Daily Data Dump - Wednesday

Freshman Weight Gain: Women With Heavy Roommates Gain Less, Study Finds. I guess the model makes sense, but it really makes one wonder about the power of prior expectations about these sorts of things. There just so many plausible stories for any given set of data. Why Does Spicy Food Taste Hot? The feeling of "heat" from the active ingredient in spicy food is an illusion due an accident of physiology. I obviously really love spicy food, even though the heat isn't "real." It makes me wonder about the idea that we shouldn't just plug ourselves into sensation generation machines if we ever had the technology. Ninety Years of Drosophila melanogaster Hybrids. I assume there'll be a bit celebration in 10 years? Natural Selection and the Distribution of Identity-by-Descent in the Human Genome. Shows how the haplotype based tests to detect natural selection can be thought of as simply detecting patterns of identity-by-descent within the genome. They whip out the HapMap3 data set. Misconduct case taints research. Depressing. The Hauser affair is going to have a "long tail" after the media's forgotten all about it.