The Crux

Turning Japanese, or, How to Change Your Self’s Ethnicity in Just 1 Week

Mark Changizi — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:45:31 +0000

Mark Changizi is an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of human cognition at 2AI Labs. He is the author of The Brain from 25000 Feet, The Vision Revolution, and his newest book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.”

Tom Stafford, co-author of the excellent book Mind Hacks, recently wrote a piece for the BBC about one of the most fundamental principles in the brain’s arsenal. This principle is so important that it ought to have a super-excitingly electrifying name; alas, it’s misleadingly boring. The principle is “adaptation,” or otherwise called “tuning out” or “getting used to it.” In an effort to help further communicate the sorts of powers adaptation gives us, it struck me to relate a remarkable “adaptation encounter” I recently had.

In 2011 I had the pleasure of visiting Japan for the first time. In addition to fascinating neuroscience, priceless culture, wonderful food, and world-class skiing, during my week there I had the mind-blowing experience of…turning Japanese.

You don’t think it’s possible for a white person to turn Japanese? Well, you can…perceptually. In fact, although it is I who had turned Japanese during my stay, ...

Is Environmentalism Anti-Science?

Crux Guest Blogger — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:10:38 +0000

By Keith Kloor, a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in a range of publications, from Science to Smithsonian. Since 2004, he’s been an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. You can find him on Twitter here.

Greens are often mocked as self-righteous, hybrid-driving, politically correct foodies these days (see this episode of South Park and this scene from Portlandia.) But it wasn’t that long ago—when Earth First and Earth Liberation were in the headlines—that greens were perceived as militant activists. They camped out in trees to stop clear-cutting and intercepted whaling ships and oil and gas rigs on the high seas.

In recent years, a new forceful brand of green activism has come back into vogue. One action (carried out with Monkey Wrenching flair) became a touchstone for the nascent climate movement. In 2011, climate activists engaged in a multi-day civil disobedience event that has since turned a proposed oil pipeline into a rallying cause for American environmental groups.

This, combined with grassroots opposition to gas fracking, has energized the sagging global green movement. But though activist greens have frequently claimed to stand behind science, their recent actions, especially in regard to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, say otherwise.

For instance, whether all the ...

What Is the “Bible of Psychiatry” Supposed to Do? The Peculiar Challenges of an Uncertain Science

Vaughan Bell — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:45:52 +0000

The American Psychiatric Association have just published the latest update of the draft DSM-5 psychiatric diagnosis manual, which is due to be completed in 2013. The changes have provoked much comment, criticism, and heated debate, and many have used the opportunity to attack psychiatric diagnosis and the perceived failure to find “biological tests” to replace descriptions of mental phenomena. But to understand the strengths and weaknesses of psychiatric diagnosis, it’s important to know where the challenges lie.

Think of classifying mental illness like classifying literature. For the purposes of research and for the purposes of helping people with their reading, I want to be able to say whether a book falls within a certain genre—perhaps supernatural horror, romantic fiction, or historical biography. The problem is similar because both mental disorder and literature are largely defined at the level of meaning, which inevitably involves our subjective perceptions. For example, there is no objective way of defining whether a book is a love story or whether a person has a low mood. This fact is used by some to suggest that the diagnosis of mental illness is just “made up” or “purely subjective,” but this is clearly rubbish. ...

Depth Change: What Do the “Battleship” Aliens Want From Us, Anyway?

Seth Shostak — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:25 +0000

Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, and the host of the weekly radio show and podcast “Big Picture Science.”

Join Seth and 50 eminent scientists and sci-fi experts at SETIcon, to be held June 22-24 in Silicon Valley: www.seticon.org.

Battleship is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. Who cares?

No one, not when the fate of the Earth is in question. I’m proud to note that only the American film industry has the guts (not to mention the computer graphics horsepower) to fill the screen with a tale of ill-mannered aliens bent on incinerating the planet.

Consequently, Peter Berg’s film is pleasingly free of pretensions. It doesn’t waste your neural cycles exploring the uncharted labyrinths of the protagonists’ psyches, or anything overly Greek like that. It’s bad guys versus good guys, and the good guys win by being smarter, braver, and, in most cases, better looking.

The plot is exposed even before the main title settles ...

Behind the TIME Cover: Most Human Societies Don’t Get Our Breastfeeding Hang-up

Crux Guest Blogger — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:57:53 +0000

Eric Michael Johnson has a master’s degree in evolutionary anthropology focusing on great ape behavioral ecology. He is currently a doctoral student in the history of science at University of British Columbia looking at the interplay between evolutionary biology and politics. He blogs at The Primate Diaries at Scientific American, where this post originally appeared.

“Attachment (with respect to Martin Schoeller),” by Nathaniel Gold

My son will be 3 years old next month and is still breastfeeding. In other words, he is a typical primate. However, when I tell most people about this the reactions I receive run the gamut from mild confusion to serious discomfort. Their concerns are usually that extended breastfeeding could be stunting his independence and emotional development–the “Linus Blanket Syndrome” in the words of Michael Zollicoffer, a pediatrician at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. Worse yet, they hint that it might even cause“destructive” psychosexual problems that he will be burdened with throughout his adult life. Could they be right? Was our choice “a prescription for psychological disaster” as Fox News psychiatrist Keith Ablow wrote in response to TIME magazine’s provocative cover ...

Freedom From Fungus: Why Don’t Humans Have Chestnut-Style Blights and White Nose-Style Syndromes?

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:59:07 +0000

Sarah Zhang is Discover’s web intern. See her blogging here and here, and follow her on Twitter at @sarahzhang.

Delegates to Indiana’s constitutional convention worked under this tree in 1816.
It later succumbed to Dutch elm disease.

Unless you have a weakened immune system or a stubborn case of athlete’s foot, it’s unlikely you spend much time worrying about fungi. And you shouldn’t—fungal diseases are not generally a big problem for a healthy person; common ones like athlete’s foot are annoying but not serious. In terms of infections, it’s bacteria, parasites, and viruses that kill us.

But the rest of nature tells a different story. According to a recent review of fungal diseases in Nature, fungi are responsible for 72% of the local extinctions of animals and 64% among plants. White nose syndrome in bats and Dutch elm disease are two high-profile examples of extremely deadly fungal diseases gaining wider ranges through global trade. While each fungus itself is unique, many fungal pathogens share several special abilities that make them especially lethal.

Unlike viruses and most bacteria, fungi can survive—and survive for years—in dry or frigid environments outside of ...

Is the Purpose of Sleep to Let Our Brains “Defragment,” Like a Hard Drive?

Crux Guest Blogger — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:42:47 +0000

Neuroskeptic is a neuroscientist who takes a skeptical look at his own field and beyond at the Neuroskeptic blog.

Why do we sleep? We spend a third of our lives doing so, and all known animals with a nervous system either sleep, or show some kind of related behaviour. But scientists still don’t know what the point of it is.

There are plenty of theories. Some researchers argue that sleep has no specific function, but rather serves as evolution’s way of keeping us inactive, to save energy and keep us safely tucked away at those times of day when there’s not much point being awake. On this view, sleep is like hibernation in bears, or even autumn leaf fall in trees.

But others argue that sleep has a restorative function—something about animal biology means that we need sleep to survive. This seems like common sense. Going without sleep feels bad, after all, and prolonged sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. We also know that in severe cases it can lead to mental disturbances, hallucinations and, in some laboratory animals, eventually death.

Waking up after a good night’s sleep, you feel restored, and many studies have ...

Youth, Regret, and the Pain of Possibilities Lost

Crux Guest Blogger — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:05:10 +0000

Science journalist Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Her next book, co-authored with her daughter Samantha Henig, is called Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? and will be out in November.

Is regret something you accumulate in your life, piling it up as you remember an ever-increasing number of things that really could have gone better? If so, you’d think that young people would have fewer regrets than older ones, since they haven’t lived as long and haven’t missed as many chances—and if they have missed a chance at some adventure or relationship, they’re more likely to think that the chance will come around again.

But a recent study by Stefanie Brassen and her colleagues at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany suggests that young people feel more regret than old people, largely because the older people seem to be quashing those nasty feelings before the feelings overtake them. Indeed, they found that the only 60-somethings who experienced regret at the same level as 20-somethings were those who were depressed.

I think it’s worth considering, though, whether the German investigators really were tapping ...

To Keep Yourself Healthy: Brush, Floss, and Measure Your Microbes Daily?

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:08:17 +0000

As these plots of bacterial diversity in two subjects over a period of 16 weeks show,
microbiomes vary widely among women and change radically over time.

When John Mayer sang “Your Body is a Wonderland,” he probably wasn’t talking about the trillions of microbes that live all over your skin and inside every orifice you have to offer—but it does pretty much describe things. In the last decade or so, scientists have confirmed that we’re just as much an ecosystem as a rainforest is: full of ecological niches inhabited by countless bacteria, many of which have been evolving with us for millions of years. Our tiny passengers aren’t passive, either. Studies in mice and some in humans have linked these microbial populations, or microbiomes, to the host’s digestion, gut health, behavior, and even mood. A healthy microbiome keeps the host’s systems in good working order and prevents invasion by microbes that mean us harm.

But what is a healthy microbiome, exactly? That’s an important question, since diagnosing and treating illnesses related to microbiome imbalance requires some definition of normal. In the first few studies to try to address this question, scientists have found that there are ...

Human Races May Have Biological Meaning, But Races Mean Nothing About Humanity

Razib Khan — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:04:11 +0000

Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002 (see his Discover Blog, Gene Expression), previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.

…At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Schaaffhause has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

- The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, Volume 1 – by Charles Darwin

The above quote is not to vilify Charles Darwin. On the contrary, I believe Darwin was a scientific hero whose work is the foundation of modern biology. Nevertheless, he was a man of his age. Despite the fact that Darwin was a political ...

The Limits to Environmentalism

Crux Guest Blogger — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:58:50 +0000

In Sleeper, Woody Allen finds that socializing is different after the 70′s.
Environmentalism? Not so much.

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined ...

Does Brain Scanning Show Just the Tip of the Iceberg?

Crux Guest Blogger — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:10:27 +0000

By Neuroskeptic, a neuroscientist who takes a skeptical look at his own field, and beyond. A different version of this post appeared on the Neuroskeptic blog.

Brain-scanning studies may be giving us a misleading picture of the brain, according to recently published findings from two teams of neuroscientists.

Both studies made use of a much larger set of data than is usual in neuroimaging studies. A typical scanning experiment might include around 20 people, each of whom performs a given task maybe a few dozen times. So when French neuroscientists Benjamin Thyreau and colleagues analysed the data from 1,326 people, they were able to increase the statistical power of their experiment by an order of magnitude. An American team led by Javier Gonzalez-Castillo, on the other hand, only had 3 people, but each one was scanned while performing the same task 500 times over.

In both cases, the researchers found that close to the whole of the brain “lit up”—that is, showed increased metabolic activity—when people were doing simple mental tasks, compared to just resting. In one case, it was seeing videos of people’s faces; in the other, it was deciding whether stimuli ...

Steak of the Art: The Fatal Flaws of In Vitro Meat

Crux Guest Blogger — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:00:51 +0000

Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA who blogs about about biology, engineering, biological engineering, and biologically inspired engineering at Oscillator.

When you factor in the fertilizer needed to grow animal feed and the sheer volume of methane expelled by cows (mostly, though not entirely, from their mouths), a carnivore driving a Prius can contribute more to global warming than a vegan in a Hummer. Given the environmental toll of factory farming it’s easy to see why people get excited about the idea of meat grown in a lab, without fertilizer, feed corn, or burps.

In this vision of the future, our steaks are grown in vats rather than in cows, with layers of cow cells nurtured on complex machinery to create a cruelty-free, sustainable meat alternative. The technology involved is today used mainly to grow cells for pharmaceutical development, but that hasn’t stopped several groups from experimenting with “in vitro meat,” as it’s called, over the last decade. In fact, a team of tissue engineers led by professor Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands recently announced their goal to make the world’s first in vitro hamburger ...

5 Ways to Turn a Liberal Into a Conservative (At Least Until the Hangover Sets In)

Crux Guest Blogger — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:24:46 +0000

By Chris Mooney, a science and political journalist, blogger, podcaster, and experienced trainer of scientists in the art of communication. He is the author of four books, including the just-released The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality and the New York Times-bestselling The Republican War on Science. He blogs for Science Progress, a website of the Center for American Progress and Center for American Progress Action Fund, and is a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast.

Voting image via Shutterstock

One of the first questions that usually comes up when people ask me about my book The Republican Brain is: “How do you explain my Uncle Elmer, who grew up a hard core Democrat and was very active in the union, but now has a bumper sticker that reads ‘Don’t Tread on Me’?”

Okay: I’m making this question up, but it’s pretty close to reality. People constantly want to know how to explain political conversions—cases in which individuals have changed political outlooks, sometimes very dramatically, from left to right or right to left.
When I get the standard political conversion question, the one I ask in return may come as a surprise: “Are you ...

What If Music and Language Are Neither Instinct nor Invention?

Mark Changizi — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:42:17 +0000

Earlier this week there was a debate on the origins of music at the Atlantic between two well-known psychologists. Geoffrey Miller (author of The Mating Mind) thinks music is an instinct, one due to sexual selection. On the other side is Gary Marcus (author of Guitar Zero), who believes music is a cultural invention. Given my recent book on the issue, Harnessed, many have asked me where I fall on the question, Is music an instinct or an invention?

My answer is that music is neither instinct nor invention—or, from another perspective, music is both—and this debate provides an opportunity to remind ourselves that there is a third option for the origins of music, an option that I have argued may also underlie our writing and language capabilities.

What if music only has the illusion of instinct? Might there be processes that could ...

The Triumph of Technodorkiness: Why We’re Gladly Turning Ourselves Into Yesterday’s Losers

Crux Guest Blogger — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:08:11 +0000

By David H. Freedman, a journalist who’s contributed to many magazines, including DISCOVER, where he writes the Impatient Futurist column. His latest book, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them, came out in 2010. Find him on Twitter at @dhfreedman.

Computer glasses have arrived, or are about to. Google has released some advance information about its Project Glass, which essentially embeds smartphone-like capabilities, including a video display, into eyeglasses. A video put out by the company suggests we’ll be able to walk down the street—and, we can extrapolate, distractedly walk right into the street, or drive down the street—while watching and listening to video chats, catching up on social networks (including Google+, of course), and getting turn-by-turn directions (though you’ll be on your own in avoiding people, lampposts and buses, unless there’s a radar-equipped version in the works).

Toshiba developed a six-pound surround-sight bubble helmet. It didn’t take off.

The reviews have mostly been cautiously enthusiastic. But they seem to be glossing over what an astounding leap this is for technophiles. I don’t mean in the sense that this is an amazing new ...

Identical Twins Usually Don’t Die From the Same Thing: The Lost Message About Genes & Disease

Crux Guest Blogger — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:06:24 +0000

By Luke Jostins, a postgraduate student working on the genetic basis of complex autoimmune diseases. Jostins has a strong background in informatics and statistical genetics, and writes about genetic epidemiology and sequencing technology on the his blog Genetic Inference. A different version of this post appeared on the group blog Genomes Unzipped.

One of the great hopes for genetic medicine is that we will be able to predict which people will develop certain diseases, and then focus preventative measures to those at risk. Scientists have long known that one of the wrinkles in this plan is that we will only rarely be able to say with certainty whether someone develop a given disease based on their genetics—more often, we can only give an estimate of their disease risk.

This realization came mostly from twin studies, which look at the disease histories of identical and non-identical twins. Twin studies use established models of genetic risk among families and populations, along with the different levels of similarity of identical and non-identical twins, to estimate how much of disease risk comes from genetic factors and how much comes from environmental risk factors. (See this post for more details.) There are some complexities here, and ...

Cheap Soul Teleportation, Coming Soon to a Theater Near You?

Mark Changizi — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:39:34 +0000

Also check out his related commentary on a promotional video for Project Glass, Google’s augmented-reality project.

Experience happens here—from my point of view. It could happen over there, or from a viewpoint of an objective nowhere. But instead it happens from the confines of my own body. In fact, it happens from my eyes (or from a viewpoint right between the eyes). That’s where I am. That’s consciousness central—my “soul.” In fact, a recent study by Christina Starmans at Yale showed that children and adults presume that this “soul” lies in the eyes (even when the eyes are positioned, in cartoon characters, in unusual spots like the chest).

The question I wish to raise here is whether we can teleport our soul, and, specifically, how best we might do it. I’ll suggest that we may be able to get near-complete soul teleportation into the movie (or video ...

Chocolate & Red Meat Can Be Bad for Your Science: Why Many Nutrition Studies Are All Wrong

Crux Guest Blogger — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:07:42 +0000

By Gary Taubes, author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science (1993), Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), and Why We Get Fat (2011). Taubes is a former staff member at DISCOVER. He has won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times and was awarded an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97. A modified version of this post appeared on Taubes’ blog.

The last couple of weeks have witnessed a slightly-greater-than-usual outbreak of extremely newsworthy nutrition stories that could be described as bad journalism feasting on bad science. The first was a report out of the Harvard School of Public Health that meat-eating apparently causes premature death and disease (here’s how the New York Times covered it), and the second out of UC San Diego suggesting that chocolate is a food we should all be eating to lose weight (the Times again).

Both of these studies were classic examples of what is known technically as observational epidemiology, a field of research I discussed at great length back in 2007 in a cover article for in the New York Times Magazine. The ...

Santorum’s Slipping Tongue: What Do Speech Errors Really Reveal About Inner Thoughts?

Julie Sedivy — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:13:10 +0000

Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.

Last week, a verbal stumble by Republican candidate Rick Santorum led to a fresh batch of accusations that he harbors racist sentiments. Here is a video clip and transcript, from a speech delivered on March 27th 2012 in Janesville, Wisconsin:

We know, we know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like. The anti-war government nig- uh, the uh America was a source for division around the world.”

Almost immediately, this video clip began to zip around the internet, with many people arguing that Santorum had caught himself in the middle of uttering a racial slur against Barack Obama, inadvertently revealing his true attitude. The presumption behind these arguments is that “Freudian slips” reflect a layer of thoughts and attitudes that sometimes slip past the mental guards of consciousness and bubble to the surface. That they’re the window to what someone was really thinking, despite his best efforts to conceal it.

But decades of research in psycholinguistics reveal that ...

Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics

Julie Sedivy — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:13:11 +0000

There’s been a good bit of discussion and hand-wringing lately over whether the American public is becoming more and more politically polarized and what this all means for the future of our democracy. You may have wrung your own hands over the issue. But even if you have, chances are you’re not losing sleep over the fact that Americans are very clearly becoming more polarized linguistically.

It may seem surprising, but in this age where geographic mobility and instant communication have increased our exposure to people outside of our neighborhoods or towns, American regional dialects are pulling further apart from each other, rather than moving closer together. And renowned linguist William Labov thinks there’s a connection between political and linguistic segregation.

Dialect regions as defined by the Atlas of North American English

In the final volume of his seminal book series Principles of Linguistic Change, Labov spends a ...

It Came From the Media: What Prompted the Ruckus About “Pink Slime”? And Is It Unhealthy?

Crux Guest Blogger — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:34:41 +0000

By Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997. It originally appeared on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.

What I’ve been trying to figure out, since the processed beef “pink slime” story broke this month is this: Are we just reacting to what Benjamin Radford at Discovery News calls ”the ick factor”? Or does pink slime (which the industry understandably prefers to call “lean finely textured beef“) actually pose a health risk? And does anything in the flurry of recent coverage help us sort that out?

It’s worth looking at the coverage that began in early March with a story in The Daily by David Knowles and an ABC News segment by Jim Avila. As noted in The Huffington Post by Michael Hill, in a matter of days the issue went “from simmer to boil.”

Let’s stipulate that some of this response derives from the very term “pink slime,” which tends to stimulate the “ugh” response. “Pink”—not so bad. But “slime”? Have you ever heard anyone use that word in a positive, how-attractive-your-slime-covered-dinner-is kind of way?

The term was ...

Eyes in the Sky Look Back in Time

Charles Choi — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:31:56 +0000

Charles Q. Choi is a science journalist who has also written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, Science, and Nature. In his spare time, he has ventured to all seven continents.

The Fertile Crescent in the Near East was long known as “the cradle of civilization,” and at its heart lies Mesopotamia, home to the earliest known cities, such as Ur. Now satellite images are helping uncover the history of human settlements in this storied area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the latest example of how two very modern technologies—sophisticated computing and images of Earth taken from space—are helping shed light on long-extinct species and the earliest complex human societies.

In a study published this week in PNAS, the fortuitously named Harvard archaeologist Jason Ur worked with Bjoern Menze at MIT to develop a computer algorithm that could detect types of soil known as anthrosols from satellite images. Anthrosols are created by long-term human activity, and are finer, lighter-colored and richer in organic material than surrounding soil. The algorithm was trained on what anthrosols from known sites look like based on the patterns of light they reflect, giving the software the chance to spot anthrosols in as-yet unknown ...

Are We “Meant” to Have Language and Music?

Mark Changizi — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:31:17 +0000

What do ironing and hang-gliding have in common? Not much really, except that we weren’t designed to do either of them. And that goes for a million other modern-civilization things we regularly do but are not “supposed” to do. We’re fish out of water, living in radically unnatural environments and behaving ridiculously for a great ape. So, if one were interested in figuring out which things are fundamentally part of what it is to be human, then those million crazy things we do these days would not be on the list.

iStockphoto

But what would be on the list?

At the top of the list of things we do that we’re supposed to be doing, and that are at the core of what it is to be human rather than some other sort of animal, are language and music. Language is the pinnacle of usefulness, and was key to our domination ...

Bio-Info-Tech: The Cyborg Baby of Cheap Genomes and Cloud Data

Razib Khan — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:00:28 +0000

By now you may have heard about Oxford Nanopore’s new whole-genome sequencing technology, which has the promise of taking the enterprise of sequencing an individual’s genome out of the basic science laboratory, and out to the consumer mass market. From what I gather the hype is not just vaporware; it’s a foretaste of what’s to come. But at the end of the day, this particular device is not the important point in any case. Do you know which firm popularized television? Probably not. When technology goes mainstream, it ceases to be buzzworthy. Rather, it becomes seamlessly integrated into our lives and disappears into the fabric of our daily background humdrum. The banality of what was innovation is a testament to its success. We’re on the cusp of the age when genomics becomes banal, and cutting-edge science becomes everyday utility.

Granted, the short-term impact of mass personal genomics is still going to be exceedingly technical. Scientific genealogy nuts will purchase the latest software, and argue over the esoteric aspects of “coverage,” (the redundancy of the sequence data, which correlates with accuracy) and the necessity of supplementing the genome with the ...