organization:university of california, davis

Most White Americans’ DNA Can Be Identified Through Genealogy Databases - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/science-genetic-genealogy-study.html

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The genetic genealogy industry is booming. In recent years, more than 15 million people have offered up their DNA — a cheek swab, some saliva in a test-tube — to services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com in pursuit of answers about their heritage. In exchange for a genetic fingerprint, individuals may find a birth parent, long-lost cousins, perhaps even a link to Oprah or Alexander the Great.

But as these registries of genetic identity grow, it’s becoming harder for individuals to retain any anonymity. Already, 60 percent of Americans of Northern European descent — the primary group using these sites — can be identified through such databases whether or not they’ve joined one themselves, according to a study published today in the journal Science.

Within two or three years, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA, researchers found. The science-fiction future, in which everyone is known whether or not they want to be, is nigh.

Their results were eye-opening. The team found that a DNA sample from an American of Northern European heritage could be tracked successfully to a third-cousin distance of its owner in 60 percent of cases. A comparable analysis on the MyHeritage site had similar results. (The analysis focused on Americans of North European background because 75 percent of the users on GEDmatch and other genealogy sites belong to that demographic.)

Some experts have raised questions about the study’s methodology. Its sample size was small, and it didn’t factor in that more than one match is often required to identify a suspect.

CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist with Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, also expressed worry in an email that the Science paper may obscure the difficulty involved in puzzling out someone’s identity; it takes a highly skilled expert to build a family tree from the initial genetic clues.

Still, she said, the takeaway of the study “is not news to us.” In recent months Ms. Moore has been involved in a dozen murder and sexual assault cases that used GEDmatch to identify suspects. Of the 100 crime-scene profiles that her firm had uploaded to GEDmatch by May, half were obviously solvable, she said, and 20 were “promising.”

“I think it’s a strong and convincing paper,” said Graham Coop, a population genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis. In a blog post in May, Dr. Coop calculated just how lucky investigators had been in the Golden State killer case. He reached a statistical conclusion similar to Dr. Erlich’s: society is not far from being able to identify 90 percent of people through the DNA of their cousins in genealogical databases.

“This is this moment of, wow, oh, this opens up a lot of possibilities, some of which are good and some are more questionable,” he said.

In an alarming result, the Science study found that a supposedly “anonymized” genetic profile taken from a medical data set could be uploaded to GEDmatch and positively identified. This shows that an individual’s private health data might not be so private after all.

#Génomique #ADN #Vie_privée

Learning to Speak Shrub - Issue 59: Connections
▻http://nautil.us/issue/59/connections/learning-to-speak-shrub-rp

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Entomologist Richard Karban knows how to get sagebrush talking. To start the conversation, he poses as a grasshopper or a chewing beetle—he uses scissors to cut leaves on one of the shrubs. Lopping off the leaves entirely won’t fool the plants. So he makes many snips around the edges and tips of the leaves—“a lot of little bites.” A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That’s because Karban’s cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent (...)

How to Tell If You’re a Jerk - Issue 40: Learning
▻http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-to-tell-if-youre-a-jerk

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Here’s something you probably didn’t do this morning: Look in the mirror and ask, am I a jerk? It seems like a reasonable question. There are, presumably, genuine jerks in the world. And many of those jerks, presumably, have a pretty high moral opinion of themselves, or at least a moderate opinion of themselves. They don’t think of themselves as jerks, because jerk self-knowledge is hard to come by. Psychologist Simine Vazire at the University of California, Davis argues that we tend to have good self-knowledge of our own traits when those traits are both evaluatively neutral (in the sense that it’s not especially good or bad to have those traits), and straightforwardly observable.Wikipedia For example, people tend to know whether they are talkative. It’s more or less okay to be talkative (...)

This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it’s basically unstoppable - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/02/this-disease-has-killed-a-million-trees-in-california-and-scientists-say-its-basically-unstoppable/?tid=sm_tw

Healthy forests are especially important at a time of climate change — they’re an incredible tool to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Dead forests, on the other hand, can light the spark for wildfires, which are already showing a long-predicted uptick in activity.

In California’s coastal forests, health is anything but good. Since 1995, a fungal pathogen that causes a phenomenon dubbed ‘sudden oak death’ (a far catchier name than that of the pathogen itself, Phytophthora ramorum) has taken out millions of oak and tanoak trees, particularly along the coast extending northward from Monterey County. That includes areas of Marin County, Sonoma County and Big Sur.

The pathogen is a fungus that affects different trees differently, and not all are susceptible. It will tear through a forest and kill some trees while leaving others standing.

But in some trees, the pathogen causes tree trunks to crack open a ‘canker’ and literally bleed out sap. The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s.

“Millions of acres of land have been affected in coastal California,” says Richard Cobb, a postdoc at the University of California, Davis, who studies the disease. “It spreads via wind and rain, and it’s made some really big jumps to different parts of the state and into Oregon. It probably spread into California via the nursery trade. And it has been moved around the country a lot, also within the nursery trade.”

#forêt #Phytophthora_ramorum #pathogène #climat

There’s a One-in-Four Chance the Fish You Just Ordered Contains Plastic
▻http://www.alternet.org/environment/25-fish-contains-plastic

About a quarter of fish samples from markets in Indonesia and fresh off the boat in California are filled with plastic and debris such as clothing fibers, scientists at the University of California, Davis, have found.

#poissons #poisons

How gender-specific toys can negatively impact a child’s development.
Some psychologists are applauding Target’s decision to remove gender-based labels in children’s bedding and toy aisles, but say more changes are needed
▻http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/08/12/how-gender-specific-toys-can-negatively-impact-a-childs-development

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, while women in the U.S. were closing the gap in education and employment and breaking into the top ranks of politics and industry, one sector was moving in the wrong direction. “The world of toys looks a lot more like 1952 than 2012,” Elizabeth Sweet, a sociologist studying children and gender inequality at the University of California, Davis wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed a few years ago. In the 1970s, according to Sweet, few children’s toys were targeted specifically at boys or girls; nearly 70 percent of toys had no gender-specific labels at all. Many toy ads seemed to deliberately flout gender stereotypes—depicting girls driving toy cars and airplanes and boys playing with kitchen sets and dolls.

By the mid-1990s, however, gendered advertising had returned to 1950s-levels, and it continued to grow in the 2000s. Critics blame the backlash on second-wave feminism, the nostalgia of gift-giving grandparents and shrewd marketers, who realized they could convince parents of boys and girls to buy two versions of the same product.

In the past couple of years, the tide has finally begun to turn. WalMart and Toys R Us have recently agreed to tone down their gender-specific children’s marketing strategies, and in a blog post on the company’s website last week, Target announced plans to get rid of gender-based labeling in the children’s bedding and toy aisles: they’ll phase out explicit references to gender as well as the use of pink and blue colored paper on the shelves. “As guests have pointed out, in some departments like Toys, Home or Entertainment, suggesting products by gender is unnecessary,” Target said in the post. “We heard you, and we agree.”

Pressure from customers, as well as the example set by its competitors, seems to have played a role in the retail giant’s decision. In June, an Ohio woman tweeted a picture of a sign advertising “Building sets” and “Girls’ building sets,” with the caption, “Don’t do this, @target”; it’s been retweeted more than 3,000 times.

Some psychologists are applauding Target’s move. “The decision to remove gender labels is a big first step in reducing gender stereotypes,” says Lisa Dinella, a psychologist at Monmouth University. Several studies show that children prefer toys they believe are intended for their gender. Just last year, a paper co-authored by Dinella suggested that color can also be used to manipulate children’s perceptions of what toys they should play with; Dinella and her co-authors, Erica Weisgram and Megan Fulcher, showed that girls were much more likely to opt for traditionally male toys, like airplanes, if they were pink.

Girls’ preference for pink is learned, not innate; cognitive research suggests that all babies actually prefer blue. (According to Jo Paoletti, author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, the association of boys with blue and girls with pink dates to the 1940s.) In 2011, Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache undertook a study of a group of boys and girls between the ages of seven months and five years. Each child was tasked with choosing between two similar objects, one of which was pink, the other blue. It was around the age of two that girls began to select the pink toy more often than the blue one; at two and a half, the preference for pink became even more pronounced. Boys developed an aversion to the pink toy along the same timeline.

The impact of sex-specific toy choice has implications for children’s learning and attitudes far beyond the playground. “Play with masculine toys is associated with large motor development and spatial skills and play with feminine toys is associated with fine motor development, language development and social skills,” says Megan Fulcher, associate professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University.

“Children may then extend this perspective from toys and clothes into future roles, occupations, and characteristics,” she adds. In 2008, she was part of a team of researchers who found that children with gender-stereotyped decorations in their bedrooms also held more stereotypical attitudes towards boys and girls.

Research suggests, too, that kids pay more attention to — and form more lasting memories of — the toys they believe are meant for their gender. In 1986, psychologist Marilyn Bradbard presented children ages four to nine with unfamiliar toys in gender-specific boxes, and gave them six minutes to play. One week later, she and her team administered memory tests and found that the girls had more detailed recollections of the objects in the “girly” box and vice versa.

“Organizing merchandise by gender also acts as a barrier that prevents children from exploring the wide array of toys and activities available,” says Dinella. “Target is on the right track, but we still need marketing campaigns to stop gender labeling their products via color.”

#genre #jouets #féminisme

How Odd Behavior in Some Young Horses May Reveal a Cause of Autism - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-odd-behavior-in-some-young-horses-may-reveal-a-cause-of-autism

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By gently squeezing maladjusted foals, veterinary researcher John Madigan recreates the experience of traveling through the birth canal, lowering the levels of certain neurosteroids and “waking up” the young horses.Joe Proudman / UC DavisAs a toxicologist at the University of California, Davis, Isaac Pessah focuses on how different molecules regulate human brain function and development. Yet when he found himself at the university’s equine research center, watching a troubled newborn foal, he was struck by its eerily familiar clinical symptoms.Horses are prey animals, and like most animals whose chief form of defense is flight, they are up on their feet almost immediately after birth. At first they stagger around in the straw in their stalls, pitching their outsized legs out like tent (...)

Pepper-spraying campus police won’t face charges - Yahoo! News
►http://news.yahoo.com/pepper-spraying-campus-police-wont-face-charges-032232434.html

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — The University of California, Davis police officers who doused students and alumni with pepper spray during a campus protest last November won’t face criminal charges, prosecutors said Wednesday.

The chemical crackdown prompted widespread condemnation, campus protests and calls for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after videos shot by witnesses were widely played online. Images of an officer casually spraying orange pepper-spray in the faces of nonviolent protesters became a rallying point for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

But the Yolo County District Attorney’s office said in a statement that there was insufficient evidence to prove the use of force was illegal.

A task force appointed by the university concluded in April that the Nov. 18 pepper-spraying was “objectively unreasonable” and could have been prevented.

Hacks of Valor | Yochai Benkler - Foreign Affairs
►http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137382/yochai-benkler/hacks-of-valor

Many of these cases, however, are ambiguous: Last November, for example, #Anonymous activists released the personal details of a police officer who had pepper-sprayed protesters at the University of California, Davis. Similar personal disclosures were a mainstay of the hacks against Arizona law-enforcement officers in 2011. In those cases, there are fewer easy answers to the questions of who is a valid target, what of that target’s information can rightfully be exposed, and who gets to answer these very questions.

We are left, then, with the task of assessing threats in a state of moral ambiguity. In more naïve times, one might naturally prefer a law-bound state deciding which power abuses should be reined in and which information exposed. But these are no longer naïve times. A decade that saw the normalization in U.S. policy of lawless detentions, torture, and targeted assassinations; a persistent refusal to bring those now or formerly in power, in both the public and private sectors, to account for their failures; and a political system that increasingly favors the rich have eroded that certitude. Perhaps that is the greatest challenge that Anonymous poses: It both embodies and expresses a growing doubt that actors with formal authority will make decisions of greater legitimacy than individuals acting collectively in newly powerful networks and guided by their own consciences.

Anonymous demonstrates one of the new core aspects of power in a networked, democratic society: Individuals are vastly more effective and less susceptible to manipulation, control, and suppression by traditional sources of power than they were even a decade ago.

Why Do Police Officers Use Pepper Spray ? (Wired Science)
►http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/pepper-spray-psychology/?intcid=story_ribbon

When pepper spray became a mainstream law enforcement tool in the 1990s, it was hailed as a relatively peaceful alternative to harsh physical violence. But as demonstrated by the routine spraying of Occupy Wall Street activists, culminating in the horrific assault at the University of California, Davis, pepper spray can too easily become a tool of first and excessive resort. (...) Source: Wired Science