HENRY the Human Evolution News Relay

17Dec/09Off

Evolution Going Great, Reports Trilobite

Evolution Going Great, Reports Trilobite:

"Things are looking mighty fine," announced the prehistoric invertebrate, taking measure of his surroundings through a series of small, hexagonal eyelets located at the tip of his thorax. "Sulfurous gas seems to be bubbling up to the surface pretty good, and several single-cell organisms appear to be mutating at a rather steady pace. Also, just today, I developed the ability to roll into a small protective shell in order to avoid predators".

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11Dec/09Off

Mapping human genetic diversity in Asia

Out in today's Science is Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia

Asia harbors substantial cultural and linguistic diversity, but the geographic structure of genetic variation across the continent remains enigmatic. Here we report a large-scale survey of autosomal variation from a broad geographic sample of Asian human populations. Our results show that genetic ancestry is strongly correlated with linguistic affiliations as well as geography. Most populations show relatedness within ethnic/linguistic groups, despite prevalent gene flow among populations. More than 90% of East Asian (EA) haplotypes could be found in either Southeast Asian (SEA) or Central-South Asian (CSA) populations and show clinal structure with haplotype diversity decreasing from south to north. Furthermore, 50% of EA haplotypes were found in SEA only and 5% were found in CSA only, indicating that SEA was a major geographic source of EA populations.

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10Dec/09Off

BEAST v1.5.3 released

Version 1.5.3 of BEAST (the most powerful Bayesian phylogenetics software available), has been released. Lots and lots of bugfixes!

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8Dec/09Off

Beatles 3000

Do you ever have the nagging doubt that anthropology gets it ever so slightly wrong?

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3Dec/09Off

Crux – A python library for molecular phylogenetics

Crux is a software toolkit for molecular phylogenetic inference that runs on (at least) Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It is structured as a set of Python modules, which makes it possible to quickly develop Python scripts that perform unique, non-canned analyses.

Get Crux here

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2Dec/09Off

H.M.’s brain to be dissected live online

If you've ever heard anything about cognitive psychology, then you've probably heard about H.M.

Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), better known as HM or H.M., was a memory-impaired patient who was widely studied from the late 1950s until his death. His case played a very important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory, and in the development of cognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. (wikipedia)

Tomorrow - his brain will be dissected live online.

26Nov/09Off

Peer Review 1945

For all those who've had the pleasure of going through peer review - this video shows us that it affects even the worst of us:

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