The Ed's Up #137

The Genetics of Staying in School

"In a study of almost 294,000 people, an international team has identified variants in 74 genes that are associated with educational attainment. In other words, those who carry more of these variants, on average, complete more years of formal schooling. You can almost hear the tsunami of misinterpreted takes cresting the horizon..." (Image: Sheng Li / Reuters)
 

Obama Drops the Microbiome

Today, the White House is announcing the launch of the National Microbiome Initiative (NMI)—an ambitious plan to better understand the microbes that live in humans, other animals, crops, soils, oceans, and more. These miniscule organisms are attracting mammoth budgets: federal agencies are committing $121 million to the NMI over the next two years, while more than 100 universities, non-profits, and companies are chipping in another $400 million. Essentially, America has decided to point half a billion microscopes at the planet, and look through them. (Image: Jim Young) 
 

Climate Change Is Shrinking Earth’s Far-Flying Birds

"Every year, flocks of red knots criss-cross the globe. Different populations have their own itineraries, but all are epically long: Alaska to Venezuela; Canada to Patagonia; Siberia to Australia.  These migratory marathons mean that the red knot’s fate in one continent can be decided by conditions half a world away. And that makes it a global indicator, a sentinel for a changing world. It is the proverbial canary in the coalmine, except the mine is the planet. And the canary is shrinking. (Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) 
 

How This Fish Survives in a Sea Cucumber’s Bum

In 1975, Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow was diving off the Banda Islands in Indonesia, when he collected a leopard sea cucumber—a cylindrical relative of starfish and sea urchins. It was a large and stubby specimen, 40 centimetres long (16 inches) and 14 centimetres wide. He dropped it in a bucket of water, which he placed in a refrigerated room. Sometime later, a slender, eel-like fish swam out of the sea cucumber’s anus. It was a star pearlfish, and it wasn’t alone. (Image: Waterframe) 
 

More good reads

• Megan Garber’s epic piece on the history, technology, and sociology of high heels has a superb line in virtually every paragraph. It’s utterly fascinating.
• This piece on a (perhaps quixotic) quest to get someone to run a marathon in under 2hrs is full of gold nuggets. By Yannis Pitsiladis
• “Leave it to the youngest person in the lab to think of the Big Idea.” Great story about some critical Zika experiments. By Pam Belluck.
• I’ve been reading Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar's Guide to the City and it's incredible.
• Yes, the ongoing bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef is bad. But it isn't dead or dying — yet. By Hannah Waters
• The Computer Virus That Haunted Early AIDS Researchers. Kaveh Waddell on ransomware that was delivered by floppy disk.
• A neuroscientist threatened to sue Jesse Singal when he asked about his side business selling brain tonics
• John Oliver does p-hacking, bad science reporting, and oxytocin bullshit. It's glorious
• Computer gleans chemical insight from lab notebook failures