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Science Friday: Men and Women Really Do See the World Differently | Junk DNA Not Junk | Northern Europeans 10% NE Asian

BTW, the video is a joke; not connected with the study

Men and Women Really Do See the World Differently

    Guys' eyes are more sensitive to small details and moving objects, while women are more perceptive to color changes, according to a new vision study that suggests men and women actually do see things differently.

    "As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men and women," researcher Israel Abramov, of the City University of New York (CUNY), said in a statement. Research has shown women have more sensitive ears and sniffers than men.

    "[A] recent, large review of the literature concluded that, in most cases females had better sensitivity, and discriminated and categorized odors better than males," Abramov and colleagues write Tuesday (Sept. 4) in the journal Biology of Sex Differences.

    Abramov and his team from CUNY's Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges compared the vision of males and females over age 16 who had normal color vision and 20/20 sight — or at least 20/20 vision with glasses or contacts.

    [...]

http://www.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-differently.html


Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role

    Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.

    Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.

    The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs. They can also help explain how the environment can affect disease risk. In the case of identical twins, small changes in environmental exposure can slightly alter gene switches, with the result that one twin gets a disease and the other does not.

    [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/science/far-from-junk-dna-dark-matter-proves-crucial-to-health.html?_r=1


Across the sea of grass: how Northern Europeans got to be ~10% Northeast Asian

    [...]

    But the bigger shock is that Europeans, and especially Northern Europeans, seem to have a substantial Northeast Asian component. From the nature of the prose I feel that the authors were definitely taken aback. They basically say so in so many words. In the process of resolving their confusion they skinned the cat every which way. And it does look to me that Northern Europeans are truly descended in part from a population which has affinities to the “First Americans.” I say this specifically because the Siberian samples they tested actually gave a weaker result than the South American Amerindians on the 3-population test.

    [...]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/09/across-the-sea-of-grass-how-northern-europeans-got-to-be-10-northeast-asian/