Author: Razib Khan
-
Lost lines from the Star-Spangled Banner
Here are the original lyrics. The military context is obvious.
-
Dispute over longevity research getting more coverage
Earlier this week I pointed to the controversy which has erupted around the widely reported new paper, Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans. Newsweek did the most thorough early reporting, but now The New York Times has published a follow up story covering the scientific criticisms to the original paper’s methodology. There’s nothing new…
-
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Wealth and Obesity: A Bolivian Perspective. Inverted correlations of socioeconomic status and obesity in one country. World Recovery Continues, But Risks Increase, Says IMF. Interesting how volatile economic “projections” can be as you move across a window of time. Erotic or Disgusting? Basically making gay and straight men watch regular (including “girl-girl” bracketed) and gay…
-
Katz
-
To catch a predator: familial DNA
I already blogged this general issue, but the ‘grim sleeper’ murderer was caught because of a match of old samples with those of us his son. If I had to bet money I think this sort of result (California and Colorado are the two American states which have a system in place to allow for…
-
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
The Gender/Math Gap. Ziel takes a closer look at the SAT gender gap. Ticking Biological Clock Increases Women’s Libido, New Research Shows. The study is from David Buss’ group, which is known for this sort of sensationalist stuff. That being said, it seems like you could turn this into a book titled “The Dirty Thirties.”…
-
The short life expectancy of longevity genes (?)
When I first heard in the media there was a new study of longevity which had produced a model based on your SNP profile that was “77% accurate” as to whether you’d live to the age of 100 or not, I assumed this was confusion or distortion (perhaps The Daily Mail had broken embargo first…
-
The ScienceBlogs hegira
I was going to post a set of links for the weblogs from ScienceBlogs who have left for new digs, but Skull in the Stars is tracking it. Probably best to check in this weekend if you’re really curious, some people are still in wait-and-see mode.
-
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Case-Control Analysis of SNPs in GLUT4, RBP4 and STRA6: Association of SNPs in STRA6 with Type 2 Diabetes in a South Indian Population. Nice to see this sort of stuff. If Reich et al. are correct that there are many population-specific disease patterns in South Asia then this level of granularity is necessary. Huffington Post…
-
Don’t genetically profile yourself just yet…perhaps
Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post: Within an hour of this story’s publication, the…
-
Liberal Creationists Are Not Very Intelligent
A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM…
-
Malnutrition now, arthritis later?
Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition: “As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It…
-
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Poutine. It sounds gross, and it looks gross. Apparently Canadians eat it. More on Tibet, demography and selection. John Hawks posts an exchange with Rasmus Nielsen, who did a lot of the statistical analysis on the recent Tibet & altitude papers. Read the whole thing, but this part was funny: “I certainly now understand why…
-
Diplomacy among the aliens
One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity…
-
How Lost Should Have Ended
So I’ve never watched an episode of Lost. And I probably never will as people keep saying that the finale made following all those seasons kind of pointless. But could someone interpret the following video? I don’t get what’s so amusi…
-
Sometimes it just tastes good Felix
The more you know, the better it tastes: People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world…. I agree that the “story”…
-
The Human Edge (on NPR)
NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered). As a constructive criticism, I wonder…
-
Authenticity and the Fermi paradox
I know that the simplest explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we’re the first intelligent technological life form in the universe. But thinking about Paul Bloom’s thesis that a sense of “authenticity” is necessary for pleasure made me wonder a bit more about the possibility that once intelligent life forms get to the point…
-
7/5/2010 Open Thread
I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which…