23andMe: Pimp their service to adoptees
Sequencing technology: The $100 Genome
The technology necessary to achieve a $100 genome is still at least five years away, says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, and a member of Complete Genomics' scientific advisory board. "But [it's] coming from a company that has an almost-as-good technology coming out this year."
Both Drmanac and Boyce-Jacino say that one of the biggest advantages of their technology will be the ability to sequence very long strands of DNA. The newest sequencing technologies in use today read DNA in fairly short spurts, from about 30 to 200 letters, which are then stitched together by a computer. This approach works well for some applications, such as resequencing a known genome. But a growing number of studies suggest that the small structural changes in DNA, such as deletions or inversions of short sequences, play a significant role in human variability, says Jeff Schloss, program director for technology development at the National Human Genome Research Center, in Bethesda, MD. "Those are much harder to pick up with short reads."
Neanderthals: Poor speakers. So says computer simulation.
That conclusion doesn't fit in with Neanderthals' large brains, which may have been an adaptation to language, says Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St Louis. "Ultimately what is important is not the anatomy of the mouth but the neuronal control of it."
Denmark: "World's happiest country" (chart); douchebag Tim Ferris comments
Testosterone: Salivary T correlated with trading success (via NYT)
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