biology
bioephemera | September 24, 2008
Shadow Hand
Check out this slideshow of robot hands from Wired. It tracks the evolution of the hand from the first attempts to duplicate the functionality of a human hand, to integration of self-monitoring proprioceptive and sensory capabilities, to replicating the anatomical and physiological structure of the human hand - both in order to better understand the biology, and to accommodate the connection of prostheses. On the way, it becomes obvious what a thing of complexity and beauty the human hand really is.
bioephemera | September 22, 2008For the past two years, Scibling Bora has shepherded the creation of an anthology sampling the best of science blogging, called The Open Laboratory. Blog posts written since December 20, 2007 are eligible for consideration; you can nominate your own posts, as well as posts by other bloggers. The rules are here.
My first nominee? This smashing post by Mo on Wilder Penfield, the man who mapped the brain. It's incredibly long, though. Perhaps Mo should write his own book. . .
Things to consider:
-The deadline is December 1, 2008.
-Multiple submissions are okay - in other words, don't worry if…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2008tags: political views, politics, physiology, threat response, psychology, philosophyfight or flight, nature versus nurture
Most Americans have been actively engaged in the frustrating sport of arguing about politics, which often leads to the common refrain; "You just don't get it!" So this made me wonder why people who seem to have similar life experiences can end up with such dramatically different personal philosophies -- philosophies that ultimately affect their political views and voting behavior. Apparently, I am not the only one to wonder about such things, because a paper was just…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2008Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists' knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.)
But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts…
bioephemera | September 19, 2008
Blue Forest
Kevin O'Neill
io9.com posed its readers a challenge a few months back: design a synthetic lifeform using BioBricks. They didn't want another Spore creature - it had to be something biologically plausible, and preferably, functional. The question: would those readers voluntarily do the equivalent of biochem lab homework?
The answer appears to be heck, yes. The winner, nerd overachiever Vijaykumar Meli, proposed a modified rhizobial bacterium capable of invading rice roots, conferring nitrogen fixation capability on the plant and significantly reducing its need for fertilizer. He…
oracknows | September 18, 2008This one's been floating around the intertubes, at least those parts of the intertubes I frequent, for several days now at least. But it's so good that I just can't resist posting it myself.
I had no idea John Cleese had a video podcast...
jstemwedel | September 9, 2008While other ScienceBlogs bloggers (notably Revere and Orac) post periodically on the state of the scientific evidence with regard to whether cell phones have biological effects on those using them, I've mostly followed the discussion from the sidelines. Possibly this is because I'm a tremendous Luddite who got a cell phone under protest (and who uses a phone with maybe three functions -- place a call, receive a call, and store phone numbers). Possibly it's because in my estimation the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2008We interrupt this broadcast to explain something to everybody who has ever used the expression "a homo sapien". Sapiens is not a plural. It is an adjective ending in an S, just like erectus, afarensis and neanderthalensis. (It means "wise".) You would never say "a homo erectu", right? Don't try to learn Latin from Del tha Funkee Homosapien.
tfk | September 8, 2008Kos wonders:
Does O'Reilly really want to maintain that the difference between Jamie Lynn and Bristol is that the Spears daughter was "running around unsupervised"? Because if O'Reilly insists that Bristol, to the contrary, was supervised, then how exactly did she get knocked up? It would follow that ... yeah. Gross.
Of course she supervised. Palin believes in abstinence-only education, so how else could her daughter have learned the basic anatomy, biology, and mechanics necessary to conceive a child?
bioephemera | September 7, 2008
Prototypical "bioephemera" - butterflies and flowers - as seen last Saturday at the wonderful Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Georgetown. I think it's a palamedes swallowtail (Papilio palamedes), which is common to DC/Virginia; but I'm not sure. (Unfortunately I only brought my iPhone, not my real camera!)
scientificactivist | September 5, 2008If so, you should check out EcoliWiki, which you might find a useful resource, and you might even find yourself compelled to contribute some of your knowledge to it.
Since I'm already blogging about E. coli today, I thought I would also bring up an interesting project I found out about earlier this week. I'm currently wrapping up a short visit to my alma mater, Texas A&M University, and while there, I've met up with two local science bloggers that I know of: Matt Springer of Built on Facts (a fellow blogger here on ScienceBlogs.com) and Jim Hu of Blogs for Industry. Hu is an associate…
scientificactivist | September 5, 2008Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life
by Carl Zimmer
Pantheon: 2008, 256 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
I come face-to-face with Escherichia coli every day. In a sense, we all do--as billions of E. coli inhabit every individual's intestines. But for me, E. coli is a protein factory. I'm a structural biologist, and my work depends on being able to produce large amounts of specific proteins--generally proteins found in humans or mice. However, purifying large amounts of these proteins from humans or mice would be virtually impossible, and manipulating these proteins in the manner I…
revere | September 5, 2008When influenza viruses with different genetic make-up co-infect a cell there is the possibility that they will mix their genetic endowments. The influenza virus is designed to do only one thing: make a copy of itself. It does this by tricking the host's protein manufacturing machinery to use the virus's genetic blueprint to make a viral copy. Influenza genes come in eight discrete packages and at some point these genetic segments are naked in the cell. If the segments of two viruses are in the cell at the same time the segments can mix and match, with some of the segments of one virus being…
revere | September 2, 2008You might think it is an arcane subject, but a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes" by Grime et al., is quite a stunner. This paper is about a century old formula called the Overton Rule (or Meyer - Overton Rule), used extensively to predict how fast chemicals get into cells and which ones do so most easily. It has been used to predict which anesthetics would work best and how fast and which toxic chemicals would get into which cells and how fast. For those of us who…
bioephemera | September 1, 2008
light table with brain specimen slices
National Museum of Health and Medicine
Neuroanatomical collection
A few months ago I took a tour of the National Museum of Health and Medicine's neuroanatomical research collection. It's a remarkable hoard of preserved and sectioned human brains, most sandwiched between plates of glass. Some of the specimens are quite old (the NMHM has specimens dating back to the Civil War). I took a few photos to show you what the facility is like.
storage cabinets for NMHM's neuroanatomical collection
The cabinets above house trays of glass slides containing serial…
bioephemera | August 31, 2008My friend mdvlist sent me the link to some rather odd educational materials, called "Lyrical Life Science." They're folk songs set to familiar tunes, but the lyrics are all biology. I realize that folk songs about science have a storied history. But these are kinda weird - like "Sirenians" set to "Drunken Sailor," or "Oh Bacteria" set to "Oh Susanna" ("though lacking any nucleus, you do have a cell wall. . . ")
mdvlist claims that the kids in her party LOVED these CDs, although she was not impressed by the quality of the music. Nor was I - in fact, I couldn't understand half of what they are…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2008
An hour and a half in the woods around little nearby lakelet Knipträsk garnered us a fine harvest of mushrooms. The last time I blogged about a shroom-picking expedition we had ten kinds. Today we had eleven, most of them hedgehogs and boletes:
Terracotta hedgehog, Rödgul taggsvamp, Hydnum rufescens
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Slippery Jack, Smörsopp, Suillus luteus
Gypsy mushroom, Rynkad tofsskivling, Rozites caperata
Common puffball, Vårtig röksvamp, Lycoperdon perlatum
Black…
bioephemera | August 28, 2008
Tia Resleure
Winged Cat
Mixed Media, 2002
Speaking of possible hoaxes, I noticed thanks to Zooillogix that the Chinese winged cat story is making the rounds again. I blogged about this in May 2007 on bioephemera - apparently they haven't even changed the photo accompanying the story!
Although the Tia Resleure sculpture above is a fake, and the Chinese story may be a recycled urban myth with suspiciously few specifics, reports of winged cats have been around a long time. Here's what I had to say about it back in May 2007:
You've probably heard the recent reports of a winged cat. The cat's…
bioephemera | August 28, 2008
A sad story from Bangladesh: a baby boy born with two heads has passed away at just two days old. What makes the story especially sad is that apparently the boy, named Kiron, was doing surprisingly well shortly after birth, even eating, but his parents could not afford further medical treatment at a larger hospital. They took him home, where he died of respiratory problems.
The photo above shows how remarkably normal both heads look - at first, I thought it was a hoax. It's unclear at this point how Kiron developed two heads, although what little I've seen suggests that it was probably a…
tfk | August 26, 2008Among my favorite things are pie, blackberries, and good friends. Imagine what happens when a good friend writes an article about blackberries and blackberry pie:
It’s August in the Pacific Northwest, and the ubiquitous brambles of Himalayan blackberry, Rubus armeniacus, are suddenly covered with ripe berries, a transformation which radically –- hypocritically, even –- alters our attitude toward them.
For ten-and-a-half months each year, these highly invasive blackberry bushes are Seattle’s enemy. They rank high on the list of things we love to hate, along with bad espresso, SUVs and that…