Month: November 2013
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Endings & beginnings
Update: Comments enabled now! Until further notice this is my last post as a blogger at Discover Magazine. This shouldn’t impact regular readers. As always you can follow me by going to: My feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/RazibKhansTotalFeed My Twitter, https://twitter.com/razibkhan And of course, my website, http://www.razib.com From December 1st, 2013, I will be blogging at Ron Unz’s…
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The total information world
Happy Thanksgiving (if you are an American)! It’s been a busy few days in the world of personal genomics. By coincidence I have a coauthored comment in Genome Biology out, Rumors of the death of consumer genomics are greatly exaggerated (it was written and submitted a while back). If you haven’t, please read the FDA’s…
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The FDA and 23andMe
First, download your 23andMe raw results now if you have them. If you don’t know what’s going on, the FDA has finally started to move aggressively against the firm. Unfortunately this is not surprising, as this was foreshadowed years ago. And, 23andMe has been moving aggressively to emphasize its medical, as opposed to genealogical, services…
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Open Thread, 11/24/13
One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed…
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Open Thread, 11/24/13
One of the stranger call-ins on my interview with Kathleen Dunn last month was when a woman who proudly declared that she was a math major in college asserted that 23andMe had told her she wasn’t at risk for many diseases which now in her 60s she had developed. I didn’t want to be too pointed…
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Our ancestors are part us…or the other way around?
Keeping a close watch on media representations of the new Nature paper on the ancient Siberian genome. Here’s The New York Times, 24,000-Year-Old Body Is Kin to Both Europeans and American Indians. I don’t have a problem with the title, but the roll-out isn’t totally accurate in what it will connote to the audience in…
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The long First Age of mankind
“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world – that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work. – Mark Thomas, as reported by Nature This is in…
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Some of us don’t care if people look like us
Alone in a Room Full of Science Writers: You can never overestimate how empowering it is to see someone who looks like you—only older and more successful. That, much more than well-meaning advice and encouragement, tells you that you can … Continue reading →
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Open Thread, 11/17/2013
Finished J. P. Mallory’s The Origins of the Irish. Good book, but it was as illuminating as to the origins of the Irish as Danel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained was in explaining consciousness.The post Open Thread, 11/17/2013 appeared first on Gene Expression.
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The color of life as a coincidence
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence…
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The color of life as a coincidence
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence…
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Is that white supremacist part black?
Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes,…
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Is that white supremacist part black?
Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle’s black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they’re out of South Park episodes,…
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Isn’t he special!
There’s a nice letter in Nature right now with an understated title, Mating advantage for rare males in wild guppy populations. But if you dig deeper you see some moderately grand claims being made. The key issue is that the authors seem to be implying that negative frequency dependent selection (NFDS) is a major factor…
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bioRxiv is here
For years many in the biological sciences community have been jealous of the exist of arXiv. This preprint server allows researchers to distribute their work widely to all comers. On occasion when when there have been debates about mimicking arXiv for biology there has been skepticism about the nature of the outcomes (my own rejoinder…
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Vaccination, and social information networks
If you have not read Julia Ioffe’s story about getting whooping cough at the age of 31 (also see follow up), you might want to. Here’s some further context, Vaccine Refusals Fueled California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic. This topic has been covered and dissected in great detail by many writers and scientists, so I won’t repeat what…
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Open Thread, 11/10/2013
Change is the only constant. The post Open Thread, 11/10/2013 appeared first on Gene Expression.
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Selection happens; but where, when, and why?
One of the secondary issues which cropped up with Nina Davuluri winning Miss America is that it seems implausible that someone with her complexion would be able to win any Indian beauty contest. A quick skim of Google images “Miss India” will make clear the reality that I’m alluding to. The Indian beauty ideal, especially…