Notes & links - December 9th, 2010

Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said. Carl Zimmer's correspondence dump is gold. Linear Population Model: Explores a linear model to examine genetic population admixture results and human prehistory. I read every post on this weblog after I stumbled upon it yesterday. The major focus seems to be to use ADMIXTURE results along with formal diffusion models to construct a plausible scenario of the spread of Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia to Europe. I think the author probably needs to be a bit careful about the noise in the data, but still very interesting. Anticipated some of my own thoughts which I was too cowardly to post online! You may not know it from the links on the front page, but Wired does have some awesome science blogs. I often mention the enfant terrible of the cognitive neuroscience blogosphere, Jonah R. Lehrer, but be sure to check out Laelaps ...