Branson’s plan to save lemurs is turning heads.

If you build Madagascar’s lemurs a new home, will they come? And can you trust them not to trash the place?

Sir Richard Branson, private moon shot funder, Virgin Group kingpin, kooky billionaire du jour, has been turning heads with his announcement that he plans to import 30 ring-tailed lemurs from zoos to one of his privately owned islands in the British Virgin Islands. The idea is to give endangered or threatened species a new place to live and breed—Madagascar’s civil war has meant a resurgence in lemur habitat loss, and ring-taileds are listed as “near threatened”—but biologists and conservationists are pointing out how Branson could be doing the island’s native ecosystem a serious disservice. “It’s pretty weird,” Simon Stuart, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission, told the BBC. “What else lives on the island, and how might they be affected?”

On the one hand, it’s rather charming that Branson has such a hands-on approach to problems of conservation (he’s also founded the Virgin Green Fund to tackle next-generation fuel development), which are often depressingly intractable. But the ...

Dear readers,

I’ve received several emails asking why I’ve been posting less. While it’s true I’ve had a busy Spring semester between the book’s debut, speaking engagements, and teaching responsibilities, be assured I am not slowing down. Rather, quite the opposite! I’ve taken on new projects that I’ll share more about soon. And I’ll also continue to blog emphasizing the conservation of biodiversity on a changing planet.

On Earth Day and every day, I truly believe there is much reason for hope.

Sheril

What’s the News: Researchers have known for decades that what a woman eats during her pregnancy can impact her child’s weight later in life. Now, a new study shows a possible mechanism for how mom’s diet affects baby’s weight: Epigenetic changes—changes that can increase or decrease the expression of a particular gene but don’t alter the genetic sequence—to a gene involved in fat metabolism can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy.

How the Heck:

The researchers asked nearly 80 pregnant women in Britain about their diets during pregnancy (and checked their blood for traces of some foods, to provide a more objective measure of diet).
At the birth of each child, the researchers took a sample of the child’s DNA from the umbilical cord. They analyzed the DNA for methylation, a common epigenetic change that occurs when a structure called a methyl group latches onto a particular point in a person’s DNA. When the children were nine years old, the researchers measured their body fat.
Children with methylation of a gene called RXR?, which is important in helping fat cells develop normally and in regulating their metabolism, were more likely to be obese than children ...

After seeing this post up on how high information levels and education may lead to political polarization, I wanted to revisit the GSS data on political moderation and independence in light of educational attainment and intelligence. For the later I used the proxy of a score on a vocabulary test which has a 0.70 correlation with general intelligence. My question was this: what are the different effects of intelligence and education on ideology and partisanship?

To answer this question I looked at two response variables, POLVIEWS and PARTYID, which measure ideology from very liberal to very conservative and partisanship from strong Democrat to strong Republican. I amalgamated “leaners” so that in the middle I had moderates and independents left. For the vocab test I used WORDSUM. The scores have a value from 0 to 10, out of 10. I combined the 0-4 interval because the sample size there was small. Finally, I limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites after the year 2000 to eliminate some background confounds (e.g., minorities tend to be way more Democratic, all things equal).

I generated some area graphs. First, I looked at proportions of each ideology or party in a particular category. For example, ...

Thanks to Joe DeCapo for his response to my offer of an autographed book plate for the new edition of Parasite Rex. And yes, his cat (named ?) does probably haz one.

Home.

Image credit: NASA

The gorgeous night-sky time lapse animations keep on coming: this one, using images by Colin Legg, shows the sky over the Australian Outback. Make sure you’ve set the HD to on and make it full-screen!

The part with the sky reflected in the water with the island in the background (about one minute in to the video) is breathtaking, and even more so when the Milky Way hovers into view. There is something simply magical (if I may use that word) in these animations, showing the motion of the sky above us. We hardly notice it, but it is compelling and engrossing when seen in this way.

I’ve posted a lot of these videos, and I just found out that a master of them, José Francisco Salgado, will be giving a seminar on them in Chicago on May 14. That should be interesting; I’ve featured his work before (see Related Posts below) and it’s beautiful.

Related posts:

- Salgado #1: Time lapse: The spinning Chilean sky
- Salgado #2: Sidereal Motion
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse video

Human growth hormone (HGH) is one among the many hormones your body naturally produces. HGH influences growth in that it helps encourage cell reproduction and regeneration. Athletes really like to pretend that HGH makes them more powerful. It might, but it probably doesn’t. Whether it works or not, athletes should be allowed to utilize it. But banning performance enhancers is a topic already covered, so let’s look at something more interesting.

As part of a thread called “The Bias Against Short Men,” Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish published an email by a reader struggling with a difficult question:

The doctor noticed that my son was comfortably sitting at the bottom of the growth chart and that he would most likely end up a measly 5’5” (a little more than my wife and myself). He went on to say that this could qualify as “idiopathic short stature syndrom.” And that we could potentially get our son on HGH (actually, it’s called rGH I think – see here) if we felt that his projected short height could affect his self-confidence and ultimately, his mental health.

Unlike HGH in athletes, HGH used to ...

Yesterday’s talks were devoted to the idea of dark matter, which as you know is the hottest topic in cosmology these days, both theoretically and experimentally.

Eric Armengaud and Lars Bergstrom gave updates on the state of direct searches and indirect searches for dark matter, respectively. John March-Russell gave a theory talk about possible connections between dark matter and the baryon asymmetry. The density of dark matter and ordinary matter in the universe is the same, to within an order of magnitude, even though we usually think of them as arising from completely different mechanisms. That’s a coincidence that bugs some people, and the last couple of years have seen a boomlet of papers proposing models in which the two phenomena are actually connected. Tracy Slatyer gave an update on proposals for a new dark force coupled to dark matter, which could give rise to interesting signatures in both direct and indirect detection experiments.

This is science at its most intense. A big, looming mystery, a bounty of clever theoretical ideas, not nearly enough data to pinpoint the correct answer, but more than enough data to exclude or tightly constrain most of the ideas you might have. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if we finally discover the dark matter in the next few years; unfortunately, it wouldn’t really be surprising if it eluded detection for a very long time. If we knew the answers ahead of time, it wouldn’t be science (or nearly as much fun).

Today is our last day in Avignon, devoted to cosmic acceleration. My own talk later today is on “White and Dark Smokes in Cosmology.” (The title wasn’t my idea, but I couldn’t have done better, given the context.) It’s the last talk of the conference, so I’ll try to take a big-picture perspective and not sweat the technical details, but (following tradition) I will admit that it’s an excuse to talk about my own recent papers and ideas I think are interesting but haven’t written papers about. At least it should be short, which I understand is the primary criterion for a successful talk of this type.

Also, few people have strong feelings about non-gaussianities or neutrinos, but many people have strong feelings about reductionism. Quelle surprise!

In my persistent slog beating the drums for open genomics I’ve made the argument that people should have the right to have more information about what their genetic code entails without the necessary and mandatory imprimatur of professional assent. Not only that, but I’d want to know myself. This is not a new found position which I’ve come to of late. I recall 17 years ago having a classroom discussion on this topic in the wake of the tests for Huntington’s disease, and I was certainly pro-knowledge. That being said, there were conditionals. My position was that this sort of information would be the most useful for the young, because they could determine the arc of their life with full knowledge of their probable time window. A friend argued that ultimately you should always live every day as if it is your last day anyhow, so why get tested? This is great as a superficial talking point, but as a concrete matter our decisions are conditioned on the expected number of alloted days we have.

A few years ago I heard about the story of the singer Bobby Darin, and it made me think of those issues. From ...

A boring man

Immanuel Kant is famous. You’ve probably heard of him. And you know some of his ideas, such as the categorical imperative, or have at some point started the Critique of Pure Reason (if you’re like me, you never finish it). But what do you know about his biography? I may not be able to complete a Critique of Pure Reason, but I did read Manfred Kuehn’s Kant: A Biography in the winter of 2002. From that I learned one surprising fact: Immanuel Kant in his personal beliefs was not an orthodox Christian, if he had religious sentiment at all. This surprised me because I had read elsewhere in passing that Kant was a Pietistic Lutheran. Ultimately whether Kant was religious or not was not a major issue for me, but I did update my personal factual database.

Fast forward six years to 2008. I was at a party kicking back with some philosophers (as in, people completing their doctorates), and it came up that one of them was doing their dissertation on some of Kant’s ideas. This individual happened to ...

In general, I believe what we know about human psychology runs contrary to the New Atheist approach and strategy. However, I do my best to follow the data, and here’s a study that suggest at least one aspect of their approach may work. The tactic finding support here is not necessarily being confrontational–that would tend to prompt negative emotional reactions, and thus defensiveness and inflexibility towards New Atheist arguments–but rather, making it more widely known that you’re actually there–as “out” atheists try to do:

Although prejudice is typically positively related to relative outgroup size, four studies found converging evidence that perceived atheist prevalence reduces anti-atheist prejudice. Study 1 demonstrated that anti-atheist prejudice among religious believers is reduced in countries in which atheists are especially prevalent. Study 2 demonstrated that perceived atheist prevalence is negatively associated with anti-atheist prejudice. Study 3 demonstrated a causal relationship: Reminders of atheist prevalence reduced explicit distrust of atheists. These results appeared distinct from intergroup contact effects. Study 4 demonstrated that prevalence information decreased implicit atheist distrust. The latter two experiments provide the first evidence that mere prevalence information can reduce prejudice against any outgroup. These findings offer insights about anti-atheist prejudice, a poorly understood phenomenon. Furthermore, they suggest both novel directions for future prejudice research and potential interventions that could reduce a variety of prejudices.

Full study here.

You don’t need to know Dutch:

“The ecological valence theory (EVT) posits that preference for a color is determined by people’s average affective response to everything associated with it (Palmer & Schloss, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 8877-8882, 2010). The EVT thus implies the existence of sociocultural effects: Color preference should increase with positive feelings (or decrease with negative feelings) toward an institution strongly associated with a color. We tested this prediction by measuring undergraduates’ color preferences at two rival universities, Berkeley and Stanford, to determine whether students liked their university’s colors better than their rivals did. Students not only preferred their own colors more than their rivals did, but the degree of their preference increased with self-rated positive affect (“school spirit”) for their university. These results support the EVT’s claim that color preference is caused by learned affective responses to associated objects and institutions, because it is unlikely that students choose their university or develop their degree of school spirit on the basis of preexisting color preferences.”

Photo: flickr/Monica’s Dad

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Superbowl Special: Sports fans ...

Zack Ajmal has been taking his Reference 3 data set for a stroll over at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Or, more accurately, he’s been driving his computer to crunch up ADMIXTURE results ascending up a later of K’s. Because it is the Harappa Ancestry Project Zack’s populations are overloaded a touch on South Asians. He managed to get a hold of the data set from Reconstructing Indian History. If you will recall this paper showed that the South Asian component which falls out of ancestry structure inference algorithms may actually be a stabilized hybrid of two ancient populations, “Ancestral North Indian” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indian” (ASI). ANI are a population which can be compared pretty easily to other West Eurasians. There are no “pure” groups of ASI, but the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands are the closest, having diverged from the mainland ASI populations tens of thousands of years ago.

At K = 11, that is, 11 inferred ancestral populations, Zack seems to have now stumbled onto the patterns which one would expect from this hybrid model of South Asians. Let me quote him:

Now let’s take all the reference populations with an Onge component between 10% ...

Trading profiles of Michael Mann and Stephen McIntyre, and managing somehow to be funny about the whole thing, Kate Sheppard over at Mother Jones has published a wonderful narrative of “ClimateGate” and the lessons learned. As someone who reviewed one of the leading books on the subject–Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files, which really loses you in the weeds–I urge you to read Kate’s story and have no such fear. Here’s how it starts off:

IT’S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a “fucking terrorist,” “killer,” or “one-world-government socialist.” It’s even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.

Read on here.

What’s the News: Anxiety. Insomnia. Hallucinations. Methamphetamine’s effects on the human brain are well documented, but researchers know relatively little about how the drug affects the body on the molecular scale. Looking at fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), scientists have detailed how meth disrupts chemical reactions associated with generating energy, creating sperm cells, and regulating muscles. Most interestingly, they discovered that meth-exposed fruit flies may live longer when they eat sugar. “We know that methamphetamine influences cellular processes associated with aging, it affects spermatogenesis, and it affects the heart,” says University of Illinois entomologist Barry Pittendrigh. “One could almost call meth a perfect storm toxin because it does so much damage to so many different tissues in the body.”

How the Heck:

By keeping tabs on protein production and gene expression while exposing fruit flies to meth, researchers discovered 34 changes in the molecular pathways that drive cells, disrupting cell structure, hormones, energy generation, sugar metabolism, sperm cell formation, as well as skeletal and cardiac muscles.
The major insight was that meth exposure may cause cells to produce energy via glycolysis, an inefficient means of energy production that breaks down glucose without using ...

One of the aspects of fiction is that it serves as a Rorschach test. Over at Slate Nina Shen Rastogi has a post up, Is “Game of Thrones” Racist?:

The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport very little clothing, bedeck themselves in blue paint, and, as depicted in the premiere episode, their weddings are riotous affairs full of thumping drums, ululations, orgiastic public sex, passionate throat-slitting, and fly-ridden baskets full of delicious, bloody animal hearts. A man in a turban presents the new khaleesi with an inlaid box full of hissing snakes. After their nuptials, the immense Khal Drogo takes Daenerys to a seaside cliff at twilight and then, against her muted pleas, takes her doggie-style.

They are, in short, barbarians of the most stereotypical, un-PC sort. As I watched, I kept thinking, “Are they still allowed to do that?”

I wasn’t the only viewer who found the depiction of the Dothraki uncomfortable, to say the least. Time’s TV critic James Poniewozik, noting that the Dothraki seem to be made up of a “grabbag of exotic/dark/savage signifiers,” wondered if it was “possible to be racist toward a race that does not ...

To celebrate, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. pointed Hubble’s eye at this pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. Just beautiful.

If you don’t know Tim Minchin, well, you should. He is an extremely talented songwriter and performer, a major skeptic, and also very, very funny. He has a song called "Storm", what is essentially a nine-minute beat poem about an encounter at a dinner party with a woman of decidedly unskeptical thoughts. "Storm" is hilarious, and swept through the skeptic community like, well, a storm.

At the first TAM London in 2009, Tim announced that an animated short would be made to go with the song, and now it’s finally out! [NSFW language]

This is incredible work, and my hat’s off to Tim, animator DC Turner, and to UK skeptic and my pal Tracy King, who worked extremely hard to get this made. All three of them were interviewed about the work over at Mad Art Lab (NSFW language) which is well worth your time to read.

Congrats to them for getting this done, and for doing such a tremendous job on it!

Related posts:

- TAM London in review
- TAM London followup (links to other people’s reviews of TAM London)
- TAM London video interviews: Brian Cox,