evolgen | January 22, 2007I got my motherboard replaced a couple of hours ago, so I now have my old forms of procrastination at my disposal -- blogging and blog reading.
I've got one link for you that is relevant to Gregg Easterbrook's anti-multi-author screed. This one comes from BioCurious; it's an article on attributing credit in multi-author papers. Enjoy.
evolgen | January 20, 2007Three things:
A new edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at Neurotopia. Go read the latest genetics blogging.
The anecdote at the beginning of my rant about elevator usage needs a slight correction: I think the grad student who took the elevator down has a bum knee (it's a new injury). I'm not too disappointed that she took the elevator, as walking down stairs sucks when your knee's screwed up. That's what I get for passing judgment without knowing all the facts. But that doesn't make up for all the perfectly healthy people who ride the elevator despite the fact that they don't need…
evolgen | January 18, 2007Allow me to set the stage. I just emerged from the autoclave room with a cart full of hot, steamy, dirty vials and bottles of Drosophila media in tow (see image below the fold). The glassware had been the home for thousands of flies for a period of over a month. What started out as a mixture of agar, cornmeal, yeast, molasses was churned up and excreted into by tons of larvae. All this nastiness was then heated at high pressure, releasing all kinds of aromas that I have the pleasure of dragging around our building. I'm a real popular guy.
I had to push the cart from the autoclave room to the…
evolgen | January 17, 2007Esquire runs a regular article called "Answer Fella" in which stupid questions get stupid answers. In this month's edition we find out whether cloned humans have souls, why South Dakota's badlands are called badlands, and how many potatoes make up a bag of chips. My favorite answer, however, is to the question of what happens to the bodies of large animals when they die at the zoo:
According to Brandie Smith, director of conservation and science for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a necropsy--an animal autopsy--is performed first, to determine the cause of death and for research. "We…
evolgen | January 17, 2007Nature Genetics is asking:
What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?
George Church would repeat the Applera dataset for everyone on earth, sequencing every exon from every human being. Francis Collins would sequence people with diseases and old people. Stephen O'Brien would sequence the genomes of all 38 extant species of cats (big surprise) to study the evolution of that taxon and generate SNP markers. O'Brien would also sequence the genomes of the 100 most endangered mammals and every species of primate. Evan Eichler would…
evolgen | January 17, 2007Do you consider yourself a Science Blogger? You could be a hard blogging scientist, science journalist, student of science, or just a member of the general public with an interest in the scientific process. If you identify with any of these, I've got a challenge for you.
It boils down to this:
One week of science blogging and only science blogging.
At least one post a day of pure science content.
No blogging about anti-science -- no creationism, no anti-vaccination, no global warming denialists.
Just Science from February 5 through February 11.
More information can be found here or…
evolgen | January 17, 2007Two science blogging carnivals have been posted in the past few days. The first edition of Oekologie (ecology and environmental science) is up at The Infinite Sphere, and Aardvarchaeology has the newest Four Stone Hearth (anthropology). Also, Evil Monkey is scheduled to post a fresh edition of Mendel's Garden any minute now -- or two days ago. Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for that one too.
evolgen | January 17, 2007Imagine you put grandma in a retirement home. One day, you and the kids head out to Shady Acres to pay a visit to grandma. You meet her in her room -- planning to hit up the 4pm dinner as her guest so she can show off the grandkids to the other retirees -- only to discover she's got an infant in her arms. Well, it's happened:
SHREVEPORT, La. - It's both a surprise and a mystery. At Caddo Parish's Chimp Haven, where retired male chimpanzees all get vasectomies, a female chimp has turned up pregnant. Chimp Haven managers knew something was up when they could not find one of their chimps last…
evolgen | January 16, 2007Gregg Easterbrook -- good sportswriter, crappy at pretty much everything else he does -- likes to take pot-shots at scientific research in his ESPN column "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (TMQ). In this week's edition he tells us how he doesn't think scientific papers should have multiple authors and how he doesn't like the advertisements in the journal Science.
TMQ dislikes the modern convention of listing multiple people as "authors" of a work written by a single person; this is part of the overall cheapening of the written word. Several previous items have concerned the absurd number of…
evolgen | January 16, 2007
Don't say I didn't warn you. We have irrefutable evidence that the manatees are attacking. We're only now gaining insights into their advance technology. Only a week ago did I say to Sandy:
And I'm obsessed with manatees, not chimeras. That is, unless the matatees devise some sort of manatee/lobster chimera. That would really freak me out.
Never did I think I could be so right, yet so wrong, at the same time. This site contains some odd pictures demonstrating what happens when animal-animal chimeras go wrong. Included is the photo above -- the MANAPHANT, or manatee/elephant chimera. The…
evolgen | January 16, 2007To the uninitiated, chromosome number may appear to reflect genome size -- more chromosomes would mean a larger genome. This is not necessarily the case if we measure genome size by the number of base pairs in a genome. There are two primary ways to change chromosome number: chromosomal duplications and chromosomal fusions/fissions. Chromosomal duplications (either through polyploidization or aneuploidy) do change the size of the genome, either by creating a second copy of a single chromosome or duplicating an entire genome. Fusions and fissions, on the other hand, merely rearrange the…
evolgen | January 15, 2007T-Rex thinks he's eliminated zombies with logic. The basic idea: Zombies depend on human brains to survive, but they also must bite humans (turning them into zombies) to create more zombies. If zombies were really good at catching humans and eating their brains, there would be no more humans and the zombie population would die off. Conversely, if the zombies had trouble getting to the human brains, they could convert humans into zombies (by biting them without eating their brains), but they would starve due to brain deprivation.
Anders Sandberg disagrees, and he's done the simulations to back…
evolgen | January 15, 2007There are a lot of different ways for animals to determine which individuals develop into boys and which ones become girls. You're probably most familiar with the form of chromosomal sex determination that utilizes X and Y chromosomes -- males are XY and females are XX. There are others, including ZW (males are ZZ, females are ZW) and environmental sex determination (e.g., sex can be determined by egg rearing temperature).
One of the most interesting sex determination systems -- from an evolutionary perspective -- involves differences in ploidy between males and females. Hymenoptera (ants,…
evolgen | January 14, 2007I'm a big fan of recycling. I try to recycle whatever I can -- paper, plastics, glass, aluminum -- whenever I can. I was under the impression that recycling produces less waste than dumping in landfills and is better for the environment in general. Because of this, I was willing to pay the extra costs (indirectly through taxes) to support municipal recycling programs. Penn and Teller beg to differ:
If you don't want to watch the entire thing, here's the take home message: recycling paper and plastic is wasteful and costs a lot more than landfilling. Penn and Teller linger a lot on the wasted…
evolgen | January 14, 2007
Hang with me here on this one.
Marlowe's Cousin Shakespeare's Sister responds to a criticism of Nancy Pelosi with a little bit of feminist satire (reproduced below the fold): "No woman in the history of politics has used her womb like Nancy Pelosi.". Shakes (I think that's what the cool kids call her) Photoshops a woman's naughty bits complete with symbols of the evil liberal agenda -- pink triangles and rainbows (we're guessing she couldn't find any good pictures of sequins or ruby studded pinky rings).
What really got me about the feminist pussy, however, is what she included in place of…
evolgen | January 13, 2007Larry Moran has been writing about olfactory receptors (1, 2, 3). The last two focus on work that has come out of Masatoshi Nei's group on the evolution of gene families -- OR genes being a archetype of gene family evolution.
evolgen | January 11, 2007One year ago today the current incarnation of evolgen at ScienceBlogs was launched. A lot has happened in that year -- we junked DNA; we became terrified of manatees; we were voted the sexiest blog in all of scibloggistan by Nature; we were awarded the Nobel prizes for Physiology or Medicine, Peace, and Literature; we cured cancer -- but most notably, we changed banners. A lot. So, in honor of a full year without pissing on the floor (which is more than some folks can say) we're unveiling a new banner. Our last banner. The best banner of all time. This banner will be up until the internet…
evolgen | January 11, 2007The post from yesterday was inspired by the news coverage surrounding the paper describing gene expression differences (DOI) between human populations. The original article uses neither the term 'race' nor the term ''Caucasian''. Instead, what would normally be called 'races' are referred to as 'populations' -- aside from the single use of 'ethnic groups' in the title of the paper -- and the population that would be called ''Caucasian' ' is dubbed 'European-derived'.
When we look at some of the news coverage of the article, though, we see different terminology. The Nature news item by the…
evolgen | January 10, 2007The curtain has been drawn and the secrets to data analysis revealed. Do you have a data set sitting around in need of analysis? Read this and learn how to find significant results somewhere -- anywhere -- in your data. Because negative results won't get you published; and you won't get hired/tenure if you don't publish; and your career will be a failure. Here's a taste:
There are always anomalies. The World Series has been swept 17 times, five more than the model would predict. Plug this into the BINOMDIST function in Excel. (Understanding how this function works is optional and may in some…