Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 5, 2012, 9:43 am
I've updated my collection of online resources for genomics, sequence analysis and phylogeny - click here or on the "BioInfo" tab above. These are all the tools that I use regularly in my work, so they're geared towards comparative genomics (mostly vertebrates), gene and protein predictions, ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 3, 2011, 2:28 am
In a few hours the Nobel committee at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm will announce this year's Nobel prize winner in Physiology or Medicine. I'm going to be watching it all go down in this here handy live-feed video widget. The chemistry prize, which is often awarded to advancements in basic ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Sep 29, 2011, 8:21 am
This video and story have been making the rounds on the Internet in the last few days. I just saw it yesterday and it's fascinating! For the first time (allegedly), "tool-use" in a fish has been filmed and the behavior is available for all of us to see. The fish in question is a species of wrasse ob...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Sep 8, 2011, 11:32 am
Teleost fish genome sequences have been absolutely essential to our understanding of vertebrate genome evolution, and to vertebrate evolution in general. Last month I welcomed the addition of the Atlantic cod genome to the sequenced fish genomes, and highlighted some of the main findings of the firs...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Aug 17, 2011, 3:49 pm
I don't like the term "living fossil". Sure, when used well it can be eye-catching in a pedagogical way, but it's still sort of vague and problematic, and used badly it's outright confusing and may reinforce misconceptions about evolution. That's why when you see it used, you often see it between qu...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Aug 12, 2011, 2:07 pm
Great news for those of us who are interested in comparative genomics, and fish genomes in particular - yesterday the Atlantic cod genome was made public at the cod genome project website to coincide with the description of the genome, published online in advance by Nature (reference below). ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jul 28, 2011, 12:18 pm
The subject of feathered dinosaurs and the evolution of birds is something that fascinates me and captures my imagination, as I'm sure it does a lot of people. Not only because it changes the way we look at the world around us, specifically birds, but also because there's a lot of cool evolutionary ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jul 22, 2011, 5:32 am
As a footnote to my previous post about Gregor Mendel, I offer these interesting Google NGrams. To start off, we plot the terms "Gregor Mendel", just "Mendel", "Mendelian" as well as the genus of the garden pea Mendel worked with, "Pisum". Not surprisingly, the years 1866 and 1900 (or ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jul 20, 2011, 2:35 pm
Today is the 189th anniversary of the birth of scientist Gregor Mendel, as commemorated by today's doodle on google.com. It's one of their better ones, I think. The picture shows the plant that Mendel has become famous for, the common pea Pisum sativum, but it also cleverly shows an illustra...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jun 30, 2011, 11:43 am
I've added the above illustration of a Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) to my collection of illustrations together with one I had already made of a lungfish (open image). If you like you can download both high-res TIF-files here. The same Creative Common license applies as described under the ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jun 27, 2011, 6:29 pm
Nicotine is not only very, very addictive, as a central nervous system stimulant it can also affect our motivations and behaviors in a wider sense. One of the behaviors it can modify is appetitive behavior. It's a well-funded fact that smokers tend to have a lower body-mass than non-smokers, and tha...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jun 27, 2011, 7:34 am
At 80beats (@Discover blogs) there is a post about a method of inferring the body temperature of large dinosaurs by looking at the temperature that would be needed for the enamel of Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus teeth to form. The post references a recent study published in Science. The conclusion ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jun 7, 2011, 10:05 am
Or: How I really should have come up with a better title. A small announcement: I have an article out as a first author in this month's issue of the journal Endocrinology. It's a nice journal and we spent a long time working on the manuscript so I'm very pleased that it's out. Here's a Worlde ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - May 31, 2011, 12:08 pm
>> I started the following post about melatonin sometime in March to coincide with my lecture on biological rhythms on our undergrad neurobiology course. But I got really busy and then really sick so I never actually finished it. Here it is then at last. An all too common sight, at least at my place...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - May 7, 2011, 8:32 am
March and April disappeared in a daze and didn't lend me much time to spend on blogging. Finishing my teaching and course assistant duties for our undergraduate neurobiology course while re-working and re-submitting a research paper (now accepted in Endocrinology) took up most of March. Then to top ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 20, 2011, 12:46 pm
I'm catching up on my reading this weekend. Right now I'm getting through Misha Angrist's "Here Is A Human Being" and getting increasingly jealous for every page. Angrist had his genome sequenced as a part of the Personal Genome Project, something I wouldn't mind having done myself. I found t...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 12, 2011, 5:35 am
It's Darwin day! The anniversary of the old man's birthday (202nd this year) and a great opportunity to dig up some piece of Darwiniana and celebrate evolution! Hood mockingbird, endemic to Española island, Galapagos. Ref: Wikimedia Commons. Darwin's Galapagos finches and their differing beak...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 11, 2011, 12:46 pm
Since I posted my two entries on the oxytocin/ethnocentrism link last week - part 1, part 2 - they have really taken off and gotten more attention than my very modest blog is used to. The first one has been linked on economist Tyler Cowen's blog Marginal Revolution, which generated a surge of over 3...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 11, 2011, 5:13 am
This is the second post where I take a look at Google NGram visualizations of the history of neuroscience. If you haven't seen the first one, you probably should before continuing to read this one. In my previous post I completely ignored a large number of the cells in the brain: glial cells!...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 10, 2011, 3:54 pm
Having written recently about falsehoods associated with the hormone oxytocin, and having taught about neuroimaging today, I find myself inspired by a couple of recent posts from the scientific blogosphere that expose falsehoods about the brain's activity and functional magnetic resonance imaging (f...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 6, 2011, 2:30 am
In the days and weeks following the release of Google's NGram Viewer I got completely addicted and started plotting everything between heaven and earth, just like everyone else. The scientific merits of Google's NGram Viewer have been discussed over and again, especially the term "culturomics", and ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Feb 2, 2011, 9:18 am
>> Go here for part 1. I didn't want to risk making my previous post too long, and I wanted to keep it focused on "hormonal determinism", so I set aside a whole branch of my commentary on the link between the hormone oxytocin and ethnocentrism for another post. The findings I comment on were presen...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jan 24, 2011, 12:29 pm
>> Go here for part 2. There is an inordinate readiness, both within scientific circles and in popular scientific understanding, to ascribe direct causation to the actions of hormones, especially when it comes to moods and behaviors. For example, consider how you’d usually interpret the common ex...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jan 11, 2011, 8:33 am
To consider the possibility that you are wrong is the hallmark of any good researcher and scientist. Darwin made the following observation in his autobiography, in a passage discussing why "On the Origin of Species" was so successful: I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, th...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jan 6, 2011, 12:58 pm
A report published yesterday in the medical journal BMJ finally reveals exactly how the supposed link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was fabricated: "Secrets of the MMR Scare: How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed" by Brian Deer, accompanied by an editorial in the...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jan 5, 2011, 7:32 am
During these holidays I've tried to catch up with a lot of reading, and one book that I literally could not put down is Mike Brown's "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming". It's a very personal re-count of the discoveries by Brown's research team that lead to the "demotion" of Pluto from a pl...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Jan 4, 2011, 5:45 pm
Happy new year! In 2010 blogging had to take a back seat to many things. I spent a lot of time preparing for and defending my half-time thesis*, as well as preparing most of my research for publication or presentation. Especially the first half of the year seemed to disappear doing that. I also help...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 31, 2010, 6:45 am
Re: My previous post. I missed a few commentaries other than PZ Myers' summary from yesterday: Jerry Coyne wrote one a while ago called The "decline effect": can we demonstrate anything in science?, and ORAC has one called Is the "decline effect" really so mysterious? Both mention Jonah Lehrers clar...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 30, 2010, 9:45 pm
This holiday season I've been taking some extra days off and as a consequence of not having to get up early I've developed the habit of staying up very late catching up on some reading. So this post comes to you in the wee small hours of the night. One of the articles I've been postponing to r...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 20, 2010, 3:48 pm
I've been having fun with Google's new NGram viewer, which allows you to mine data from about 5 million books scanned by Google books and trace the use of different concepts in literature from the last 500 years. I've been plotting a few evolutionary concepts and comparing them with creationism to s...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 7, 2010, 1:46 pm
>> My previous post was more of a summary of what the reporting of the "NASA arsenic-thriving bacteria" story looked like from my perspective in the wake of the massive Internet onslaught of information. In this post I want to talk about how the style of communication that drove this story has lead ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 3, 2010, 1:49 pm
Almost instantly after coming home from work yesterday, I noticed a steady stream of mentions of a mysterious and hugely hyped NASA press conference scheduled for later in the day trickling in via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news sites. I got excited, but also a bit confused. NASA's announcement se...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Dec 1, 2010, 3:02 pm
I won the Science 3.0 evolution-themed blog contest! Naturally, I'm pretty chuffed. I blog mostly to practice my writing, because I like to write, and while it's nice when people read my entries, I don't expect any significant amount of traffic or attention, so this is very encouraging. I really enj...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 24, 2010, 3:49 pm
Looks like more people than me think mucus-feeding discus fish are interesting. My post "Is there anything fish don't do!? Mucus-feeding and prolactin" has been picked as an Editor's Selection at ResearchBlogging.org. Like I wrote yesterday, it's also competing for an evolution blogging award at Sci...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 24, 2010, 2:03 pm
The big celebration was last year, but there's no reason why we shouldn't remember that today it's been 151 years since the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The contribution to science presented in "Origin" is of course always recognized, and it's often...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 23, 2010, 2:43 pm
Pretty cool news... My last post was nominated in an evolution blogging contest at Science 3.0. The contest goes on until the end of November so please go visit my entry page at Science 3.0 and show your appreciation to help my chances with the editorial committee. The post is partly being judged on...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 18, 2010, 11:23 am
Much of my work involves studying fish genomes. Over time I've gotten to know them pretty well and I can only conclude that fish are incredible and inordinately interesting creatures. Unfortunately fish have an undeservedly low standing in the eyes of the general public, as well as many researchers ...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 16, 2010, 5:40 am
Over at his blog The Loom Carl Zimmer puts forward an open question about evolutionary biology and citizenship. My task is to discuss “how understanding evolution allows Americans citizens to formulate more informed decisions about societally important matters.” I like this assignment, because i...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Nov 9, 2010, 4:38 am
I chose to get vaccinated for the seasonal flu this year as well! This is my post from last year. In general it's a good idea to get vaccinated, even if you're young and healthy. If nothing else, make it a yearly statement in the face of the anti-vaccination loonies. Last year I got vaccinated...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 21, 2010, 2:17 pm
I think you should pop over to Epiphenom and read the discussion on Tom Rees' post about how young kids can't help believing what they're told. It seems that small children have a very strong bias to believe verbal testimony over anything else and can't tell from experience that they're being lied t...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 21, 2010, 12:38 pm
Einstein's brain was photographed only hours after his death. Ref: Falk (see reference below) Einstein's brain pops up quite often in popular science lore about the relation between brain size and intelligence. The most common myth (based solely on my own experience) is that Einstein's brain was sm...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 13, 2010, 2:40 pm
A recently published study in PNAS explores how small babies relate order and disorder, or entropy, to the different types of things that may cause them. Amazingly, babies as small as 12 months old show some understanding of the difference between the deliberate and goal-directed "agents" that can c...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 10, 2010, 2:19 pm
This past September 27th I attended a lecture given by Steve Fuller here at Uppsala University entitled "The Problems Posed by Intelligent Design Theory? Philosophy, Politics, Science, and Theology". Steve Fuller is a sociologist, quite prominent in his field, known to scientists and skeptics for hi...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 7, 2010, 10:01 am
For a couple of years now I've been making these animal illustrations whenever I've needed a picture for a publication, a poster or a presentation. Pretty soon people in my lab wanted to use them in their presentations as well, so I thought I'd let everyone use them freely and not just my coll...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 6, 2010, 3:00 am
In a few hours the permanent secretary general of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce this year's winner(s) of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This prize is often directly connected to the most exciting basic research in molecular and cellular biology so of course I always pay extra at...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 4, 2010, 7:45 am
The Nobel committe at the Karolinska Institute has awarded Robert G. Edwards this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology "for the development of in vitro fertilization". You can't argue against the 4 million people that have been born thanks to in vitro fertilization. That if anything is...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 4, 2010, 1:30 am
Later today the Nobel committee at the Karolinska Institute will announce the winners of this year's Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Last year I tipped my favourites to win and I was right. This year I've been a bit too busy to read up on the latest Nobel buzz so I don't want to offer a predi...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Oct 3, 2010, 2:24 pm
This is pretty interesting stuff. According to a survey published this week by something called The Pew Forum, atheists seem to know religion better than religious people do... among other findings. What can I say? It's sort of unsurprising. It certainly confirms my experience as an atheist in discu...
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Sep 13, 2010, 5:13 pm
At least according to the word analysis at http://urlai.com/url/egosumdaniel.blogspot.com. egosumdaniel.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time. Yeah, so, what else is new?
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Daniel O. posted an article on Ego sum Daniel - Aug 20, 2010, 6:46 am
>>I'm at a conference in Hungary, so this post is a little bit delayed from the original date I started to write it If you've followed the debate that's been going on in the blogosphere, you know that Ray Kurtzweil, computer scientist, inventor,"futurist" and self-proclaimed prophet of "the si...
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