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The Price of Casino-Like Finance Is Higher Than We Think: However, Maxine suspects that the longest term and most severe damage from the finance casino will not be from government deficits required to shore up too-big-to-fail banks and insurers. It will be from two powerful, long-standing price…

Raising Kids May Lower Blood Pressure: A new Brigham Young University study found that parenthood is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women. ... The study involved 198 adults who wore portable blood pressure monitors, mostly concealed by their clothes, for 24 hours. The…

The changing height of Homo erectus: Today, I think it's fair to say that the variation of stature in Homo erectus was more or less like the variation within living people. There are short and tall populations today, varied in ecology and latitude. The average stature of young men in the…

A week ago I pointed out that in some visualizations of world wide population variation South Asians & mestizos seem to overlap which each other to a great extent. The reason for this is that both populations can be modeled as admixtures between two separate, but related, populations. Mestizos…

This sounds entirely plausible to me, On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life: I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives…

Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals: Two sites of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Iberia, dated to as early as approximately 50,000 years ago, yielded perforated and pigment-stained marine shells. At Cueva de los Aviones, three umbo-perforated…

Interesting new ScienceBlog, Oscillator. From the about page: A collection of notes, thoughts, and news about synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering in principle and in practice.

Tracking footprints of artificial selection in the dog genome: The size, shape, and behavior of the modern domesticated dog has been sculpted by artificial selection for at least 14,000 years. The genetic substrates of selective breeding, however, remain largely unknown. Here, we describe a genome-…

Eric Michael Johnson has put up a three part series on deconstructing the intellectual tradition of Social Darwinism. This is blogging as scholarship at its best. When it comes to intellectual history it is often rather easy to quote a particular passage or emphasize one aspect of a movement, and…

I hadn't logged into my Google Wave account for about a month. No one seems to be using it. But I checked it out the other day, and it seems someone finally contacted me last week...turns out it was an "old friend" who I've been ignoring because of his anti-social personality disorder (blocked him…

Check it out. Claims he'll do it weekly. More power to him, I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the social media stuff at this point (I'm sure I'm not alone), so anyone who is willing to human-filter the data gets my support.

The New Republic has published a review of the book The Invention of the Jewish People. There is a genetic aspect to the story: But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand's…

Weird but fun list, SNPedia's Top 10 SNPs of the Year: SNPedia now contains nearly 10,000 SNPs and to welcome 2010 we'd like to highlight at least 10. These SNPs have been selected based on an elusive and ultimately subjective combination of medical importance, statistical believability, and…

Update: Must read post from p-ter. A Composite of Multiple Signals Distinguishes Causal Variants in Regions of Positive Selection: The human genome contains hundreds of regions whose patterns of genetic variation indicate recent positive natural selection, yet for most the underlying gene and the…

In the aughts the elucidation of human pigmentation genetics was of one the major successes of 'omic' techniques. The fact that humans exhibit some continuous variation in complexion was strongly suggestive that more than one gene was at work to generate the range of the phenotype. On the other…

I got interested in vitamin D a few years ago because I was trying to figure out a plausible explanation for why many of the genetic variants implicated in lighter skin seem to have risen in frequency relatively recently, 10,000 years ago, when modern humans have been extant at higher latitudes on…

Last month I pointed to two papers on China genetics. Rereading a bit more closely, I stumbled upon a very curious PC plot. It shows the relationship of various continental populations on the first two principal components of variation genetically. Look at how Mexican Americans from Los Angeles…

The Accuracy of Stated Energy Contents of Reduced-Energy, Commercially Prepared Foods: The accuracy of stated energy contents of reduced-energy restaurant foods and frozen meals purchased from supermarkets was evaluated. Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods…

Alex Tabarrok has the back story on the infamous Paul Samuelson projections about Soviet growth. It gets interesting: Tarshis and Heilbroner were more liberal than Samuelson and McConnell but offered a more nuanced, descriptive and tentative account of the Soviet economy. Why? Levy and Peart…

Dental maturational sequence and dental tissue proportions in the early Upper Paleolithic child from Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal: Neandertals differ from recent and terminal Pleistocene human populations in their patterns of dental development, endostructural (internal structure) organization,…

Apparently there'll be a new Skip Gates documentary on personal genomics on PBS, Faces of America.

The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details: ...the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds,…

Personal genomics comes to TV:

Here. Or embedded: We talk about The Faith Instinct.

Irish atheists challenge new blasphemy laws: Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court. The new law, which was passed in July,…

Noticed a piece at The Root, The Decade in Race: WTF Was That?: After the tragedy of 9/11, Arab American stereotypes morph from harmless convenient store owner to new American nigger. The Simpsons' Apuh is suddenly nowhere near as funny There really needed to be more said here. The convenience…

Carl Zimmer has a nice write up of the a new paper in Science which characterizes the nature of the cells which are manifest during devil facial tumor disease. The Tasmanian Devil Transcriptome Reveals Schwann Cell Origins of a Clonally Transmissible Cancer: The Tasmanian devil, a marsupial…