Science Odds and Ends

But the platinum-record artist then began to wonder if he, in fact, might have something to offer science.

"I was curious," he wrote in his column. "Given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years—not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol…you name it—there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why."

By sequencing hundreds of human genomes, the 1000 Genomes Project has produced the most detailed catalog of human variation yet. This catalog, described in the 28 October issue of Nature, as well as a companion paper in Science that identifies duplicated regions of the genome known as copy number variants, provide a tremendous resource for probing the evolution of human genetic diversity and the genetic underpinnings of disease.

Science is making the paper by Sudmant et al., as well as a related News story, freely available (nonsubscribers require a simple registration). Both articles will be published in the 29 October 2010 issue of Science.
Research Article
Diversity of Human Copy Number Variation and Multicopy Genes
P. H. Sudmant et al.
Download PDF http://www.sciencemag.org/hottopics/100 ... 30_641.pdf

News of the Week
1000 Genomes Gives New Map Of Genetic Diversity
E. Pennisi
Download PDF http://www.sciencemag.org/hottopics/100 ... enomes.pdf

The following paper, published in the journal Nature, is freely available:
A Map of Human Genome Variation from Population-Scale Sequencing
The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium
Read the paper on Nature's web site http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 09534.html

Geneticists are getting to the long and short of the genes that control how tall a person will grow. The short answer is that at least 180 different common genetic variants are involved; the long, that more than 600 variants may control human height. That may sound impressive, but each of the genes involved has a small effect, and researchers are still able to account for only about 10 percent of the genetic contributions that give rise to the wide variation in height. Larger studies might uncover even more genetic variants associated with height. Assuming all variants have the same modest effects as the ones in this study — each affecting height by a millimeter or so — the researchers calculate that between 483 and 1,040 different variants may be involved, accounting for almost 20 percent of the genetic components that determine height.

Yet something in seawater nourishes big schemes and dreams. In 2000, researchers began collaborating in a network that has now grown to involve at least 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations. The coalition tackled “three grand questions,” in the words of Jesse Ausubel of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, an environmental scientist and cofounder of the census. The goal, as Ausubel put it, was to discover what has lived in the ocean, what lives there now and what will live there in the future.

The new approach makes traffic lights go with the flow, rather than enslaving drivers to the tyranny of timed signals. By measuring vehicle inflow and outflow through each intersection as it occurs and coordinating lights with only their nearest neighbors, a systemwide smoothness emerges, scientists report in a September Santa Fe Institute working paper. The researchers ran a simulation of their approach in the city center of Dresden. The area has 13 traffic light–controlled intersections, 68 pedestrian crossings, a train station that serves more than 13,000 passengers on an average day and seven bus and tram lines that cross the network every 10 minutes in opposite directions. The flexible self-control approach reduced time stuck waiting in traffic by 56 percent for trams and buses, 9 percent for cars and trucks, and 36 percent for pedestrians crossing intersections. Dresden is now close to implementing the new system, says Helbing, and Zurich is also considering the approach.

British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole.

Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.

As every essay-writer knows, half the fun is to interpret the question. The latest, about digital vs. analog reality, could go in a lot of different directions. The obvious one is to ask whether spacetime is discrete and what that would mean, but I imagine that entrants will come up with even more interesting interpretations.