Cavalcade of Mammals

I’m growing some cacti from seeds. I have seeds for:
opuntia engelmannii

ferocactus gracilis

echinocactus grusonii

opuntia violacea

myrtillocactus geometrizans

hylocereus undatus

The Powder Keg: The seething racial resentment of the Obama era is of an altogether different kind. by Charles P. Pierce
Many tarantulas are one particular shade of vivid blue, and no one knows why. A structural color, not a pigment color.
Doggerland, between England and France was covered by the ocean 7,000 YPB.

Woman can smell Parkinson’s disease

A bogus “Obama economic indicators” graphic is going around Facebook. Here are employment stats for the Obama Presidency:
This chart is incorrect–let’s take a look a the first line.

Full time workers, Jan 2009 are 116M (BLS Jan 2009, A-6), down to 111M a year later at the peak of the recession, and now in Sept 2015 at 122M (+ 6 million jobs in 6.5 years) (BLS Sept 2015). Well done Mr president!.

Under Bush, Jan 2001 – Jan 2009 employment went from 112M to 116M (+4 million in 8 years). (Table A-4
These figures are readily available from the BLS Current Population Survey.

Trap, neuter, release does not work

Article on the HEMA documentary. How People Actually Fought With Swords.
Back to the Source, a documentary about Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA).

Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts by Brooke Harrington

Turgay Trough Geoglyphs 250+ collections of mounds in square, cross, line, and tri-armed shapes

Man’s larger penis is a consequence of his larger brain. All about the baby head.

Studs Terkel, recordings from The Good War

How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains, by Ferris Jabr Experiments putting human/chimp regualtory regions into mice, database of human accelerated regions (HARs).

Mitochondria are a network of tubular organelles


Chicago cops conduct illegal spying on protesters

Thelonious Monk’s List of Tips for Playing a Gig

Forensic Pseudoscience: The Unheralded Crisis of Criminal Justice

Cops ‘seized’ more stuff than robbers last year

More guns means more people shot
How to sequence and assemble a large eukaryote genome with long reads in 2015
Convert between RefSeq and Ensembl Transcript
Ion Torrent S5, $65k, between Proton and PGM in capability, 200bp reads in 2.5 hrs

Podcasts:
Stuff You Should Know
Stuff You Missed in History Class
HOW TO DO EVERYTHING
Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

50 despicable things George W. Bush did before and after 9/11
Oak leaf mites bite humans this year

Beer:
Practical Porter
Beer Styles: Making a Porter Recipe

Japanese zoning. Allow mixed land use by design, up to a maximum use for each zone. Contrasted with US Euclidian zoning.
India’s Subterranean Stepwells
Solidarity Squandered by Rick Perlstein. The attacks brought us together until we let them turn us against each other–and damn near everyone else.
Article on the culture of Iceland and how it intersects with the 2008 bankruptcy crisis, “Wall Street on the Tundra” J
by MICHAEL LEWIS, APRIL 2009
Illinois good hiking spots
Pics of a WWI German sub (sunk and recovered by the British–all Steampunk
Rethinking government debt by Frances Coppola. Covers the economics of money and debt.
God damn letter sent to Abraham Lincoln
Virus GBV-C protects somewhat against AIDs

Colourlex: pigments and paintings
Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural) (pdf)

The toxicological significance of exposures to synthetic chemicals is examined in the context of exposures to naturally occurring chemicals. We calculate that 99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods. We conclude that natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests. We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.

“Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany
Genetics of color, COLOUR AND PATTERN CHARTS
Sarah Hartwell
Info on college costs from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
A genome-wide analysis of putative functional and exonic variation associated with extremely high intelligence. Spain et. al., 2015. Molecular Psychiatry

Although individual differences in intelligence (general cognitive ability) are highly heritable, molecular genetic analyses to date have had limited success in identifying specific loci responsible for its heritability. This study is the first to investigate exome variation in individuals of extremely high intelligence. Under the quantitative genetic model, sampling from the high extreme of the distribution should provide increased power to detect associations. We therefore performed a case–control association analysis with 1409 individuals drawn from the top 0.0003 (IQ >170) of the population distribution of intelligence and 3253 unselected population-based controls. Our analysis focused on putative functional exonic variants assayed on the Illumina HumanExome BeadChip. We did not observe any individual protein-altering variants that are reproducibly associated with extremely high intelligence and within the entire distribution of intelligence. Moreover, no significant associations were found for multiple rare alleles within individual genes. However, analyses using genome-wide similarity between unrelated individuals (genome-wide complex trait analysis) indicate that the genotyped functional protein-altering variation yields a heritability estimate of 17.4% (s.e. 1.7%) based on a liability model. In addition, investigation of nominally significant associations revealed fewer rare alleles associated with extremely high intelligence than would be expected under the null hypothesis. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis that rare functional alleles are more frequently detrimental than beneficial to intelligence.

First octopus genome published: California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides

Pentagon tiling discovery.

Hugo awards 2015! Yea, the asshole muckers lost! Nice to see Orphan Black win.

What the alternate Hugo Ballot would likely have been Good source for my TO READ list.

Flying Spaghetti Monster propaganda materials

HTTP error codes in cat gifs

Scientists who found gluten sensitivity evidence have now shown it doesn’t exist. Follow up study by Peter Gibson at Monash University in Australia to his 2011 paper

Short and succinct argument for removing ten Commandments from public spaces.
Orac on ‘integrative medicine’
Recommended economics books by Brad DeLong
Lyme disease, common and dangerous
Trump’s short and long cons
The myths of bioinformatics software
Were Republicans really the party of civil rights in the 1960s?
History of British slave ownership

A second group has found protein preserved in dinosaur fossils. I wouldn’t call this solid yet, but it is encouraging. This hit the news in September 2009

Fibres and cellular structures preserved in 75-million–year-old dinosaur specimens

Abstract
Exceptionally preserved organic remains are known throughout the vertebrate fossil record, and recently, evidence has emerged that such soft tissue might contain original components. We examined samples from eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones using nano-analytical techniques; the bones are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue. In one sample, we observe structures consistent with endogenous collagen fibre remains displaying ~67 nm banding, indicating the possible preservation of the original quaternary structure. Using ToF-SIMS, we identify amino-acid fragments typical of collagen fibrils. Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu whole blood. Using advanced material characterization approaches, we find that these putative biological structures can be well preserved over geological timescales, and their preservation is more common than previously thought. The preservation of protein over geological timescales offers the opportunity to investigate relationships, physiology and behaviour of long extinct animals.
Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7352, 09 June 2015

Pseudoscience: IgG Food Intolerance Tests
William Thompson, the Savannah, Georgia Daily Morning News editor who designed the Confederate flag describes its racist meaning
What the rich want, everyone in the US gets. Survey data
Making Leavers machine lace
Why early Chlamydia vaccines failed (and lowered resistance to Chlamydia)

RepSox, a TGF-β1 inhibitor, promotes stem cell growth and enhances neurogenesis and muscle regeneration in old mice. Neurogenesis occurs primarily in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, and this is where the authors find it. No functional tests are shown.

The compound, 2-(3-(6-Methylpyridin-2-yl)-1H-pyrazol-4-yl)-1,5-naphthyridine or RepSox (PubChem) has been mentioned in half a dozen studies as a drug that promotes stem cell proliferation. Compound sells for research use at $50 / gram.

<p>Systemic attenuation of the TGF-β pathway by a single drug simultaneously rejuvenates hippocampal neurogenesis and myogenesis in the same old mammal. Hanadie Yousef, Michael J. Conboy, Adam Morgenthaler, Christina Schlesinger, Lukasz Bugaj, Preeti Paliwal, Christopher Greer, Irina M. Conboy, David Schaffer
Oncotarget. May 06, 2015. (pdf)