Recovery sites of mammoth hair samples for mtDNA sequencing. Red samples indicate those sequenced for the present study.

The authors note that three of the sequences represent a distinct clade of mammoths (red circles) found between the Lena and Kolyma rivers in Siberia, which apparently went extinct some 30,000 years prior to their counterparts elsewhere.  This study demonstrates application of the 454 technology outside hominin evolution, as well as the wealth of data on species diversity available in ancient samples.

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Source: M. Gilbert et. al. 2008. Intraspecific phylogenetic analysis of Siberian woolly mammoths using complete mitochondrial genomes PNAS 105: 8327 - 8332.

Mary tackles the topic from the perspective of genuine curiosity, not blind belief or rigid skepticism, which I appreciate. She explores possibilities, such as the effects of infrasound and electromagnetism on human perception. While Bonk is still my favorite of her books, Spook is a pretty good read.

John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, has a recent review of Spook as well.

What really jumped out at me, though, was this:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source (emphasis mine).

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

I’m wondering if this lack of critical thinking skills is a side effect of all the information available on the Internet, or if the Internet has just exposed a wider problem, the fundamental lack of critical thinking by a majority of the US population.

This subject has been on my mind recently, due in part to family members who send e-mails “proving” that the presidential candidate they do not support did something horrible, and therefore is obviously not qualified to be leader of the free world, commander-in-chief, etc.  These emails amount to little more than character assassination, and the scary thing is, people believe them and don’t bother to check the facts (easily done online) for themselves.

In the future, traditional reading skills may not be as important as the ability to determine reliable sources, and critical consideration — not just comprehension — of what is read.

Labmeeting is a tool for scientists. It was created to help with those things that make doing science needlessly difficult. These include:

• Finding someone at Wisconsin who works on aging in yeast
• Remembering whether the paper about helix bundles was 8753.pdf or science.pdf
• Moving journal club to Tuesday
• Finding out the next time someone gives a seminar on spectroscopy

… and, above all, sharing one’s interests, expertise, and discoveries with others.

With this tool, you can also upload your Endnote libraries (and associated articles), so you have access to your “paper collection” from anywhere. Sharing references with colleagues is a breeze, and there’s even a place to upload lab-specific protocols and post lab events.

Now, I’m off to invite the rest of my lab to join and start uploading papers!

Burial is certainly the most common choice, but for those that donate their body for research, there are a myriad of options, not just being a cadaver in an anatomy lab. She went to the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm to find out exactly what happens to a human body after death, when left to its own devices. Some can end up in the embalming lab at mortician school, or as practice heads for plastic surgeons, or as crash test dummies. She found others in the Harvard Brain Bank, and thought that might be a possibility:

My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren’t very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say “I’m going to Harvard” and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank — only a brain.

What she wanted was to be a brain in jar, a la Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein. She was disappointed to discover the brains sliced and stored in rubbermaid containers in a lab refrigerator.

While this book is not for the squeamish, it’s definitely an interesting read, and gives the reader plenty to think about. Instead of embalming, how about compost?

Independent investigations have documented the suppression,
manipulation, and distortion of federal government science
before it ever enters the policy arena. Censorship of scientists
has become pervasive, public access to scientific information
has been curtailed, and subtle yet dangerous systemic changes
have sidelined science from the policy-making process.

These are real issues with serious consequences. We have been
successful in raising awareness about the abuse of science,
holding those who misuse science accountable for their actions,
and pushing for widespread changes that will restore scientific
integrity to federal policy making.

This year’s cartoons have less of an evolutionary focus, examining government policy and the effects of politics on the scientific enterprise instead.  I’ve already cast my vote, now it’s your turn.

The Lost King of France tells the story of the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Louis-Charles, who was imprisoned in the Temple along with his parents and older sister during the Revolution. The tale is similar to what happened to the Romanovs in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, but was one I had never heard. I knew, of course, that King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been beheaded by Robspierre’s government, but not that their children remained imprisoned for years after their parents’ deaths.

Their daughter, Marie-Therese, was released (and exiled) in 1795, but her brother had been secluded years before, and rumors ran riot that he had been smuggled safely out of the Temple. As with the Romanovs, there were pretenders to the throne, which Marie-Therese never openly acknowledged, due in part to the official record stating that the dauphin had died in the Temple in 1795. But no one was really sure what had happened to him. That is, until 2000, when geneticists analyzed a tissue sample from a child’s heart, reportedly taken from the Orphan in the Tower during the autopsy by the attending physician.

This was a great read, engaging, and combining two of my favorite subjects, history and genetics. Better still, it demonstrates how genetic analysis can be used to answer historical questions, unequivocally.

We call it Darwinism, for short. But in truth, it didn’t start with Darwin, or with Wallace either, for that matter. Great ideas seldom arise in the romantic way we like to imagine—the bolt from the blue, the lone genius running through the streets crying, “Eureka!” Like evolution itself, science more often advances by small steps, with different lines converging on the same solution.

What many fundamentalists seem to forget (or choose to selectively ignore), is the fact that Darwin was a product of his time, and had he not published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, someone else (namely Alfred Russel Wallace) surely would have.

Alfred Russel Wallace
Co-founder of the theory of evolution