Postdoc Vagabond

Recent Articles

• Freethinker’s Book Club: Darwin’s Sacred Cause

  March 9, 2010 in Anthropology, Books, Evolution, Science

  [T]wo subjects which moved my Father perhaps more deeply than any others were cruelty to animals & slavery – his detestation of both was intense, and his indignation was overwhelming in case of any levity or want of feeling on these matters.  – William Darwin
  The trick to finishing books this year is getting up early, [...]

• (Re)producing in Grad School

  March 3, 2010 in Grad School

  While attending my first professional conference post-PhD, I met a potential incoming graduate student who was curious about our opinions on having kids while earning an advanced degree.  She’s coming into the lab that had 14 children during my time there, but the immediate response from one of my colleagues, who is in the PhD [...]

• Freethinker’s 2010 Book Club Update

  March 1, 2010 in Books, postdoc

  So we’re coming to the end of February, and I’m still reading Darwin’s Sacred Cause, having rechecked it from the library – twice.  Not able to get as much pleasure reading done as I had planned, especially this semester.  I’m taking three classes (Epidemiology, Biostats II, and Grant Writing), plus developing my own research projects [...]

• Paleo-Eskimo Genome Sequenced

  February 14, 2010 in Anthropology, Genetics

  As reported in the New York Times, the cover article of Nature this week describes the sequencing of a Paleo-Eskimo genome from Greenland.  This is the first ancient sequence from the New World, and is important for a number of reasons:

  The sequence analysis was conducted from a sample of human hair that was recovered from [...]

• The Necessity of Mentors

  February 12, 2010 in Education, Science

  A subject that’s been on my mind quite a bit this week, and coincidentally, several related things have popped up on my radar. First, a video from SciVee, intended for high school girls who might be considering a career in science.

  The best advice? Just do it. If that’s what your passion is, go [...]

• The Anthropology Song

  February 11, 2010 in Anthropology

  By Dai Cooper, via my grad student listserv.

• XKCD: Science Montage

  February 8, 2010 in Science

• National Science Literacy Month

  February 1, 2010 in Education, Science

  We need to do a better job advertising this, because I’m a scientist and this is the first I’ve heard of it. In the spirit of science literacy, here are a few links to explore.

  Scitable – “a free science library and personal learning tool” from Nature. The current focus is genetics (my favorite topic).
  Women in [...]

• Mining Scientific Literature

  January 30, 2010 in Education, Science, research

  There’s an interesting piece in the most recent issue of Nature.  Corie Lok discusses how researchers are dealing with the information firehose that is scientific literature.  How big is that firehose?
  The 19 million citations and abstracts covered by the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search engine include nearly 830,000 articles published in 2009, up [...]

• The Western European Y

  January 24, 2010 in Anthropology, Genetics

  A new study in PLoS Biology suggests one of the most common Western European Y halplogroups, R1b1b2, might have originated in Turkey and radiated into Europe with the spread of agriculture during the Neolithic.  This is significant because this haplogroup is the most frequent in Western Europe, and has been posited as a signal from [...]