Three of thefive reads from today’s edition of my Read Two newsletter. You can get the other two here or sign up for more. Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? They don’t call it the hard problem for nothing. By Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian. The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts […]
Continue reading →The War on Drugs started with Billie Holiday. – Johann Hari, POLITICO Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To […]
Continue reading →Over at NPR, Barbara King has a post about the mostly amusing deceptions that chimpanzee mothers sometimes engage in. It’s a nice post that includes an amusing video, which I’ve pasted below; note the look on the face of the mom when she cashes in on the deception, which is centered around an exchange of favors, and take […]
Continue reading →Adam Rutherford addresses James Watson’s attempt to dodge his past: Like all contemporary biologists, my career is largely based on his work. The medal? If I could afford it, I wouldn’t want it. My field, human genetics, was founded by another racist, Francis Galton, who sought to demonstrate white British dominance over the colonies using biometrics. He […]
Continue reading →Linda Greenhouse says it is — and that next to SCOTUS’s decision to put Obamacare on the choppping block, Bush v. Gore was nothing. There was no urgency. There was no crisis of governance, not even a potential one. There is, rather, a politically manufactured argument over how to interpret several sections of the Affordable […]
Continue reading →A good day (so far). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that “The Social Life of Genes” (Pacific Standard, Sept/Oct 2013), my article on how the genome responds to social life, won the 2014 AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Award for best magazine work in 2013 — a distinction I’m tickled to be honored with. […]
Continue reading →Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished — she asks, “Did he leave anything more significant than the loud bang of a door shut down the generations?” Of course he did. He left his DNA […]
Continue reading →Today’s Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology went to a trio of researchers who figured out the basis of how the brain tracks and manages space, a task that is closely tied to memory. This ability to remember and manage space — to navigate your way through life — is vital. Here, in a brief story I told at a Story […]
Continue reading →Michael O’Donovan and Kenneth Kendler, eminences in psychiatric genetics for good reason, look at the implications of recent (early) progress in identifying the dispersed genetic roots of schizophrenia. For ease of reading, I’ve inserted a few paragraph breaks in their long paragraph, which is the last of 9 points they make about recent findings. The money […]
Continue reading →From Hawks: Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I replaced 99% of the genes in my body with that of a hunter-gatherer”. AS THE SUN set over Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, nearly thirty minutes had passed since I had […]
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