogenetic reconstructions suggest that marriages in early ancestral human societies probably had low levels of polygyny (low reproductive skew) and reciprocal exchanges between the families of marital partners (i.e., brideservice or brideprice).

There’s an ...

I was just on MSNBC with Chris Hayes (substituting for Lawrence O’Donnell), here is the clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Zack Ajmal has posted his K = 11 Reference 3 results including Harappa Ancestry Project participants. Below are the results sorted by the East Asian, South Asian, and Onge. I limited it to those who had 5% or more East Asian. All caps = reference populations. The rest are individuals from HAP:

Group
Subgroup
Ethnicity
S Asian
Onge
E Asian Austro-Asiatic
Khasic
KHASI
21%
21%
48% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
JUANG
26%
43%
28% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
BONDA
27%
44%
27% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
GADABA
29%
42%
24% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
KHARIA
33%
44%
21% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
SAVARA
33%
44%
21% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
HO
34%
44%
20% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
MAWASI
38%
44%
16% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
ASUR
42%
42%
14% Austro-Asiatic
Munda
SANTHAL
40%
45%
13% Indo-European
Indo-European
SAHARIYA
44%
39%
12%

Bengali
51%
28%
12%

Bengali
49%
28%
11% Indo-European
Indo-European
SATNAMI
49%
36%
8%
Isolate
BURUSHO
47%
10%
6%

Bengali
54%
29%
6%

Bengali/Oriya
53%
29%
5% Dravidian
Dravidian
MALAYAN
50%
42%
5%

UP
48%
21%
5%

That’s my parents at 12 and 11 percent East Asian. Using the new reference population Zack estimates that my “Ancestral South Indian” (ASI) is ~43%. That makes more sense to me that Dodecad’s estimate of ~34%. I think that Dodecad method was confused because I do have genuine East Asian admixture, and the estimate of “Ancestral North India” (ANI) vs. ASI is confounded by other components. I suspect that the estimates of Onge are probably less valid for groups like the Khasi because of bleeding over from the East Asian component (in other words, the regression which Zack used to predict ASI is fitted to South Asian populations without East Asian admixture, and isn’t fully transferable to those that have it). But the geographical breakdown of the East Asian element is pretty striking, if expected. ...