FW: Happy 2013 Winter Solstice!

[Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

 > From: Mark Reimers <http://www.yahoo.ca/~mark1reimers>
 > Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2013 14:01:51 -0800 (PST)
 >
 > Hi Robert,
 > Nice to hear from you. Too bad about the take-over, but I guess that's the norm 
 > in the valley. Sounds like you landed on your feet.
 > 
 > Here is my Solstice letter
 > 
 > Mark Reimers
 > humanist, scientist, and mathematician
 > 
 > Mark and DeAndra are still living in Richmond and have been active in the 
 > Greater Richmond Humanists and the Richmond Unitarian fellowship. DeAndra is 
 > active in the neighborhood association.
 > 
 > DeAndra has continued to work at the National Science Foundation in Washington 
 > DC, commuting up on Monday morning and returning Thursday night. She has 
 > shepherded programs linking State Dept and NSF. Her parents have settled into 
 > their new home. She is beginning to look at a change of career, perhaps a 
 > senior admin position in a university.
 > 
 > Mark has given over twenty public lectures to large groups in Richmond and 
 > elsewhere on scientific and humanist topics, among them "Evolution of the Human 
 > Mind" and "Morality and the Brain".
 > 
 > Mark's scientific work
 > Although it has been known for a decade that DNA methylation in front of genes 
 > shuts them down, whether DNA methylation regulates genes in normal tissue has 
 > still been unknown. In the BrainSpan data Mark found a correlation between 
 > patterns of DNA methylation across the gene and gene expression that may be 
 > part of the long-sought relationship in normal tissues.
 > 
 > At the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics Mark presented his method that 
 > identifies many more genetic variants associated with disease by integrating 
 > the expensive hard-won association information with available information on 
 > DNA states.
 > 
 > At the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting Mark presented his work on 
 > describing spontaneous brain activity by equations and showing that one could 
 > infer active connections between brain regions. 
 > 
 > One interesting thing has been an analysis of the genes that control plasticity 
 > in the human brain. It has long been thought that there must have been some 
 > evolutionary change in the genes that affect learning, but Seth Grant's study 
 > in 2006 showed definitively that these genes were almost unchanged between apes 
 > and humans. Mark's group has found that in fact the regulation of these genes 
 > has evolved very rapidly, consistent with the other findings that most recent 
 > evolution in the human lineage has been in regulatory DNA rather than in the '
 > genes' themselves.