Genetics

Can’t believe in a TCRA association (at the moment)

Nature genetics published recently an association paper of an of an autism researcher researcher writing here on narcolepsy

Using genome-wide association (GWA) in Caucasians with replication in three ethnic groups, we found association between narcolepsy and polymorphisms in the TRA@ (T-cell receptor alpha) locus, with highest significance at rs1154155 (average allelic odds ratio 1.69, genotypic odds ratios 1.94 and 2.55, P < 10-21, 1,830 cases, 2,164 controls). This is the first documented genetic involvement of the TRA@ locus, encoding the major receptor for HLA-peptide presentation, in any disease.

I am always cautious of these “first ever” claims Continue reading Can’t believe in a TCRA association (at the moment) →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Philosophy

How to increase blogging?

Nature has a headline about “how to stop blogging”

Is the scientific conference in its death throes? Researchers have long anguished about the hyper-competitive culture that leads attendees to suppress their most interesting unpublished results. Such protectiveness can only be worsened by the increasing dissemination of results beyond the conference hall by bloggers.

Oh, do they really ask if scientific conferences are in its death throes? Big scientific conferences that have deadlines 1 year in advance? Big scientific conferences where I take notes for 6 or 8 hours and discover in the evening that there is nothing, definitely nothing new?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

P≤0.0069 in election results

Too many “7” digits were found for candidate A in a study of the presidential election results.

This method is closely related to Benford’s Law. A highly significant (p ~ 0.0007) excess of vote counts for candidate K that start with the digit 7 is found (41 observed, 21.2–22 expected).

I have to admit that I heard for the first time of the Newcomb-Benford’s Law (NBL)…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Philosophy, Theology

What discriminates science journalists and science bloggers?

A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble

more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.

Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Philosophy

My 5th sense

We are equipped with senses to react to sudden environmental changes but we do not even have any reflex to react to slow and gradual environmental changes. Wikibooks has a nice entry about Peter Senge that covers in more detail his “5th sense”. I found this entry by the beer game(while reasoning about logistics of science factories).

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

Please, send always an ics file in the attachment

as it is rather time consuming to type in all appointments.
screenshot1
Appointments can be exported from outlook (win XP) abd ical (Mac OS X) just by drag and drop to your favorite mail program. It is just one click here on the attachment to import the date here (Lufthansa already knows that but you may use this hint in your company to get the inventor award). BTW The screenshot shows another neat idea of integrating dynamic Doodle feeds.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Joke

Funny? Laughable? Ridiculous?

www.cell.com/current-biology shows humour

Human emotional expressions, such as laughter, are argued to have their origins in ancestral nonhuman primate displays. To test this hypothesis, the current work examined the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Allergy, Genetics

Ghost in your genes

was an earlier title of a BBC documentation about gene methylation. While running today an analysis of segregating methylation marks, I have major difficulties to find out the status of the human epigenome map. The Sanger site seems to be down for a long time, there aren’t any updates of the AHEAD consortium, the site of the Epigenetics Society is largely uniformative, methDB gives me “information about the research situation in France and why French scientists are in conflict with the current government”, an EU network excellence has only a fashionable website while another EU project is even not fashionable. Or do I miss something??

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026