The wonderfulicious Brea Grant is this week’s Geek a Week.

Brea’s an actress who played Daphne, "The Speedster" on "Heroes", and I was tickled a while back to find out she reads my blog. I had a lot of fun hanging out with her at Comic Con last year (and hope to see her again while I’m there in a couple of weeks), and even did a short interview with her when I was there.

Brea is smart, funny, generous with her time, and a complete and total comic book geek. When Len Peralta, who does the Geek a Week podcast and art, interviewed me for the series, he asked if I knew anyone else I would recommend. That was an easy one! I’m glad it worked out.. and she wasn’t the only person I suggested. Stay tuned.

Len’s got quite a few more very cool folks on his list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does with them. The trading cards are killer funny and it’s always nice to hear what’s going on inside other people’s nerdy heads.

In October 2007, the British band Radiohead released their seventh album – In Rainbows – as a digital download that customers could pay whatever they liked for. The results of this risky venture are a guarded secret, but the album’s popularity was clear. It topped the charts and allegedly sold 1.2 million copies in the first day alone. Even though many fans paid nothing (the average contribution ranged from $2.26 to around $8 depending on the survey), the band still earned more money from In Rainbows than their previous album, Hail to the Thief. But according to a new study, Radiohead could have earned even more money by adding a slight twist to their plan – telling people that half their voluntary payments would go to charity.

Many businesses are trying out new strategies that appeal to the better nature of their customers. Some promote the fact that they donate a proportion of their profits to charity. Others, from Radiohead to restaurants, invite people to pay what they like for their products. People often get away without paying anything but in practice, they frequently cough up something. But according to Ayelet Gneezy from the University of California, San Diego, the best strategy is to fuse the two approaches.

At a theme park, Gneezy conducted a massive study of over 113,000 people who had to choose whether to buy a photo of themselves on a roller coaster. They were given one of four pricing plans. Under the basic one, when they were asked to pay a flat fee of $12.95 for the photo, only 0.5% of them did so.

When they could pay what they wanted, sales skyrocketed and 8.4% took a photo, almost 17 times more than before. But on average, the tight-fisted customers paid a measly $0.92 for the photo, which barely covered the cost of printing and actively selling one. That’s not the best business model – the company proves itself to be generous, it’s products sell like (free) hot-cakes, but its profit margins take a big hit. You could argue that Radiohead experienced the same thing – their album was a hit but customers paid relatively little for it.

When Gneezy told customers that half of the $12.95 price tag would go to charity, only 0.57% riders bought a photo – a pathetic increase over the standard price plan. This is akin to the practices of “corporate social responsibility” that many companies practice, where they try to demonstrate a sense of social consciousness. But financially, this approach had minimal benefits. It led to more sales, but once you take away the amount given to charity, the sound of hollow coffers came ringing out. You see the same thing on eBay. If people say that 10% of their earnings go to charity, their items only sell for around 2% more.

But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.

This is a substantial result, especially since it came from a real setting. The theme park that Gneezy used stands to make another $600,000 a year in profits if it takes up her sales strategy. And just to be sure, Gneezy confirmed that sales at a nearby souvenir shop didn’t fall on the days when she ran her study. These extra profits weren’t coming at a cost to retailers elsewhere in the park.

Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as “shared social responsibility”, where businesses and customers work together for the public good. It’s a slightly different idea to corporate social responsibility, where the act of charity is dictated by the company. And it’s very different from the classic view of the modern corporation as a profit-making machine, beholden only to its shareholders.

Corporate social responsibility is a mantra for many a modern firm, but it’s often done at a financial cost. Customers might assume that the company has ulterior motives for its practices beyond the call of ethics. Indeed, that’s often the case – acts of goodwill can do wonders for a company’s brand, and public interest in its products of services. But if people suspect that they’re somehow being manipulated, that can negate the positive effects of any act of charity.

Gneezy thinks that shared social responsibility is a better model because the company is clearly putting itself at financial risk, and people are less likely to smell a rat. Customers are also more likely to personally identify with the cause they are contributing to. Regardless of who sets the price, they are still contributing to charity, but it feels more like an active decision if they choose the price themselves.

There’s more evidence to back up this idea in the experiment – when Gneezy added a charitable donation to the pay-what-you-want scheme, fewer people bought the photo. The option to name your own price attracts a lot of cheapskate customers, who may not actually want the product very much, and who aren’t prepared to pay much, if anything, for it.

When the charity factor is introduced, these casual freeloaders balk at the idea of paying nothing, because it’s more likely to reflect badly on them. Rather than naming a higher price, their preference is to avoid buying altogether – for them, it isn’t worth it. Sales fall, but the actual profits go up because the remaining customers are motivated by their desire for the product and for the cause, will pay for both.

The experiment could be expanded in many interesting ways. For example, what about a discounted fixed price option with charitable donation, or a pay-what-you-want option with a minimum threshold? For now, it tells us that trying to tap into the ethical side of consumerism is very tricky, but possible without compromising profits. As Gneezy concludes, “Apparently, a company can best serve its community and its shareholders by sharing its social responsibility with its customers.”

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1186744

Image from alterna2

More on decision-making:

• Sports results can affect election results
• Requests work better than orders, even when we’re asking or ordering ourselves
• Why do people overbid in auctions?
• Undecided voters aren’t really undecided – the hidden side of decision-making

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Rosetta leaves asteroid Lutetia after a close encounter. Click for larger. Credit ESA via Science@NASA

The ESA spacecraft Rosetta is a comet chaser launched in February 2004 atop the powerful Ariane-5 rocket from launch facilities in French Guiana.  The comet Rosetta is ultimately going to reach is Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in May 2014.

You’d thing that huge rocket would send the comparatively small spacecraft right to the comet, but that’s just not the way things work.  Rosetta is having to take kind of the long way around, including two trips into the asteroid belt and taking advantage of gravitational speed boosts by a flyby of Mars (in 2007) and three flybys of Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009).  If you’ve ever been on a long ride with kids in the back seat you know the drill, instead ESA has people like me in the back seat going “are we there yet – are we there yet?”).

It’s a good thing for us in every long trip there are bound to be some worthwhile sights along the way and in this case it’s an asteroid named Lutetia.  The image above is a shot of Rosetta leaving Lutetia and if you look close or better yet click on the image to make it larger you will see Saturn in the background.

You can see this image and more including close ups at Science@NASA and even more at the ESA Rosetta webpage.

Researchers have decided to get personal with Mona Lisa–by irradiating her face. In a study recently published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers trucked around the Louvre to look at nine faces painted by Leonardo Da Vinci with a portable X-ray machine.

Their particular technique, as reported by the BBC, is called X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and is a way to uncover the layers of paint without damaging the paintings. By looking at this layering, they learned more about Da Vinci’s brush strokes and a technique called sfumato, which he used to hide transitions between dark and light areas and to create realistic shading.

The Da Vinci researchers aren’t the only X-ray art historians. Another recently published study looked at “Mayan blue”–a long lasting pigment made by the civilization that lived in Central American from 2500 BC to the 1600s.

Archeologists were impressed with Mayan blue’s resistance to fading, given that most of the other colors used in Mayan artworks lost their vividness long ago. As reported by Technology Review, Catherine Dejoie at the Néel Institute in Grenoble used X-ray diffraction and also examined the blue samples’ weight changes during heating (called thermogravimetric analysis) to uncover the pigment’s secret.

The researchers knew that the Mayans made their blue by heating the pigment with palygorskite (a type of clay); their analysis showed that this heating allowed the pigment to enter tiny channels in the clay which are sealed after the mixture cools, protecting and keeping the pigment true blue for centuries.

Check out DISCOVER’s new Web TV show Joe Genius, in which things get blown up for the sake of science.

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Image: Wikimedia

I have to say: Since we ruthlessly banned a lot of bad actors over the past week or so, discussions at the Intersection have been quite civil and productive. See, for example, this thread. Or this one. And something else has occurred, too--I actually find myself commenting on my own blog again. I'd largely stopped doing it (and largely stopped paying detailed attention to most comments) because anything I'd say would be pored over, twisted, bent, attacked, and so on. So saying anything at all seemed a waste of time. This has been a learning experience for me. My initial outlook in the blogosphere, and one I held for a very long time, was that I should err on the side of letting everyone who wanted to post do so rapidly, without hinderance. Only after the fact, and after much clear and undeniable abuse of the privilege, should I or Sheril step in and moderate or ban. But I now see that perhaps this was not right at all. Moderating all comments here takes much more work, and creates more delay; but so far, it also ensures better discussion. The ideal approach, I think, would be if some commenters could become "trusted" and get ...

Identical twins don’t share everything. The mix of viruses in a person’s gut, a new study says, is unique to each of us, even if we share nearly all our DNA with another person. That is, at least according to our poop.

This year scientists have been working to decode the genetics of the beneficial microbes that live inside us, like the bacteria that help us digest food. But those trillions of bacteria have partners of their own—beneficial viruses. Jeffrey Gordon and colleagues wanted to see what those viruses were like, and how they differed from person to person. To do it, they studied fecal samples that came from four sets of identical twins, as well as their mothers.

Each identical twin had virus populations that didn’t resemble those of their sibling—or anybody else, for that matter.

Remarkably, more than 80 percent of the viruses in the stool samples had not been previously discovered. “The novelty of the viruses was immediately apparent,” Gordon said. The intestinal viromes of identical twins were about as different as the viromes of unrelated individuals [MSNBC].

In addition, those viruses appeared to be stable over time, as opposed to the ever-shifted bacterial populations in people. And the virus-bacterium relationship in our gut, the study suggests, is different than in many other places. Viruses that infect bacteria and take advantage of them to replicate are called bacteriophages, and the two often enter an evolutionary arms race of new attacks and defenses.

Not inside us, though.

When the researchers probed deeper, they found that many of the bacteriophages carried bacterial genes that help microbes survive the anaerobic conditions in the colon. “You could see that these viruses were porting around genes that could benefit their host bacteria,” Gordon says. If the viruses transfer those genes to other bacteria that don’t normally carry them, that could help genetically disadvantaged bacteria evolve to live better in the colon [Science News].

If our gut viruses are truly unique, then the question for future research becomes: Why? And how does one’s unique viral population become established?

Gordon’s study also shakes up our picture of who’s the boss. We’ve talked before about humans’ reliance on our resident bacteria, without which we could not survive. But if bacteria are reliant upon viruses to shake up their genetics and help them survive the harsh environment of human intestines, are not viruses the true lords of our guts? Says microbiologist David Relman:

“It could be that viruses are the real drivers of the system because of their ability to modify the bacteria that then modify the human host,” he says. “So this study is in some ways looking into the genesis of the human body by seeing what viruses within it are up to” [Nature].

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Image: Gordon et. al.

[An old post I'm fond of]

Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn’t ask me about: how the garden snails have babies. Because then I would have to explain about the love darts.

Garden snails, and many other related species of snails, are hermaphrodites, equipped both with a penis that can deliver sperm to other males and with eggs that can be fertilized by the sperm of others. Two hermaphroditic snails can fertilize each other, or just play the role of male or female. Snail mating is a slow, languorous process, but it also involves some heavy weaponry. Before delivering their sperm, many species (including garden snails) fire nasty-looking darts made of calcium carbonate into the flesh of their mate. In the 1970s, scientists sugested that this was a gift to help the recipient raise its fertilized eggs. But it turns out that snails don’t incorporate the calcium in the dart into their bodies. Instead, love darts turn out to deliver hormones that manipulate a snail’s reproductive organs.

Evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that this love dart evolved due to a sexual arms race. When a snail receives some sperm, it can gain some evolutionary advantage if it can choose whether to use it or not. By choosing the best sperm, a snail can produce the best offspring. But it might be in the evolutionary interest of sperm-delivering snails to rob their mates of their ability to choose. And love darts appear to do just that. Their hormones prevent a snail from destroying sperm with digestive enzymes, so that firing a love dart leads to more eggs being fertilized.

Recently Joris Koene of Vrije University in the Netherlands Hinrich Schulenberg of Tuebingen University in Germany set out to see how this evolutionary arms race has played out over millions of years. They analyzed DNA from 51 different snail species that produce love darts, which allowed them to work out how the snails are related to one another. They then compared the darts produced by each species, along with other aspects of their reproduction, such as how fast the sperm could swim and the shape of the pocket that receives the sperm.

Koene and Schulenberg found that love darts are indeed part of a grand sexual arms race. Love darts have evolved many times, initially as simple cones but then turning into elaborate harpoons in some lineages. (The picture at the end of this post shows eight love darts, in side view and cross section.) In the same species in which these ornate weapons have evolved, snails have also evolved more powerful tactics for delivering their sperm, including increasingly complex glands where the darts and hormones are produced. These aggressive tactics have evolved, it seems, in response to the evolution of female choice. Species with elaborate love darts also have spermatophore-receving organs that have long, maze-like tunnels through which the sperm have to travel. By forcing sperm to travel further, the snails can cut down the increased survival of the sperm thanks to the dart-delivered hormones.

Sexual conflict has been proposed as a driving force in the evolution of many species, and this new research (which is published free online today at BMC Evolutionary Biology) supports the idea that hermaphrodites are not immune to it. What’s particularly cool about the paper is that all these attacks and counter-attacks co-vary. That is, species with more blades on their love darts tend to have longer rerpoductive tracts and more elaborate hormone-producing glands and so on. Only by comparing dozens of species were they able to find this sort of a relationship.

My wife always tells me that as a science writer, I ought to be well-prepared to give our children the talk about the birds and the bees. But I’m not sure the love darts would send quite the right message.

Perhaps you’re one of those people who get their dander up when you hear creationists saying “I’m not descended from some monkey” not only for the obvious reason, but also because you can’t help but blurt out, “No, you mean ‘ape!’ We’re apes, not monkeys.”

Indeed, our superfamily, Hominoidea, split from the group labeled “old world monkeys” millions of years ago—but perhaps not as many million as we thought. In Nature this week, a team of scientists report on a 28-29 million year old fossil that appears to predate the split, meaning the separation would have happened more recently than other studies suggested.

The partial skull of this new creature, which the team dubbed Saadanius hijazensis, turned up in Saudi Arabia in February 2009.

Saadanius sports a projecting snout, a relatively tall face with long, narrow nasal bones, broad cheek teeth and other traits resembling those of older primates previously unearthed at a geological formation on the edge of Egypt’s Sahara Desert. Researchers estimate that those creatures lived between 35 million and 30 million years ago.

But a few critical anatomical features, including a long, tube-shaped ear canal, distinguish Saadanius from its primate predecessors, the scientists say. And unlike Old World monkeys and hominoids that evolved after about 24 million years ago, Saadanius — which Zalmout’s group identifies as a male based on dental characteristics — lacked nasal sinuses and large canine teeth typical of later ape and monkey males [Science News].

In short: Before Saadanius, the researchers write, there wasn’t much evidence between 30 and 23 million years ago to illustrate the divergence between our group and the old world monkeys (which led to today’s baboons and macaques). And DNA studies had suggested a separation sometime between 35 and 29 million years ago. But if this team of scientists is right, it means that the separation’s date was in the range of 24 to 29 million years ago instead.

“The roots of apes, humans and monkeys go back a long way. We were interested to know when these ancient primates diverged because, in a way, that’s when we got our start,” said William Sanders, an author on the paper at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Palaeontology. “Knowing the date is important because you can then look at what the conditions were like at that time and place and get some idea of what was driving their evolution,” he added [The Guardian].

But while it’s tempting to see ourselves in primate fossils, there’s no way to know whether Saadanius was actually an ancestor of humanity. It may have predated that split between old world monkeys and apes, but it could have been a branch on the evolutionary tree that died out.

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Image: Zalmout and Sanders

World Trade Center construction workers dug up something unexpected this week: an 18th century sailing ship.

Plans for the new Trade Center require workers to unearth parts of lower Manhattan left undisturbed during construction of the original buildings. During part of this dig, in an area between Liberty and Cedar Streets, beams of wood rose from the mud. Yesterday, archaeologists confirmed that 20 to 30 feet below street level, a 30-foot ship chunk has rested for more than 200 years.

It’s not unusual for such artifacts to hide under large coastal cities. As a young city’s population grows, inhabitants look for any way possible to extend the city’s borders, transforming dirt and trash poured into the water into prime real estate. As The New York Times reports, this isn’t the first ship uncovered in Manhattan. In 1982, New Yorkers discovered a 1700s sailing vessel that had been hiding under 175 Water Street.

A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told The New York Times that he believes that the entire ship may have originally been around 2 to 3 times larger than the uncovered piece and, because the section looks deliberately sawed off, it’s likely that the ship was purposely chopped up and used for landfill material. Now uncovered, the ship is vulnerable to degradation, so archaeologists must work quickly to document and move the find as construction continues around it.

Archaeologist Doug Mackey told the The New York Times that because of the ship’s vulnerability, he is particularly happy to have this week’s rainy weather:

“If the sun had been out,” he said, “the wood would already have started to fall apart.”

Pictures of the dig are available at The New York Times website.

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Image: New York Historical Society

In light of California's most recent faux pas, today's guest commentary comes from California native David Lowry. David's an extraordinary plant biologist working on the genetics of switchgrass as a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin. (And yes I'm biased, he's soon to be my husband). Given the economic crisis has wreaked havoc to my beloved home state of California, why are our lawmakers spending any time on a horribly misguided quest to dethrone serpentine (pictured left) as the state rock? A bit of background: Serpentine is commonly found in the hilly areas of California. It usually has a lovely smooth green or whitish tinge and its chemical composition has other characteristics fascinating to geologists, which I won’t detail here…except to include that some forms contain a small amount of asbestos, which leads us to our current predicament. You all remember asbestos, right? That lung cancer-causing white powdery substance that closed down your school gym as a kid for a year when they discovered it in those flame-resistant tiles (which seemed like a good idea at the time) lining the ceiling. Yep, it’s nasty stuff. We know we don’t want it around and can move on, right? Wrong! In a misguided attempt ...

Back at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli continues to tilt against his windmill of climate change: he still wants to investigate climate scientist Michael Mann for possible fraud. As I’ve pointed out before, Cuccinelli is attacking Michael Mann despite Mann repeatedly being cleared of all wrongdoing. Cuccinelli subpoenaed UVa for records involving Mann, but the University filed an appeal saying (correctly) this would chill academic freedom.

The Daily Progress has an update: Cuccinelli won’t quit:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli argued Tuesday that the University of Virginia must comply with his demand for a trove of documents related to the research of former UVa climate change scientist Michael Mann, saying that Mann’s academic freedom does not shield him from Cuccinelli’s probe into possible fraud.

Apparently it doesn’t shield him from frivolous lawsuits, either. Mann has been investigated quite thoroughly by several panels, and has been cleared of wrongdoing. In my opinion, Cuccinelli is on a fishing expedition, hoping to find anything to throw against Mann.

Cuccinelli has made it clear he’s a climate change denier. The Progress calls him a skeptic, but a real skeptic looks at the evidence fairly and objectively. I don’t see much evidence of that; which is why I think the term denier fits better. I have little problem with climate change skeptics — someone who fairly and scientifically looks at the data to come to a reasonable conclusion. Technically, I’m a skeptic as well, since I have looked into the issue as best I can.

The difference is, the evidence I have seen all points to the Earth warming up. I have to rely on the experts, of course, since this isn’t my chosen field, but as a scientist myself I can look at the data and understand the processes involved in analyzing it. So when I say I think climate change/global warming is real, it’s not based on faith or politics or anything like that.

It’s based on evidence.

I hope the judge in this case upholds the UVa appeal, and denies (haha) Cuccinelli’s request. His ongoing attempts to look into Mann’s work does chill academic freedom, but it’s also bad money long, long after good.

Tip o’ the thermometer to Nicole Wassacommandago.

Gabriel writes, “I’m a Brazilian biologist. I had the idea of tattooing a neural net as a form of tribute to scientific, logical thinking and the rational understanding of the world.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being an individual’s position, were transposed onto a geographical map. The figure to the left (from this paper) is has been widely circulated. You don’t have to be a deep thinker to understand why things shake out this way; people are more closely related to those near than those far because gene flow ties populations together, and its power decreases as a function of distance.

Of course the world isn’t flat, and history perturbs regularities. Jews for example often don’t shake out where they “should” geographically, because of their historical mobility contingent upon random and often capricious geopolitical or social pressures. The Hazara of Afghanistan have their ethnogenesis in the melange of peoples who were thrown together after the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and Iran in the 13th century, and the subsequent collapse of the Ilkhan dynasty. Though the Hazara have mixed with their Persian, Tajik and Pashtun neighbors, they still retain a strong stamp of Mongolian ancestry which means that they are at some remove on the “genetic map” from their geographical neighbors.

So when interpreting these sorts of results you have two extreme dynamics operative. On the one hand you have an equilibrium state where gene flow is mediated through continuous but small flows of migration; women moving between villages, younger sons venturing out of the village in search of better opportunities. Then you have the random (or perhaps modeled as a poisson distribution) “shocks” which are attributed to world-historical (or region-historical) events which leave an outsized and often perplexing stamp and distort the genetic map from the geographic one. Sometimes the two are not in balance. In much of the New World and Australasia the native populations were genetically replaced by settlers from the outside. Thousands of years of genetic variation accumulated and shaped by localized gene flow events were wiped clean off the map by the demographic tsunami.

Obviously that’s an extreme scenario. The macroscale does not always render the microscale irrelevant in such a fashion. A new short paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics gives us an example. Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe:

The genetic structure of human populations is important in population genetics, forensics and medicine. Using genome-wide scans and individuals with all four grandparents born in the same settlement, we here demonstrate remarkable geographical structure across 8–30?km in three different parts of rural Europe. After excluding close kin and inbreeding, village of origin could still be predicted correctly on the basis of genetic data for 89–100% of individuals.

Here’s the ubiquitous PC chart, except on the scale of villages:

As noted above they excluded close relatives, out to second cousins. They judge the genetic time depth is about ~120 years into the past back to the common ancestry. Remember that if their grandparents are from this village they obviously are going to be somewhat inbred, from the perspective of an American whose ancestors are from different nations. But for most of history the European case was the typical one, not the American one where people from different continents mingled.

Here’s part of the discussion which I think needs highlighting:

To explore how many markers are required to recover these fine scale patterns of structure, we ranked SNPs by FST among villages and repeated the PCA for the most differentiated subsets of 30?000, 10?000, 3000 and 300 SNPs in each population. In all three populations, 10?000 or more high FST SNPs recovered an essentially identical picture to that using the full data set, and even 3000 SNPs preserved considerable separation between the villages (not shown). Using only the most discriminating 300 SNPs, little structure could be observed between the two Croatian villages; however, in Scotland and Italy one of the three settlements included in each location remained completely differentiated from the other two (not shown). We note that these results are only indicative of the minimum number of SNPs required to separate these populations, as by necessity SNPs have been selected intrinsically on the basis of FST within the same data set, rather than extrinsically from other data.

The slightly lower differentiation of the Croatian villages is not surprising given the fact that they are physically the closest of those considered here, being 8?km apart, with only low hills separating them. In contrast, the settlements in the Scottish Isles and Italy are separated by 15–30?km of sea in the former case, and of 3000?m mountains in the latter, although there are deep connecting valleys.

First, we get a sense of the range of informative markers necessary to discern population structure well in much of the Old World. For continental races (e.g., Europeans vs. East Asians) you need on the order of 10-100 markers to distinguish them with a high degree of confidence (closer to the low bound than the high). It looks like in the case of village vs. village differences, it will be on the order of 100-1000 markers. I suspect in Iraq or the Caucasus you’ll need less than 300 markers, because genetic differentiation is higher over a shorter distance due to inbreeding, ethnic diversity, and geography (more the former in Iraq, more the latter in the Caucasus). In contrast, in regions where geography is conducive to transport and local norms enforce exogamy I wouldn’t be surprised if you need more like a thousand markers.

Second, observe the importance of topographical detail. I have observed before than Sardinia is a genetic outlier in Europe. That’s not because Sardinians interbred with native elves of that island. Rather, a water barrier serves as a major check on continuous gene flow mediated by banal contacts (e.g., going to the market and meeting a person from the neighboring village). Islands become worlds unto themselves. Though they are effected by the exogenous shocks, they are less subject to the continuous gene flow at the equilibrium because the water serves as a barrier. Similarly mountains can produce genetic barriers as well, because they make travel rather difficult. In Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy L. L. Cavalli-Sforza documents in detail through Roman Catholic Church records what a big impact modern roads had on inbreeding coefficients, which plunged in the 19th century. Distortions of the genetic map tells about variations in elevation in the third dimension on the geographic map!

The utility of this sort of data collection and analysis in the modern world is an empirical question. On the one hand many Europeans are relatively less inclined to move in comparison to Americans. And yet the breaking down of borders with the European Union and the likely need for a more productive economic sector on that continent because of changing demographics point to greater mobility, migration and mixing, which would make these sorts of studies of only near-term use. Of more interest to me are going to be fine-grained analyses of social groups. For example the Indian caste system. Last fall in the Reich et al. paper the authors seemed to be indicating the likelihood of a lot of between population variance groups these groups. It doesn’t matter if a particular Bania sub-caste from Gujarat is scattered across the world, from Kenya to England to the United States. They may all still marry amongst a set of individuals who hale from the same original few villages.

Good times.

Citation: O’Dushlaine, C., McQuillan, R., Weale, M., Crouch, D., Johansson, Aulchenko, Y., Franklin, C., Polašek, O., Fuchsberger, C., Corvin, A., Hicks, A., Vitart, V., Hayward, C., Wild, S., Meitinger, T., van Duijn, C., Gyllensten, U., Wright, A., Campbell, H., Pramstaller, P., Rudan, I., & Wilson, J. (2010). Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe European Journal of Human Genetics DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2010.92

Machines.  We have been dependent on them throughout human history.  The more advanced we’ve become, the more advanced have our machines become.  In the latter half of the 20th century, we developed computers.   Now, we live much of our lives with, and through, computers and other machines (a computer is really nothing but a machine…an interesting one, for certain, but a machine).  Many people wonder if we really control the machines, or if the machines control us.  I admit to being a fan of the Terminator and Matrix franchises, but I’m not going to tell you if I have any hacking skills until I check with an attorney.

This is the main fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate anastromical postions. This is from about 150-100 BCE. Image by French Wiki User Marsyas, copyrighted, all rights reserved.

Three things have advanced our technology through the last 60 years; greed, war, and space exploration.  “Greed” because if you designed something newer/cooler/better/faster than your competitors, you got rich.  “War” because if your perceived enemy — the dreaded “THEM” — gets ahead of you in technology they can control you.  “Space exploration” because it was there.  No philosophical arguments about greed or war from me (or you, please).  They are with us, and we have to deal with them.  Shall we just accept for today that competitiveness and aggression is in our nature, and move on to what’s really interesting?  I’m talking about space exploration.

This is the IBM AN/FSQ7 (well, part of it). It's ONE computer. Built to detect bombers, it was in operation until 1979. Image by Debbie Vaters

When we were first developing the technology to go into space, I admit I had some serious doubts.  Remember, we’re talking about the very beginning of the 60′s.  If you suppose life then was much as it is now, you are sadly mistaken.  Let me think:  Okay, the telephones weighed five pounds and were permanently affixed to one spot.  There was no caller ID, no answering machines, no call waiting, no texting.  You had a black and white television (maybe) and three channels.  No cable, no satellites, no pocket calculators, no cell phones, and no home computers.  And we’re going to the moon.  Okey dokey.

The Apollo 11 Lunar Module - Taken by Neil Armstrong (that's Buzz Aldrin you see) NASA

Obviously we did it.  And kept doing it.  It cost a lot in money and lives, and not just in the United States.  People all over the world have paid the price, at the time most notably in the USSR and the US.  We did it because we developed the machines to take us where our two feet couldn’t.  A space ship is nothing but a machine designed to move you from one place to another, much like your automobile.  Granted it’s a bit more complicated than this year’s Honda, but the concept is the same.  We can trace our most advanced vehicles, I’d say the space shuttles, way back to the simple cart.  As soon as you get the concept down, and build the first machine for it, you can keep growing and improving from there.

A reproduction of the Model T Ford - PhotoBucket Public Domain image

Operating a machine in space brings on new and exciting challenges, of course.  For one, if your vehicle fails you have a whole boat load of problems in space that you don’t have on the ground.  Beyond that, we’ve now developed machines to go where we can’t go yet.  Our rovers on Mars, the Voyagers, Cassini, Messenger… we have a whole pack of them roaming around out there.  Sure, we have some (very) limited control over them, but basically we’ve designed machines to go out where we can’t and collect specific information for us.

Artist conception of the Spirit Rover on Mars - NASA

That’s the beginning.  That’s the concept.  This is part one of Trudy’s post, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the machines we use in space exploration.

While I was at TAM 8 a breathless story came out claiming that methane erupting from the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was going to cause a catastrophic global extinction event. I knew the story smelled bad right away^* but was a bit busy at the meeting, so I couldn’t attack it.

Happily, my pal Annalee Newitz at io9 did. She talked to actual experts and found out there simply isn’t enough methane leaking from the oil plume to do much except to the local environment. In my humble opinion, this ecological disaster sucks enough without adding hysteria to it.

Tip o’ the top hat to Rob Sheridan and aeontriad.

On the distinction between yuppies and hippies: Individual differences in prediction biases for planning future tasks.

“The present study investigated variables related to errors in predicting when tasks will be completed. Participants (N = 184) responded to the Time Structure Questionnaire (TSQ; Jones, Banicky, Pomare, & Lasane, 1999) and Temporal Orientation Scale (TOS; Bond & Feather, 1988) and predicted when they would complete either a desirable or undesirable task. Factor analysis of the TSQ and TOS identified two factors: yuppie traits, which involved being hard-working and goal-oriented, and hippie traits that reflected “living for the moment”. Overall, individuals tended to underestimate when they would complete both tasks. However, for the undesirable task, yuppie traits corresponded with less prediction bias whereas hippie traits were associated with greater bias.”

Bonus excerpt from the Introduction:
“Kahneman and Tversky (1979) observed that individuals typically underestimated how much time they needed to complete their projects despite the fact that similar tasks in the past had taken longer than expected. They described this optimistic bias as the “planning fallacy” which subsequent research has shown to occur for predictions about the completion of many different tasks, including honors theses (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994), word puzzles, tax forms (Buehler, Griffin, & MacDonald, 1997), origami, furniture assembly (Byram, 1997), and computer programming (Connolly & Dean, 1997).”

Thanks to David for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/Wineblat Eugene – Portraits

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It’s what happens to your brain after you’re born that makes you human.

Jason Hill and colleagues were comparing the structure of newborn brains to those of adults when they came upon a striking find, documented this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Clearly, the brain expands greatly as you grow from baby to adult. But the researchers discovered not only that the brain grows in a non-uniform way, but also that the parts of the brain that change most rapidly as people grow up are the same parts that changed the most as humans evolved away from our primate relatives.

The research revealed that brain regions involved in higher cognitive and executive processes—such as language and reasoning—grow about twice as much as regions associated with basic senses such vision and hearing…. “The parts of the [brain] that have grown the most to make us uniquely humans are the same regions that tend to grow the most postnatally,” Hill said [National Geographic].

But why would we be born with brains more like those of the apes? At birth, more basic abilities like the physical senses are more important for survival, the researchers say. Study author David Van Essen also hypothesizes that it could be advantageous for those brain regions to grow once you’re out of the womb, allowing, for instance, the extraordinary capacity of children to pick up language.

Lastly, there’s the more practical side of the birth process:

The limitations on brain size imposed by the need to pass through the mother’s pelvis at birth might also force the brain to prioritize, said study researcher Dr. Terrie Inder, professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine [LiveScience].

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Image: iStockphoto

The bits that make up Earth apparently took their time pulling themselves together. New research hints that our home didn’t form as a fully-fledged planet until 70 million years after its currently accepted birth date, making the planet younger than scientists believed.

The evidence appears in Nature and looks at the Earth’s “accretion”–the swirling together of gas and dust that formed our planet. Researchers previously believed that the Earth’s accretion was a fairly steady process, happening in about 30 million years, but this study suggests that Earth took a lot longer to form.

“The whole issue hinges on working out how long it took for the core of the Earth to form, which is one of the big unknowns in this area of science,” said Dr. John Rudge, one of the authors at the University of Cambridge. “One of the problems has been that scientists usually presume Earth’s accretion happened at an exponentially decreasing rate. We believe that the process may not have been that simple and that it could well have been a much more staggered, stop-start affair.” [The Telegraph]

Specifically, the scientists compared isotopes in our planet’s mantle with those found in meteorites, which are as old as the solar system. The researchers used meteorites as samples of our embryonic planet’s materials, and by comparing the isotopes in these building materials to the final product–the earth’s mantle–they could make several computer models to determine how the planet formed.

After looking at models using different isotopes, the researchers believe that the planet had one great growth spurt (sticking together about two-thirds of the Earth’s current mass) followed by a period of long slow growth. They say the formation could have ended with a walloping by a planet-sized chunk of materials that gave us the last of our mass and also broke off a chunk to form the Moon.

“If correct, [this model] would mean the Earth was about 100 million years in the making altogether,” Dr. Rudge said. “We estimate that makes it about 4.467 billion years old–a mere youngster compared with the 4.537 billion-year-old planet we had previously imagined.” [BBC]

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Image: NASA

When it comes to submarines, stealth is no longer an excuse for being anti-social. A 40-inch-long buoy may soon allow submarine captains to send text messages from under the sea.

After leaving the submarine’s trash chute, the buoy stays tethered to the vessel by miles of cables, LiveScience reports. Once sailors have texted to their hearts’ content, they can cut the buoy loose. Alternatively, Lockheed Martin, the system’s designer, also pictures buoys dropped from airplanes, which could receive submarine messages via an “acoustic messaging system” that resembles sonar and send them along in text message form.

By air or by garbage disposal, the buoys would improve current submarine communications, Rod Reints at Lockheed Martin told LiveScience.

“Currently, they have to go up to near periscope depth to communicate . . . . They become more vulnerable to attack as they get closer to the surface. Ultimately, we’re trying to increase the communication availability of the sailors while increasing their safety.”

If successful, one could only imagine the buoy’s other applications. Underwater robots, for example, could text us live updates about sunken vessels or oil leaks. Also, given that we can now text in caves and tweet in space, the buoy, by allowing people to text from miles under water, means that there is nowhere lft 2 escape.

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Image: U.S. Navy

I love stuff like this: what would the credits of "Firefly" have been like had the show been made in the 1980s? Pretty much like this:

This was done by Garrison Dean and my bud Charlie Jane Anders from io9.

I saw right away (like many others) that they left off Simon Tam from the credits! So what did they do? In a sense, they apologized but in a freaking brilliant and hilarious way:

Awe. Some. Makes me want to sit down with my DVD set of "Firefly", too. Into the black once more…

Tip o’ the Crazy Ivan to Wil.