I decided to create “science only” feed. Specifically, a feed which has only the posts which directly and primarily address natural science topics (obviously mostly genetics). I just added the category “Science” to all the posts which I thought were appropriate. Note that I exclude topics such as Creationism, or surveys of scientists, from this category, as well as my link roundups which mix science and non-science. It’s more like stuff I’d put into Research Blogging, though not always. Anyway, here’s the address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionScience

Also, if you don’t like RSS, this is the category address:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/category/science/

If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by and for histories of how Jews & Catholics entered the American religious mainstream in the middle of the 20th century after a century of rejection by the Protestant establishment).* This is clear when you read about attempts to “Christianize” Roman Catholic Filipinos after the conquest of that nation from Spain in the early 20th century, or the reality that both American Catholicism and Judaism were often torn by conflicts between explicit assimilationists who wished to emulate the Protestant congregational model dominant in the United States, and those which argued for the perpetuation of a separate distinctive religious culture outside of the mainstream. And yet today this doesn’t matter much because the assimilationists won. Consider the fact that Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, has a daughter who is an Episcopal priest (her mother is an English Anglican). Sonia Sotomayor is likely to be indistinguishable from the other Left-leaning justices, though she shares a Roman Catholic confession with the conservatives on the court. Religion in the United States by and large has become a personal label which serves as a marker toward one’s origins and one’s current loyalties, rather than a confession which indicates identity with a “thick” and exclusive subculture (the Amish, Hasidic Jews and Fundamentalist Mormons being exceptions). In this way the United States is like South Korea or many African nations, where religious pluralism and individual fluidity in choice and identity are the rule and not the exception.

The contrast with race and sex is notable. The predominance of males and whites on the bench is often commented on, but less so the fact that Roman Catholics are overrepresented by a factor of three, and Jews by nearly an order of magnitude. In fact, there seem to be a dearth of white Protestants at the pinnacles of American politics today. In the Congressional leadership Harry Reid is a Mormon, Nancy Pelosi & John Boehner are Roman Catholic. Steny Hoyer and Mitch McConnell “represent” for white Protestants, but the Vice President is a Roman Catholic.

* It is correct that many of the Founding Fathers, most famously Thomas Jefferson, were not orthodox Christians. But they were cultural Christians, more specifically cultural Protestants, and particularly of the denominations of their ancestors. Jefferson and George Washington were affiliated in some way throughout their life with the Episcopal Church of the Virginia gentry. John Adams was a Unitarian Christian whose outlook was shaped by the origins of Unitarianism in New England as a liberal reform movement within Congregational Calvinist Christianity. As such, the Founders shared Protestant suspicions of the Roman Catholic Church, whether it be due to Reform Christian antagonism of old or a newer Enlightenment anti-clericalism. Recall that one of the causa belli for colonial rebellion against the British crown was the toleration given to French Roman Catholics in Canada (this was later discretely removed from enumerations of causes because of the possibility that Quebec would join the rebellion, as well as the need for alliance with Roman Catholic France).

In this diavlog with Glenn Loury the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan recounts the results of an experiment.

- If given the option of paying $100 for an item vs. $80 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $80 and going across town

- If given the option of paying $1000 for an item vs. $980 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $1000 and not going across town

I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, in a few months.

How Privacy Vanishes Online. Pretty banal actually. Social networking has really changed things. As I've said before I'm fascinated by the large number of people who, even those who want to be anonymous, enter in their real email addresses when leaving a comment. There seems a default "trust unless you shouldn't trust" setting, so we naively input our information assuming it isn't being mined by someone. In any case, a bigger issue in the future I think will be stupid government officials who scan up documents which they shouldn't scan up. It's happened a few times so far, but I think it'll get worse in this decade.

I have mentioned before the current fad in vitamin D related papers in the medical literature. It's also broken into the pop culture Zeitgeist as well, I regularly get forwards on the topic. Here is a Google Trends chart for the United States:

The history of medicine is, unfortunately, rather similar to the history of astrology. In fact for much of history doctors are likely to have increased, rather than decreased, mortality, thanks to an ignorance of germ theory and false paradigms such as Humorism. The demand-side pressures for cures & prevention seems to still exert a powerful push toward the rise & fall of fads (see google trends for "low carb" for example). A difference between pre-modern and contemporary fads though is that they're not all capricious today. Unfortunately though medicine is still complex, and the demand-side pressures often require an Answer. You have rafts of correlational studies, with each correlation adding to a positive feedback loop until the fad crests, and a new "it-cure" emerges on the scene (and no surprise that the beer industry is supposedly behind some of the studies which show that drinking in moderation is correlated with greater life expectancy).

All this is why papers like this are important, Vitamin D controls T cell antigen receptor signaling and activation of human T cells:

Phospholipase C (PLC) isozymes are key signaling proteins downstream of many extracellular stimuli. Here we show that naive human T cells had very low expression of PLC-?1 and that this correlated with low T cell antigen receptor (TCR) responsiveness in naive T cells. However, TCR triggering led to an upregulation of ~75-fold in PLC-?1 expression, which correlated with greater TCR responsiveness. Induction of PLC-?1 was dependent on vitamin D and expression of the vitamin D receptor (VDR).Naive T cells did not express VDR, but VDR expression was induced by TCR signaling via the alternative mitogen-activated protein kinase p38 pathway. Thus, initial TCR signaling via p38 leads to successive induction of VDR and PLC-?1, which are required for subsequent classical TCR signaling and T cell activation.

ScienceDaily has a good summary. This schematic represents the biochemical steps: