Gene Expression

Human mutation unveiled

What a great age we live in. Until recently critical parameters in population genetics such as mutation rates had to be inferred and assumed, even though they served as bases for much more complex inferences. Now with humans (and humans are only the beginning!) much of what was inferred is being assessed in a more direct fashion. Caterina Campbell and Even Eichler have a review in Trends in Genetics which surveys the field as it stands now, Properties and rates of germline mutations in human …

The Crux

Citizen Science Ventures Into Space

by Kiki Sanford

Inside a nondescript office building in Mountain View, California, a gathering took place recently that might have been a glimpse into the future.

At first, the people, like the building, didn’t offer many hints of what that future might look like. They came from all walks of life: young, old, students, businesspeople, men and women.

Then they started talking.

Rockets, microgravity, space planes, moon bases, gas stations in orbit – if you didn’t know better …

Seriously, Science?

Just like babies, mouse pups calm down when carried around.

It’s probably a good thing that babies scream, or else they might never get fed. But carrying a screaming kicking infant can make it difficult to outrun the lion that’s chasing you. So, it makes sense that animal babies have evolved to calm down when being carried. But just because it makes sense, doesn’t make it true! So, how does one test this? Well, if human babies have evolved to be calm when carried, you would expect other mammal’s babies would also calm down when carried. These scienti …

Science Sushi

"You'll Do": Lack of Choosiness in Female Strawberry Poison Dart Frogs

Mate choice is one of the most well-studied aspects of evolution. To prove that they’re worth the effort, animals will do just about anything. They dance, prance, sing, bellow, and fight for attention. When you look around the animal kingdom, the wild results of mate choice boldly stand out, from the impractically beautiful tails of peacocks to the ostentatious antlers of elk and deer. With so much focus placed on quality, you might assume that every species has their own complex way of conv …

Collide-a-Scape

The Zen Master of Statistics

You may not know this, but there is a celebrity data geek who isn’t named Nate Silver. This other famous statistician is a rock star in the global health and development world. He captivates audiences with innovative presentations that illuminate abstract facts and figures. Last year, Time magazine called Hans Rosling one of the 100 most influential people in the world, writing:
His 2006 TED talk, in which he animated statistics to tell the story of socio-economic development, has been viewed …

Gene Expression

10,000 hours may gain you little if you have no talent

A few years ago Malcolm Gladwell made the “10,000 hour rule” famous in his book Outliers. In practice (e.g., discussions with people day to day or on this blog) the rule gets translated into the inference “practice is what matters.” When talking about genetics this often implicitly also entails that “genes don’t matter.” I’m not saying that this is necessarily what Gladwell’s own exposition taken literally would suggest, but ideas have a way of evolving once they’re outside of the pages of a …

The Crux

How I Rediscovered the Oldest Zero in History

Mathematically, the Greco-Roman-Etruscan number system is an endlessly repetitive number system that is inefficient and cumbersome. To write 3333, which we do by repeating the sign 3 four times, a Roman would have had to scribble down MMMCCCXXXIII—three times as many characters. And I challenge anyone to multiply this number by MMDCCCLXXIX—using only the Roman system (meaning without translating these numbers into what they would be in our base-10 number system and then back into Roman n …

Seriously, Science?

To fart or not to fart: that is the question.

Smelly farts on airplanes: we’ve all been there, either as the producer or the consumer (or often both). Unfortunately, little attention has been paid in the literature to this all-too-common phenomenon…until now. We can’t tell whether these authors are being totally serious or not, but either way, we think their suggestion for how to deal with the issue of smelly farts on airplanes is a pretty good one.

Flatulence on airplanes: just let it go.

“Flatus is natural and an invariable co …

Gene Expression

Please ignore mtDNA and Y chromosomal haplogroups

This is a public service announcement. If you are a user of direct-to-consumer personal genomics services, please do not pay any attention to your mtDNA and Y chromosomal haplogroups. Why? Because they hardly tell you anything about your individual ancestry. What do I mean by this? Your mtDNA comes down from your mother’s-mother’s-mother’s-mother… and similarly for your Y chromosomal lineage if you are a male. These few individuals are not any more likely to contribute to your ancestry tha …

Fire in the Mind

Angelina Jolie's State of the Art Cancer Treatment

It’s rare for a decision involving a genetic predisposition to seem so clearcut — an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer before you die. Those were the odds Angelina Jolie was given after she was found to have inherited a defective gene called BRCA1. There was also the matter of BRCA-related ovarian cancer, with her lifetime odds put at 50 percent. With no other effective remedies in sight, she decided on a double mastectomy with plans to follow that with an oophorectomy, the remov …