Science online, through a panopticon darkly edition

Photo by BarackObama.com.

• About that study of queer-identified folks in STEM: It's off to a great start.
• No prior (heh) experience needed. A nice introduction to Bayesian statistics.
• But it's maybe okay if you don't mind being arrested by mistake. Why ubiquitous survelliance is a problem even if you don't mind being watched—and that's before we account for the how hard it is to prove innocence once suspicion is sparked.
• In mice. Gene knockouts that cause obesity and obssessive-compulsive behavior cancel each other out.
• At a zoo, even! Advice on finding a post-PhD career outside academia.
• Bout damn' time. How television weather-people are coming around on global warming.
• What one thing should change in undergrad classes? Maybe you'd remove all the desks.
• You're out of luck if you work with plants. When scientists take the Up-Goer Five challenge
• SCOTUS tries to rule on the Central Dogma. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that naturally occurring DNA sequences may not be patented. But the text of the decision [PDF] is drawing complaints from people who know actual biology, and one justice admitted in his concurrence that he doesn't understand the science.

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Queer in STEM, one month in

Happy Pride! Have some data. Photo by torbakhopper.

Over at the blog for the Queer in STEM study, I've just posted an update on the project's progress about a month after we first launched it. In short: it's going really amazingly well.

Back on May 7, we opened an online survey of folks working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer. As of today, 1,523 people have answered the call—out of which, 1,180 participants have completed the key survey questions on their identity and experience.

Our "snowball sampling" method of asking participants to pass along links to the study has been extremely successful: we know that the survey has been mentioned in at least 185 tweets, recommended 467 times on Facebook, and shared 20 times on Google+. We've been linked from websites we know well—like It's Okay to Be Smart and Minority Postdoc—and also from new friends like Geek Feminism, The Asexual Agenda, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Lab and Field, and many, many folks on Tumblr.

To find out what's next for the project, and to help spread the word (or even answer the questionnaire, if by some tiny chance you haven't yet), go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, the wrong kind of fan mail edition

Paleo-dieting Hiwi-style? Hope you like roast iguana. Photo by christophedemulder.

• Not at all the way it works in science. A brief guide to the way evolution works in science fiction.
• Woah. A project in nanotech fabrication captures images of the breakup and formation of carbon-carbon bonds.
• Yeah, don't do this. Where "this" is e-mailing perfectly nice scientists and science writers and asking them to do your homework for you.
• Sweet. Candy company Mars launches a project to sequence the genomes of crops that are staples in the developing world.
• "... except perhaps, for Google+ posts." Social media postings correlate with formal citations of scientific papers.
• Star Trek is for nerds; Star Wars is for geeks. The difference between nerds and geeks, quantified.
• Want to eat like a hunter-gatherer? First you've got to decide which kind of hunter-gatherer you are.
• "Evolutionary traps" When human-created environmental change turns adaptations into maladaptations.
• Color, insulation, even defense. What use were feathers before dinosaurs evolved flight?

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New, rigorous study looks for genes associated with education—but doesn't find much

Genetics may impact how long you stay in school—by a factor of a month or so. Photo by velkr0.

Late update: Michelle Meyer, who sits on the advisory board of the consortium responsible for the study discussed below, briefly discusses the results on her blog, and links to a Frequently Asked Questions document [PDF] meant to accompany the study, which makes some reasonable and sensible points about how best to understand the findings. A point I didn't emphasize originally is that the small effect size of the sites identified suggests that a lot of previous "sociological genetics" studies are now called into question—because their sample sizes were far too small to detect such subtle effects.

A few months ago, I roundly thrashed a study that attempted to identify genes associated with educational achievement. It was, to put it mildly, shooting fish in a barrel: that paper was published in a journal that doesn't handle much (if any) genetics research, the sample size was small, the genetic data was sparse, the analysis applied to the genetic data didn't test for what the authors wanted to test for, and the authors ignored basic statistical practice when they interpreted the results.

This week, though, there's a new study of the genetic basis for educational achievement that is the mirror-image opposite of the one I beat up: it's online ahead of print in Science, it has a great big sample size of 101,069 participants and a built-in "replication" sample of 25,490 more, it works with good genome-wide genetic data, and it looks to be both admirably careful in its statistical work and cautious in its conclusions—which is consistent with the inclusion, in the paper's lengthy author list, of some folks who know what they're talking about when it comes to association genetics.

So, naturally, I wanted to write something about this study as a nice example of what's possible when genetic analysis is done right. Unfortunately, the actual results of the study don't give me much to discuss—because, for all its rigor and caution, it doesn't find much in the way of genetic explanation for educational achievement.

Science online, visibly relevant edition

Dandelions are packed with yummy glucosinolates. Photo by nothingtosay.

• This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: I review a book that rebuts Stephen Jay Gould's paleontological perspective.
• Or ringworlds. The search for alien civilizations may be simpler if we look for Dyson spheres.
• "They told me I made a bomb on school property ..." Kiera Wilmot speaks out.
• Depends what you mean by "phytonutrients." Are the wild ancestors of dometic crops more nutritious?
• Oops. Guy calling for more scientific outreach seems not to know much about scientific outreach.
• Of course I was going to link to this. Failed experiments are the Kobayashi Maru test of science.
• Score (yet another) one for Charles Darwin. Phylogenetic diversity predicts primary productivity.
• Dolphins are assholes. Which is why you'd have to be nuts to invite some to your childbirthing.

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The Molecular Ecologist: Relentless Evolution

Darwin's finches, like this medium ground finch, are a prime example of what John Thompson calls "relentless evolution." Photo by David Cook Wildlife Photography.

When I was just starting graduate school, one of the first things I wanted was readings to get me up to speed on the current state of research on the evolution of interactions between species. My dissertation advisor handed me The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution, by John Thompson (who, it should be said, had been my advisor's postdoctoral mentor). Thompson turned out to be just the author for the job, wrangling a huge body of research into a clear, straightforward text, and all in support of his argument that metapopulation dynamics—populations linked by migration across a landscape of varied environments—are the engine driving much of evolution.

Now, Thompson's published a new book, titled Relentless Evolution, which pretty much picks up where The Geographic Mosaic left off. And I've reviewed it for The Molecular Ecologist.

Gould’s “paradox of the visibly irrelevent” holds that, if we are to understand the river of evolutionary history, we must look below the spume and spray of year-to-year adaptative change to find the deeper currents that can, over time, carve canyons. In his new book Relentless Evolution (University of Chicago Press, $35.00 in paperback), John N. Thompson makes the opposing argument with gusto: To Thompson, studying the roiling eddies that Gould dimissed as transient and superficial is the only way to understand the deeper currents, and the river’s course ahead of us.

Should you run out and buy a copy? If you're even slightly on the fence, I suggest you go read my whole review.◼

Science online, on the road edition

Barnacles. Photo by jby.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Tracing the origins of the fungus among us.
• Yay! Charges against DIY chemist Kiera Wilmot have been dropped, and she's going to space camp.
• Wow: "75 percent of all tornadoes on Earth occur in North America." For the devastating tornadoes that hit Oklahoma this week, some meteorlogical context.
• Yum! Acacias ensure that no one steals the food rewards provided for mutualistic ants by making poisonous food rewards.
• Good enough is good enough. The magic of evolution revealed in the inefficiency of an adaptation to poisonous environments.
• It would make sense. Could immune response influence human reproductive function?
• Whoops. Sweetened poisons have selected for cockroaches that can't stand glucose.

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