Cartoon Time.

DNA project aims to count Scots red heads

From the BBC

7 November 2012

A project is being launched which aims to find out how many people in Scotland carry the red hair gene. Researchers from the ScotlandsDNA project also hope to discover why Scotland appears to have the most red-headed people in the world. Only about 1-2% of the world's population has red hair, but in Scotland the figure is much higher at around 13% or about 650,000 people. The information will be used to make a "ginger" map of the British Isles. Researchers at the ScotlandsDNA project believe the figure for Scottish red hair gene carriers may be much higher, and could be as many as 1.6m. A person who doesn't have red hair can still produce red haired children if their partner is a carrier of a gene. Red hair appears in people with two copies of a recessive gene on chromosome 16 which causes a mutation in the MC1R protein and can often skip generations. Contrary to popular belief, the gene is not dying out and will most likely continue for many generations to come. The ScotlandsDNA project is launching a new test which costs £25 and will tell participants whether or not they're a carrier of a red haired gene. It will also inform them of which of three types of the gene they have, and possibly provide some insight into why Scotland is the most red-headed nation on earth.

Managing director of ScotlandsDNA, Alastair Moffat is keen to map the number of possible carriers of the gene in Scotland and attempt to explain why we have so many Scots red-heads. "It's not necessarily the people who have red hair that interest us at ScotlandsDNA, what we want to do is discover who carries the red hair gene variant," Mr Moffat told BBC Scotland. "I think that's a much larger number. For example, in my own family, I have three kids and two of them have red hair - and while I haven't got much hair, it's certainly not red, and neither has my wife. "In either side of our families, there was no red hair - and I thought, where has this come from? That was what got me interested. We're looking at people who have already had their DNA tested by Scotland's DNA, which is simple for us to do. But they have to be tested first, and then we can tell them if they're carriers of the red-head variant."

All physical colouring is a mixture of two pigments; black melanin and red/yellow melanin, but in red-heads a particular receptor in the pathway for pigmentation, MC1R, is disrupted and black melanin is suppressed while red/yellow melanin is allowed to be made. The result is red hair, light skin colour, often freckles and a greater sensitivity to sunlight.

The three types of red-head gene are:

  Cysteine-red (or R151C) is carried by 10% of British people

  Tryptophan-red (or R160W) is carried by 9% of British people

  Histidine-red (or D294H) is carried by 2.5% of British people

There are other, much rarer variants, but for a child to have red hair, both parents must be carriers and there is a 25% chance that their offspring will have it, which is known as "recessive inheritance". Everyone who carries one of the variants is a direct descendant of the first person ever to have it, but Mr Moffat believes the origins of the gene are more an adaptation to Scotland's poor weather. Mr Moffat added: "I think it's to do with sunshine - we all need vitamin D from sunshine, but Scotland is cloudy, we have an Atlantic climate and we need light skin to get as much vitamin D from the Sun as possible.

[Well, I certainly hope that red heads aren’t in decline as they’re probably my favourite type – even more than brunettes! I’m blaming my Irish ancestry here rather than any Scottish DNA – though it would be interesting to discover if anything from north of the border is lurking around in my genome. Oh, and if you can’t place the girl from the top of the story it’s Scottish Dr Who ex-companion Karen Gillan.] 

Getting chilly - Gotta keep warm......

Just Finished Reading: The Sea King – The Life of James Iredell Waddell by Gary McKay

Those of you who read here regularly will know, or have seen me say, that I don’t really ‘do’ biographies. I’m honestly not really interested in the minutiae of people’s lives and have no real desire to know the intricate and intimate details or who did what to who when. If a particular person did, said, or thought a particular thing that I’m interested in then I’m interested in that thing rather than understanding why that person’s first marriage failed.

Anyway, I digress.

One of the reasons I ended up reading this particular biography was that I wasn’t aware of its genre before I bought it [grin]. Not exactly observant of me – since it alluded to it on the front cover – but such things happen from time to time. But a biography it turned out to be – of probably the most successful navy captain in the American Civil War and quite possibly one of the most successful in American naval history. Waddell was, I discovered, a fascinating character. He was a dyed in the wool (or would that be cotton) Southern Gentleman in the classic style who fought a duel with a fellow office – then in the United States navy over an argument regarding regulations. He also taught for many years at the US Navy premier training schools passing on his legendary skill in both navigation and gunnery. He was according to those who knew him an officer admired by many and one likely to go far indeed – until the outbreak of Civil War whilst at sea. On his return to New York he found that he could not take up arms against the break-away Confederacy he so identified with and so, as a man of honour resigned his commission and gave his word, as a gentleman, that he would not take up arms against the Union. This was apparently not enough and he, reluctantly, signed a document to say just that. Retiring to his family home he applied to be paid the back-pay he was entitled to. After much argument it was agreed that he would get his money – only on condition that he, yet again, affirm that he would not take up arms for the Confederacy. His honour, now well and truly called into question, forced him to do just that and he quickly made his way South to enlist in any capacity he could fill.

After many weeks where he was either under or unemployed he was finally sent to Europe and there, again after several adventures and misadventures eventually took his post of Captain of the soon to be infamous Confederate commerce raider the CSS Shenandoah. In the brilliant campaign waged against Union merchant shipping he practically singlehandedly destroyed the American whaling fleet, almost brought the United States and Britain into a state of war and was a hairs breadth from bombarding San Francisco where he would have captured a fair proportion of the American gold reserves. Still fighting weeks after the Confederacy was defeated Waddell and his crew where labelled pirates and hunted by every navy on Earth until they finally surrendered in Liverpool harbour from which they had begun their campaign many months before.

If I hadn’t already read about the Shenandoah and the Alabama in previous books the story portrayed here would have certainly blown me away – it still did a pretty good job! It is definitely the stuff of legend that can inspire young boys (and much older young boys) to read the exploits of heroes with open mouths and eyes wide in astonishment. Why the adventures of the Confederate commerce raiders haven’t been made into a Hollywood blockbuster is beyond me. It has just about everything going for it – in bucket loads! Honour, adventure, danger, ships chasing each other at full steam, dodging icebergs and much else besides, political intrigue and double-dealing….. I’d certainly pay to see that on the silver screen and I doubt if I’d be the only one there.

As you can tell my interest in this period of maritime naval history has yet to diminish. Indeed it has expanded to cover the 40 or so years between the first ironclads and the early 20th Century when recognisable warships came online with the Dreadnought class of ships. Expect a number of books on this subject in the coming year as well as novels both of this period and other great ages of naval conflict. Oh, and as you might have guessed, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Civil War and Military/Navy History.

Cartoon Time.

Just Finished Reading: Engineering Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan

I love Hard SF – SF with a hard scientific or engineering edge. It can still have spaceships and aliens and even time-machines but everything must have a firm foundation in science. I’ve even read Hard SF with equations and detailed diagrams to add to the over all realism of the story.

But not to put off the more casual reader I can tell you that none of the 14 short stories in this particular volume have either equations or diagrams of any sort. What it does have are a wide variety of SF from the skies over a future battlefield where semi-intelligent craft battle it out against human ground targets and its ‘malfunctioning’ sister craft who have yet to attain full sentience (Malak by Peter Watts), an ‘upgraded’ child who cannot function in the world without her music (Watching the Music Dance by Kristine Kathryn Rusch), a group of dissident Soviet Communists using outdated atomic propulsion to launch themselves to a new life on Mars (Laika’s Ghost by Karl Schroeder), a ‘first contact’ situation that turns out to be something quite different a deeply disturbing (The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter), the crew of a deep space probe blasted by high energy radiation trying to survive the degrading of all of their IT including that housed in their own brains (Bit Rot by Charles Stross) and a very strange story indeed where a collector of old movies is sent a film depicting himself decades before his was born and starring grandchildren he has yet to have (Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar).

As usual with collections of short stories the quality (or maybe just the appeal) varies. On the whole though this was a pretty good selection of modern SF across a whole spectrum of sub-genres. Definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in the more scientific end of the SF continuum.

Cartoon Time.

SMALL PLANETS DON'T NEED STARS WITH HEAVY METAL CONTENT TO FORM

From NASA

June 13, 2012

WASHINGTON -- The formation of small worlds like Earth previously was thought to occur mostly around stars rich in heavy elements such as iron and silicon. However, new ground-based observations, combined with data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, shows small planets form around stars with a wide range of heavy element content and suggests they may be widespread in our galaxy.

A research team led by Lars A. Buchhave, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, studied the elemental composition of more than 150 stars harboring 226 planet candidates smaller than Neptune. "I wanted to investigate whether small planets needed a special environment in order to form, like the giant gas planets, which we know preferentially develop in environments with a high content of heavy elements," said Buchhave. "This study shows that small planets do not discriminate and form around stars with a wide range of heavy metal content, including stars with only 25 percent of the sun's metallicity." Astronomers refer to all chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals. They define metallicity is the metal content of heavier elements in a star. Stars with a higher fraction of heavy elements than the sun are considered metal-rich. Stars with a lower fraction of heavy elements are considered metal-poor.

Planets are created disks of gas and dust around new stars. Planets like Earth are composed almost entirely of elements such as iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium. The metallicity of a star mirrors the metal content of the planet-forming disk. Astronomers have hypothesized that large quantities of heavy elements in the disk would lead to more efficient planet formation. It has long been noted that giant planets with short orbital periods tend to be associated with metal-rich stars.

Unlike gas giants, the occurrence of smaller planets is not strongly dependent on the heavy element content of their host stars. Planets up to four times the size of Earth can form around stars with a wide range of heavy element content, including stars with a lower metallicity than the sun. The findings are described in a new study published in the journal Nature. "Kepler has identified thousands of planet candidates, making it possible to study big-picture questions like the one posed by Lars. Does nature require special environments to form Earth-size planets?" said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "The data suggest that small planets may form around stars with a wide range of metallicities -- that nature is opportunistic and prolific, finding pathways we might otherwise have thought difficult."

The ground-based spectroscopic observations for this study were made at the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands; Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins in Ariz.; McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin; and W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Launched in March 2009, Kepler searches for planets by continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars, looking for telltale dips in their brightness caused by passing, or transiting, planets. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a planet. Follow-up observations from ground-based telescopes are also needed to confirm a candidate as a planet.

[So it would appear that Earth sized planets should be more common that previously thought. For the emergence and development of life-as-we-know-it this can only be a good thing.]

Pretty close, but not totally my head.  [grin]