Pleasure through signalling
As some of you know, I have a problem. An addiction that is. For most of the year I stock up on fresh habanero pepper. Usually I try to limit myself to 1-2 peppers per meal…but when not in the company of others who may civilize me I can lose cont…
1 out of 3 young Iranian men “gay”?
Married at age 21
A few years ago the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted that his nation did not have gays as they did in the West. What Ahmadinejad seems to have meant is that a public gay identity does not exist in Iran. He has to be …
Probability of pregnancy by age
I just finished reading My Fertility Crisis, which is excerpted from a longer piece you can get on Kindle for $1.99. The author is a single woman in her early 40s who is going through IVF treatments, without success so far. She outlines the choices she…
Dominance, the social construct that confuses
A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer:
At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11…
Marry far and breed tall strong sons
The Pith: When it comes to the final outcome of a largely biologically specified trait like human height it looks as if it isn’t just the genes your parents give you that matters. Rather, the relationship of their genes also counts. The more diss…
Good calories, bad potatoes?
Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men:
Within each 4-year period, participants gained an average of 3.35 lb (5th to 95th percentile, −4.1 to 12.4). On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary comp…
Less fear of the flu for asthmatics?
One of the reasons I tend toward a bit of hypochondria is probably the fact that what for others are inconvenient minor ailments often trigger my asthma. So nice to see this, Why Does Flu Trigger Asthma?:
When children with asthma get the flu, they oft…
Kissing and cancer
I recently listened to Paul Ewald talk about how a lot of cancer is due to infection on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge. That wasn’t too surprising, Ewald has been making the case for a connection between infection and lots of disease…
Do you live near a food desert?
I really like visualization of statistical information, but sometimes you need a reality check. People with local information really can add value. For example, I apparently live a few blocks away from the edge of a “food desert” according …
Evolution may explain why baby comes early
Image credit
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
Checking for Alzheimer’s risk with 23andMe
Dr. Daniel MacArthur at Genomes Unzipped:
23andMe announced yesterday that it will now be releasing information on Alzheimer’s disease risk markers in the APOE gene to customers who purchased their recently upgraded v3 test. The APOE markers are famo…
When the doctor is a patient….
So I’ve been seeing headlines like this today: Physicians Recommend Different Treatments for Patients Than They Choose for Themselves, Study Finds. Here are the numbers:
A total of 242 physicians returned the colon cancer questionnaire (response …
Fair & balanced on circumsion
When Michelle mentioned on Twitter that she was going to write about circumcision, I told her to expect some angry people to come out of the wood-work. Today she has a post up at Scientific American, What’s the deal with male circumcision and fe…
Fat China!
Paul French talks about his new book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. And rest assured, this is one measure by which America is still #1 in relation to China….
Who are those Houston Gujus?
The figure to the left is a three dimensional representation of principal components 1, 2, and 3, generated from a sample of Gujaratis from Houston, and Chinese from Denver. When these two populations are pooled together the Chinese form a very homogen…
Counting beans the proper way
Apropos of several of my recent posts, The New York Times has an interesting article up, Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers. Basically it outlines the difficulty of enumerating different racial and ethnic groups for different purposes in a mor…
Health care costs and ancestry
The Pith: In this post I examine the relationship between racial ancestry and cancer mortality risks conditioned on particular courses of treatment. I review research which indicates that the amount of Native American ancestry can be a very important …
Does your twin have “rights” on your genomes?
Randall Parker asks, Genetic Privacy And Identical Twins:
Suppose you have a right to genetic privacy. You might believe you do. Suppose you have an identical twin. Suppose the identical twin decides to publish his (or her) genetic sequence on the web….
The “science diet”
Cell has an interesting piece, profiling four diets, Cell Culture: New Year’s Diets. I know many of the readers of this weblog take an interest in this area. In particular, many subscribe to the Paleo diet or are avid fans of Gary Taubes’ G…
Diabetes stops at the state line!
Visualization of data is great. And sometimes it tells us something…though we don’t always know what. Slate has an interactive feature showing the rise of diabetes in America by county. Nothing too surprising.
But follow the gradient from El Paso to the Illinois-Missouri border. The differences are small across state lines, but the consistent differences […]