According to a story on Physorg.com, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have concluded that all blue-eyed people on the planet are descended from a single ancestor who lived six to ten thousand years ago. The ancestor was the first to have a genetic mutation that reduces the amount of melanin in the iris of the eye: “Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department […]
A study released today suggests that exercise may slow the aging process at the molecular level. The study looked at the effect of exercise on telomeres (sequences of DNA) taken from blood samples of twins. Because telomeres shrink over time, they are thought to reflect the aging process. According to Scientific American, the telomeres of subjects who exercised the most (an average of 199 minutes weekly) were longer than those […]
The local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, which I respect a great deal, and which does a very good job of reporting on local and regional issues, published a story earlier this week about a candidate for the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors who had failed to pay property taxes for a number of years. This entry is not about the substance of the story (I try to stay […]
It’s getting scary for me, finding myself in agreement Frank Rich. But his column today in the New York Times, beautifully titled "The Billary Road to Republican Victory," pretty much says what I’ve been thinking, as does, frankly, almost everything I’ve read today. Among the best: Joe Klein and Vaughn Ververs on Big Bloated Bill’s well-deserved smackdown in South Carolina. Somehow the last week brings back a irritating memory I […]
Well that didn’t take long, did it? Just when I thought, against my better judgment perhaps, that maybe, maybe Hillary Clinton was capable of reinventing and reinvigorating her campaign (see this post), we’ve all be treated to a week that not only makes perfectly clear that she’s incapable of that, but also reminds me why I will never vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m not the only one feeling this way […]
Following up on this post about lap dancers, here’s yet another story in The Economist on the mysterious mechanisms of sexual attraction. It seems that there is a part of our DNA that is responsible for building a part of the immune system called the major histocompatability complex (MHC). In mice, MHC also has a role in sexual attractiveness — it changes odors (in the case of mice, the odor […]
Reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s close victory in the New Hampshire primary, it seems that amidst all the talk of who was the “candidate of change,” it was a change in Ms. Clinton as a candidate that may have made the difference. From her showing at least a little sense of humor during the debates (“Well that hurts my feelings“), to her greater accessibility to reporters, to her much-commented upon emotional […]
I am fascinated with the notion that much of what drives our behavior results not from conscious decisions, but from “intuition” or subconscious perception. For this reason, one of my favorite scientific studies of last year was the simple, clever one reported in The Economist about fertile lap dancers. Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico looked at whether lap dancers who were in oestrus, and thus fertile, earned […]
During our Thursday evening immersion in the Iowa Caucus results, because I’d used the term several times, my wife asked me what, exactly, did I mean by “populist.” I realized that this is one of those terms that I feel I know, but have a hard time explaining in words. (OK, maybe that’s a sign that I don’t really know.) I said that populists were those who distrusted big business […]
As a lapsed Iowan, the results of the Iowa Caucuses last evening did not surprise me. Iowans tend to have a populist streak, which affected both races. On the Republican side, I always figured that Mitt Romney would have trouble in Iowa. Not many Iowans can feel real kinship with an investment fund manager, specially one as preppy and squeaky clean as Mitt Romney. On the other hand, Mike Huckabee’s […]