evolgen
Posts by this author
There are certain scientific disciplines that are well represented in the blogosphere. Bioinformatics comes to mind. As does physics. But these are computer savvy people who probably spend quite a bit of time hooked up to the interwebs. How about scientists that need to get their hands dirty? Like…
My university has been hosting panel discussions on science, religion, and teaching. I missed the first installment, which consisted of faculty members from science and humanities departments and a local clergyman. The second discussion was led by four students from a course cross listed in Science…
The five nurses and one doctor (the Tripoli Six) accused of infecting hundreds of patients with HIV in Libya are awaiting the verdict of their trial, expected to be handed down on December 19. The second trial concluded on November 4 -- the original guilty verdict was overturned. I previously…
Circus of the Spineless #15 has been posted at Words & Pictures. Go check out the best invertebrate (cough, paraphyletic taxon, cough) blogging from the past month or so.
A few weeks ago PNAS published a paper on the evolution of snake sex chromosomes. The authors compare snake sex chromosome evolution with that of mammals and birds. Given my passing interest in sex chromosome evolution, I decided to check it out.
Snakes use sex chromosomes to determine the sex of…
The funniest lab accident?
There was the time I spent an entire day trying to make electrophoretic gels using distilled water instead of buffer. The agarose suspended fine in the distilled water, but I couldn't get it to solidify. I kept remaking the agarose solution and never got anything…
We usually think of speciation as a bifurcating process -- a single lineage splitting into two. The relationships of those species can often be determined using DNA sequences. But we know that there are exceptions, like horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. And hybrid speciation in plants. These…
The ninth edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted by the collective of Oregon State grad students known as Salamander Candy. Go read the month's best genetics blogging.
Sandy has declared her love for all things "-omics". She even came up with a nifty table to define a bunch of omes. It's like she's created a list-o-omes-eome.
Snark aside, here's why she likes omes:
I like "ome" [see, I told you she would tell us why she likes omes] because it simultaneously…
The USC offensive line sucks.
Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian suck.
Absolute failure.
When you play against a speed defense, you run right at them. You attack them. You make them overrun and overplay. You don't run slow developing plays.
And when you play against a young, crappy QB who likes to run…
In the sake of fairness, it's worth reporting that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) may not be as flawed as previously thought (see the original paper here). I spent a bit of time earlier this year barking about how mtDNA is a less than stellar marker for inferring demography because it's subject to…
What if some phylogenies were simply irresolvable? That is, what if, no matter how much data we collected, it would be impossible to reconstruct, with a high level of certainty, an accurate representation of the tree of life? That would suck. A lot. I have mentioned how this can result from long…
Dr. Joan Bushwell (not her real name) has hurled some poo at the -omicists. You know, those people who attach -omics to everything and act like they've come up with a brand new research discipline. I imagine them making the "guitar player changing chords" face (go to 1:09 in this video) when they…
Last week I linked to Carl Zimmer's take down of Casey Luskin. Notice how the text containing the link to Carl's post says "Casey Luskin". It's called a Google bomb -- we're trying to make Carl's post the number one search result when one enters Casey Luskin as a query in Google. It only works if a…
If you're getting near finishing your PhD (within a couple of years or less), check out this article from PLoS Computational Biology. It offers ten suggestions to consider when searching for a post doc. The suggestions are not comp-bio specific, but I'd be interested in hearing if people have other…
A bunch of grad students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are organizing an online symposium in the Life Sciences. They've got a list of speakers and you can upload your own presentation. The conference runs from December 4-8, but I'm not sure how exactly this virtual conference…
A couple of years ago, one of the rear tail lights went out on my car. I'm kinda handy with tools, so I figured it would be an easy fix. I poked around in the trunk area with my screw driver, removing every screw within spitting distance of the lamp. I tugged on the lamp in every possible direction…
Everyone's jumping on this meme, but I'm not gonna do it. Ooops . . . Looks like I just did it. Anyway, blogging's been light recently. Hopefully I can get my act together and have some posts up later this week. And by "get my act together" I mean procrastinate from doing real work by writing blog…
Remember Maciej Giertych? He's the Polish representative to the European Parliament who wants creationism taught in schools alongside evolution. And he's got a degree in tree physiology, but he claims to be a population geneticist. Anyway, his letter to Nature made it seem like Poland has this big…
There's an old paradigm in human population genetics that we each differ from each other by less than one percent at the DNA sequence level. While that may be true for our DNA sequences, recent work indicates that there's also quite a bit of variation amongst individuals in the actual content of…
Happy Turkey Day!! As a special gift, I give you yet another -ome to spread on your Thanksgiving bird. You see, I'm fascinated by -omics, the idea that you can affix "-ome" to your favorite biological system to prime the hype machine. And what I have for you this time makes me think of the juices…
Colin Purrington, he of the great textbook disclaimer stickers (and whose website is a treasure trove of information), is looking for some prison statistics:
A common theme in anti-evolution writings is that teaching kids about Darwin will cause them to lose all touch with morality, and will end up…
Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?
That's the question they are asking us this week. And everyone is answering E.O. Wilson. This, of course, comes with the caveat that if Carl Sagan were alive today, he'd be the obvious choice.
If we can't get Carl Sagan,…
The sixty seventh edition of the Tangled Bank has been posted at Newton's Binomium. It's a Thanksgiving edition, so go give thanks for some good science blogging.
I've got another pet-peeve-itch to scratch, so I'm picking up a tall glass of haterade.
I'm walking down the stairwell in my building, and I encounter someone heading upstairs carrying a styrofoam container (I can't tell what's in it, but it's probably filled with ice and something worth keeping…
The new issue of Current Biology contains an interview with Drosophila geneticist Michael Ashburner. Here's a quote from the article:
Scientists should realize that if they submit to journals -- like those published by Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer, Wiley and the like -- then their work will be less…
John Hawks reports that the gene that, when mutated, can turn male flies gay and females into lesbians can also make boy flies fight like girls and vice-versa. This research will be published in an upcoming edition of Nature Neuroscience. And be sure to check out the videos from the fruit fly…
Two years ago today (November 21, 2004 at 11:23 AM) I launched evolgen in its original incarnation. The first post, entitled "First Post", celebrated the occasion:
This is the first post to the evolgen blog. Not much to say other than there is more to come (hopefully).
The first evolutionary…
When we were asked what the best science TV show is, a couple of people answered Mythbusters. It turns out it's not a science show. Here's how Jamie Hyneman, one of the shows creators, describes it:
Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the "Mythbusters" team "don't have any pretense of…