Just how Neanderthal are you?

This week the News blog have been asking just how Neanderthal are you? They reveal that customers of the genetics testing service, 23&Me, can now find an answer to that question thanks to their newly-released Neanderthal Ancestry Estimator:

This is a massive over-simplification, but Durand’s method distils the several hundred thousand SNPs into two numbers, called principle components, which can be graphed on x- and y-axes. The method then compares the distance of an individual’s genome to that of Neanderthals. They define 0% Neanderthal interbreeding based on the coordinates of 246 Africans, so the closer your genome is to that of the Neanderthals and the further from that of the Africans, the more Neanderthal ancestry it contains.

Find out more in their report.

The Bering Sea Lashes Out

The Frontier Scientists are continuing to keep us updated on the Arctic Cruise expedition and in their latest update the winter conditions have grown worse:

The Bering Sea is gnashing its teeth and flailing around. Clearly it took offense at our attempts to wrest the secrets of plankton overwintering from its icy depths. We have been unable to work for a day and a half now because of bad weather. Two nights ago, we were working across a line of stations that lie to the south of Saint Lawrence Island. We knew that a low pressure system was going to come in but we thought we had time to finish the line.

Photo: The view from the bridge this afternoon. Winds were about 40 knots at this time. Note the water streaming off the surface of the waves. Despite the high winds, Healy rode very well and was quite comfortable.

Stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks.

Climate change

In her latest post, Paige Brown alerts us to 25 Things You Didn’t Know About… Climate Change:

 6. Advanced computer models that incorporate factors such as volcanic activity, solar activity, greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, and aerosol pollution cannot reproduce the most recent warming trend unless they include the impact of human-activity-generated greenhouse gases. (Henson 2011, p. 10)

Image of Climate Attribution based on published data.

Continue to her post to read the other facts.

Spooky science

This week’s guest post is by Professor Chris French, Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit  in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.  His guest post, The rise of anomalistic psychology – and the fall of parapsychology? considers paranormal activity:

If paranormal forces really do not exist, how are we to explain the widespread belief in them and the sizeable minority of the population who claim to have had direct personal experience of paranormal phenomena? One possible answer is that there are certain events and experiences which may appear to involve paranormal phenomena but which can in fact be fully explained in non-paranormal, usually psychological, terms. This is the approach adopted by anomalistic psychologists. In general, anomalistic psychologists attempt to explain such phenomena in terms of known psychological effects such as hallucinations, false memories, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, placebo effects, suggestibility, reasoning biases and so on. It is noteworthy that anomalistic psychologists have, in just a few decades, produced many examples of replicable effects that adequately explain a range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.

You can also watch a video of Professor Chris French explaining anomalistic psychology in the post.

Boson

With all the talk this week of the Higgs boson particle, Kausik Datta has been telling us more about the person that this “God Particle” is named after:

 

I, on the other hand, want to briefly focus on the person, who introduced the principles of Statistical Mechanics guiding photons in 1924 and after whom physicist/mathematician Paul Dirac named the one of the most elementary of subatomic particles, Bosons. That person is Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist who made significant advances in the studies of Statistical Mechanics and Quantam Statistics.

Find our more about Satyendra Nath Bose, in Kausik’s post.

A geeky Christmas decoration

Continuing this theme, Viktor Poor’s latest cartoon is a Christmas decoration which may or may not exist: