razib | March 16, 2010There's an article in The New York Times on the recent paper which extracted genetic material from remains in Xinjiang dated to 4,000 years ago. Remember that these remains exhibited male lineages which were west Eurasian, specifically R1a1, while the female lineages (mtDNA) were more heterogeneous, both eastern and western. This particular twist in history is of very strong interest. I think there are three reasons for this. First, it is counter-intuitive, as we don't have a good grasp of how mobile ancient nomadic populations were. Most of their history is unaccessible because they were…
razib | March 15, 2010The Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Cova Gran (Catalunya, Spain) and the extinction of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula:
The excavations carried out in Cova Gran de Santa Linya (Southeastern PrePyrenees, Catalunya, Spain) have unearthed a new archaeological sequence attributable to the Middle Palaeoloithic/Upper Palaeolithic (MP/UP) transition. This article presents data on the stratigraphy, archaeology, and 14C AMS dates of three Early Upper Palaeolithic and four Late Middle Palaeolithic levels excavated in Cova Gran. All these archaeological levels fall within the 34-32 ka…
razib | March 15, 2010The strange case of the twins of Kodinji:
The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The average in the rest of the country is 8.1 per 1,000 live births.
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Unlike in Cândido Godói, consanguineous (blood-related) marriages are not a factor in the Kodinji twin phenomenon. "The majority of the population is Muslim, but the incidences of twinning are present even among the small…
razib | March 15, 2010Randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation to prevent seasonal influenza A in schoolchildren:
Design: From December 2008 through March 2009, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial comparing vitamin D3 supplements (1200 IU/d) with placebo in schoolchildren. The primary outcome was the incidence of influenza A, diagnosed with influenza antigen testing with a nasopharyngeal swab specimen.
Results: Influenza A occurred in 18 of 167 (10.8%) children in the vitamin D3 group compared with 31 of 167 (18.6%) children in the placebo group [relative risk (RR), 0.58; 95% CI…
razib | March 15, 2010And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning is a litany of how the mapping from Hebrew to other languages has resulted in a distortion of the precise idiom of the original. I actually thought the best example of this given was a non-Biblical one, the fact that English-speakers are totally clueless as to the implication of the title of the Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate, which sends a rather clear message only intelligible in a Spanish speaking context. English speakers have tended to generate novel meanings from the cryptic title at total variance with the…
razib | March 13, 2010Via a comment, a site which you will love, or which will drive you insane, Complete Small Dogs Guide. I found this story about a chihuahua carried away by a large bird, only to return to its owner.
razib | March 13, 2010This comment from Chris is interesting:
I would speculate that the the massive productivity gains were due to a massive resorting of American society along cognitive lines; from 1940 to 1970 a large number of high ability people who were previously locked into agriculture and industry were able to sort themselves into more innovative positions. This would lead to a massive burst of innovation, which led to increases in productivity, as previously unlocked talent was put to use.
From 1970 to 1990 this resorting was mostly winding down and productivity in the economy was heavily constrained by…
razib | March 13, 2010In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt:
At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year.
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The Apollo Group -- which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix -- derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.
For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama…
razib | March 11, 2010The New York Times has a scary but numerically rich piece on the impending pension crisis in Europe. As in the days of yore Greece looks to be a pioneer. Here's an interesting pair of numbers:
According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece's pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government's debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of a nation's economic output. That would be the highest debt level among the 16 nations that use the euro, and far…
razib | March 11, 2010I remember Craig Venter talking about synthetic life in the fall of 2007 with Carl Zimmer. Last summer he said that we'd have the first "synthetic species" by the end of the year. I haven't heard about it in 2010, have you? Anyone have info on what's going on here? No surprise that project deadlines get pushed back, it happens. But it seems like I've been hearing "wait 6 months" since the beginning of 2008. Does it actually work out so that only God can pull this off? Or is this vaporscience (OK, he got the genome part nailed down, but that was a while ago)?
razib | March 10, 2010Reviewed by other ScienceBloggers:
Prehistoric DNA reveals the story of a Pleistocene survivor, the muskox
Ancient DNA Isolated from Fossil Eggshells May Provide Clues to Eggstinction of Giant Birds
razib | March 9, 2010Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:
From page 33:
Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all)...are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in…
razib | March 8, 2010I'm starting to see Disqus and Echo all over the web. Anyone else notice this? I wasn't happy when I had to move Gene Expression Classic off Haloscan, so the whole "death of comments" fad isn't something I'm a fan of. But it seems like Facebook's creation of a successful private web is now driving the Facebookification of the public web. The main issue I have with all this revolution of the "discussion" is that in my experience as a blogger most "discussion" is retarded and most discussants are barely sentient.
razib | March 7, 2010I have mentioned before the current fad in vitamin D related papers in the medical literature. It's also broken into the pop culture Zeitgeist as well, I regularly get forwards on the topic. Here is a Google Trends chart for the United States:
The history of medicine is, unfortunately, rather similar to the history of astrology. In fact for much of history doctors are likely to have increased, rather than decreased, mortality, thanks to an ignorance of germ theory and false paradigms such as Humorism. The demand-side pressures for cures & prevention seems to still exert a powerful push…
razib | March 7, 2010Felix Salmon, Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ:
The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren't really bloggers at heart. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a long and detailed blog entry on the court case between JP Morgan and Mexico's Cablevisión. The WSJ's Deal Journal blog didn't link to it, but a couple of days later, the blog's lead writer, Michael Corkery, had a piece in the print version of the newspaper which added nothing to the story, quoted the same Cablevisión executive that I had spoken to,…
razib | March 7, 2010The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1:
Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe.
Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with…
razib | March 6, 2010Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch:
The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting.
Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93 percent opposed the deal and less than 2 percent supported it. The rest cast invalid votes.
But the rejection will still have major repercussions, keeping financial aid on hold and threatening to undermine the center-left government of Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir.
"This has no…
razib | March 6, 2010This is funny:
Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.
They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.
Check this conclusion:
Ms. Collbran says she still believes in Scientology -- not in the church as it is now constituted, but in its…