links for 2009-02-08

Very good story re: simplification of disease genetics.

"The reason for this disappointing outcome, in his view, is that natural selection has been far more efficient than many researchers expected at screening out disease-causing variants. The common disease/common variant idea is largely wrong. What has happened is that a multitude of rare variants lie at the root of most common diseases, being rigorously pruned away as soon as any starts to become widespread. "

"I told a friend who lives in St. Petersburg that I was going to Helsinki. He wrote, “Enjoy your herring … and your reindeer.” Even through the e-mail message, I could hear his sneer. Finland’s cuisine has been historically maligned. In 2001, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy argued that Finland did not deserve to house the European Union’s food-safety agency because “Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is.”"

Nice article on fusing urban and agricultural.

As part of a wee counter-Industrial Age brainwave I've been surfing lately, one theme is what "old" technology we had, say, agriculture, that was more widespread and that might have to come back for us to move forward.

I think as (I hope) biology becomes more important as an advanced technology, old biological tech, like farming, will become important again (just think of the affect on farming due to biofuels, mentioned at the start of the article). Likewise, we're swinging back to previous times of more diverse (and seasonal and local) food crops. Might nature be staging a comeback?

"Creating open space where others wouldn’t think to look for it is a trademark of architect David Baker, who, for Curran House, an affordable housing project in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, designed roof gardens with small individual container garden plots allowing residents to cultivate their own crops."

"But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect."

All the more reason to get my butt out the door.

"Delivr, currently in private beta (we’ve got invites – see below), literally mobilizes your web content. Whether it’s a web address, Flickr photo, YouTube video, or street address, Delivr will enhance the content for mobile viewing and generate a unique URL that you can then send to friends via social sites or SMS message."

"The Navy offloaded fuel, water and personnel from a grounded, $1 billion guided missile cruiser so tugboats and a salvage ship can try again early Sunday morning to free it from a rock and sand shoal."

I wonder how much trust in GPS has to do with this.

"In what has now become a harbinger of spring, the Red Sox equipment truck arrived on Yawkey Way at 7:35 a.m. on a Saturday morning in February 2008 in preparation for departure to Fort Myers later in the morning."