Genomes Unzipped points me to a Nature survey on personal genomics for scientific researchers. With price points down to $200 or so many scientists have been at least genotyped. Though it varies by domain. Many molecular biologists seem intrigued by the novelty of personal genotyping services. In contrast, in a room of a dozen or [...]

This piece in The New York Times goes through the A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s, of Rick Perry’s transcript. Two questions which come to mind: 1) If we know this about Perry, why shouldn’t we know this about all the candidates? I don’t know what getting a B in business law and a D [...]

I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some [...]

Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with [...]

Last fall, it came to light that researchers had infected 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients with syphilis in a US Public Health Service study between 1946 and 1948. The American government apologized  for these “abhorrent” practices, and promised to investigate what had happened. A White House bioethics commission released its report on the study this [...]

I’m going to address two points in this post. The next possible target for getting an undersampled population, and the Malagasy results. First, lots of great submissions in regards to populations which are undersampled. Some of them are actually already in the data sets. For example, the Burusho and Kalash are in the HGDP. There [...]

Where is the cup? THERE IS NO CUP.   What’s the News: Ever since Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, proposed that sufficiently advanced computers could pass as human in a conversation, the classic Turing test has involved what’s essentially instant messaging. Computers designed to imitate human conversational patterns are often entered by their [...]

I’ve posted lots of pictures of globular clusters in the past, but this new one is something special. And not just because it’s stunningly beautiful… which it is: [Click to spheroidenate, or grab the massively embiggened 3850x3850 pixel version.] This is Hubble’s view of NGC 7006, a relatively faint cluster of a hundred or so [...]

So I went to a Greek festival last weekend, and ate a ton of really good food. It was outside, with lots of tents set up with different cuisine, and one of them made me smile. I took the picture here, and tweeted this: "At a Greek festival, where they’re serving spicy grilled astrophysicist," linking [...]

Some parents give their children a head start in life by lavishing them with money or opportunities. The mother seed beetle (Mimosestes amicus) does so by providing her children with shields to defend them from body-snatchers. A female seed beetle abandons her eggs after laying them. Until they hatch, they are vulnerable to body-snatching parasites, [...]

Today, September 14, 2011, is the vernal equinox for the northern hemisphere of Mars! If you want to be technical, it’s the time when the axis of Martian rotation is perpendicular to the direction of the Sun, and the northern hemisphere is headed into summer (making it the autumnal equinox for the southern hemisphere). When [...]

The answer, according to a new study, is making them feel better about themselves. As I report:

…the contested issues under examination were whether the 2007 troop “Surge” decreased insurgent attacks in Iraq (it did), whether the U.S. economy added jobs during 2010 under President Obama (it did), and whether global average temperatures have risen since 1940 (they have). Those who opposed the Iraq war and supported troop withdrawals were disinclined to credit George W. Bush’s surge with having worked. Those who oppose President Obama are disinclined to credit him on the economy, or to generally believe in global warming—especially that it is human caused.

Nyhan and Reifler once again confronted partisans with information on these subjects that (presumably) contradicted their beliefs—but there was a twist. This time, the contradictory information was sometimes presented in the form of a convincing graph, showing a clear trend (in attacks, jobs, or temperatures). And second, sometimes the individuals went into the manipulation after having undergone a “self-affirmation” exercise, in which they were asked to describe a positive character attribute or value that they possessed, and a situation in which showing that attribute or trait made them feel good about themselves.

And in both cases, the manipulation worked—although by different means.

Presenting an unequivocal graph was powerful enough to change people’s views, even as presenting technical text (at least in the rising temperatures case) was not. Meanwhile, getting people to affirm their values and sense of self also decreased their resistance, presumably because they felt less threatened by challenging information after having had their egos reinforced and their identities bolstered.

Read on here. Huge implications for effective science communication.

The Nile crocodile is a truly iconic animal. Or, more accurately, two iconic animals. As I’ve just written over at Nature News: The iconic Nile crocodile actually comprises two different species — and they are only distantly related. The large east African Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) is in fact more closely related to four species [...]

If you ask someone to guess the number of sweets in a jar, the odds that they’ll land upon the right number are low – fairground raffles rely on that inaccuracy. But if you ask many people to take guesses, something odd happens. Even though their individual answers can be wildly off, the average of [...]

Here’s a gratifying review of A Planet of Viruses, just out in the Washington Post: In A Planet of Viruses (Univ. of Chicago, $20), science writer Carl Zimmer accomplishes in a mere 100 pages what other authors struggle to do in 500: He reshapes our understanding of the hidden realities at the core of everyday [...]

If you’ve ever wondered what it must feel like to fly around the Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour, then wonder no more. [Make sure you set it to the highest resolution, then make it full screen. You're welcome.] I saw this on Universe Today, where you can get details, as well as in the [...]

The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically [...]

Very busy week. I don’t have time to look for past posts and I haven’t been reading the comments closely, so I’m skipping those. 1) Weird search query of the week: “why, according to christian, did foragers become farmers?.” 2) And finally, your weekly fluff fix: (a guest kat who made as sojourn at casa [...]

UPDATE:  Solved by Kristian at 1:14

YAY!  Looks like we’re back on track for the weekly riddle.  You missed me, didn’t you?  I know you did; admit it.  I apologize for the abrupt “vacation”, but it truly could not be helped.

My DSL is spotty, so it may take me a moment or two to respond to your guesses.  Hang in there.  I’m around — I’m just trapped under a pile of collapsed internet.

So, let’s get to guessing!  You’ll look to the real world to find the answer to today’s riddle, although you could also find it in fantasy and fiction.

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Early man probably knew today’s answer, but it took a while to figure out its true nature.

This shows evidence of quite a violent early life.

For some reason, this is warm where it should be cool, and cool where it should be warm.

My favorite gemstone -- the aquamarine

To us, this is a giant — but among its own kind, it’s something of a pipsqueak.

Its arrangement is very much like a cherry.

In theory, this is a place where water gets weird.

I bet when this object was a child, it got teased about its name.

Speaking of names, something around this should make you think of British playwrights.

You will have read about this in the “Cthulhu Mythos”.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot and Junior - NASA

There you have it, nice and tidy and ready for you to solve.  Remember, if it takes me a minute or two to answer, I’m just digging my way out of a smoking pile of crashed internet.  Good luck!

Top picks Italian seismologists are being accused of manslaughter for not predicting the L’Aquila quake. Great feature by Stephen S Hall The dark side of the placebo effect: Alexis Madrigal looks at instances when belief can kill Wonderful Robert Krulwich post about “extreme tidying up” “Victor may have cerebral palsy, but cerebral palsy does not [...]