evolgen | October 8, 2007The finalists for the 2007 Blogging Scholarship have been announced. There's 20 of them, and, from a quick perusal of the list, it appears that four of them are science bloggers. Two of those four are familiar to evolgen: Shelley of Retrospectacle and Kambiz of Anthropology.net. The other two are new to me, but appear to have actual science content: The Big Room and The Biourbanist.
At this point, you're probably expecting me to tell you to go to the voting page and click a particular finalist. Well, I'm not going to do that. If you are a fan of science blogging, however, I suggest you vote…
evolgen | October 7, 2007Mark Liberman has an excellent post examining the general public's understanding of basic statistical concepts such as means, variances, and distributions. Here's a taste:
Until about a hundred years ago, our language and culture lacked the words and ideas needed to deal with the evaluation and comparison of sampled properties of groups. Even today, only a minuscule proportion of the U.S. population understands even the simplest form of these concepts and terms. Out of the roughly 300 million Americans, I doubt that as many as 500 thousand grasp these ideas to any practical extent, and 50,000…
evolgen | October 7, 2007My series on using computational tools to study molecular evolution [Publishing Original Research on Blogs] has focused on the evolution of the aldolase gene family in Drosophila. When I described the Backstory, I left out a lot of details regarding the biochemistry of glycolysis. Well, Larry Moran happens to be a biochemist -- he's even written a book about biochemistyr -- and he's posted a more comprehensive look at aldolase. I focused my introduction on animals, which use aldolase in glycolysis -- the breakdown of glucose into smaller molecules. Larry points out that the opposite pathway (…
evolgen | October 5, 2007Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Backstory
Part 3 - Obtaining Sequences
This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 4 of this series (Obtaining More Sequences) can be found below.
Obtaining More Sequences
Last time we downloaded sequences for both aldolase genes from Drosophila melanogaster (see here). But, if we want to study the evolution of these genes, we need sequences from a few more species. There are now complete genome sequences available for 12 Drosophila species…
evolgen | October 4, 2007The new edition of Circus of the Spineless has been posted at The annotated budak. Go get yourself some invert blogging!
evolgen | October 3, 2007Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Backstory
This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 3 of this series (Obtaining Sequences) can be found below.
Obtaining Sequences
In the previous post I described the aldolase gene family, which encode proteins involved in cellular respiration. There are two aldolase genes in the Drosophila melanogaster genome. If we want to study the evolution of these genes, we can obtain the sequences from the 12 Drosophila species that have had their…
evolgen | October 2, 2007Pedro has posted a new edition of Bio::Blogs, the bioinformatics blog carnival. Go check out the hottest new computational biology blogging.
evolgen | October 1, 2007
Some of you may recall that last year we held a sort-of fundraiser to support science education. The program was organized through DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit dedicated to getting money to teachers to support in class projects. Each teacher submits a proposal requesting funds for their desired project, and prospective donors select which project they would like to support with their donation -- hence, Donors Choose. Last year evolgen readers raised over $500 ($881 to be exact), and ScienceBlogs readers in total raised over $15,000 (with Seed chipping in another $10,000).
This year we've…
evolgen | October 1, 2007This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here.
Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 2 of this series (The Backstory) can be found below.
The Backstory
The reason you and I and all other animals (and most other forms of life) can do things (like live) is because we combine oxygen with sugars to make energy. Eventually, the oxygen…
evolgen | September 29, 2007Most of us are so used to the male+female=baby system of reproduction that we practice that it doesn't even occur to us that there are other options. Sure, there's the occasional instance of parthenogenesis in some megafaunal species, but that seems like the exception rather than the norm. And we do recognize that a lot of the microbes that make up the majority of life on Earth reproduce asexual. But, when it comes to sex, we're stuck on male+female=baby.
Kurt Vonnegut thought otherwise. In his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, he introduced the Tralfamadorians and their understanding of…
evolgen | September 28, 2007This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here.
In April of last year, Bora pushed the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible researcher, I would need to obtain permission from any collaborators (including my advisor) before publishing anything we have been working on together. But what about small side projects or minor findings that I don't expect to publish elsewhere? As it turns out, such a project has been laying…
evolgen | September 27, 2007Or is he micro-phobe?
Nature Genetics has published a mostly positive review of the new Evolution textbook by Nick Barton and others (the others include blogger Jonathan Eisen) The review is penned by Francisco Ayala. Among the things Ayala brings up is the coverage various taxa receive:
Surprisingly, however, five of the nine chapters of Part II are dedicated to the history of microbial evolution, and only one chapter deals with the diversification of plants and animals.
So, of the nine chapters in Part II, six deal with particular groups of organisms. Of those six, five focus on microbial…
evolgen | September 26, 2007The newest edition of Tangled Bank has been posted by Martin at Aardvarchaeology. Go read yourself some science!
evolgen | September 26, 2007The human genome is one big, bloated motherfucker. It's almost all non-protein-coding DNA. The same is true for many other eukaryotic genomes. Sure, some of it has a function. But a whole lot of it (and maybe most of it) is just junk.
There are some who point to a relationship between genome size and organismal completexity and argue that those large genomes are necessary to explain the compelexity they observe. There are other that disagree -- T.R. Gregory at Genomicron being one of the more vocal objectors in the geno-blogosphere. First off, how do you measure complexity? Second of all,…
evolgen | September 26, 2007Over a year ago I threatened to perform some original research and publish it on my blog. I got as far as writing an introduction to the project, but I never actually posted any data. I know, I suck.I had hoped to make the project simple enough that people could follow along. The problem was the available data were not in a form that would be accessible for most readers. So, I've held off until now. But the appropriate data have now been deposited in Genbank, so I can continue the series.
Over the next couple of days I'll post the previously published entries, and they will be followed by the…
evolgen | September 16, 2007Carl Zimmer has a post covering three recent papers on gene duplication: one on amylase variation in humans, one on whole genome duplication in yeast, and one on duplications of genes in the Drosophila arizonae reproductive tract. In all three papers, results are presented showing the importance of duplicated genes in adapting to the environment.
Now, gene duplication isn't anything new around these parts. Those who know me know that I have a bit of an interest in gene duplication. Those who don't, well, consider yourself informed that I have a bit of an interest in gene duplication.
Given…
evolgen | September 14, 2007
I'm sure by now you've heard of the ginormous spider web that was spun in Texas. The thing was huge -- 200 yards long -- and it was spun by multiple different species. That interspecific collaboration got Bill Poser thinking, so he blogged about it at Language Log:
The web covers hundreds of square meters. Not only was it built by hundreds of spiders, who normally build isolated webs and eat each other if they get too close, but entomologist Allen Dean reports that they belong to twelve different families! We're talking massive inter-species communication here folks, and not particularly…
evolgen | September 12, 2007As I was making my way back from a seminar on skin color genetics yesterday, I noticed a couple of bugs perched on the outer wall of my building. This wouldn't be a blog worthy moment, except that the bugs were huge . . . and in mid coitus. I hurried inside and ran upstairs to grab my camera. I returned -- with both my camera and another grad student -- to find the bugs in the same position as when I left them.
This wasn't exactly a high energy sexual encounter. In fact, the male appeared to be just sitting on the back of the female -- as if he were in the process of pinning her in some kind…
evolgen | September 12, 2007Matt at the Behavioral Ecology Blog has posted the newest edition of the Tangled Bank, the original science blogging carnival.