Posts

December 26, 2012

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2:58 PM | Leviticus 20:13 and Avoiding the Gay Death Penalty Behaviorially

King James The King James Bible said: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death" Leviticus 20:13. Fortunately, however, there is a way for two gay men to avoid the wrath of God and maintain a loving relationship. Let them toss the double mattress and box spring out to the bulk trash and invest in two separate single beds, so that when they feel the urge to hug and kiss each other, they can […]

December 25, 2012

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4:58 PM | Can science help the picky eater? Interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic (part 1).

This summer, I reviewed Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic. This month, with the approach of the holiday season (prime time for picky eaters to sit with non-picky eaters at meal time), Stephanie and I sat down for lunch at Evvia [...]

December 24, 2012

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3:54 PM | Competing theories on the relation between Santa and the elves.

For many, this time of year is the height of hectic, whether due to holiday preparations or grade-filing deadlines at the end of the semester (or, for some of us, both of those together). Amidst the buzz and bustle, sometimes it’s a gift to slow down enough to find a quiet moment and listen to [...]

December 21, 2012

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3:35 PM | On the Curious Science of Christmas Shopping

It struck me yesterday, while battling my way around a jam-packed shopping centre in Essex, that anthropologists must really like Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I usually enjoy Christmas too. But for those scientists who get their kicks out of the study of humanity, the prospect of the annual festival of spending must be truly mouth-watering. Because what I experienced yesterday – I find it quite traumatic to talk about – was nothing less than mass hysteria, brought about by... Read more

December 18, 2012

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3:10 AM | Found Those Million-odd Pieces

Oh, I was doing so well until I wasn’t. But at least when I wasn’t, I was really committed to it. I’m not sure what threw the anxiety into overdrive today, but by about 10am I was a quivering mess. And once again, it wasn’t so much the potential diagnosis as it was not knowing [...]

December 17, 2012

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1:48 PM | Exaggerations and errors in the promotion of genetic ancestry testing

One thing we have done in Genomes Unzipped is to report on what is on the market for consumers interested in getting information about their genetic data. While we have found generally positive things to say about this market, there are also many exaggerated claims especially when it comes to making inferences about an [...]

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12:07 AM | A Million and One Little Pieces, Minus the Million

I expected to fly into approximately a million little pieces, give or take, by about 3pm Friday afternoon. In fact, I was so convinced that this was going to happen I began pulling things together to go home, because I am constitutionally incapable of falling apart at work, and I figured the strain of that [...]

December 12, 2012

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1:53 AM | Are scientists obligated to call out the bad work of other scientists? (A thought experiment)

Here’s a thought experiment. While it was prompted by intertubes discussions of evolutionary psychology and some of its practitioners, I take it the ethical issues are not limited to that field. Say there’s an area of scientific research that is at a relatively early stage of its development. People working in this area of research [...]

December 10, 2012

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1:00 PM | My genome, unzipped

As part of the Personal Genome Project (PGP), my genome was recently sequenced by Complete Genomics. My PGP profile, including the sequence, is here, and their report on my genome is here. As I play around with the best ways to analyze these data, I’ll write additional posts, but for now I’ve noticed only one [...]

December 07, 2012

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6:14 PM | Please Follow Me on Twitter

I've been busy these past few months with the prospective sale of my home and driving to New York and North Jersey. I haven't been writing much, but I've been tweeting. To get my updates, please follow me on Twitter, https://twitter.com/#!/RewardConsent.

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6:07 AM | Thoughts on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

On December 6, 1989, in Montreal, fourteen women were murdered for being women in what their murderer perceived to be a space that rightly belonged to men: Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student [...]

November 29, 2012

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11:46 PM | Book review: Cooking for Geeks.

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter O’Reilly Media, 2010 We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations. If you have family members and [...]

November 19, 2012

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1:07 PM | Looking closer at natural selection in inflammatory bowel disease

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we recently published a large study into the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which included a number of analyses digging into the biology and evolutionary history of IBD genetic risk. Gratifyingly, our paper has stimulated a lot of discussion among other scientists, which has generated several ideas [...]

November 07, 2012

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7:18 PM | Ten guidelines for tweeting at conferences

Many of the Genomes Unzipped team are spending the week at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in San Francisco. This year the coverage of the meeting on Twitter is more intense than ever before, and social media is becoming an increasingly mainstream component of the conference. Chris Gunter, Jonathan Gitlin, Jeannine Mjoseth, Shirley [...]

November 06, 2012

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10:56 PM | DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012 update.

We’re less than four days from the end of this year’s Science Bloggers for Students drive, the last moments of Friday, November 9. And, I wanted to bring you up to date on the little post-Sandy challenge I issued last week. You may recall that I added three projects to my giving page from hurricane [...]

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5:49 PM | Science education: Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?

In my blogging career (and even before), I’ve spent a fair bit of time bemoaning the low level of scientific education/literacy/competence among the American public. Indeed, I have expressed the unpopular opinion that all college students ought to do the equivalent of a minor in some particular science as one of their graduation requirements. I [...]

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1:57 PM | I say “Pharma”, you say?… Philanthropist?

Generosity is a rare quality in business, and it’s certainly not the first word that springs to mind when thinking about the drugs industry. Big Pharma is not widely known for its Big Heartedness. So, last January, when I heard about AstraZeneca’s plans to give away valuable data on several of its patented compounds, I was curious about what exactly had been slipped into the tea up at AZ HQ. Had CEO David Brennan accidentally mistaken an exciting new schizophrenia... Read more

November 03, 2012

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8:26 PM | DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012: helping classrooms in the aftermath of Super-storm Sandy.

Super-storm Sandy did major damage to the East Coast, especially New Jersey and New York City. The offices of DonorsChoose are in New York City. Their fabulous staff is safe (and mostly dry) and their computer servers are up, which means the Science Bloggers for Students drive has been operational and ready to receive your [...]

November 02, 2012

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11:48 AM | Dozens of new IBD genes, but can they predict disease?

Out in Nature this week is a paper by three Genomes Unzipped authors reporting 71 new genetic associations with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This breaks the record for the largest number of associations for any common disease, and includes many new and interesting biological insights that you should all go and read about in the [...]

November 01, 2012

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8:43 PM | We dodged the apocalypse, so let’s help some classrooms.

We’re coming into the home stretch of our annual DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students drive: Science Bloggers for Students: No Apocalypse in Sight (Transcript below) And, now until the end of the drive, you can get your donations matched (up to $100 per donor) thanks to the generosity of the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors. Just [...]

October 24, 2012

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1:15 PM | Electronic cigarettes: smoke without fire?

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” Mark Twain For my first blog post here on SciLogs, I thought I’d choose a subject that we can all agree on. Smoking. It’s bad, right? I mean, really bad. Obviously. But are there any exceptions? Are all cigarettes really unequivocally, indisputably, “disgusting-habit-breath-stinks-probably-going-to-kill-you” bad, or are some just […]

October 22, 2012

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1:00 PM | The danger of pointing out bad behavior: retribution (and the community’s role in preventing it).

There has been a lot of discussion of Dario Maestripieri’s disappointment at the unattractiveness of his female colleagues in the neuroscience community. Indeed, it’s notable how much of this discussion has been in public channels, not just private emails or conversations conducted with sound waves which then dissipate into the aether. No doubt, this is [...]

October 19, 2012

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9:11 PM | Reading the writing on the (Facebook) wall: a community responds to Dario Maestripieri.

Imagine an academic scientist goes to a big professional meeting in his field. For whatever reason, he then decides to share the following “impression” of that meeting with his Facebook friends: My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually [...]

October 17, 2012

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2:11 AM | On the apparent horrors of requiring high school students to take chemistry.

There’s a guest post on the Washington Post “Answer Sheet” blog by David Bernstein entitled “Why are you forcing my son to take chemistry?” in which the author argues against his 15-year-old son’s school’s requirement that all its students take a year of chemistry. Derek Lowe provides a concise summary of the gist: My son [...]

October 16, 2012

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4:48 PM | Ada Lovelace Day book review: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renée Bergland Boston: Beacon Press [...]

October 15, 2012

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7:34 PM | Kicking off DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2012.

Since 2006, science bloggers have been working with DonorsChoose.org and our readers to help public school students and teachers get the resources they need to make learning come alive. Is there an origin story for the annual Science Bloggers for Students drive? As a matter of fact*, there is: Science Bloggers for Students Origin Story [...]

October 09, 2012

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7:06 PM | The Problem With Incest: Evolution, Morality, and the Politics of Abortion

The profound negative effects of incest on unborn children raise the issues of moral consistency and of abortion politics. At what point do reasonable people temper logical consistency with compassion and common sense?

October 06, 2012

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2:21 AM | Coming Out of the Closet Behavior Category Poem

This painting reminds me of my friend in the poem. We had a guest teacher tonight at the Artist's Guild Coffee House poetry group in Island Heights, New Jersey who taught us how to write a French Rondeau. I wrote my new poem, Nate the Great, which follows the rhyming scheme and the refrain, but not the usual syllable count, of this form of poem. I dedicate it to the life of Nate Cotler, my guide to good living since the early 1990s, who died of a heart attack only last month at the […]

September 30, 2012

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10:01 PM | Community responsibility for a safety culture in academic chemistry.

This is another approximate transcript of a part of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. This segment (from about 29:55 to 52:00) includes our discussion of what a just punishment might look like for PI Patrick Harran for his part in the Sheri Sangji case. From there, our discussion shifted to [...]

September 28, 2012

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11:03 PM | Why does lab safety look different to chemists in academia and chemists in industry?

Here’s another approximate transcript of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. In this segment (from about 19:30 to 29:30), we consider how reaction to the Sheri Sangji case sound different when they’re coming from academic chemists than when they’re coming from industry, and we spin some hypotheses about what might be [...]