You can’t really tell from the press release, but $ORK is fairly heavily involved in the GAIN project. Helping get the hardware and system-side software infrastructure for that designed, configured, and/or written is one of the many things that has been keeping me busy recently.
New research claims to show computer use doesn’t cause carpal tunnel syndrome:
The popular belief that excessive computer use causes painful carpal tunnel syndrome has been contradicted by experts at Harvard Medical School. According to them, even as much as seven hours a day of tapping on a computer keyboard won’t increase your risk of this disabling disorder.
So, all I’ve got to do is get it down to under seven hours (i.e., cut it by around 50%) and I’m good. Right-o…
And the “damn, that’s messed up” news just keeps coming: Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts. Oy.
(via jwz.)
I’ve obviously been going to way too many confrontational meetings lately, because the first thing I thought of when I saw the recent ‘inhaled oxytocin inspires trust’ stories was “how long until we see inhaled oxytocin antagonists used as a negotiating tool?”. (The non-biologists in the crowd should see this page for a good overview of what an antagonist is in this context.)
There’s no shortage of scary news on the avian flu pandemic front. Estimates of up to 7.5 million dead and 30 million needing hospitalization; current mortality rates are around 60%, and human-to-human transmission has possibly been observed.
As mentioned below, TheChild is fighting off some virus that’s laying a bit of a fever on her. This lead, in a roundabout way, to TheWife and I discussing whether it was “feed a cold, starve a fever”, or vice versa. I applied The Google Solution, and found that Google votes for the “feed a cold” form, but only at 3,440 hits to 1,430. That useless bit of trivia is going to be clogging my brain forever, but now I’ve introduced the same brainclog into all of your heads too — haha!
(By the way, The Staight Dope says:
Doctors have been trying to stamp out the above piece of folklore
for years. Current medical thinking is that you want to keep an even
strain when you’re sick with either a cold or a fever, and you
certainly don’t want to stress your system by stuffing or starving
yourself.
so there’s that.)
Biology News has the scoop on a major microRNA paper, out this week in Nature Genetics:
The paper, published in the latest issue of the journal Nature
Genetics, found that a microRNA gene regulates, on average, 200
different human gene transcripts and that many microRNAs can
coordinate their activities to regulate specific target genes. The
paper contains detailed genome-wide predictions for all human
microRNAs as well as tissue-specific predictions. Several
predictions were validated experimentally. The findings demonstrate
an unforeseen staggering complexity of gene regulation executed by
microRNAs on a genome-wide level.
My gradual school advisor, Roy Parker, has been going on about this scenario for at least the last 10 years; probably longer. Looks like he was mostly right…
You know Charles Darwin has a posse, baby.
This week’s Economist reports on a study by Faurie and Raymond — to appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society; PDF pre-print available from Faurie’s web site — that looks at why left-handedness persists in human populations. The authors hypothesize that in violent conflicts between left- and right-handers, that left-handers enjoy a competitive advantage, since their opponent won’t be used to their style. This is, of course, not a new hypothesis — it’s an obvious extension of the empirically-observed advantage lefties have in sports such as baseball, fencing, and boxing. What’s new here is that the authors took the next step: they hypothesized further that if this was the reason why left-handedness was maintained in human populations, then the frequency of left-handed individuals should correlate with the amount of violence in a population. The authors had to constrain their data to “traditional societies”, because firearms remove handedness from the equation, but when they looked at the data, they did find a strong positive correlation between murder rate and proportion of left-handers in the population. Almost 23% of the famously violent Yanamamo are left-handed, for example, compared to only 3.4% in a pacifistic group in Burkina Faso.
I am, of course, left-handed, and that’s why I found this article interesting. But the thing that tickled me enough to post about it is the penultimate sentence of the Economist article:
While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they more successfully violent.
Anyone wondering about holiday gifts for me: a tee shirt reading “left-handed, therefore more successfully violent” will be accepted with profuse thanks.
(The original Economist article is online, although you’ll have to be a subscriber to see it.)