Word: acta
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...that in Overkalix, boys who enjoyed those rare overabundant winters - kids who went from normal eating to gluttony in a single season - produced sons and grandsons who lived shorter lives. Far shorter: in the first paper Bygren wrote about Norrbotten, which was published in 2001 in the Dutch journal Acta Biotheoretica, he showed that the grandsons of Overkalix boys who had overeaten died an average of six years earlier than the grandsons of those who had endured a poor harvest. Once Bygren and his team controlled for certain socioeconomic variations, the difference in longevity jumped to an astonishing 32 years...
Published in the Italian journal Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, Pembrey's paper, now considered seminal in epigenetic theory, was contentious at the time; major journals had rejected it. Although he is a committed Darwinist, Pembrey used the paper - a review of available epigenetic science - to speculate beyond Darwin: What if the environmental pressures and social changes of the industrial age had become so powerful that evolution had begun to demand that our genes respond faster? What if our DNA now had to react not over many generations and millions of years but, as Pembrey wrote, within...
...timetable would mean that genes themselves wouldn't have had enough years to change. But, Pembrey reasoned, maybe the epigenetic marks atop DNA would have had time to change. Pembrey wasn't sure how you would test such a grand theory, and he put the idea aside after the Acta paper appeared. But in May 2000, out of the blue, he received an e-mail from Bygren - whom he did not know - about the Overkalix life-expectancy data. The two struck up a friendship and began discussing how to construct a new experiment that would clarify the Overkalix mystery...
...Except Acta probably did get the memo. Rumors about his job security have flown around Washington for months, and yet his team did no better. That, frankly, reflects a baseball reality that few are willing to concede: A manager has no significant impact on his team’s win total...
...might be specious to suggest that Acta could have just flipped a switch to become a better manager and save his job—except that this very logic is necessary to substantiate the belief that managers do make a difference. Take, for example, Joe Maddon, the celebrated manager of the Tampa Bay Rays. In his third year in Tampa, Maddon took the Rays to the World Series—after finishing dead last his first two years. Maddon is now regarded as one of the league’s best, because he succeeded in flipping that switch...