I’ve had the sniffles now for a few days, and as always, I feel self-conscious about where my germs are landing. This little tutorial combats wayward nasally-propelled microbes with the Sneeze-In-Your-Sleeve strategy. Very amusing - and it suggests another possible use for the tentacle arm.
And seriously - don’t sneeze on people. Or your hands. Euw.
(Thanks to my friend Jacob, intrepid microbiologist, for the heads-up on this one.)
3 comments January 29th, 2008
FYI: AAAS will award a $1,000 prize this year to a high school science teacher, for “leadership in science education”. Candidates must be nominated by their chairs or administrators, and must complete an application by March 2:
Entries must be able to demonstrate the results of an inventive teaching strategy designed to encourage a diverse range of students to become motivated, successful learners of the ideas and skills that are critical to science literacy.
Reading about their 2007 winner, chemistry teacher Chris Kennedy, made me smile - and miss teaching.
More info: AAAS Leadership in Science Education Prize For High School Teachers
Add comment January 17th, 2008
Protein #324, 2003
enamel, silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
The protein-inspired art of Steve Miller in turn inspires Visualizing Science: Image-making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge, a cool-sounding symposium to be held next Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
Miller’s strongest work is reminiscent of Japanese brush painting or Hubble photographs: darkly tangible, stylized forms floating in luminous space. But other pieces, like “Protein #330,” rely on the intrigue of the incomprehensible. What can that scribbled notation mean to the audience? Yes, it’s imposing a certain quantitative context on the protein’s inscrutable, cloud-like form, inviting reflection on the tension between the unlabeled natural artifact and the scientist’s interpretation of it. But I have no idea what it means. Nor would it matter if it was mathematically nonsensical; no one would notice. Not sure how I feel about that.
Protein #330, 2003
silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
Steve Miller’s work
Via the indispensible Biomedicine on Display (bookmark it!)
Add comment October 20th, 2007
Jason at Cephalopodcast.com challenged me to visit this site, sponsored by the New York Zoo, to create my “wild self.” It’s like one of those flip books where you mix and match body parts. As a biologist, such egregious phylogenetic cross-pollination bugs me a little bit, but darn, I like my new look.
2 comments October 18th, 2007
AC Gilbert chemistry set, 1922
From Wired Science on PBS
Tonight is the premiere of a new PBS science series, Wired Science. My fear is that, as with so many other science programs, it will be the kind of staccato, jumpy show that skips right over real science in favor of juicy but inaccurate soundbytes. (I have to confess Wired sometimes gives me a technicolor headache).
On the other hand, the first episode, Dangerous Science, sounds so promising:
In Search of an Old-Fashioned Chemistry Experience
Fifty years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American family without a chemistry set lurking somewhere in the house. It was one of those rare toys that was both fun and educational, helping kids equate science with excitement—after all, building an exploding volcano in the living room never gets old.
But say “chemistry set” to a kid today and you’re likely to get a blank stare or a snicker in response. While the sets still technically exist, they rarely contain any real “chemicals,” thanks to safety and liability fears; they also characterize scientists as crazy and eccentric rather than respectable and intelligent. This may be fueling kids’ declining interest in science, as evidenced by the fact that a third as many students are pursuing college chemistry degrees today as they did back then. Could the disappearance of the old chemistry sets be somewhat to blame? A lot of scientists say yes.
They also promise to reveal what’s in Cool Whip. It’s like the science of Americana! This could be good. . .
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm (most markets - better check your local public TV listings).
Add comment October 3rd, 2007
I winced in sympathy at this account, “A biologist in Nigeria”, by Dave Ng (The World’s Fair) of his experience teaching a genetics course. The conditions were simply awful. But I’m afraid any non-biologist readers won’t understand how awful - why, you may reasonably wonder, do we insist on shiny, spotless, well-lit, glass-and-brushed-metal labs full of inscrutable gadgetry and hypnotically blinking lights? Are we striving for some kind of James Bond ubervillain aesthetic?
The answer is obviously yes. But it’s not that scientists are excessively fastidious and high-maintenance - not entirely - it’s that the techniques are so demanding. A few stray skin cells or a moment’s power surge can ruin an expensive day-long cloning experiment. Everything has to be sterile; everything has to work in a timely manner. Now imagine training students to do such experiments inside a Dumpster with broken tools, and you get some idea what Dave was facing.
Once, as an undergrad, cradled in the luxuries of a top-notch US research university,* I found my experiments contaminated time and again - despite every tool being autoclaved and every reagent brand-new. I troubleshot my protocol in the conventional way, and concluded that - I barely believe this myself - large (multi-kb) chunks of DNA were flying zeppelin-like across a large lab space into my Eppendorf tubes, contaminating my work. When I did everything inside the laminar airflow hood, the problem went away. That’s when I learned that even if you have all the right equipment, science can still go mysteriously awry.
At that time, I took everything for granted - the laminar hood, the limitless stocks of new reagents on the shelves, the bags of pristine Eppendorf tubes - and the considerable funds I spent repeating my little student experiment until I solved the problem (using that shiny sterile glass-and-brushed-metal laminar hood). Sterility, reliable power, and access to common reagents are well within reach of every US lab, even grant-poor ones. Without such infrastructure, it barely matters how imaginative or innovative a nation’s scientists are. In some countries, it is practically impossible to do molecular biology.
Nonetheless, Dave miraculously managed to make his teaching lab work - and is returning to do it all again. Afterward, there will be several dozen young Nigerian scientists who truly understand what biotechnology is, and hopefully, how to bring more of it to their nation. If only they could clone Dave, and send him out to all the other countries without clean labs or basic reagents.
*I didn’t actually attend that school, I was just there for the summer - to ogle the ubervillain labs, of course!
Add comment July 29th, 2007
The Science of Addiction
Time Magazine
Graphic by Fielding Cage and Joe Lertola
• Time currently features a solid non-specialist article on the biology of addiction, including some nicely executed web graphics showing brain structures (above)
• These little “Brain Briefings” from the Society for Neuroscience are suitable for non-specialists or students. . . or as refreshers for we neurobiologists who’ve forgotten things we ought to have retained. (Bad brain! Naughty, lazy hippocampus!) (Via Madam Fathom)
• MIT OpenCourseWare | Literature | Darwin and Design
As if I didn’t have enough things to read (that means you, O reproachful pile of Sciences and New Yorkers), MIT has posted the content for many of its courses, including this one.
• Nature’s Milestones in Development series
I used these when I taught developmental biology.
Add comment July 10th, 2007
The Wellcome collection of medical images has been made available for non-profit use under a Creative Commons license. This is a really fabulous resource. Just for fun I searched “trepanation” and got nine images like these:
Thanks to Stranger Fruit for the heads-up (oops, no pun was intended).
Also of interest: 43 submissions to the Worth 100 medical anomaly competition (via Boing Boing).
5 comments July 9th, 2007
The LA Times recently reviewed Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab
But what is normal? How should we relate to a donated cadaver in the anatomy lab - as a person, or a thing? Some reactions seem to be universal - gallows humor, for example. Humans have been laughing at death since long before Shakespeare. (What other weapon do we have? Death always wins, and the cadaver’s the un-living proof of it.) We have some general rules of conduct - for example, treating the cadaver with respect, keeping the pieces of the various cadavers separate, covering face and genitals when they are not being examined. But such rules seem to be mostly for the students’ comfort, since it’s hard for a cadaver to retain modesty or dignity, at least in a traditional sense, when skin is missing and viscera are exposed.
Students respond to cadavers in personal ways, based on their own family histories, so one student’s experience of dissection is unlike any other’s. Everyone sees the cadaver differently: is this a person, or a patient, or a body, or a teaching specimen, or an illustration. . .? When students take limbs from a skeleton and hold them up to their own arms, turning them to determine the correct orientation, they enact a little unconscious ritual: memento mori. One student was fine with the cadavers until her grandmother passed away; after that, she found the cadaver so disturbing she couldn’t be in the same room with it. The boundaries of life and death, previously comfortably clear, had blurred intolerably. Before class began, students came to me, concerned that they might find the body of a deceased relative in the lab: when and were and who, they wanted to know. (Why came much later.)
Montross’ book takes on some of these issues. As reviewed by Harvard professor, poet and doctor Rafael Campo,
“Body of Work” is at its best when Montross, who is also a poet, allows us to observe the astonishing beauty her dissection reveals, and to relish the language she uses to describe it. “The language of these bones slides along their edges,” she writes. “Os coxae, the hip bones. Their three parts, with names like flowers: ilium, ischium, pubis…. The pelvic brim, as if water spills over it…. Brim, arch, spine. The ligament names like a call to prayer: sacrospinous, sacrotuberous. Sacrosanct.”
This wonder cabinet of anatomical language is familiar to any biologist. It is indeed beautiful. So is the body it describes. But Campo rebukes Montross for allowing such language to establish a clinical distance between herself and the life history of her assigned cadaver, “Eve:”
I believe it is the depersonalization first modeled for aspiring doctors in their encounters with cadavers that accounts for much of the lack of professionalism and career burnout in physicians, and the callous treatment patients too often receive nowadays.
Really: studying the body as beautiful, complex object is a precursor to treating living patients callously? I have never known anyone to leave an anatomy lab feeling less respect and wonder for human beings than before they began. Yet Campo wants the anatomical curriculum to explicitly address the spiritual, not just the physical:
In this age of frequently misapplied technology, here is a chance to make productive use of video cameras and monitors: Might not a video of Eve, telling of her life and created at the time she decided to donate her body, help mitigate some of the mistreatment Montross documents, as well as the subsequent distancing she (however uneasily) comes to approve?
A pleasant idea - and what I’d expect from the author of The Desire To Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry. Empathy should be part of the training of doctors and nurses alike. But is anatomy lab the right venue in which to share the life history of a cadaver? Personal details would increase the discomfort of beginners - in my experience, overly powerful empathy for the deceased disrupts their ability to cut and handle the body (a point Campo seems to dismiss). Would cadavers without life stories receive less respect or care than those who had documented their lives?
Isn’t the point that regardless of our living identities, whether we are good or bad, our bodies are kin, after death and in life? When the cadaver was alive, it was home to a unique mind. Now that its cells are dead, is its role in the laboratory to elegize that mind - or to represent universal anatomical mechanisms? As a biologist, the answer seems fairly clear. Perhaps a doctor feels differently; I don’t know. But I was disappointed as Montross appears to conclude her book by backtracking from scientific objectivity to elegaic ritual (with Campo’s approval):
Great teacher,” she intones, “I give you flowers. I carry your body to the funeral pyre. When you burn, may every space in you that I have named flare and burst into light.” Thus she aligns herself with the humane tradition of honoring the dead, and the act of love inherent in tending to them. The detached concern she professes to want to emulate seems refreshingly absent here. Perhaps, in recognizing our universal and very human contradictions, there is hope for the beleaguered medical profession, after all.
Honestly, this leaves me cold. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if my body ever ends up in a cadaver lab, I don’t want people intoning poetry to it. I want them to dissect it. And yes, I said “it,” not “me.” I’ll be dead. My body is a wonderful clockwork, but it ain’t me.
The imagined ritual may be beautiful and humane, but it is a pleasant fiction, meant for the observer, not the observed. It has nothing to do with the cadaver’s living identity - we have no idea who “Eve” was, nor if she even desired commemoration. Most importantly, the manifest beauty of the human body doesn’t require validation by tradition or flowers (or words). We don’t have to turn a cadaver into a spiritual symbol to make it a wonder: it already is wonderful, even in death. And if someone fails to understand that, I doubt they should be practicing medicine at all.
6 comments July 8th, 2007
PZ Myers at Pharyngula just generated an interesting thread, “we don’t have physics envy, but we still have to deal with physics snobbery,” about whether biology is regarded as a lesser discipline, compared with “harder” sciences like physics. PZ references this post at Biology in Science Fiction, which in turn references this excellent post at Northstate Science.
It’s quite true that non-biologists seem to feel qualified to hold forth on topics such as alien life, evolution, and medicine. . .why? Is biology really so much easier than other sciences, so you don’t even need a formal education in it? (Why the heck was I studying for all those years?)
I’m conflicted about this issue. If there is a hierarchy of sciences, I admit, I do think physics has an edge - simply because it’s more fundamental. Physics squeezes in closer to the cogs and cam-shafts of universal truth than biology can, which gives me a knee-jerk fascination with/admiration for physics (mdvlst is not allowed to comment on this issue).
But is biology “easier,” a soft science, teetering on some slippery slope to the - gasp - humanities? Hardly! The common idea that biology is mere “memorization of facts and terms” is complete baloney. No science consists solely of memorization. In biology, you do have to memorize lists of terms and structures and genes in order to proceed with hypothesis testing, because you’re dealing with complex, unique systems - a particular eukaryotic cell replete with proteins and organelles, an ecosystem with constituent organisms, etc. You have to know a sufficient number of parts before you can build meaningful predictions about the system. But such “naming of parts” does not make you a biologist.
Further, even “naming of parts” goes a lot deeper than people realize. Since I taught anatomy - a class almost entirely about naming parts - I’ve encountered many non-biologists claiming to “know” anatomy already, on the strength of a high school course. (They do not similarly claim to “know” physics.) Yet I’m certain these people would fail my easiest anatomy exams - they claim to know all the bones of the human body, but have no idea where or what the ethmoid or sphenoid are. They couldn’t begin to draw the circulatory system, or point out the cells on a slide of cartilage.
That’s ok - I didn’t know every single bone either; I learned them in order to teach them. But why do people so readily assume there’s no more to anatomy than they dimly remember? Why do they think biology is shallow and easy? Why do physics students arrive for the first day of class with paralyzed looks of dread, when my biology students arrive cocky and contemptuous, then grow astonished and resentful when biology turns out to be hard?
I realized way back in college that as a biologist I would never be considered a “real” scientist by many of my fellows. One friend made a point of reminding me frequently that chemistry was much more rigorous than biology - just in case I forgot my place in the hard science/soft science caste system. Whatever; I found biology more interesting and exciting than chemistry. Plus, biology is squishy!
But it’s not just about people disrespecting my field, or inventing biologically implausible alien races, or the regrettable case of Scully from The X-Files doing a Southern blot in an impossibly short time with an unamplified sample to prove she had alien DNA, or the aliens had human DNA, or whatever that storyline was. Unfortunately, the idea that biology isn’t an especially rigorous science reinforces all sorts of problems - from school boards that give equal weight to intelligent design and evolution, to uninformed decisions about health care (trust me, college students know laughably little about conception and contraception), to policies about scientific research (on stem cells, for example) made on unscientific, partisan grounds.
Why is biology so vulnerable to disrespect? Do people think “life” is not a sufficiently scientific concept, and thus the “study of life” is a fuzzy sort of science? Is it familiarity breeding contempt - we’ve all got bodies, after all? (We’re all made of atoms, but that doesn’t mean people think they understand atomic theory). Is it some sort of inborn affinity for macroscopic plants and animals, but not for the invisibly small, which gives people a proprietary sense of familiarity with “biology”? I just don’t get it.
8 comments July 1st, 2007
The white color of this albino peacock is due to the missing black melanine pigment. The usual rich colors of the peacock are seen because black pigment which absorbs most of the incident light, allowing us to see only the interference colors. In this peacock, the interference is still happening, but the effect is entirely washed out by the abundance of white light. In this albino, you can see that the “eyes” of the tail feathers are clear, not colored.
Via the Evilutionary Biologist, a fun website about the science of color - not just the biology of our eyes, but the physical properties of objects that make them appear colored. Why is water in the sea blue, but water in a glass clear? How is the glow of lightning different than that of a light bulb? What causes the rainbow of color “in” an opal? There’s quite a bit here I didn’t know, or don’t understand as well as I should!
The website is maintained by an organization called IDEA. Some of the pages are under construction, and unfortunately the dates suggest the project may be abandoned, but at least it’s a good start for future reading. IDEA also has a mixed bag of other websites, including color vision and art, pigments, scientific analysis of old masters, and butter. (One of these things is not like the others. . . !)
1 comment June 18th, 2007
This lovely pink bauble is better known as a:
A) gremlin
B) globulin
C) glomerulus
D) gomphosis
E) gomphus
(answer below the fold. . .)
The answer is C) glomerulus. And this illustration by Jim Stanis is the finest glomerulus I have ever seen - podocytes, pedicels and all!
Bonus point if you know what a glomerulus does - without looking it up on Wikipedia. Quadruple bonus points if you know what all the other answers actually are.
Illustration via Street Anatomy, of course.
3 comments June 17th, 2007
From the Bizarre Vintage Americana Time Capsule: “City of the Bees,” a 1951 bee filmstrip from the “Moody Institute of Science.”
I happened across this film while researching an upcoming post. Until twenty minutes in, I suspected the MIS was another name for the Dharma Initiative. I started looking surreptitiously for Marvin Candle. But everything changed around 22:00, when retro-charming, grainy footage of dancing bees was suddenly displaced by the Ten Commandments! Hey. . . this isn’t really about science, is it?
Imagine the clatter of the classroom tape projector. Be surprised by the gratuitous riot scenes, no doubt caused by reefer-mad materialist mobs, at 24:00. Be horrified by the “warped and twisted” (!) practices of unspecified native tribes. The Bible finally appears at 26:00, and the rest of this confused film is a sermon.
I wonder: were these films widely shown in public schools? The biology is the thinnest possible veneer for overt religious instruction, and I hope public schools would have objected, even in 1951. But for all I know, they’re still shown in science classes today.
(Turns out the Moody Institute of Science wasn’t the forebear of the Dharma Initiative after all, but another DI - which is all about ID.)
Want more faux-biology? Here’s some carnivorous plants! With rockets, and . . . oh, whatever.
3 comments June 15th, 2007
You’ve probably heard the recent reports of a winged cat. The cat’s Chinese owner
says the wings, which contain bones, make her pet look like a ‘cat angel’. Her explanation is that the cat sprouted the wings after being sexually harassed.
“A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow,” she said.
However, experts say the phenomenon is more likely down to a gene mutation, and say it shouldn’t prevent the cat living a normal life. (source)
Did the tomcat grow these wings just to fly away from his groupies? How Lamarckian of him!
More on winged cats at the end of this post. . . but first, there are much odder stories blamed on “gene mutations”. I ran across this dreadful mess in a 2005 issue of Pravda:
Geneticists say that mutations seriously change the set of chromosomes, and people with mutations can thus hardly be called humans.
In Yerevan in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, 18-year-old girl Narine Aivasyan shocked doctors with her unusual disease. The girl complained about an abscess on her wrist that had been hurting her for a long period already. When doctors opened the bandage on Narine’s hand they saw two very thin thorns sticking out of the hand. . . Doctors removed from 70 to 100 thorns from the girl’s arm every day. But they still appeared later, which suggested there were two or three parasite cells still staying in the girl’s organism. Doctors from many countries stated there was not a surgical but rather a microbiological problem.
When researchers studied the bigger thorns they arrived at a conclusion that they were no longer of vegetative origin. As a result of mutation, the patient got new unknown cells, some sort of a hybrid of a human and a plant. In other words, the young girl was turning into a cactus.
Yikes! I have no idea what is wrong with Narine, but I seriously doubt she was a Triffid. Honestly, I find the quality of this “journalism” far scarier than the ludicrous idea of cactus-human hybrids.
Unfortunately, it’s on the internet, and there are quite a few people out there who think that anything published on the internet is reliable. Including some of my former students.
So where should one go for reliable information about genetic diseases, without running into questionably sane sensationalism? My favorite authority is the invaluable OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man). Users can search OMIM by the name of a gene, the name of its associated disease, or keywords (Tim at Sciencesque uses OMIM’s search function to select random genes for review). But I’ve found that even for senior biology majors, the information in OMIM can be dense and difficult. It’s best to supplement OMIM with some alternative, accessible, trustworthy sources - and ScienceRoll has compiled exactly such a useful list. I highly recommend bookmarking it.
Back to the winged cats. In fact, they do exist. But the usual explanation is matted hair, not mutation. Henry David Thoreau documented the first report of a winged cat in Walden:
she was of a dark brownish-grey colour, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flattened out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her ‘wings,’ which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and the domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?
Thoreau’s “poet’s cat” sounds much like my own cat in appearance and coloring. Her fur forms felt-like dreadlocks that I have to cut out with scissors. Unattended, they could easily become ten inches long and stiff, like wings, before being shed when the anchor hairs fall out. (I doubt Thoreau appreciated what a pain it would be grooming a “poet’s cat”.)
Many cases of winged cats made serious news during the last century. In 1926, Time Magazine reported a case near Wapato, WA (where I spent several childhood summers). Most of the “wings” were probably caused by matted fur, or a genetic collagen deficiency called feline cutaneous asthenia (the cat equivalent of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). Creative taxidermy artists have also pieced together fake winged cats.
The Chinese winged cat supposedly had bones in its “wings;” neither matted fur nor FCA (nor taxidermy, since it’s alive) would explain that. I’ve found large sticks and burrs completely encased in my cat’s matted fur, and they feel like small bones, so I’m skeptical. But if the wings really have a bone structure, then the cat may have supernumerary (extra) limbs of some degree. The cause could be a genetic mutation - or a non-genetic birth defect.
In any case, since its owner describes it as an “angel cat,” I hope it won’t share the unfortunate fate of the Russian “Devil Cat,” which was drowned by superstitious locals in 2004.
More: the winged cat page.
1 comment May 29th, 2007
Ocellated Antbirds value study
from Drawing the Motmot
I’m a naughty watercolorist: I don’t do value studies before I paint. I know they’re important - especially in watercolor, because you can’t paint over your mistakes. But I’m just too lazy to do a full-sized piece twice over, and it’s frustrating experimenting with values in a dinky little thumbnail sketch. With pencil, the value gamut is too narrow to represent the values of paint, and I get graphite all over my hand in the process (I’m a lefty). I quit bothering with studies long ago, and I know my work has suffered for it.
Drawing The Motmot has convinced me with this post to try value studies again - in Photoshop, where it’s trivial to create and compare several different studies, and you never have to struggle to get back to a pure, clean white, or to render a true black. This post is a great back-to-basics reminder of the importance of value studies, even if you’re lazy and self-trained, like I am.
PS. speaking of value studies, Today’s Inspiration just posted this brief tribute to Andrew Loomis, an early 20th century illustrator who worked largely in black and white. His works are goldmines for anyone interested in learning anatomy or value-based composition. Unfortunately, Loomis’ books are out of print and increasingly scarce, but you can find pdfs online, and this post links to some sources.
Add comment May 9th, 2007
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