The Navy Is Sick of the One-Person Subs It Uses for Deep-Sea Diving
by Ben on Feb.26, 2013, under General
The Navy Is Sick of the One-Person Subs It Uses for Deep-Sea Diving
To survive at the deepest depths, diverse need enormous, pressure-resistant suits that limit divers’ mobility. But the Navy is sick of trading survivability for flexibility, no matter how far into the deep its divers wade.
Pentagon Wants a ‘Family of Devices’ as It Makes Big Move Into Mobile Market
by Ben on Feb.26, 2013, under General
Pentagon Wants a ‘Family of Devices’ as It Makes Big Move Into Mobile Market
The next big mobile-device customer is going to be the U.S. military. Finally.
Air Force to Stealth Fighter Pilots: Get Used to Coughing Fits
by Ben on Feb.26, 2013, under General
Air Force to Stealth Fighter Pilots: Get Used to Coughing Fits
Chronic coughing is the cost of piloting the F-22 stealth fighter. At least that’s the Air Force’s position.
World’s lightest material weighs 75 times less than Styrofoam
by Ben on Aug.11, 2012, under General
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Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic
by Ben on Aug.11, 2012, under General
Abstract
General intelligence is an important human quantitative trait that accounts for much of the variation in diverse cognitive abilities. Individual differences in intelligence are strongly associated with many important life outcomes, including educational and occupational attainments, income, health and lifespan. Data from twin and family studies are consistent with a high heritability of intelligence, but this inference has been controversial. We conducted a genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549,692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation. Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ?1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.
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