evolgen
Posts by this author
October 29, 2006
Big ups to the grad students in the Ecology and Evolution Department at the University of Arizona for putting on a killer Halloween party and letting a couple of uncostumed drosophilists share in the festivities. That's the good.
The bad: US Airways. I just found out my last flight (of three) on my…
October 26, 2006
There will be a ton of papers coming out over the next couple of weeks on the recently sequenced honeybee (Apis mellifera) genome. Carl Zimmer has a review of some of the topics that will be addressed in the upcoming publications. The NHGRI also has some information.
October 26, 2006
On November 7, the citizens of the State of Ohio will be voting a bunch of things, just like all Americans. One of the things they'll be voting for are seats on the State Board of Education (see Ed's discussion here). In one of the races, an anti-science incumbent, Deborah Owens-Fink, is running…
October 26, 2006
At least in polyploids.
So says this review of this paper. Take home message: polyploids use duplicates to buffer against mutations to important genes.
The review is brought to you by the Science Creative Quarterly. SCQ is brought to you by David Ng, who has just introduced The Filter. If you don't…
October 25, 2006
I'm currently waiting to board my third flight of the day (for this trip), sitting in the Las Vegas airport. The Las Vegas airport has free wireless! That's a good thing. It's also packed with slot machines going "bleep-bleep", "ding-ding", and "do-do-do-do". That's kind of annoying.
The southwest…
October 25, 2006
At the same time this post is scheduled to go up on ScienceBlogs I should be a few thousand feet above Middle America. I'll be spending the rest of this week in Tucson, Arizona (which I like to pronounce "Tuck-Sun", like how we pronounce Phoenix "Pa-Ho-Nix") learning about Drosophila. Sure, I…
October 25, 2006
Chuck Norris doesn't "believe" in evolution. And he's writing about it in the Wing Nut Daily. I won't link to the actual article, but you can read about it here. Thanks Bora for ruining my appreciation for the Texas Ranger.
To make up for bringing you that bad piece of news, here are the first four…
October 24, 2006
No ocean, river, or fjord is safe. The manatees are attacking. We've warned you before. Now is the time to take notice. Three times is a trend.
October 24, 2006
Some biologist in Poland said this:
"A scientist showed me a picture of an American boxer. He had all the traits of Neanderthal man. These people are among us. They are part of the human race, probably more prevalent once upon a time, but who still exist."
Apparently those dudes from the Geico…
October 20, 2006
I haven't touched an Ask A ScienceBlogger for a couple of months. This week, the powers that be are asking us:
What's the best science TV show of all time?
The first show that came to mind was Mr. Wizard. As young tyke in the 1980s, I watched a lot of Nickelodeon. Nick was a staple of my early TV…
October 20, 2006
The Idiot Box is contributing toward our search for the next science rockstar:
Filling Carl Sagan's shoes will be tough, but someone's gotta do it. Click on the image to the see the rest of the suggestions.
October 19, 2006
Check out this gem from the London Times:
Fraud may also be good for science, according to Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Since most scientific duplicity involves researchers "idealising" results that they probably would eventually have achieved anyway, such fact…
October 18, 2006
I need to vent . . .
I'm sick and tired of people referring to "higher" and "lower" eukaryotes. And, while I'm at it, I'm also sick of people mixing up "homology", "identity" and "similarity". This is nothing new; I've just reached a point where I need to write it down for the world to see.
First,…
October 18, 2006
We're in need of a host for the 9th Edition of Mendel's Garden, scheduled for 6 November. Mendel's Garden is blog carnival devoted to genetics, from evolutionary to molecular. If you would like to host the upcoming edition or any future edition, please contact Paul Decelles via the Blog Carnival…
October 17, 2006
Science has published THE genome of breast and colorectal cancers. Not the whole genome, mind you, but just 13,023 protein coding genes. The researchers identified mutations associated with cancers, but I'm not sure if they looked outside of the protein coding sequences (I have yet to read the…
October 17, 2006
Ben wants a house band, but he doesn't think it should be Phish. I agree. Phish sucks. A good house band should accompany a night of drinking. Let's just say Phish is the appropriate accompaniment for a mind altering substance not called alcohol. So who should be the ScienceBlogs house band? As…
October 16, 2006
Kevin's got us doing another nerd test. According to this test, I'm pretty smart. I'm not sure how this result relates to my nerdiness, geekiness, or dorkiness. I can tell you this: it won't be keeping me from biting the heads off of chickens!
October 16, 2006
If you thought American colleges and universities were all about thugging it up and diagramming the Z-scheme, you'd be surprised to learn how big of a deal football is. Heck, if you were to visit some universities on Saturday afternoon in autumn, you'd be surprised to learn that you were on the…
October 16, 2006
This video confirms two things I've long suspected: nature is really cool and white people can't dance. Okay, I have independent evidence for the second thing, but check out this little fella's moves:
He really shakes a proverbial tail feather. But like human males, the only reason for this guy to…
October 16, 2006
I've said it before. I'll say it again:
The best way to get your paper into a high profile journal like Science or Nature is to find the biggest of something, the smallest of something, or something that fucks funny.
This paper further supports my point.
October 15, 2006
We're not a big fan of Francis Collins around these parts. He's done some good science and helped lead one of the most important research projects in history. He also has a habit of contradicting or ignoring science when he pontificates on his faith. We don't dig that. Over at Talk Reason, Gert…
October 15, 2006
Little Lord Sweater Vest teaches photosynthesis at the Ohio State University. Seriously. Watch below:
(Via Deadspin.)
October 15, 2006
Sandy has posted the eight edition of Mendel's Garden at Discovering Biology in a Digital World. Go read the best genetics blogging from the past couple of weeks. If you have written something about genetics and would like to be included in the next edition of the carnival, you can submit your…
October 12, 2006
The most important nail was hammered in by this article -- a symbolic slap across the face to anyone who uses mtDNA, and mtDNA only, to study demography. An upcoming article in BMC Biology lays down another nail:
A study published today in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that fewer than…
October 12, 2006
Ralf Neumann has interpreted my fascination with -omics as distaste for neologisms:
A blogger named "RPM" reacted even more drastically to the methylome-paper on his weblog "evolgen" (http://scienceblogs.com/evolgen) in a post entitled "Yet Another '-ome'". "We can thank Andrew Feinberg for…
October 12, 2006
One of the greatest developments of the post-genomic era has been the refinement of the concept of the 'gene'. The central dogma states that genes encode RNA transcripts which are translated into the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein. But protein coding genes make up a small fraction of…
October 11, 2006
Busting my balls, indeed. Check out this headline:
Intelligent design gets political
Geoff Brumfiel
Teaching creationism becomes an election issue in Michigan.
Intelligent design didn't get political in Michigan. Intelligent design is politics. Intelligent design isn't science; it's a political…
October 11, 2006
Don't worry, this one has nothing to do with mtDNA.
There's been a bit of a hubbub recently in the ScienceBlogs community about science journalism. Sometimes we're a bit too hard on the journalists. In this week's issue of Nature, Robert Barton takes the journal to task for their coverage of the…
October 11, 2006
Sandy at Discovering Biology in a Digital World will be hosting the upcoming edition of Mendel's Garden. If you have written something about genetics, consider submitting it to this blog carnival. You can email Sandy or use the blog carnival submission page. The deadline for submission is Saturday…