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What neighborhood is your rat from?
Combs is a graduate student at Fordham University and, like many young people, he came to New York to follow his dreams. His dreams just happened to be studying urban rats. For the past two years, Combs and his colleagues have been trapping and sequencing the DNA of brown rats in Manhattan, producing the most comprehensive genetic portrait [DOI: 10.1111/mec.14437] yet of the city's most dominant rodent population.
As a whole, Manhattan's rats are genetically most similar to those from Western Europe, especially Great Britain and France. They most likely came on ships in the mid-18th century, when New York was still a British colony. Combs was surprised to find Manhattan's rats so homogenous in origin. New York has been the center of so much trade and immigration, yet the descendants of these Western European rats have held on.
When Combs looked closer, distinct rat subpopulations emerged. Manhattan has two genetically distinguishable groups of rats: the uptown rats and the downtown rats, separated by the geographic barrier that is midtown. It's not that midtown is rat-free—such a notion is inconceivable—but the commercial district lacks the household trash (aka food) and backyards (aka shelter) that rats like. Since rats tend to move only a few blocks in their lifetimes, the uptown rats and downtown rats don't mix much.
The researchers found they could tell what neighborhood rats had come from by analysing their DNA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:10PM (1 child)
There's good evidence that their IQ boost is due to bilingualism being more prevalent in their culture. IQ is meaningless as a measure of native intelligence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:20AM
There is even better evidence that anti-semites, like the aforementioned jmorris and the slovenly Ethanol_fueled, are just fucking stupid. Which is why, I guess, that IQ must be meaningless. When you are that dumb, almost everything in meaningless, right? Since nothing means anything since it makes no sense and it somehow must be the fault of the Jews or the N****ers, or the SJWs, because it is just not right that someone should be soooooo stupid, and have it be their own stupid fault, is it? Suddenly, I have a tear for the jmorris. It is not easy, being that stupid. I will pray for him. Mostly I pray that his stupidity may be shortlived.