john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

PubMed at 20 million

Sun, 2010-08-22 08:30 -- John Hawks

Twenty Million Papers in PubMed: A Triumph or a Tragedy?

That’s a lot of data and it’s growing at a rate of about one paper per minute (on average).

A full list of "triumphs" and "tragedies" at the link. I'm not too worried about the proliferation of noise, but wish that something could be done about the problem of non-unique author names.

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.