Cow DNA tells us domestication is an incredibly difficult undertaking.

Everyone knows about how genetics is changing how we look at and treat human disease. But what may be less appreciated is what it can tell us about human history.

From studying human genetics, we know that all humans started out in Africa. We also know that early humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans before wiping them out. Now a new study looking at cow DNA is teaching us about our agricultural history.

Scientists compared DNA from 8,000 year old cow bones to 20 or so different modern cow breeds from all over the world. When they plugged their data into various computer models, the one that made the most sense had modern cows coming from about 80 wild founders around 10,000 years ago.

Not only does this help explain why cows all look so much alike, it also tells us that our ancestors only managed to domesticate cows once. This is despite the fact that ancient, wild cows (called aurochs) were wandering all over Africa, Asia, and Europe at the time.

The obvious conclusion is that domesticating a cow is really hard. And this makes sense if you think about the animals.

No, I don’t mean placid Bessie out in the pasture. Ancient cows were huge, ornery creatures that would have been hard to capture alive and hard to breed. Archeological evidence suggests it took hundreds of years or more of breeding to get animals that were smaller and more docile.

Archeological evidence also helps us pinpoint where the first domestication probably happened – the Middle East. But because archeological data is often incomplete, it can’t tell us whether this was the only cattle domestication event in human history. We need genetics to confirm this (or at least to confirm that modern cows came from a single domestication event).

Genetics is providing insight into human history that we could not have gotten in any other way. We can see that humans lost their fur and gained darker skin around 1.2 million years ago. And we can see that our original pale skin from back when we were hairy came back into fashion in Europe about 6000-12,000 years ago.

And cows aren’t the first animal’s DNA to tell us something about ourselves either. By looking at lice DNA, scientists think that humans first started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago.

It is amazing what we can learn about our history from looking at the DNA of ourselves and our associated creatures. Soon we’ll learn even more. As the price of deciphering our DNA goes down, the number of questions we can answer will go up dramatically. The only thing that will keep us back is figuring out the best questions to ask.

People often think of medicine as hard work, but an emerging group of tech-savvy entrepreneurs is looking to re-shape people’s perspectives and turn health, and health research, into a form of play.

At the Game Developers’ Conference here in San Francisco this week, computer scientist Jérôme Waldispühl showed off a project that he and colleagues at McGill University just published in PLoS ONE. (KQED QUEST blogger Dr. Barry Starr wrote about this game in December.)

It’s called Phylo, and it turns the puzzles of biology into a game anyone can play.

Phylo takes a fresh approach to sorting through the data produced by the Human Genome Project, some three billion bits that spell out the instructions for how to make and maintain a human being.

Researchers are continuously looking through this genetic code to search for genes that may make us susceptible to a particular disease. Finding that needle in the haystack takes time, as scientists must look at each piece of data to evaluate its potential to wreak biological havoc. They also need context to understand the significance of each gene’s sequence.

“By themselves, sequences tell us nothing,” Waldispühl said. To make sense of this data, researchers are interested in comparing human DNA to that of other animals, like monkeys or mice. This gives us a window into evolution – if the exact same sequence ended up in horses and humans, then it is probably important, and a change, or mutation, would be bad news.

Waldispühl turned these inter-species comparisons into a game by color-coding the DNA and laying out human and animal sequences on top of each other, the way many scientists do to make sense of it.

“In the puzzle, you’re trying to make columns of the same color, [and] you’re finding evolutionarily conserved regions.”

The result is a game that looks something like a mash-up of Tetris and a Rubik’s cube. To play, you try to arrange the rows to get the same color going down across different species, and you can introduce gaps if necessary. The computer’s score is the ‘Par’, and your goal is to beat it.

Competing with the computer may sound daunting at first. After all, this process seems like something computers should be really good at. But for this kind of pattern recognition, humans turn out to be much smarter than computers at figuring out which mutations can be thrown away, and which may be a red flag for disease.

For all the nuances of the science behind the game, it should ultimately still be fun to play. I asked Jon Bernstein, a doctor and researcher at Stanford, to try it out. “I thought it was very interesting – it was visually appealing, the interface was nice, and fun to play around with.”

The game is focused on genetics, Dr. Bernstein’s area of expertise, but that didn’t mean it was easy. “Many of the levels were pretty challenging.”

The game is timely, as DNA sequencing is becoming more and more useful in terms of diagnosing and treating all sorts of illnesses

“There are many, many situations in which genetic information is helpful in understanding the cause of human disease,” said Bernstein. “There are many cases in which it impacts how you take care of people and the counseling you can provide them.”

But as Bernstein told me, some forms of sequencing are still very expensive, on the order of $10,000. “And most of the cost is really the interpretation, not running the test itself.”

Games like Phylo are an effort to help scientists interpret these data. By making these problems fun, easy to play with, and accessible to anyone in the world, game designers like Waldispühl are essentially crowd-sourcing solutions to complex problems in health.

And there are plenty of gamers who would be willing to help out. Waldispühl told me that McGill put out a press release on the game and got a much larger response than they expected.

“A couple of hours after we launched the game, the server was saturated and we put all of the department in an emergency state because everything was blocked,” he said.

“We had basically a puzzle downloaded every half-second. It was just crazy.”

Finding innovative ways to quickly make sense of genetic data is becoming more important as sequencing becomes faster and more widely used. However, there are many questions that come up between sequencing a person’s DNA and pinpointing the cause of their disease, and Phylo may be answering the wrong one.

“This particular game is about aligning DNA sequences. In clinical medicine, a lot of questions are asked and answered at the level of protein,” Stanford’s Bernstein said.

DNA is the blueprint for protein, and bad proteins can cause disease. Looking at information from the protein perspective would be much more useful to doctors, and games like Foldit are already looking at some aspects of that problem.

Foldit is a science-focused game that was first released to the public in 2008, and it has had considerable success since then. It allows players to virtually interact with proteins and solve puzzles about their shape. Foldit was able to harness the power of the game-playing masses to determine the shape of the AIDS virus in rhesus monkeys, a problem that had eluded researchers for 15 years. They even published their findings in a sub-journal of Nature.

Phylo may not be as useful as Foldit in its current incarnation, but it does have potential. Since its launch in November 2010, Phylo has contributed to 450,000 solutions through the work of 20,000 registered players and thousands more who play anonymously. Its interface could easily be adopted to compare proteins instead of DNA sequences, but the challenge would be in making it enjoyable for anyone to play.

“We really wanted to make a casual game – that people can play it without thinking they are solving a problem,” Waldispühl said. “People want to have fun. And we can reuse the energy they spend gaming to do something useful.”

Animals are doing surprisingly well in the radioactive areas around Chernobyl.

Imagine people’s worst fears are realized and the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon here in California has a Chernobyl-style meltdown. The effects on people are obvious: high rates of thyroid and other cancers, permanent resettlement elsewhere, increased rates of birth defects and so on. But as the area around Chernobyl is showing, the effects on the environment may be more subtle.

Over the break I watched a Nature special called, "Radioactive Wolves". This is a documentary about wildlife in a radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

Even though the area around Chernobyl is still so contaminated that humans can only go in for limited amounts of time, the wildlife appears to be doing surprisingly well. Birth defects are higher than in surrounding areas but life is thriving. Wolves are doing great, beavers have returned and everything looks hunky dory.

This seemed strange to me. I would think that so much radiation should be having pretty severe effects on these animals. And as noted in this in this NIH study, for certain individuals it definitely is.

The difference is in perspective. For the individual, the area around Chernobyl is terrible. Your kids have a higher rate of being stillborn or having birth defects, you have a much higher rate of developing various cancers, and so on. But for the species as a whole, things aren’t so bad. The higher background radiation appears to hardly be affecting their numbers at all.

Now this isn’t to say that the initial fallout wasn’t catastrophic to wildlife. It was. Untold numbers of animals died a terrible death in Chernobyl’s aftermath.

For the lucky survivors and new immigrants, though, Chernobyl is a different story. It is a chance to live a life without human interference. At least for now it looks like the high background radiation is preferable to man for these animals.

It is important that scientists keep studying this ecosystem though. The DNA of the animals in this area are under constant attack from the radiation. There may come a tipping point where the genetic burden becomes too high and populations start to crash. We’ll have to wait and see.

Additional Reading: NY Times Review of Radioactive Wolves

By reversing evolution, scientists may be able to transform chickens into dinosaurs one step at a time.

You may remember that in Jurassic Park, scientists sequenced some dinosaur DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber. They made a copy of this DNA, filled in the gaps with frog DNA and then created a dinosaur.

Although cool, we're not likely to get dinosaurs this way in the near future for a bunch of different reasons. The biggest for now (besides not having any dinosaur DNA) is that we can’t clone anything bigger than a bacterium with just a piece of DNA. To clone a multi-celled creature like a dinosaur, we need frozen or even better, live cells.

While this might be possible for some extinct animals including mammoths, 65 million years is just too long to find any frozen or viable cells. But there may be another way to one day create Jurassic Park. By messing with a chicken’s genes.

Current theories are that birds evolved from dinosaurs. This means that all the information for making a dinosaur was contained in bird DNA at one time. The trick is to figure out what this dinosaur DNA looked like and to change bird DNA accordingly and/or to unlock any hidden dinosaur DNA that may still be in bird DNA.

After 65 million years you might think all traces of dino-DNA would be lost in birds. Surprisingly, you’d be wrong. It looks like there is still some T-rex lurking in a chicken’s DNA.

In the last decade, scientists have been able to make chickens look a bit more dinosaur-like by changing how the chickens use the genes they already have. For example, they have been able to make a chicken’s tail look a bit more like a dinosaur’s.

A big difference between birds and dinosaurs is that dinosaurs have much longer tails. But this doesn’t hold up in a chicken embryo.

At a very early stage of development, chicken embryos have what looks like a very reptilian tail with 16 vertebrae. Later in development, though, most of the vertebrae disappear until only five are left.

What this means is that if scientists can figure out how to keep the vertebrae from disappearing, they might end up with a long tailed chicken. And they’ve actually managed to sort of do this already.

By changing when certain genes are turned on or off, they have managed to create a chicken with a tail that has eight vertebrae. Not quite a dinosaur but a step in that direction.

They have also been able to create a chicken with teeth. And even a snout! All of this without fundamentally changing a chicken’s genes but instead changing how they are used.

Now they probably won’t be able to make the chicken-dinosaur transition simply by changing how chicken genes are used. There are bound to have been some significant changes in certain key genes that will have to be replicated to really make a dinosaur. And for that we’ll need to figure out what dinosaur DNA looked like.

But still, we can make a lot of progress towards making a dinosaur by simply using the toolkit of current bird genes. In the end, we’ll probably be able to recreate something very much like a dinosaur. The question will then become whether we should.

QUEST story on how scientists can figure out ancient DNA from modern DNA.

Sex may have evolved to cut down on genetic variation.

No, I don’t mean in the red light district of Amsterdam or at Mustang Ranch. What I am talking about is the high biological cost of sex. In fact, it is so expensive it can be hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place.

The main reason sex is so costly is it takes two parents to have a kid. Asexual creatures can do it on their own.

This doesn’t sound like much of an advantage, but it is. Some computer simulations show that a single asexual individual can overtake a population of one million sexual creatures in about 50 generations. That is about 1000 years for people and only 8 years for mice.

So sex needs to have some pretty big advantages to have ever evolved in the first place. Otherwise the first sexual creature would have been quickly swamped out by all of its asexual brethren as soon as it appeared.

In the past, scientists have pointed to variation as one of sex’s big advantage. This probably isn’t the whole story though. Or even most of it.

Sex does create additional variety through the mixing of genes but it probably isn’t enough to explain the rise of sex. You’d have to live in some pretty chaotic times for this variation to offer enough an advantage to an individual to overcome its cost. Eight or a thousand years just isn’t that long in an evolutionary time scale.

A new review out is bringing up an old idea that Muller came up with back in 1932. The main advantage of sex is to provide a safe time to recombine our DNA.

Recombination is simply the swapping of DNA between two identical (or nearly identical) pieces of DNA. For us that means swapping between the chromosomes we got from mom and dad. So DNA is swapped between our two chromosome 1’s our two chromosome 2’s and so on.

This is where part of that variation we were talking about earlier comes from. But more importantly, recombination actually helps repair DNA damage. You can see the effects of no recombination by looking at our sad little Y chromosome which is slowly disappearing because it has no one to recombine with except itself.

But recombination is a double edged sword. Cells need it to repair their DNA but it can cause lots of DNA damage if it isn’t controlled. For example, even with all of our controls in place, 1 in 1000 humans still ends up with one chromosome stuck to another.

You can see what happens with uncontrolled recombination by looking at cancer cells. These cells end up with extra chromosomes, chromosomes stuck together, and lots of other chromosomal problems because they recombine willy-nilly. They do well for themselves but are definitely bad for the individual.

So it makes sense to contain recombination to some easily controlled time. Sex may have arisen and took over the world because it provides a safer way to keep harmful DNA damage in check. The variation that everyone goes on about may simply have been a beneficial side effect.

After just nine generations, the sexual beasts on the left are already being swamped out by the asexual ones on the right.

See the following for more information:

Muller’s Ratchet
Extra chromosomes and new species

Scientists are finally unraveling enough of the mystery of
human DNA to help individual patients.

In the last few months, a couple of stories have come out that show the promise of the upcoming genetic revolution. In each case, doctors found a patient’s best treatment by looking at every last letter of that patient’s DNA.

In the first case, a young boy had all the hallmarks of an immune problem but there was no conclusive diagnosis. Without knowing for sure what was wrong, doctors weren’t comfortable treating the boy with a risky bone marrow transplant.

Then scientists sequenced the boy’s DNA. Lo and behold there was a never-before-seen mutation in a known gene. This nailed down the diagnosis of a potentially life-threatening form of irritable bowel disease (IBD).

The doctors went ahead with the bone marrow transplant. The boy not only survived the treatment, but his symptoms cleared up as well. He is now essentially cured because he had his DNA sequenced.

The second case involves a set of boy-girl twins. They suffer from a movement disorder called dopamine-responsive dystonia (DRD).

Patients with DRD are usually treated with L-dopa. This can often clear up most symptoms but didn’t seem to help these twins as much. In particular, the twin sister still suffered severe enough symptoms to greatly diminish her quality of life.

Scientists sequenced the twins’ DNA and found out that they had a kind of DRD that responds best to both L-dopa and a medicine called 5-HTP. Once they both received this new treatment, their symptoms improved dramatically.

For example, the girl used to suffer from something called layngospasms that usually ended in vomiting. With the new treatment, this went away. An obvious improvement to her life!

Assuming prices keep dropping for sequencing and Congress keeps allocating money for basic research, there may come a day in the not too distant future when many more patients like these will be helped. People will have better lives because doctors can figure out what is wrong by looking at their DNA. As long as doctors have the tools they need to help patients that is.

Right now the information is so scattered and so specialized that most doctors can’t help without a scientist’s intervention. This greatly limits the number of patients who can be helped.

Getting this whole process streamlined enough so that more than just the wealthy, connected, or lucky can benefit won’t be easy. We need to generate lots more data. But we also need to collect and organize the data so doctors can take a patient’s DNA data and translate it into the right treatment without the help of a genetic scientist.

This last part is not exciting work but is absolutely necessary if the promise of the genomic revolution is to be fully realized. Here’s hoping someone funds something like this.

Great story about DRD and how L-dopa can help.

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It'll be a long time before scientists figure out why this branch is white.
And even longer before the public finds out.

Is there any place to check in for updates on this research?

Timothy Jordan asked this question on Chris Bauer’s blog about figuring out the genetics of redwood albinism. Unfortunately, the answer is that there really isn’t any place to see how the research is going.

This is because science is this weird combination of secrecy and openness. Research projects start out as proprietary but once finished, they become open source.

What this means is that no results will be released until a good chunk of the research is done and it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. This usually takes a year or more and albino redwoods will probably take even longer.

Part of the reason for this is simple caution on the part of scientists. No one wants to release results so early that that they have to retract them later. Like everyone else, scientists don’t like to be proven wrong in public.

But this only explains not communicating preliminary results. Once a result is pretty solid, it should be OK to broadcast publicly. Except that it still isn’t.

This isn’t the fault of many of the scientists doing the research. I remember wanting to shout my latest results from the mountaintops as soon as I got them. Lots of scientists I have talked to feel the same way.

The problem has more to do with how science is funded. It simply isn’t designed to allow incremental progress to become public.

Scientists rely on the federal government for most of their funding. The NIH, NSF, DOE, and a few other agencies supply the lion’s share of research dollars.

Labs are awarded these grants based on the work they have done. There is absolutely no incentive for sharing their work early. In fact, sharing work too soon can cost you grant money and maybe even (eventually) your lab.

The graveyard of the scientific careers of those scientists who released their data too soon. Photo by Corpse Reviver.

To be credible, scientific results must be published in a peer-reviewed journal. This is the “coin of the realm” in the scientific world. To succeed as a scientist, you need lots of these in the top journals and of course, successful scientists are the ones who get funded.

These journals frown on releasing data before that data can make a big splash for their journal. This forces scientists to not release information to the general public (although they can talk about it at some point at scientific meetings). To keep from perishing, scientists need to keep their results under wraps.

Not only that, but scientists are not above stealing someone’s data and using it to get to the full story first. Smaller labs in particular are vulnerable to this sort of predation. Again, this forces scientists to keep their results to themselves rather than broadcasting it far and wide. Otherwise, they’ll have nothing to show for their work and they won’t get funded.

The only way to overcome these barriers and get results presented to the public in a more timely manner would be to change how science gets funded. Make it so there is lots of money to go around so that scientists will get money whether their lab makes the breakthrough or someone else uses your preliminary results to make the breakthrough.

Of course this won’t happen. For one thing, you wouldn’t be able to screen out the bad and/or lazy scientists nor reward the true go-getters. And besides, there are already way too many labs chasing way too few grants. Given that our government is sliding into insolvency, it is very unlikely that they will throw any more money at science so the public can get information any sooner.

A new way to fund science also wouldn’t change other aspects that keep our current system in place. For example, many scientists like to get a result first and beat the other guys. No funding tweaks are going to change this competitiveness.

Looks like we’ll have to stick with the current way that science is set up. It has done a great job of explaining our world and how it works. We just need to be patient and wait for the findings to eventually be released. As soon as they are, I’ll update you right here.

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These Chinese students are kicking our butts in science.

New test results confirm what many of us have feared: U.S. students suck at science. These new numbers are not only bad for our reputation, they spell trouble for the future U.S. economy and possibly the world. Maybe President Obama is right and we are in the middle of another “Sputnik” moment.

The most recent test results put us on par with France, the Czech Republic and Hungary and miles away from the likes of China, South Korea, Finland and Australia. The top countries will be producing the best scientists who will drive economies forward. Those of us in the middle of the pack will either fall behind economically or stay competitive either by attracting good scientists from elsewhere or by changing our education system to match the Finns or the Aussies.

Of course this is only true if these results hold for top performing students, too. Since most scientists come from this group, if the top performing students in the U.S. hold their own against their counterparts in other countries, then we may be OK.

The testing folks provide this great tool, the International Data Explorer, that lets you parse the data in lots of different ways. And no matter how I sliced the data, we are in the middle of the pack. If I look at wealthy folks, or students who have educated parents or students that have scientists as parents, each category is still behind lots of different countries.

So we can’t blame the test results on immigrants, the poor or any of our usual convenient scapegoats. We are simply doing a poor job of teaching science. Such a poor job that our economy is going to be in real trouble in the not so distant future.

And it isn’t just our economy that is threatened. A general U.S. public that is not up to snuff scientifically might just put our world at risk too.

A scientifically illiterate public will fear vaccines and GM foods, won’t understand and so won’t believe in global warming and so on. This could mean a spread of disease, starvation and environmental catastrophes just to name a few.

It is important to remember that none of this is inevitable. We can ramp up our science education so that we train the best scientists in the world and maybe even create a scientifically informed and savvy public in the process.

In fact, Massachusetts has done just that in the last 15 or 20 years. If it were a country, Massachusetts would now be in the upper ranks of countries. We need to look to Massachusetts for how to improve other states' failing education systems.

Massachusetts shows that with the will and money to do it, we can turn our educational system around. Sadly, though, I am not sure most of the country will. Sputnik came with the fear of nuclear holocaust. Our current crisis comes with the fear of future irrelevance and a decreased standard of living.

The current risks are not life and death and so it will be much harder to mobilize the government, the public, and the unions to transform our education system. I guess our dominance economically and scientifically was good while it lasted.

A fun interactive that lets you compare math, science and reading scores between states and different countries.

State by state math scores compared to other countries.

Why this crisis will be harder to overcome than the Sputnik crisis.

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Finally a reliable scientific resource on the web.

A really interesting project called Scitable recently came to my attention. This site is sponsored by the same folks who publish Scientific American, Nature, and many other scientific journals and magazines. It is intended to provide students, teachers, professors and the public with easy to read, understandable materials about science.

From a quick look, it looks like a great website for advanced high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, scientists, and the well educated. If this is you, take a look here and let me know what you think.

Below is an email interview I did with the guy who runs the site, Vikram Savkar. It focuses on what Scitable offers and some ways to heal our ailing science education system.

Many of our readers will not have heard of Scitable before. Can you please give a brief history of the group and what you hope to accomplish.

Scitable is an open, high quality science teaching and learning site from Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature, Scientific American, and a number of other science journals and magazines. We launched Scitable because we feel strongly that inspiring and enabling today’s students to immerse themselves in science is crucial for the future of the planet. Without dedicated scientific researchers, or at least a science-literate population, we won’t be able to make the progress we need as a global community on sustainability, food security, diseases, and so on. Our goal is to make access to very high quality science education information and compelling scientific experiences a common denominator for students regardless of their socioeconomic or geographic background.

Can you please tell our readers who the sources are for the information on your site and how often information is updated? Do you see it as a more reliable source for people compared to what else is out there on the web (e.g. Wikipedia)?

We actively commission the pieces you see on the site from leading scientists, faculty, or science journalists, depending on the subject matter, and every piece is put through a formal review by other experts in the field. The result is that the information is high quality: current, carefully thought through, scientifically accurate, and designed explicitly for use by teachers and students. We update our pieces on average once a month . . . often when a member of the community points out a topic they think we should have covered but didn’t; we’ll route the opinion to our reviewers and if everyone agrees, we will update the article. Yes, our intention is very much for Scitable to be a marriage of the reliability and quality of information that we’re all familiar with from journals and formal publications with the ease of discovery of use that’s characteristic of sites like Wikipedia.

What is your favorite feature of Scitable? Why?

I sometimes use the search box in the People area of Scitable to figure out whether we have any student or faculty users from far-flung parts of the world . . . and usually find that we do. (Mauritius: yes. Swaziland: no. We’ll have to work on that.) We’re really trying to create a kind of global classroom – a place where students from any part of the world can collaborate with researchers, teachers, and fellow students who are interested in the same subject but potentially thousands of miles away.

Can you tell us a little bit about the resources that are available for the public, students, and/or teachers at your site? How easy is it for these people to access and use these resources?

The heart of Scitable is the extensive (and growing) content library. We have more than 600 readings in genetics, cell biology, and ecology right now, and we’re adding more across the life and physical sciences this year. We have mini-textbooks in the life sciences as well as on special topics like scientific communication and career planning. And our learning paths allow students to progress through “hot” issues like biotechnology at their own pace. We also have a strong set of classroom tools, which teachers can use to run private online research spaces for their students. In just five or ten minutes, a teacher can create a customized reading list (using content from Scitable or from anywhere on the web) and enroll students in discussions, news feeds, and so on. All of this is free. The bulk of the content doesn’t require registration; people do have to register to build or join a classroom or take a learning path. Overall, it’s really easy for people to learn through the site . . . our users are growing rapidly every month, and they come from all walks of life: students, teachers, researchers, parents, veterinarians (yes, I’ve noticed a lot of these!), genetic counselors, and more.

What do you see as the primary problem with science education today? If you had a magic wand and could fix science education, what would you do? Would it differ between K-12 and undergraduate education?

I don’t think there is a primary problem, I think that the overall quality of science education is driven by the convergence of a lot of factors: Do parents encourage kids to tinker with nature and science? Are there enough well trained science teachers, and are they incentivized to stay at tough schools? How widely available are good lab equipment and other learning materials? How successful are college instructors at reminding students of the “magic” behind the memorization? If I had a magic wand, I would wave it at all of these. If I had to pick one . . . that’s tough . . . I would probably work on ensuring that there are highly qualified teachers (which means not only understanding science but having a solid background in teaching methods) in all schools, including and particularly under resourced ones. But, really, the key point for me is that there isn’t just one thing to focus on, we must take a holistic approach.

Who is the primary audience for Scitable? K-12 students, K-12 educators, undergraduates, the general public, graduate students, etc.?

The audience in formal education ranges from advanced high school classes to junior/senior level undergraduate classes . . . we have a broad set of content in the site, so there is much there for everyone within that range. The audience among the general public seems to be encouragingly varied, there are so many different kinds of people whom I have seen find their way to the site. People really do instinctively get excited by science; when we provide a way for them to easily find good answers to their questions, they will take advantage of it.

Do you see Scitable as a resource for that day in the not too distant future when everyone knows their own DNA sequence? Are there any resources available and accessible for the average person at your site? Or is it mostly focused right now on aspiring or actual scientists?

There are many resources for the average person, and we plan to publish more. A good example is our growing collection of Spotlights, which are essentially “home pages” for topics like Alternative Energy and Acoustic Pollution, intended specifically to help general learners go beyond the newspaper headlines and learn the actual science behind hot-button issues. I don’t see us ever helping people to make medical judgments of any kind, but I do see us helping a broad set of citizens to understand something substantial about the fields of research that can lead to a vastly improved quality of life for all of us. And to vote in ways that help make this future a reality.

A previous blog on the difficulties of finding good scientific information on the web.

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Our newest relatives hailed from around this cave in Siberia.

In 2008, scientists found a fossil of a humanoid finger in the Denisova Cave in Siberia. The finger was probably from someone (or something) that had been running around Siberia forty thousand years ago.

Until recently, the scientists would have been stuck until they found additional fossils to build up a more complete skeleton. Once they had the skeleton, they could then compare it to other fossils and figure out how it related to modern humans. Of course this might never happen—it would be totally dependent on finding more fossils.

Rather than waiting around, these scientists decided to bring in a geneticist. Nowadays geneticists can sometimes read every base of a fossilized beast’s DNA. In other words, they can read its whole genome.

When geneticists did this, they found that the finger did not come from a modern human or a Neanderthal. This Denisovan (as scientists named it) probably came from a previously unknown relative that was more closely related to Neanderthals than humans. And surprisingly, their legacy lives on in some modern humans.

By comparing the DNA of the Denisovan and various modern ethnic groups, scientists could see Denisovan DNA in modern Melanesians. Apparently the ancestors of Melanesians and Denisovans had babies before the Denisovans went extinct.

The data suggest that Denisovans might have contributed up to 4-5% of their DNA to modern Melanesians. Add the 1-2% Neanderthal DNA found in non-Africans and you get up to 7% of Melanesian DNA coming from nonhuman sources. And that is just based on the two extinct species whose DNA we’ve been able to read so far.

Who knows how much DNA of other ethnic groups comes from relatives whose DNA we haven’t looked at yet. I bet someone is taking a good hard look at various groups’ DNA to see if they can answer this question without having to figure out more fossil DNA.

This all points to an exciting new twist to paleontology…the ability to look at DNA from fossils and to compare that DNA to modern humans and any other close relatives whose DNA has been sequenced. This new avenue of research should provide extra information that scientists didn’t have before and allow them to figure some things out with just a single finger bone.

BBC story on the find.

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