Category: Genetics

How It Started

How it’s going.

Some 6.9 million 23andMe customers had their data compromised after an anonymous hacker accessed user profiles and posted them for sale on the internet earlier this year, the company said on Monday.

The compromised data included users’ ancestry information as well as, for some users, health-related information based on their genetic profiles, the company said in an email.

Privacy advocates have long warned that sharing DNA with testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry makes consumers vulnerable to the exposure of sensitive genetic information that can reveal health risks of individuals and those who are related to them.

Experts.

Obliterating the competition

Imagine the public outcry, and justifiably so, if boxing associations dispensed with weight categories and let heavyweights literally smash their way to the top. But when it comes to trans-athletes competing in womens’ Jiu-Jitsu, the gods of gender identity demand sacrifices.

“I hadn’t been notified,” Wilk said. “The only thing that brought it to my attention was my teammates. They kept asking me, ‘Are you fighting a man?’ and I was honestly too focused on coaching the rest of the crew to really pay attention to my opponent.”

“The fact of the matter is that he had a man’s strength,” Alexander said. “I train with men and women and the difference is massive. After my match with Cordelia, I sat mat-side and cried as my teammates massaged out my cramping forearms.”

The Patriarchy Made Him Run Faster

In sports that are dependent on skills other than speed, endurance, and raw power – say, archery or shooting – the difference in peak male and female performance may be negligible. But where such things are decisive – as in most sports – it requires a feat of ideological contortion – a kind of learned stupidity – to not concede the obvious.

Needless to say, stupidity ensues.

The Pronoun Game

Via the CBC, a tale of pronouns, vomiting, and very niche woe:

Again, as so often, one has to ask – exactly which player in this drama is doing the misgendering? The unnamed presenter who sees a young woman named Julia and refers to her as she; or the young woman named Julia who expects to be perceived as something other than she is? Indeed, as something that doesn’t exist.

The kind of young woman who tells us, with an air of triumph, “I had been thinking about my pronouns daily for over two years.”

As one does, when one’s mental wellbeing is not at all in question.

 

Subjective considerations

Why doesn’t everyone just fake reality on my behalf? All the cool kids are demanding it these days.

“Organic” Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”

Boulder County allowing farmers to grow GMOs on open space after organic utopia didn’t materialize

Schlagel knows full well that farming public land in Boulder County is performative, visually and politically. As he wheels the John Deere around the cornfield he harvested in November, third-floor patients from UC Health’s Longs Peak Hospital on the east side of Longmont can watch him make the dust fly. He’s been willing to work within that constant judgment of Boulder County consumers.

But he’s not willing to lose his family farm raising crops that people won’t pay for.

“It’s hard for people living in the city of Boulder, and even on the western side of Boulder County, to understand what real agriculture even looks like,” Schlagel said. The crop bans were “a mandate from somebody that we’re going to transition to something better that is very naive. Because if there was something better, we would already be there.”

Now, after years of debate and voluminous series of reports and public comment, Schlagel and other Boulder County lease farmers can plant what they want. The farmers convinced Boulder County leaders that they couldn’t survive while adhering to prohibition of genetically engineered corn and pesticide coatings using controversial neonicotinoids.

Some Boulder County residents are still angry. They feel a new slate of Boulder County Commissioners sold them out after years of detailed public debate and a consensus to slowly restrict engineered farming methods. Based on staff recommendations and their own research, the commissioners voted 3 to 0 in December to reverse the scheduled bans and restore choice to the leasing farmers.

Via

Organic Is The Latin Word For “Grown In Pig Shit”

The Take Away:

There is no independently-produced evidence in the scientific literature that organic foods offer consistent nutritional or safety advantages over conventional foods. Some claimed advantages, like higher levels of antioxidants or omega-3 fatty acids or phenols, may not be advantages at all, say scientists. Other differences may be the result of whether a cow was grass fed or grain fed and have nothing to do with whether it was raised organically. Claims that organic crops are more “nutrient dense” have not been consistently supported in independent studies.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Two Arctic Fish Are Breaking the Rules of Genetics

Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen’s University, in Ontario, and the lead author on the paper, knows she’s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn’t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.

Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals—other fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.

Sarah Schaack, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have “a pretty big wow factor” even among scientists, “because the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.” But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Research risks ruining a treasured leftist slur;

Neanderthals possessed the capacity to hear, process and produce human speech, according to a new survey combining CT scans and computer models.
 
For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers used computed tomography scans to build 3D models of the ear structures in Neanderthals, Homo sapiens and Neanderthal relatives unearthed at Atapuerca, an archaeological site in Spain.

My friends, it’s time to talk reparations.

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