Monday and Tuesday I attended Social Intelligence: from Brains to Culture at the Royal Society. Lots of interesting talks around the theme of social intelligence, but one tangental note popped up in a neuroanatomy talk by Vittorio Gallese (he of the mirror neurons or “monkey-see-monkey-do cells”). I always love crazy paranormal “phenomena” being debunked, and … Read more
Via Savage Minds, who have reproduced the article from the Dominion. Gavin Menzies (author of a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World–which I have not read) claims all sorts of interesting selective stuff about Chinese exploration of the Pacific (transcript of a speech, here) and most mindbogglingly, that the Maori were not … Read more
Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link] Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as … Read more
A nifty set of philosophical and moral thought experiments from the Beeb.
Geoffrey Miller writes in SEED Magazine about Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them … Read more
Via Anthropology.net, Dance, Monkeys, Dance, a wonderful little clip on being a human. Monkey. The dedication is to Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, and you. By Ernest Cline.
A terrible sign of laziness, but the two things I want to blog about require brain power and I just can't get that together this afternoon. From Language Log, Reliable Sources on (Language) Classification. A USB flash-stick that balloons up with the amount of data stored on it. From the ever-awesome John Hawks, the unintended … Read more
From the delightful ladies at InkyCircus, big pictures of bugs! They have such personality at this scale, I don't know why people are scared of critters. Except ants, of course. That degree of organisation in something with three ganglia is scary.
The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event Behar, D. M.; Metspalu, E.; Kivisild, T.; Achilli, A.; Hadid, Y.; Tzur, S.; Pereira, L.; Amorim, A.; Quintana-Murci, L.; Majamaa, K. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN GENETICS VOL 78; NUMB 3 (2006) pp. 487-497 Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme … Read more
The wacky kids at the University of Manchester present the Jodcast, a podcast from Jodrell Bank Observatory. Stars! Space! Stuff! In case you've been living under a rock, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is still one of the coolest things ever. Am still bitter about Pluto.