After a few months in Europe, I began developing a sense of what people from different countries and regions looked like. Sometimes I couldn't always pinpoint what facial or body characteristics were the giveaways, but I definitely recognized them. I wondered about the few families that must have seeded the populations of each nation or region, and for how many centuries most of their descendants have largely stayed put. This genetic study produced a visualization of this very phenomenon. - Jared Jacobs
This sounds a lot like how Sodium-Potassium channel abnormalities cause the various periodic paralyses. It's quite satisfying when someone pinpoints the cause of a mysterious physical or behavioral problem. I imagine it would be nearly impossible to go the other way -- to predict the macro-effects of any particular cellular anomaly. - Jared Jacobs
