Josh Rosenau just got his 23andMe results back. He asked me what he could do with it. Well, I might have told him that he should throw his genotype to the public domain…but most people are a little reluctant to do that it seems (though remember, if you want to do that just email me and I’ll publicize it. For example, Blaine Bettinger just put a bunch of stuff online public domain). I told Josh to look at some of the third party tools at the website 23andYou. Focus on the left column in particular. I assume in the future the tools will get slicker and much more user friendly, but why wait until grandma gets into the game?

Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability.

“It is commonly believed that men think about sex much more often than do women, but the empirical evidence in this area is fairly weak. By means of a golf tally counter, 283 college students kept track of their thoughts pertaining to food, sleep, or sex for one week. Males reported significantly more need-based cognitions overall, but there was no significant interaction between sex of participant and type of cognition recorded. Therefore, although these young men did think more about sex than did young women, they also thought more about food and sleep. In contrast, a retrospective estimated frequency of need-based cognitions obtained at the start of the study revealed a sex difference in sexual cognitions, but not thoughts about eating or sleeping. Erotophilia and sexual desirability responding were significant predictors of frequency of sexual cognitions for women, but not for men. Overall, erotophilia was a better predictor of sexual cognition than was sex of participant. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that, although there may ...

1) First, a post from the past: Why the indigenous still dominate the Andean region.

2) Weird search query of the week (#5 keyword!): “sara sidner ethnicity”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Edge question 2011″:

At business school (at a well-respected, major research university) one of my profs prided herself on being the most “scientific” of our professors. That was her reputation and she liked to brag about how rigorous and “scientific” her classes were. What her approach consisted of was to demand that any claim made by a student be backed with a citation in the literature. That was it. You can imagine what kind of science gets produced in MBA literature and the quality of studies used to prove or disprove various management fads.
(She was also a huge proponent of using Myers-Briggs test to make hiring and staffing decisions. I consider Myers-Briggs to be one step up from astrology personally.)

Anyway, it was scientism at it’s best. And, given the non-science backgrounds of a typical MBA class, maybe that’s all that can be hoped for — to get them to look past just the management fad ...

In my experience most scientists are not too clear on the details of intelligence testing, perhaps because the whole area is somewhat in ill repute (except when you want to brag about your own SAT/GRE score!). This despite the fact that the profession of science is skewed toward the right end of the intelligence bell curve. Steve Hsu, a physicist at the University of Oregon (and someone I’ve known for a while in the interests of “full disclosure”) has a nice presentation up in PDF format which summarizes the major points of interest in this area. Worth a skim if you are unfamiliar. Additionally he alludes to future directions in the study of the genetic basis of intelligence using genomics. Here’s his abstract:

I begin with a brief review of psychometric results concerning intelligence (sometimes referred to as the g factor, or IQ). The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power) and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing (currently below $5k per genome), it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes ...

It started with an innocent, and possibly joking, request on Twitter: “Can you explain M-theory?” Having previously been asked to defend the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and various other topics, I didn’t take it very seriously.

But upon further reflection — why not? Obviously nobody is going to give a full and comprehensible account of any reasonably complex topic when limited to 140 characters, but it might be fun and even useful to try to distill the basic point of something down to its tweetable essence. Still, in a single tweet there is almost no chance to do much but introduce jargon, so I decided to allow myself three tweets. Here’s my go at summarizing M-theory. (Remember chronology is bottom-up.)

Obviously, there is more to be said, but I think some actual information is conveyed. Different people might choose different aspects of a subject to spend their precious three tweets on, but that’s part of the beauty. As someone pointed out, a poetic aspect results from subjecting yourself to such stringent limitations on what you can say.

And if it works for M-theory, what else? And thus a hashtag was born: #3tweets. Yesterday I took a stab at the Higgs boson.

This reminded me that quantum field theory is probably the single most under-popularized subject in all of fundamental physics. Particle physics, yes; string theory, sure; quantum mechanics, endlessly; but the structure of QFT itself is rarely explained in its own right. It’s worth at least a few tweets.

I certainly hope to try a few more examples. But — it’s everyone’s internet. Feel free to join in, with new topics or ones previously covered. I’m sure someone has a different take on quantum field theory than I do.

It’s Friday the 13th. So why not a morbid post? I stumbled onto to some “life tables” for 2007. Actually what the link gives you is the probability of death and life expectancy at a given age for males and females. This is obviously important for purposes of private and public insurance. The tables are naturally broken down by sex because males and females differ in their likelihood of death. Women are well known to have higher life expectancies in all but the most primitive of nations today.

I wanted to do a little visualization. I limited the years across the interval 0 to 100. Since I find life expectancy a boring statistic (well known) I want to focus on probability of death in a given year. I generated four tables.

- First, a table which shows probability of death in a given year log transformed. I had to transform because the difference between a 1 year old and a 100 year old spans four orders of magnitude.

- Second, a table which illustrates the absolute change in the probability of death year to year. This is basically measuring the absolute change between year X and year X – 1. Concretely an ...

This is happening. Pornography found in bin Laden hideout:

The pornography recovered in bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials.

…

Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases.

One issue I’ve noticed personally with some conservative Muslims is that their threshold for what is ‘pornographic’ is different from those of typical Westerners. I have an uncle who is a member of Tablighi Jamaat who considers the outfits worn by ballerinas to be pornographic and instances of crass nudity. I do wonder if outbreaks of extreme sexual deviance and psychopathy, such as the notorious Saudi gang rape, might be as much due to the peculiar collapse of what seem clear and distinct categories to us, as much as garden-variety repression. A ...

What’s the News: A non-invasive test that measures brain waves could help doctors better diagnose whether a patient is truly in a vegetative state, according to a preliminary study published today in Science. What’s more, the results suggest that a particular pathway of communication in the brain is disrupted in vegetative patients but not patients with somewhat less severe brain damage—which could not only improve diagnosis, but help researchers better understand these tragic conditions.

How the Heck:

The researchers recorded the brain activity of 21 people with severe brain injuries and 22 healthy controls using an EEG, a set of electrodes placed on the scalp that pick up electrical signals generated by the brain’s neurons firing. Of the patients with brain damage, eight had been previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, while the other thirteen were in a minimally conscious state, meaning they retained some level of conscious awareness and ability to interact.
While recording the subjects’ brainwaves, the researchers played each of them a series of sounds with unexpected changes of tone (a one-time warble in the note). When healthy people and patients in a minimally conscious state heard the blip, their brain waves showed a spike that lasted around ...

Each Friday this month, I’m having a conversation about viruses to mark the publication of my new book A Planet of Viruses. Last week, I talked to virologist Ian Lipkin about the search for new viruses and their potential to alter our behavior. Today, I’m delighted to talk with Richard Preston, the author of the Hot Zone and other books on viruses. He and I discuss the fate of smallpox. The worst viral killer in the history of civilization is now wiped off the face of the Earth, except for some laboratory stocks. Preston and I take on the question of whether we should now annihilate it. Check it out.

As the number of bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts (x axis) went up,
the malaria parasite levels dropped faster than a cartoon anvil.

What’s the News: We know the bacteria living in our guts are important to our health—but the bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts could be too. Researchers have discovered a species of mosquito gut bacteria that destroys the malaria parasite, keeping the disease from spreading to humans. This explains why some Anopheles mosquitoes (the only genus that transmits malaria) don’t spread it, and it spurs the imagination towards possible ways of tamping down the disease.

How the Heck:

Scientists have long wondered why some Anopheles mosquitoes don’t seem to carry malaria, while others of the same species or strain do. Mosquitoes’ immune response to the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, and their gut bacteria were known to play a part in this, but to uncover exactly what was going on, scientists collected gut bacteria from wild mosquitoes and watched what they did to the parasite in Petri dishes.
They identified one bacterium in particular that severely impaired the parasite’s development. When they fed it to mosquitoes, parasite levels plummeted (see graph above).
To find out how the bacteria were doing it, ...

You have a sculpture, an intricate piece of modern art, covered in bulges and blisters. Your task is to weave a cover for it. The fit must be exact. You have to fill in every dent and wrap around every lump. Here’s the catch: you have to make this faultless shroud from a single piece of string that must automatically weave itself into the right three-dimensional shape.

This is the challenge that Sarel Fleishman, Timothy Whitehead and Damian Ekiert from the University of Washington have just overcome. Their “sculpture” is a protein called haemagglutinin, or HA, which sits on the surface of flu viruses. Their “shroud” is another protein designed to perfectly fit onto the contours of HA and neutralise it. They have found a way of fashioning these designer proteins on a computer – a feat that could make it easier to create the next generation of anti-flu drugs.

Under the microscope, flu viruses look like spherical pincushions. The “pins” consist of two proteins: haemagglutinin, which allows the virus to stick to a host cell, and neuraminidase, which allows it to eventually escape. The different versions of these ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

Not much to say except this is a hilarious production designed to draw attention to the fracking debate. To be clear, my biggest concerns are not centered on the hydraulic fracturing fluid per se. I feel the recent PNAS paper highlighted the much more worrisome problem of methane gas leakage. In fact, the PNAS paper stated that there was no evidence of contamination of drinking water with deep saline brine or fracking fluids.

The anti-fracking video compared to the pro-fracking video (below) represents an interesting dichotomy in communication tactics.

Which do you feel is more effective?

We live in an era of wonder, where people send robots to other worlds and view them close up. These machines get bathed in radiation, searing heat, bitter cold, suffocating vacuum, and they keep running. Moreover, they send their data back digitally, which can then be stored in a database and, if permissions are given, accessed by the public. And a subset of that public is educated in the ways of digital media, able to stitch together pictures, carefully aligning them, balancing them, coordinating borders and overlap regions.

The result? This:

Yegads. That is Mercury as seen by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008, as it flew by the planet for the first time. It would do so again before finally entering orbit in March 2011. But as it left the smallest planet, it snapped a series of wide angle and high-resolution images.

Gordon Ugarkovic is a Croatian software developer. He’s also an amateur image processor… for a sufficiently wide definition of "amateur". He takes space images and works his prowess on them, creating dramatic and beautiful images like this one of Mercury.

Click the picture to embiggen it, or you can ...

Relics of a lost race?

One of the issues which I have been exploring and mulling over the past year and a half on this weblog has been the idea that population movements were much more extensive in the past than we have thought until late. I can say a year and a half because my thinking was clarified and made more urgent by the publication in January of 2010 a paper which totally overturned what we’d thought we’d known about what Y chromosomal phylogeography told us about European prehistory. A very common marker in Western Europe which had been assumed to be diagnostic of roots in Europe in the Pleistocene past was now argued to be a signature of the pulse of farmers out of the Middle East! The extremely high frequency of this marker among the Basques, and the presumption that the Basques were the Paleolithic ur-Europeans, allowed researchers in the early 2000s to peg the proportion of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry across Europe on the order of ~75%. At this point we don’t have total clarity, though I would argue that we need to lean ever ...

British readers might have caught wind of a new Guardian/Wellcome Trust Science Writing prize, aimed at finding the “next generation of undiscovered science writing talent.” Since the announcement, the Guardian have been pumping out a series of pieces on tips and tricks for good science writing, penned by established writers.

Alok asked me for something different – he wanted a reflection on the importance of entering and winning competitions. I won the Daily Telegraph’s young science writer prize in 2007, which in many ways was the spiritual predecessor of the new Guardian/Wellcome Trust one. My thoughts on that win, and its importance in my career, is now up at the Grauniad.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good science background must be in want of a PhD. So it was that I found myself re-enacting a bad 80s sitcom in a biochemistry lab, full of exaggerated characters and slapstick mishaps, but with fewer happy resolutions and more radioactive clothes. Somewhere, a laughter track was playing.

During this time, I realised that I wanted to swap pipettes for pens. ...

Blindfolded and fitted with noise-canceling headphones, this seal might better fit a marine-creature hostage crisis than a scientific study. In reality, it’s making history by showing for the first time that the whiskers of harbor seals are so sensitive that they can discern the shapes of objects by the ripples they make. Marine biologists have known for a while that seals use their whiskers to find fish in dark, murky waters, but as lead researcher Wolf Hanke told LiveScience, whiskers had “never been shown to analyze things” beyond that. Being able to discern shape and size means that seals may use their whiskers to pick out the fattest fish.

Henry, a 12-year-old harbor seal, was plopped into an open-air pool in a Cologne zoo to put his whiskers to the test. Researchers blindfolded and placed headphones on him so that he could only use his whiskers to sense underwater objects. In the pool, the researchers placed a plastic box containing an assortment of variably-shaped paddles. Because they trained Henry to touch his nose to a small plastic sphere whenever he thought a paddle’s ripples were different from a control paddle’s ripples, the ...

“The present study examined the relationship between aggression and players’ names on uniforms in collegiate women’s ice hockey. Aggression was defined as mean penalty minutes per game. Information, i.e., win/loss record, penalties, and names on uniforms, about the 2002-2003 season women’s ice hockey team was obtained via e-mail from 53 of 72 (74% return rate) sports information directors (Division I = 23, Division II = 2, Division III = 28). Analysis indicated that teams with personalized jerseys had significantly more penalty minutes per game than teams without personalized jerseys. However, as the majority of the teams with personalized jerseys were Division I teams and the majority of the teams without personalized jerseys were Division III teams, it is unclear whether results were due to personalized jersey or competition level of play.”

Photo: flickr/ericts8

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Do aggressive people play violent computer games more aggressively?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Experimentally induced anger!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Want to make your Africanized honey bees more aggressive? Get ‘em drunk!

WTF is NCBI ROFL? ...

Staphylococcus aureus

What’s the News: Adding sugar to certain antibiotics can boost their bacteria-battling ability, according to a study published today in Nature. In particular, sugar helps the drugs wipe out persisters, bacteria that evade antibiotics by essentially going dormant only to flare up again once the danger has passed. This technique could lead to the development of inexpensive, more effective treatments for bacterial infections.

How the Heck:

The study looked at two common bacteria: E. coli, which can lead to urinary tract and gastrointestinal infections, and Staphylococcus aureus, the bugs that cause staph infections. Both can be treated with gentamicin, one of a larger group of antibiotics called aminoglycosides.
The researchers combined gentamicin with different kinds of sugars, including mannitol, fructose and glucose. (Sucrose, the stuff you put in your coffee, is just one of many types of sugars as far as biochemistry’s concerned.
When the scientists added these sweetened antibiotics to bacteria grown in Petri dishes, it killed over 99% of the bacterial persisters. The type of sugar seemed to make a difference, as well; only fructose helped the drug kill S. aureus, for instance.
The goal, said senior author James Collins, was essentially to ...

Fabio Gironi recently interviewed me at length for an issue of Speculations, a “Journal of Speculative Realism.” The subject was science and philosophy, which I’ve been known to opine about at some length. But here we’re talking great length indeed. The interview isn’t available separately, but you can download the pdf of the whole issue here (or buy it as a bound copy). My bit starts on page 313. (The rest of the issue is also worth checking out.)

I’m a big believer that academic disciplines should engage in messy interactions, not keep demurely separate from each other. But it’s a tricky business. Just because I’m (purportedly) an expert in one thing doesn’t make me an expert in everything else; on the other hand, it is possible that one area has something to offer another one. So I am in favor of dabbling, but with humility. It’s good for people to have thoughts and opinions about issues outside their immediate expertise, and to offer them in good faith, but it’s bad if they become convinced that experts in other areas are all idiots. So when you find yourself disagreeing with the consensus of expertise in some well-established field, it might very well be because of your superior insight and training, or maybe you’re just missing something. Hopefully in an exchange like this I have something to offer without making too many blunders that would make real experts cringe.

Here’s a sample of the interview.

SC: I would be extremely suspicious of any attempts to judge that the world must ‘necessarily’ be some way rather than any other. I can imagine different worlds—or at least I think I can—so I don’t believe that this is the only possible world. That would also go for any particular feature of the laws this world follows, including their stability. Maybe the laws are constant through time, maybe they are not. (Maybe time is a fundamental concept, maybe it isn’t). We don’t yet know, but it seems clear to me that these are empirical questions, not a priori ones. Because we want to understand the world in terms that are as simple as possible, the idea that the underlying laws are stable is an obvious first guess, but one that must then be tested against the data. Said in a slightly different language: any metaphysical considerations concerning what qualities the world should properly have can be taken seriously and incorporated into Bayesian priors for evaluating theories, but ultimately those theories are judged against experiment. We should listen to the world, not decide ahead of time what it must be.

No expecting mother would ever wish harm to befall her children. Unfortunately, she may have no choice in the matter. Due to the rules of genetics, mums always run the risk of passing a “mother’s curse” onto their sons, but not their daughters.

The curse is an ancient one, the result of events that happened billions of years ago. At a time when all life consisted of single microscopic cells, one of these swallowed another. Normally, the engulfed cell would be digested, but not this time – this time, the two cells formed an alliance. The swallowed cell transferred many of its genes to its host, keeping only those involved in providing energy. It evolved into a mitochondrion – a tiny, efficient battery that would power its host, giving it the energy to become more complex. This alliance is the foundation of all complex life on the planet. All animals, plants, fungi and algae run on mitochondria power.

This means that all animals really have two genomes – their main nuclear one, and a far smaller secondary one in their mitochondria. The two sets of genes work together, each controlling ...