Blaine Bettinger, who released his genotypes into the “public domain,” has a post up, My Genome Online – A Challenge To You:

I’ve already done a fair amount of analysis myself, including the Promethease reports above (and see here), and a recent blog post about my vastly increased Type 2 Diabetes risk. However, perhaps there’s a recent but relatively study that applies, or perhaps there’s a story you can weave with a handful of SNPs. Or, even better, what can you tell me about my ancestry other than mtDNA and Y-DNA haplogroups? Don’t worry about the strength of the study, reproducibility, etc. – I’m aware of the uncertainties associated with this type of research, and my goal here is to make people aware of possibilities.

Please post your findings in the comments below, and in two weeks I’ll pick the most surprising or interesting findings and make them the focus of a new blog post.

Can you surprise me with my own genome.

As Blaine notes there are dozens of genotypes online which aren’t anonymous (obviously you can get plenty of genotype data from the HGDP and what not). I’m pretty sure that there will be thousands online in a few ...

I love pictures of the Earth from space. They give us a great perspective on our little planet down here. And sometimes they are simply stunning for their own sake… like this shot of lightning internally illuminating a storm cloud over Brazil:

[Click to 1.21gigawattenate.]

That was taken by astronaut Paolo Nespoli in January 2011 as the Space Station passed overhead. Having lived in several storm-prone areas I’ve seen lightning flash in huge thunderclouds from below, from the side, and even once from above in an airplane (which was awesome and terrifying), but never like this. If it weren’t for the caption on that picture I’d have never guessed what it was. Amazing.

I have to laugh, though: given the language they speak in Brazil, isn’t it funny it looks like a Portuguese Man o’ war?

Image Credit: ESA/NASA

Related posts:

- Epic lightning storm electrocuting Saturn… for eight months
- Who says clouds screw up observing?
- A shadow across the Shuttle
- Squishy Moonrise seen from space

The story of a PhD student weaving his way through a busy university corridor doesn’t usually make for breaking news. But then the average PhD student isn’t wheelchair-bound, visually impaired, and testing a new laser-based wheelchair navigation system. In front of a crowd of onlookers earlier this month, a student performed the first public demonstration of a wheelchair that lets blind people “see” and avoid obstacles, afterward remarking that it was just “like using a white cane” (presumably underselling the technology to blunt the jealousy blooming in the onlookers).

From the user’s perspective, the new high-tech wheelchair is quite simple: You hold a joystick in one hand to drive the motorized chair, while the other hand engages a “haptic interface” that gives tactile feedback warning you about objects in your path, be they walls, fire hydrants, or those mobile collision-makers called people.

Developed at Sweden’s Luleå University of Technology (who brought us the autonomous wheelchair), this wheelchair uses lasers that make use of the time of flight technique, wherein “a laser pulse is sent out and a portion of the pulse is reflected from any surface encountered,” and the distance ...

What’s the News: Most poisonous snakes don’t inject their prey with venom; instead, they bite the prey and venom insidiously trickles down a groove on their fangs into the wound. A new study in Physical Review Letters investigated the physics behind how venom travels down the grooves: It turns out that snake venom has unusual viscosity properties that keep it cohering together until it’s time to flow down the fangs and into the snake’s soon-to-be-snack—the same properties that account for how ketchup seems stuck in the bottle, then flows freely onto your fries.

How the Heck:

The researchers found that snake venom, like ketchup, is a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning that its viscosity depends on how fast it’s moving. Before the snake’s fangs make contact, the venom sticks together pretty well, rather than coming down the tooth in a constant trickle. Once the fangs sink in, however, and the venom starts dripping down the groove, it flows freely.
What starts the venom flowing, ...

The most interesting chart below is infant mortality rate over time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also known as the RPM.  I couldn’t resist since this will happen only one more time.

>?<

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I also liked the video of the External tank falling back towards the ground.

Click here to view the embedded video.

>?<

Over the Halloween weekend this year, October 27–30, 2011, in New Orleans, the Center for Inquiry (CfI) is hosting a critical thinking meeting called CSICon. It’ll be at the New Orleans Marriott in the French Quarter.

I’ll be at this meeting, speaking on a panel with Seth Shostak and David Morrison called — get this — Death from the Skies. And yeah, it’ll be on just what you think it’ll be on.

The meeting should be pretty great, if only because it includes a parade and a costume party. But also, speaker list is pretty impressive. I’ll have to bring my A game.

Wanna go? Register here. And check out the Facebook page, too. This will be a lot of fun.

And don’t forget TAM 9 in Vegas in July, too!

I went over to the WeCanKnow.com site: The countdown to rapture is at “0 months, 0 days.” The Family Radio site is also silent–as is the strangely unpopular Twitter feed, which I just followed.

So now it is time for some answers. Southern Baptist Ed Stetzer has put it well:

“Harold Camping, pls update http://www.family.radio.com w/your repentance statement & instructions to your now-broke followers,” Stetzer tweeted.

Like I said before, I don’t expect any repentance. I expect rationalization. But surely something needs to be said–fast. This false prediction drew massive media attention, and some very unfortunate people changed their lives–gave up their lives, basically–because of it. Prophets bear great responsibility–especially when they’re wrong.

P.S.: Gotta love the New York Times headline: “Despite Careful Calculations, The World Does Not End.”

I recently listened to Paul Ewald talk about how a lot of cancer is due to infection on the radio. That wasn’t too surprising, Ewald has been making the case for a connection between infection and lots of diseases for a while. What jumped out at me is his claim that kissing can spread some of the viruses. Here’s something he told Discover a few years back:

D: How do we get infected with these dangerous pathogens?

PE: Two of the most powerful examples are sexual transmission and kissing transmission, and by that I mean juicy kissing, not just a peck on the cheek. If you think about these modes of transmission, in which it might be a decade before a person has another partner, you realize that rapidly replicating is not very valuable—the winning strategy for the microbe would be to keep a low profile, requiring persistent infections for years. So we would expect that disproportionately, the sexually transmitted pathogens would be involved in causing cancer, or chronic diseases in general. You can test this. Just look at the pathogens that are accepted as causing cancer—Epstein-Barr virus, Kaposi’s sarcoma–associated herpesvirus, human T lymphotropic virus 1—and find out whether they’re ...

Both Eurogenes and Harappa now have map interfaces where you can drop in the origin of your location if you’re a participant. If you have submitted your data you should add your information in. We’re at a point where data is relatively plentiful, at least before the tsunami of whole genomes, so visualization and representation is of the essence.

Here’s HAP:

In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Make Great Bedfellows:

Fast Company has a write up of the survey, concluding:

What can we learn from this data? Smart gadgets are pervasive. They’re already changing long-held habits, and doing so very fast. If you’re a content creator on almost any platform, you’ll need to be aware of how your audience’s attention is changing, and if you’re a marketer then think of the plethora of new ways to appeal to the public through their emerging habits.

One thing I notice about reading on the Kindle is that I’m more likely to finish books I begin front-to-back, because the device keeps my place. Flipping through the “book” is actually not as fluid, so in some ways I guess the Kindle is enforcing a retro-traditional reading style on me.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Roger at 12:02

Happy Saturday to everyone.  Today’s riddle is a fast one, so get ready to land in the middle of it!

You’ll be looking for something in the real world today.

 

Long thought to be a companion, this item may turn out to be something more on closer inspection.

“Closer inspection” is closer than you might think.

You may wonder, as many scientists do, whether to consider this differentiated or uniform.

The Divine Comedy

This shows up in early mythology as something of a boogieman.

His press got kinder and gentler as time passed.

But not much.

US Currency - silver dollars

Nothing is given here that is not paid for.

If you can’t afford to pay, you’re pretty much stuck.

You certainly can’t go back the way you came.

Solar system by Isaac Lincoln

Got any bright ideas?  As I said, this is a fast one, so get your guess to me without delay.  You know where to find me.

spider attack

Strange print going on today, but you should be able to read the clues with no problems.  I keep trying to “fix” it, and I’ll mess it up for sure.

Top thirteen picks

“It’s not a disease. It doesn’t need curing.” Steve Silberman talks to John Robison, a “free-range Aspergian” and best-selling author.

How to fund research so that it generates insanely great ideas, not pretty good ones – an awesome piece by Tim Harford.

Looking for empathy – v.good account of fMRI experiments in action, by Kristina Bjoran. I’m very dubious about whether this approach will yield anything, but Bjoran acknowledges and discusses the controversies about fMRI and describes the process well.

A great three-part series on Alan Turing’s homosexuality & how it was treated as a mental illness, by Romeo Vitelli.

Beautiful article on how one man’s death saved the lives of seven others

How ‘Hotel-Room Journalism’ Uncovered a Qaddafi Bunker

You might get cancer. Oh and your dad isn’t your dad. How a 23andMe test profoundly changed a woman’s life

A “kinder, gentler rib spreader” by Carl Zimmer

Plague in LA. And the man who gave plague his name. This blog is two-posts old but *what posts*!

Prophecy Fail. Vaughan Bell explores what happens to doomsday cults when the world inconsiderately refuses to end.

Levees can make things worse. A great and relevant post by Anne ...

Today is Caturday, expanded in these parts to include all animals, things animal-like, and pretty much whatever I want it to mean.

Including dogs. My brother-in-law Chris is a photographer, and snapped this funny picture of my pseudonymous dog Canis Minor just as she was about to do one of her favorite things in the whole world: catch a ball.

I love my dogs. They’re friendly, smart, quirky, and loving themselves. But it’s pictures like this that remind me that while we may have domesticated them (really, domesticated each other), there remains some of that fierceness of their pack hunting past in them.

I was in a conversation recently about how smart dogs are, and whether they are self-aware. It was an interesting topic, and it centered on humor; it seems logical that to have humor you must be self-aware. Do other animals besides us have senses of humor? Dolphins?

Maybe dogs don’t (they can’t pass the mirror test, apparently*), but they sure know how to have fun. Check out the next picture Chris took of Canis Minor if you’re not sure.

I’ll note ...

The Dawn Spacecraft, launched September 27, 2007 (and getting a gravity boost from Mars in February 2009), is headed for the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.

NASA/JPL Dawn trajectory

This next image, processed to show the true size of the giant asteroid Vesta, shows Vesta in front of a spectacular background of stars.  NASA got this image May 3rd:

NASA/JPL Dawn

“Since Vesta is so bright that it outshines its starry background, Dawn team members commanded a long exposure time to make the stars visible. They corrected the resulting exaggerated size of Vesta by superimposing a short exposure image of the target asteroid, showing its true size. Vesta is the small, bright pearl in the middle of the image.”  (NASA)

Isn’t that great?  Here’s the same image, without the processing:

NASA/JPL Dawn

“This image shows the first, unprocessed image obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of the giant asteroid Vesta in front of a background of stars. It was obtained by Dawn’s framing camera on May 3, 2011, from a distance of about 1.2 million kilometers, or 750,000 miles.” (NASA)

Here’s what NASA had to say about Dawn’s adventures:

NASA Dawn Spacecraft Captures First Image Of Nearing Asteroid

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn expects to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 117 million miles from Earth.

The image from Dawn’s framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles (1.21 million km) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.

“After plying the seas of space for more than a billion miles, the Dawn team finally spotted its target,” said Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “This first image hints of detailed portraits to come from Dawn’s upcoming visit.”

Vesta is 330 miles (530 km) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes obtained images of the bright orb for about two centuries, but with little surface detail.

Mission managers expect Vesta’s gravity to capture Dawn in orbit on July 16. To enter orbit, Dawn must match the asteroid’s path around the sun, which requires very precise knowledge of the body’s location and speed. By analyzing where Vesta appears relative to stars in framing camera images, navigators will pin down its location and enable engineers to refine the spacecraft’s trajectory.

Dawn will start collecting science data in early August at an altitude of approximately 1,700 miles (2,700 km) above the asteroid’s surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, it will snap multi-angle images allowing scientists to produce topographic maps. Dawn will later orbit at approximately 120 miles (200 km) to perform other measurements and obtain closer shots of parts of the surface. Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for one year. After another long cruise phase, Dawn will arrive in 2015 at its second destination, Ceres, an even more massive body in the asteroid belt.

Gathering information about these two icons of the asteroid belt will help scientists unlock the secrets of our solar system’s early history. The mission will compare and contrast the two giant asteroids shaped by different forces. Dawn’s science instruments will measure surface composition, topography and texture. Dawn also will measure the tug of gravity from Vesta and Ceres to learn more about their internal structures. The spacecraft’s full odyssey will take it on a 3-billion-mile (5-billion-km) journey, which began with its launch in September 2007.

Dawn’s mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The University of California in Los Angeles is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau in Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering in Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR.

Venus and Jupiter pair up in the morning sky. This is looking east at 04:45. Click for May 12 pairing.

If you can get outside before daylight tomorrow and for the next few days you can get a look at the nice Jupiter/Venus pairing in the east.  Before daylight means after about 04:30 and about 05:00.  If you go out at 05:30 like I did this morning it will be too light out (in the northern hemisphere at least).  Pity too because this morning they were pretty close together.  Given the topography here the planets might not clear the mountain in time for me to see them anyway.

The images give you a representation of what you will see. The picture shows this morning and if you click it you will get tomorrow.  You will notice they spread out a little and that trend will continue as the days go by.  Venus will be somewhat brighter than Jupiter and both will be the brightest thing in the east provided the sun isn’t up.

I’ve been good about getting outside between 03:00 and 03:40. This morning the sky was amazing, I spent my time looking at Sagittarius, Scorpio and Antares. They are low in my southern horizon if you are up and about at such hours you should get a good look at them.

I kind of like the My Favorite Astronomer theme, I have two.  I will share one tomorrow.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my two favorite astronomers is UCLA Professor Andrea Ghez.

For his post subject, Bill gave me the opportunity to pick a famous astronomer and do a “thumbnail” bio on him/her.  I’m going to take a bit of literary license here and talk about the astronomer I most admire.

The astronomer I most admire isn’t famous, for one thing.  He doesn’t get any recognition for his work.  He doesn’t even get paid for it; he does it for love of the science.

Yeah, like THAT'S going to stop us! Image found at sodahead.com

He is a scientist, really.  If you tell him, “The paint’s wet.”, chances are he’ll touch it.  Just to see if it’s really wet… and how wet.  He listens to the ideas of others; not just to be polite, but because he’s truly interested.  If the idea sounds like a load of equine offal, he’ll point that out.  It doesn’t matter if the purveyor of the equine offal is an astrophysicist with four or five PhD’s.  If it’s offal, my hero will say it’s offal.  And he’ll keep saying it, until someone can prove to him that the load of equine offal is, in fact, solid gold.

The astronomer I most respect has a regular job, and he puts in his hours there so he can provide for his family.  He’s still waiting to buy that telescope he wants.  He almost had it last year, but then he found out his daughter needed braces.  Maybe next year.

Image found at funnyanimatedemoticons.com

My guy wasn’t formally trained in astronomy.  Oh, he had the bare bones minimum they teach in public schools in order to kick you up to the next grade, but that was it.  What he did was start reading and learning on his own.  He found a fascination for astronomy; a love, a passion for the cosmos.  When he googles “star” on his computer, he’s looking for Epsilon Eridani, not Angelina Jolie.  He knows that Betelgeuse was a  star long before Michael Keaton’s claim for fame.

He argues passionately and intelligently about things like quasars and pulsars because it matters to him.

There you have it:  A thumbnail sketch of my favorite astronomer/scientist.  Now, you all know I really like Newton, Einstein, Galileo… the list goes on and on.  Still, my favorite scientist, the one I respect above and beyond all the others, is the one sitting at home (or work) reading this right now.  He’s tired.  He’s shouldering the responsibility of his family, and when he gets a few free moments he learns something new about the science he passionately loves.  He’s my hero.

The scientist I most admire and respect is you.

Testing the new Soyuz launch site in French Guiana. Click for larger. Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja, 2011

The Soyuz spacecraft will soon be launching from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

The facilities are almost complete and final testing began on April 29, 2011 with a simulated launch.  The simulation is designed to ensure the facilities work as expected and allow teams to train under realistic conditions.

The image shows the vehicle as it was transferred from the preparation building to the launch area and moved to the vertical position.  A mobile gantry was then rolled out to the pad and the upper stage was hoisted atop the launcher.

The first launch will be in the third quarter of 2011.

Read more about it and see lots more images here.

A comment from earlier this week struck a nerve with me. I’ll repost it in totality first:

I find it interesting that Fox Keller seems to be assuming that human interest in “nature” began only in the 19th century. Rather, the concept of mankind’s nature has been a topic of much interest since at least the induction of philosophical inquiry by the Greeks, and remains a topic of interest in philosophical circles in the philosophy of man. While the ancient Greeks certainly had no idea about DNA or genes, they were able to examine man’s behavior and physical characteristics and to try to determine whether or not men were born a certain way (nature) or could learn to alter some traits by choice (a great example of such an inquiry is in the Nicomachaen Ethics by Aristotle, regarding the definition and inculcation of virtue). The current debate about nature vs. nurture in a specifically genetic mode is merely a more specialized version of the exact same concept…how to differentiate what parts of “man” are immutable and what parts seem to respond to differing environments (whether internally or externally imposed). That might explain why Fox Keller is so confused about why ...