Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

Daily Data Dump – Wednesday

Association of Trypanolytic ApoL1 Variants with Kidney Disease in African-Americans. Same subject as a paper I linked to a few days ago. The fact that they came out around the same date and overlap so much in topicality is a window into the competitive aspect of science.

Polyandry increases offspring viability and mother productivity but does not decrease mother survival in Drosophila pseudoobscura. My rule of thumb is to extrapolate from model organisms the closer the phenomenon is to the biomolecular scale. Nevertheless, variation in behavior and its consequences can give us insight into generalities on a higher order of organization as well.

History of asthma or eczema and cancer risk among men: a population-based case-control study in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This needs a lot more follow up to be something that you want to bank on. Still, of interest to many of us.

Healthy Families, Religious Involvement Buffer Youth Against Risk Factors Related to Drug Abuse. This is for American Indian youth. When it comes to these correlations one has to specify clearly the population that the correlation shows up in. Other studies have shown reverse directions of correlation when it comes to religion and outcome of social pathology for different ethnic groups, probably because of divergent patterns in the confounds. Another similar case are recommendations for circumcision as protective practice against HIV. This may have positive cost vs. benefit utility in South Africa, where HIV seropositive proportions are north of 20%, but basically none in Japan where they’re below 1% (lower than almost all Sub-Saharan African nations where circumcision is widely practiced, and about the same as South Korea, where circumcision is also widely practiced).

Britain’s Leader Carves Identity as Budget Cutter. David Cameron will be remembered.

Razib Khan