US condemns Taliban killing of medical aid workers – NewsyStocks.com

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Globe and Mail
US condemns Taliban killing of medical aid workers
NewsyStocks.com
... 10 medical aid workers as a " despicable act of wanton violence," saying the acts have shown that the group stands against "a future peace and freedom. ...
Six Americans on medical mission killed by Taliban, US condemns killingsNew Delhi Chronicle.com (blog)
Clinton Criticizes Aid Worker KillingsMyFox Houston
Clinton: Taliban making 'false accusations' about slain AmericansThe Hill (blog)
AFP
all 3,600 news articles »

Last Chance Before The Bonus Riddle

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UPDATE:  SOLVED at 12:12 CDT by Bert

Are you ready to be frustrated today?  Of course you are!

This is your last chance before the next bonus riddle, which is Monday the 9th.  I know you’re ready, so I’ll jump right into it.  You’re looking for a thing:

This thing is generally thought of in the singular, but it’s complicated.  It is one huge thing, composed of many tiny things, which then manifests itself as two things.

This was known of by ancient man; but not understood.

It really terrified our ancestors.

We think of this as an Earthly phenomenon, although with telescopic advancements we’ve come to realize it isn’t.

This thing is not a cause; it’s an effect with a reason.

In an of itself, it is not important.  It does nothing.  It is a harmless “result”.

As unimportant as the result may be, the cause and the reason are important.

Did you get that?  I’m pretty sure you can slay this particular dragon with very little effort, so get your guesses in quickly.  You know where to find me…

Happy birthday to two important people | Bad Astronomy

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Today happens to be the birthday of two people who are important to me: James Randi, and my sister Marci*.

If you don’t know Randi, that’s OK: you can get some good info on him in this interview he did with Big Think, or this talk he gave at TED, or his annoucement when he came out of the closet.

If you don’t know my sister, that’s too bad. She’s pretty cool.

Happy birthday Randi and Marci!

* I’ll let you guess who’s in the picture. Hint: I’m on the road, and I didn’t have any good pix of my sister on my laptop. Sorry, Marce.


And they came from Central Asia | Gene Expression

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There’s a new paper in AJHG out, Whole-Genome Genetic Diversity in a Sample of Australians with Deep Aboriginal Ancestry, which I’ll hit later. It doesn’t have anything too surprising, but in the supplements they have a figure which shows frappe and Structure plots for the HGDP populations as well as their Australian Aboriginal sample. These methods take an individual’s genome and assign elements to one of K ancestral populations. For African Americans this is highly illuminating, as K = 2 simply breaks down along European/African ancestral lines. The mean turns out to be ~20% for the minority quantum, exactly what had previously been ascertained through genealogy, classical autosomal markers (e.g., Duffy), and the average of uniparental lineages for European ancestry (African Americans tend to be enriched for European Y chromosomal markers, and have less than the expected European mtDNA markers. Again, totally intelligible in light of the history of relations in the old South).

These abstractions extract visually intelligible information out of the hundreds of thousands of concrete variant bases within human populations. They have clear and immediate utility when you have some inkling of the population history of a given sample. But when you attempt the same with populations whose histories are less clear and distinct, or who do not have such an obvious and well known genesis as African Americans, then things get murkier.


Therefore when it comes to higher values of K in many of these papers I just avoid reading too much into the results because the human mind is a pattern recognition machine, and it’s very easy to tell stories which have no way of being validated or falsified. Most of the authors of these papers tend to agree as higher K plots are usually nested in the supplements, not the main paper itself. But with all that caution entered into the record, I thought that K = 8 in the supplemental figure 1 was of some interest, and I want to focus on it just a little bit. I reedited it, removing many populations, and shifting the frappe and Structure plots at K = 8 next to each other. I also added some population labels for clarity, though if you’re familiar with the HGDP data set it’s clear what the abbreviations are.

camefromcentralasiaFirst, it seems that at K = 8 the fact that the non-indigenous ancestry of the Australian Aboriginal sample is Western European is pretty clear even without the known history (Dienekes noted this as well). The only question is distinguishing which Western Eurasian populations the contribution came from, and this is of some interest because of a possible connection between India and Australia. Many South Asians have a vague resemblance to Australian Aboriginals, and many Indian tribal groups are termed “Australoid.” More recently a very distant mtDNA link between Indian tribal groups and Aboriginals has been validated. But that’s totally expected, as all populations to the east of South Asia probably went through that region on the way out of Africa. A coalescence time on the order of 50,000 years ago seems to suggest that that is the connection, not a more recent migration as some have hypothesized, and which could give a phylogenetic causal basis to morphological similarities.

In the frappe plot, to the right, note that the South Asians are enriched for the orange shaded ancestral group. It’s residual in most Europeans, and almost absent in Australian Aboriginals. In the Structure plot, to the left, it’s the blue segment which is enriched in South Asians, and residual in Europeans. Again, it’s nearly absent in Aboriginals. That, combined with the attested presence of a high frequency of European diagnostic markers, such as the blue-eye OCA2 SNPs, should seal the deal in regards to the question of any more recent admixture from the initial settlement of the current indigenous stock with any group but Europeans.

But the reason I’m posting isn’t because of Aboriginal genetics. There are a few coarse clusters of human populations. Roughly, Amerindians, East Asians, Oceanians, West Eurasians + North Africans, and Sub-Saharan Africans. But within these clusters are further differences. Among the Mozabites (an Algerian Berber group with substantial Sub-Saharan African admixture), the Basque, and Sardinians, there seem to be an element which is nearly absent, but which increases in frequency as one goes east toward the heart of Eurasia. I am referring here to the aforementioned segments which I highlighted as the components whose lack suggests that Aboriginals received their non-indigenous ancestry from Europeans.

It makes me think about Li et al.’s argument that skewed population coverage has resulted in the omission of a major Central Eurasian ancestral population cluster between those of the west and east. If there was a major demographic pulse out of the center of Eurasia it would make sense that groups on the western fringe of the World Island, those in the western Mediterranean region, would show the least sign of it. I have no model for what such a pulse would be. Perhaps it wasn’t a pulse, but just isolation-by-distance and clinal variation which pops out in a discrete fashion if one cranks up the K’s. My initial thought is that it was the Indo-European languages, but it’s well represented in the Levant, and the Adygei (ADY) are not Indo-European anyway (though they could be distantly related to Indo-European and so exhibit some of the same genetic variation as the original population). I think there’s a good chance that here I’m confusing the analytical methods, frappe and Structure, for reality. But I thought I’d throw it out there since I’ve noticed this pattern for several years now….

I’ve got your missing links right here – 7th August 2010 | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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News

“We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.”The most amazing thing I read all week was this piece in the New Yorker by the incomparable Atul Gawande, talking about how people die, how doctors care for terminal patients and society’s attitudes to death. It’s long, but it’s Gawande, so you won’t feel it. Grab some tissues, find a comfy chair.

What lives in the sea? A new census of the world’s marine life gives a thorough answer, complete with 15 new papers in PLoS ONE, an incredible website, an interactive globe, timeline, image gallery, video gallery,

Mary Carmichael has written a wonderful series on Newsweek about her quest to decide whether to do a personal gene test. It’s humane, well-considered stuff and you should read all six parts.

More after the jump…

Drakazoon is an excellent Latin name for an “ancient blob-like creature of the deep”.

Vernon Asper was one of the first researchers in the Gulf of Mexico to study the oil gushing out from the BP well. But it has not all been smooth sailing, reports Mark Schrope for Nature News

Genome-wide association studies are often criticised for providing little value at great expense. But a new study clearly shows the value of this approach, reports Mark Henderson in the Times (subscription required)

Jonah Lehrer is a total class act. He even uses horrendous trolling as a vehicle for more science writing about conspiracy theories.

Some squid can escape predators by taking to the air. Alternatively, they’re doing it to distract us from their nuclear enrichment program, the sneaky gits. Ferris Jabr has the story at Scientific American.

Fossils: the result of millions of years of intense pressure. Oh, and bacteria. By Brian Switek at Dinosaur Tracking.

Much ado over nothing as the UK panics about meat and milk from cloned cows. Tom Chivers and Colin Blakemore set the fearmongers straight. Honestly, this is a country where we regularly eat Turkey Twizzlers, Monster Munch and pork scratching, and yet meat that is exactly the same as other meat makes people nauseous…

Antarctic Octopuses Discovered With Sub-Zero Venom – Jess McNally reports in Wired.

Why people think they are less influenced than others by adverts and persuasive messages, from Psyblog

The inflexibility of young children’s brains can make them better learners than adults, says Vaughan Bell in Mind Hacks.

1 in 200 men are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Razib Khan (heh) explores the science behind Gengy’s legacy.

Meet the anti-laser, which absorbs the light a laser shoots out

A nice, if very small, study about the power of the placebo effect.

Heh/wow

“Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts. The research could pave the way for advanced methods of enraging monkeys.”

Penis can only take so much electricity, surgeons warn.

97% of Nature’s readers have internet access, according to a survey of Nature online readers. Er…

Meet Pandarus rhincodonicus, a parasite that lives on the lips of whale sharks

Want a social media strategy? Here you go.

Robot climbs walls, but in a slightly eerie way.

Journalism/internet/blogging

My list of science writer origins is still going strong at over 120 entries, and even got a mention at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. If you’re a science writer and haven’t contributed yet, please do so.

Meet Scientopia – a new collective consisting of several ex-Sciblings, who have joined forces with many other excellent bloggers. Go and support the new community – it includes such favourites of mine as SciCurious, PalMD, and Adventures in Ethics and Science.

Frank Swain (Science Punk) gave a superb talk on the problems with the skeptic movement at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub. A podcast of his talk is now up, and it’s a must-listen. Noodlemaz has a good write-up too.

“Gatekeeping is now a collective pursuit; we’ve become our own and each other’s editors,” says Ken Doctor at the Nieman Journalism Lab. “With social media, the serendipity that came with turning pages and suddenly discovering a gem of a story that an editor put there happens in new ways. We’re re-creating such moments ourselves, each of us?individually and collectively?as we tout stories and posts to each other.”

The Royal Society has a new blog on the history of science.

Bec Crew’s hilarious blog Save Your Breath For Running Ponies has been named Australia’s best science blog. Go and congratulate her.

Andy Revkin blogs about the increasing role for scientists in talking directly to the public. “Institutions that thrive in this world of expanding, evolving communication paths are those willing to engage the public (including critics) and to experiment with different strategies.”

Drunk with power from Embargo Watch, Ivan Oransky has launched Retraction Watch.

Posting audio interviews provides “valuable content to your audience while building relationships with the people you interview”


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Languid Caturday | Bad Astronomy

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It’s Caturday! And this time, I actually have a picture of my cat.

I was trying to relax and watch Craig Ferguson, and she decided between my legs was the best spot in the whole house to be. And look how lady-like she is:

I need to stop her before that fourth beer every night. Otherwise she steals the remote and changes the channel to blue-collar comedy.

Related posts:

- Caturday rib licking
- Canis Minor shoots for the sky
- A foxy Caturday
- Owl be seeing you


Send More Money – Or Cut Something Out

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What's missing from the bold plans for human spaceflight, editorial, Washington Post

"But with the funding for NASA set around $19 billion and not likely to change, bold plans for humans in space are simply not feasible. Something must give. If the administration and Congress truly want human spaceflight, they need to fund it adequately. Piecemeal funding that dooms programs to failure is a waste of money -- especially when so many truly vital space functions, from the satellites that supply maps and communications to the telescopes that allow us to glimpse distant worlds, could benefit from such support."

NASA Is Interested In Commercial Lunar Missions

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NASA Seeks Data from Innovative Lunar Demonstrations

"NASA has issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to purchase specific data resulting from industry efforts to test and verify vehicle capabilities through demonstrations of small robotic landers. The purpose is to inform the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles.

The Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) BAA will result in multiple small firm-fixed price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a total value up to $30.1 million through 2012. Multiple awards are possible with a minimum government purchase of $10,000 for each selected contractor. A minimum order will be funded using FY10 dollars. Orders above the minimum would be competed among the successful offerors dependent on future budget availability. The deadline for submitting proposals is Sept. 8."