Apologies to any of you who tried to click through last week and found the link to my new blog broken - we had a few moving morning snafus. The new blog link and the new RSS feed should both work now - go ahead and check it out. I’ve got new stuff over there. About brains. You know you want to look. . .

I’ve decided to make a big change. As of today, bioephemera will be moving to Scienceblogs. I hope that all of you will join me there; please update your bookmarks to point to http://www.scienceblogs.com/bioephemera

The RSS feed should be http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/index.xml

but I’ve been told it may not be working yet (sorry - still getting the bugs out).

Never fear; the blog isn’t going to change very much. The format may take some getting used to - a generic, IKEA-esque white background! ack! - but I’ll keep the same categories and the same idiosyncratic mix of topics (which may or may not please you). And I’ll abuse the dashes, semicolons, parentheses and italics even more than usual - just to ensure you feel at home during the adjustment period. This site (bioephemera the elder?) will remain on line indefinitely as an archive of sorts, and I may update it periodically, but I’ll be calling Scienceblogs home.

Some of you may wonder why I’m making this change. No, it’s not for the money (I’ve never made money from this blog), although it will be nice to have my bandwidth subsidized, since y’all keep doubling my traffic! It’s not to score a big readership (see previous comment on doubling my traffic). I’m quite happy with the cadre of cognizant, witty readers I’ve acquired over the past year and a half. Moderating a zillion snarky comments has never been my goal. And it’s definitely not because I like Movable Type better than Wordpress; I have more grey hair than I did a month ago, and I still don’t have the new blog formatted just as I want it. Heck, I never got this one formatted as I wanted it, not really.

So why am I moving to a more prominent platform? Honestly, I’m concerned that science blogging is morphing into its own exclusive subphylum - blogs written by scientists, read by scientists. There’s a surfeit of intelligent, informed writing and debate on these blogs. Some of it is as good as peer review. That’s a wonderful development. But blogs that outcross science with other fields, like this one, have not been multiplying at the same healthy rate (could it be hybrid inviability?)

I don’t want the scientific blogging community to become isolated in its own quirky culture, or inaccessible, like a particularly esoteric Wikipedia article. I like science best when it’s informing other areas - art, humanities, policy - and being informed in return. I’m drawn to the interfaces between science and other domains of knowledge, because interfaces, as cellular biologists and chemists know, are where the most exciting, unexpected reactions take place.

Scienceblogs seems like the place to represent that type of interface - I’m very, very fond of Seed (Scienceblogs’ parent publication) and the mix of science, art, and culture it promotes. That mix is something I’ve been striving toward for a long time.

Going back to my very first post here at bioephemera:

If you ask a biologist why he or she chose biology as a career, I’ll bet most will cite a deep feeling of wonder and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But that feeling is not so easy to find in the lab, where we try to be objective and logical (and efficient). How we can initially turn to biology for such emotional, unscientific reasons, and then neglect them afterward, is a puzzling thing. We may never have tried to formally articulate our wonder. We may enjoy the richness and motivation it brings to our work, without needing any articulation. Even so, since art is all about capturing inarticulate truths and inspiring wonder, art may have something practical to offer biologists - a way to recapture that original feeling of wonder and surprise that brought us here.

I haven’t changed my mind one bit.

On that note, please come join me at the new blog, and thanks so much for making the last year and a half a great ride.

The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the “head table” where the animals’ severed heads are processed.

One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.

My first thought on seeing the headline was “what kind of mad pigs do we have on our hands?” But this is not a porcine analog of BSE - it’s believed to be an autoimmune condition, induced by exposure to completely benign, healthy brains.

Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as “blowing brains” on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.

If this theory is correct, the ailment — for the moment called “progressive inflammatory neuropathy” — resembles Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune condition that sometimes follows fairly benign infections, particularly those caused by an intestinal bacterium called Campylobacter. In the Minnesota cases, however, there appears to be no germ involved.

Now they’re looking for more cases in other slaughterhouses.

All of this begs the question of why anyone thought ”blowing brains” at the “head table” was a good industrial practice in the first place. And aren’t these workers given masks with sufficient filtration capacity to keep them from inhaling the dead pig? Good grief!

I may abstain from bacon for some time to come. . .

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.)

Businessweek has this little slideshow of a LEGO factory. Neat. Apparently the system is so precise, only 18 in a million LEGO bricks are defective. Which sounds about right; I’ve never found an irregular LEGO, and I’ve handled thousands.

Still, a LEGO-making factory is just not as impressive as a factory made from LEGO. Someone with apparently infinite patience built a car factory out of Mindstorms LEGOs and posted it to YouTube. There’s no narration, and it’s kind of hard to see what’s happening, so you just have to have faith until the end; but the machinery itself is hypnotic.   

Great Horned Owl
Kathryn Spence

Kathryn Spence’s owl sculptures work on several levels at once. This Great Horned Owl is a Lear of birds, ragged but regal. Like an impressionist painting, up close, he’s a bundle of discordant rags - old clothes, bits of recycled cloth - but back away and the illusion of life kicks in. The tilt of his head is pure predator.

The most delicious thing to me is that a recycled cloth owl is cuddly and cozy (mmmm, soft), but also a brutal representation of the biological food chain. His flesh is made of shredded Beanie Babies! Which means he’s just like a real owl - or any carnivore. We’re Nature’s recycling.

More of Kathryn Spence’s work is at the Stephen Wirtz gallery.

via ULLABENULLA

Photo by Eugene Richards
From “North Dakota, The Emptied Prairie”
National Geographic Magazine

These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.

I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.

Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.

Photo by Eugene Richards
via

Sciencedebate 2008 (of which I am a supporter, along with a zillion other science bloggers) wants to give us an answer to that question. Express your support here, or if you have questions, listen to this NPR interview with Shawn Otto about the process of setting the debate up. Seriously, kids. Support this one.

Unfortunately, until a science-centric debate materializes, you have to retro-engineer the candidates’ science platforms based on what they have said and done in other contexts. SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America; yeah, I’m also a member of this) is contributing to this effort via the SHARP Network (Science, Health, and Related Policies), a Wiki-based platform for tracking the candidates’ positions on key issues. It’s a great idea, but as they note, Wikipedia often falls victim to partisan sabotage, so I’m holding my breath to see if they can keep it cleaned up. If you like Wiki-ing, consider helping out.

Finally, AAAS also has an S&T election website, which although not a Wiki, does cite Wikipedia (is that okay with everyone now? I missed the memo.)

Darn, I wish I was at the science blogging conference right now! Hopefully next year. . .  have fun in NC, y’all.

What more is there to say, really? It’s a tentacle arm.

A friend of mine told me I need “at least two” of these. . .

. . . at LEAST two???? What??

And once the first one’s on, how do you get the second on. . . ?  Do I want to know?

Tentacle Arm from GaiaStore.com