Daily Data Dump - Thursday

Genetic signatures for extreme old age accurately predict odds of living past 100. I wonder how much we'll find out looking at samples at extreme values of a particular distribution of a phenotype. Right now we're focusing on lots of SNPs in a more generic sample, such as the HGDP or HapMap. Or, we're looking for associations in samples which have particular illnesses. In the near future whole genome sequencing will be applied to the very tall, very smart, and very athletic. China Is Getting Its Google Eviction Notice Ready. Google changed things in 1998 in a qualitative sense. Search pre-Google was not really search as we understand it today. But even conceding that Google is better than Bing and Baidu, it's not nearly as much better in 2010 as it was in 1998 in relation to the older generation of search engines such as Excite. That's a long way to say that I suspect that China will get away with pushing Google out of its position of dominance within the People's Republic, and I don't think that Google is that much better than Baidu that most people will notice. Differential changes in steroid hormones before competition in bonobos and chimpanzees. There's a lot of argument about whether we should use bonobos or chimpanzees as an animal model for human behavioral ecology, or more specifically the human evolutionary models of past behavior. It's pretty politically fraught. But this study seems to be suggesting that some people are more like bonobos and some more like chimpanzees. Equal Rights for Women? Survey Says: Yes, But ... Lots of variation in attitudes toward women's rights. No big surprises. Jersey Shore Season 2 trailer. Yeah, I linked to it.