Two mommies are better than one

Japanese researchers have found that female mice made from the DNA of two egg cells (bi-maternal or BM) have significantly longer lifespans than female mice made the “normal” way – from the DNA of an egg and a sperm. They think this is due to Rasgrf1, a imprinted gene on chromosome 9 of the father. BM females were also significantly smaller and lighter, which makes sense when you think of sex-specific selection. Males have increased fitness if they spend more energy growing bigger quickly because that will increase their number of mates. Females, however, get no benefit in growing bigger, since they’ll probably have the same number of mates no matter what. Losing paternally inherited genes dealing with this growth means they conserve energy and can live longer.

… *ahem*

SCIENCE IS SO FREAKING COOL!

Seriously, can you believe that we’re doing research like this? I actually remember asking a biology teacher in high school why we can’t just combine DNA from two eggs or two sperm and get a viable organism. They said it was impossible because of genetic imprinting – you need a set genes imprinted from mom, and a set imprinted from dad. But now we have the power to manipulate imprinted genes and do what we thought to be impossible just a few years ago. How cool is that?

And on top of that, I have to wonder what this means for gay couples. Obviously there’s a huge step between animal research and human research, but wouldn’t this be awesome for lesbian couples who could afford it? Not only do you actually get a daughter who is a genetic blend of both of her parents, just like any other child, but they may even have an extended lifetime? Awesome! I guess that would take away one of the ridiculous arguments fundies like to use – that you shouldn’t allow gay marriage because they can’t produce children. Ha, TAKE THAT FUNDIES! SCIENCE!

The Sexual Mystery of the Decade: Maleness glue

When I was in high school, I was part of an academic competition called Science Olympiad. Yes, I was a nerd, big surprise – but Science Olympiad was a level of awesome that far surpassed your typical quiz team. A team of fifteen would send two or three individuals to compete in events, with formats like typical exams, building airplanes, creating Rube Goldberg devices, making your own robots, using forensics to solve a crime scene. No area of science was left on covered – we had everything from ecology to quantum physics. But there was one event that was mine, one event that every time I competed in it at Regionals or State, I would win the gold:

Birds and Bees.

Yes, there was an event on reproduction, with a focus on humans. This event was offered to not only the high school teams, but the middle school ones too – shockingly progressive for many states, especially Indiana. The first year I was assigned the event I was a freshmen, though because of the grade cut offs, freshmen competed on the middle school teams. I got stuck with Birds and Bees since I was one of the oldest students and had actually gone through sex ed, unlike many of the other kids.

At the time, I was embarrassed; though looking back, it’s what sparked my scientific interest in sex. It was an easy joke for everyone (“Going to go study, Jennifer? Did you find a tutor?”) and on top of that, I had a giant crush on our coach, making it all the more awkward asking him questions about sex. I worked extra hard to find answers on my own, but eventually I found a term on our official Science Olympiad study sheet that I just didn’t understand:

“Maleness glue.”

Eventually I gave up and approached my coach, probably blushing, and stammered out, “Mr. K, er, there’s this word I don’t know…can you tell me what it means?” I handed over the sheet of paper and pointed at the offending word. His smirk (he was most likely preparing to crack a joke) soon faded to a look of confusion.

“I have no idea.”

We ventured off to the computer lab to do some Googling. Apparently Indiana’s website blocking software wasn’t so hot eight years ago, because Mr. K yelled “GAH!” and quickly closed a window (Of course he wouldn’t tell me what it was, so being the curious scientist I was I looked it up when I went home, and it was gay porn). But regardless if safe search was on or off, we couldn’t find any useful information on maleness glue. It never appeared on one of the exams, but it became a running gag because of its mysterious nature. What the hell was maleness glue?

At the time, we had created various theories about the cryptic phrase. One male friend joked that it was just a euphemism for semen, but the event instructions were very scientific – no other euphemisms or slang were included. Another friend joked that it was the substance that made men gay (bound them together like glue). As much as I enjoy that theory, it’s also not exactly scientific – but if I ever discover the gay gene, it’s getting named mglu. The only real clue we had was that it was a process “involved in gonadal determination.”

Now I’m 22 years old and about to graduate with a biology degree, and I still don’t know what it means. I’ve asked two different college professors who taught human sexuality courses, and they’ve had no clue. At this point I’m fairly convinced there is no such thing as maleness glue, but there’s still the mystery of how it got on the event instructions to begin with. If you look at the same instructions for the event provided now, they have never been edited – they still contain the mysterious maleness glue. Was it a typo of an actually relevant sexual term? Was it just some disgruntled scientist, hoping to set a young student on a life long wild goose chase?

The world may never know.

Ray Comfort’s Origin meets counter-protests at Purdue

Yesterday I commented that Ray Comfort didn’t stop by Purdue to hand out his sullied version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Since Ray changed the release date to the 18th to screw up secular counter-protesters, I thought that would be the last we saw of him. Well, I was wrong. Around 11:30 I started receiving a flood of text messages, IMs, and emails, all saying the same thing – the books were being passed out at the Engineering fountain at Purdue!

I alerted the masses via my own flurry of texts, tweets, and Facebook status updates, printed off a bunch of flyers from Don’t Diss Darwin (thankfully I was in a computer lab at the time), and ran off. I also had the foresight this morning to bring the batch of “I Support Science” Darwin Fish stickers we had been sent for free, and I’m glad I had them.Oh, and did I mention it was raining all day today? Kind of sucked.

Right after I got outside of I saw someone passing out books in front of LILY – the biology building where I live, sort of extra insulting – which showed me that they were all around campus, not just by the Engineering fountain. After politely receiving a book, I set up camp next to him handing out flyers and stickers to anyone who took a book.

Soon he ran out of books, and I was about to leave when I was approached by two biology professors I know.
Prof 1: Thank you so much for doing this!
Me: Oh, no problem.
Prof 2: Can we give you some money to reimburse you?
Me: Huh? For what?
Prof 1: For printing off all of those books. It must have cost a lot of money.
Me: Ooohhh, the Origin? Nooo, those are creationists handing it out. They added an anti-evolution introduction linking evolutionary biology to Nazism. We’re counter-protesting them.
Prof 1: I knew something smelled fishy!! Now I’ll definitely have to go read it, hahaha!

After that I ran to the Engineering fountain and found three different people widely spaces out and passing out books. A friend of mine tackled two of them who were closer together, and I focused on one (after getting another book, gotta catch ’em all!). Very quickly he figured out what I was doing, and probably wasn’t too happy. I felt a bit bad since he was apparently a high school student roped into this, while everyone else were 40 year old white males. But I continued to hand out flyers and stickers, and more non-theists came to join me and take photos.

Lurk lurk lurk.

One of our members started talking to the people handing out books and asked if they had permission to be here. They skirted around the issue and just said they were with Living Waters Ministries. Purdue’s policy states that you can’t hand out anything on campus unless you’re specifically sponsored by a student group and a member of that organization is there with you – which was clearly not happening. However, we didn’t try to get them kicked off since 1) they were almost done passing out things anyway and 2) if they want to spread their stupidity, go ahead. We’ll just show how they’re wrong.
I then explained to this guy what the book was all about, and he heartily laughed.

Soon they were out of books, and congregated around where I was passing out flyers…and then they tried to debate me. They asked me about proof for evolution, and I started rattling of patterns in DNA, transitional fossils – but then I made the mistake of saying I was studying evolutionary biology. Immediately after that, they changed the topic to the Bible and how awesome it is because they knew they had no chance in debating me in biology.

I’ve stated this before, but I reeeaaallly hate debating people, especially about the Bible. One, I’m not good at thinking on my feet – I like having a keyboard and three seconds of thought. Two, I’m not a Bible scholar, so I especially hate Biblical debates. And three, I don’t freaking care. Their reasoning is so circular that it’s maddening, and I hate repeating the same arguments over and over again knowing that it is completely pointless and that I’m not going to change anyone’s minds. Thankfully Bryan (the guy I’m dating) appeared, and he was a great help since he’s currently reading the Bible and commenting on it daily over at his own blog. Still, after going through Pascal’s wager, the inerrancy of the Bible, the circular logic of God’s word making the Bible true, the “faith” of science, the God of the Gaps, God being infinite but the beginning of the universe needing a cause, atheists not trying to look for God, and morality as proof of God, I kind of wanted to die a little. Or punch babies, but that probably wouldn’t have reflected very well on me.

Eventually I had to escape because I was planning to meet someone for lunch. I later found out they were passing out the books not just in front of LILY and the Engineering fountain, but in front of the Stewart Center Wetheril, Ford dining court, Armstrong…and who knows where else. Unfortunately, we only reached a small group of people who received books since we didn’t exactly know what was going on, but something is better than nothing. We’ve alerted all the local media, so hopefully someone will pick up on it.

But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. The most common responses I saw from people who took the book were, “Awesome, I’ve always wanted a copy!” The most common response from people rejecting the book were, “Ugh, no, I don’t believe in evolution.” You know what that means?

The only people who took Ray Comfort’s bastardized Origin were people who already accept evolution and are most likely to see through his deceitful bullshit. Them, and atheists who were gobbling them up like collector’s items. I got two, and other non-theist members were racing to grab one. I know when I’m teaching evolutionary biology at a university many years from now, I’ll be happy to wave this in front of my class and talk about the scary past where evolution actually had silly people fighting against it. At least, hopefully I’ll be able to say that.

These are going on the book shelf next to the Professor and the Dominatrix and Ken Ham’s Evolution: The Lie.

PZ Myers Speaks at Purdue: “A Few Things I’ve Learned from Creationists”

Yesterday night PZ Myers, who I’m sure you all know blogs over at Pharyngula, was nice enough to give a lecture at Purdue University. I found out through an ecology listserv that he would be speaking at an evo-devo meeting at Indiana University in Bloomington this weekend, and he was willing to fly in a day early to stop by West Lafayette first. We were all incredibly excited, and the atheists at IU were incredibly jealous.

Part of my duty at the President of the Society of Non-Theists was to safely retrieve PZ from the Indianapolis airport. Usually this would be a simple task – I’ve driven there a couple of times before and it’s about an hour and twenty away. The caveat was that PZ’s flight was supposed to arrive at 4pm, his talk started at 6pm, and flights are pretty much always late.

It seems the Flying Spaghetti Monster was not watching over us, because I soon got a phone call from PZ saying his flight was running a half hour late. No problem, plenty of time, I thought. I got to the airport and read American Gods in the parking lot for a while to waste time. But pretty soon it was getting later and later, and we both started to freak out on twitter. I unfortunately didn’t have internet access, so I had no clue what was going on (though it was apparently fairly amusing to our mutual followers).

I finally got a call at 4:50 that he had arrived, and we zoomed off toward West Lafayette, me trying to drive as quickly as possible without killing two atheist bloggers in one blow. I called my officers because I knew we’d be late, and that they should entertain the audience to prevent a riot – PZ suggested balloon animals, I suggested interpretive dance. We ended up being about 15 minutes late, but my awesome officers held down the fort by playing Mr. Diety videos (PZ: I have to follow Mr. Diety?! Oh no!). PZ then gave a great talk, “A Few Things I’ve Learned from Creationists” – which can pretty much be summed up by this photo:Thankfully PZ gave us permission to videotape it, so you can watch it yourself! (EDIT: So…apparently people think the sound quality sucks, but I think it sounds fine. Either my computer is awesome, or I’m just not that picky. Regardless, if you think it’s crappy, feel free to donate a high quality video camera to the Society of Non-Theists. EDIT 2: Thanks for all of the audio recording tips. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, we didn’t exactly know what we’re doing, and I feel really bad that it came out so badly, so I apologize. I’m still completely baffled by the people who say they can’t understand a thing, though. I can tell what he’s saying the entire talk…either listening through headphones is the trick, or I have super human hearing.)

I thought his talk was great, and so did everyone else (though I think some of the biology-heavy bits went over most people’s heads). He drew a big crowd – I wasn’t able to get an exact head count because there were so many people, but I’d estimate a little over 150 individuals were there. Just to give you an idea, here are a couple shots of the majority of the crowd (still leaving out about 30 or 40 people):Surprisingly, there weren’t many creationists there, or they were just keeping quiet. Only one question seemed to have a creationist bent, and no one looked especially furious.
We then relocated to Boiler Market, a local restaurant with great food and cheap pitchers of beer, a winning combination. About 35-40 people showed up, and we had a great time talking with our fellow non-theists. This event definitely brought some new faces out of the woodwork – hopefully they’ll stay, and we’ll see them at future meetings!The best part for me was definitely driving PZ from and to the airport. I was lucky to have him to myself for nearly three hours, and it was great fun talking to him. We talked about biology, grad school, blogging, silly religious topics, the book he’s writing, and all sorts of random things. I had a blast, and I hope he did too!

Replacement penis tissue grown in lab

Whenever I find an article that somehow combines my love for biology with my odd obsession with sex, I feel compelled to share it with all of you (aren’t you lucky?). Apparently researchers have grown replacement erectile tissue for rabbits using their own smooth muscle and endothelial cells. And this all wasn’t just for show, either:

Functional testing of the implanted tissue showed that vessel pressure within the erectile tissue was normal, that blood flowed smoothly through it, that the response to nitric oxide-induced relaxation was normal as early as one month after implantation, and that veins drained normally after erection.

Rabbits screwing like rabbits – a success!

Random thoughts:

Does this mean they removed the erectile tissue from the original rabbits? Poor bunny – but it was in the name of science!

How long until humans utilize this for people with severe erectile disfunction, or those that have been in some sort of accident?

How long until humans abuse this so you see late night infomercials telling you to inject smooth muscle cells into your penis for better erections?

Or most importantly, does this mean I am one step closer to my dream of a detachable penis*?!?!

(Via Boing Boing)

*This is an inside joke many of you are probably very glad that you don’t understand.

Why do we kiss? To build immunity!

Asking why humans kiss may seem like a silly question to an average person – because it feels good, duh. But an evolutionary biologist wonders why it feels good. Why is kissing a nearly universal human behavior? Dr. Colin Hendrie from University of Leeds has a hypothesis:

They say the gesture allows a bug named Cytomegalovirus, which is dangerous in pregnancy, to be passed from man to woman to give her time to build up protection against it.

The bug is found in saliva and normally causes no problems. But it can be extremely dangerous if caught while pregnant and can kill unborn babies or cause birth defects.

Writing in the journal Medical Hypotheses, researcher Dr Colin Hendrie from the University of Leeds, said: “Female inoculation with a specific male’s cytomegalovirus is most efficiently achieved through mouth-to-mouth contact and saliva exchange, particularly where the flow of saliva is from the male to the typically shorter female.”

Alright, this kind of sounds like a bit of armchair speculation (aka BS) to me, but at least it’s properly labeled a hypothesis. Especially the shorter female part – what? I’m pretty sure all saliva doesn’t gush into the females mouth…of course, I’m a tall female, so maybe I have some biased sampling.

It would be interesting to test levels of certain types of infections depending on how many people an individual has kissed, or something like that. That seems like a study worth participating in! Or at the very least, a good pick up line if you’re trying to snog a biologist – “Hey baby, want to increase your immunity to Cytomegalovirus?”

H1N1 and Over Skepticism?

My parents are freaking out about H1N1. Every day the news reports a new case of some young person dying, and they say I better go get the flu shot Or Else. I personally feel that the media is overreacting just to have sensationalist, scary stories that grab people’s attention. Most people who contract H1N1 have mild symptoms, and it hasn’t really killed people any more than the normal flu does…the news just doesn’t report normal flu cases. I understand that not many people have immunity so we’re worried about it’s future effects, but I can’t really force myself to freak out about that right now.

Am I being too skeptical about H1N1? Is this something I should be shaking in my boots about? I have to admit, I fall prey to kind of woo-thinking when it comes to medical things. No, I’m not an anti-vaxer – I trust vaccines and understand their importance. But at the same time, I’ve never had a flu shot and I’ve never gotten seriously ill. The couple of times I’ve had the flu it was just like any other illness – you’re mildly miserable for a couple of days, and then you’re fine. I’m not inclined to change my practices that appear to have worked so far.

My problem is I trust my own immune system and the millions of years of evolution that went into making it a little too much. I don’t take Advil unless my headache is severe, I don’t take Tylenol until my cold becomes unbearable, I avoid superfluous antibiotics, I don’t go to the eye doctor until my vision becomes blurry (actually still have to go, whoops). I know it’s a horrible habit, but I’ve always had a “suck it up unless it’s serious” mentality (or as my dad says for injuries, “Rub some dirt in it”). I feel like I don’t want to build up a tolerance to medication so I can still use it when I really need it.

Am I being completely irrational? You won’t hurt my feelings if you say so – I think we’re all irrational about something. Are there other people out there who think like I do?

Video of my Creation Museum presentation

At long last, here’s the video of my presentation about my trip to the Creation Museum – yes, the one that Ken Ham is already blogging about. I do warn you, it’s long. My talk is about an hour and then there’s about 25 minutes of Q&A. The first couple minutes are a little rocky because I was kind of nervous, but then I get in my groove and I think it’s pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Overall I received very positive feedback, even from some of the theists in the room. As you’ll see if you watch the Q&A, Pastor Brent Aucoin of the Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette attended. He was nice enough to email me and ask if he could come to the event (of course he could!) and disclosed that he helped with the construction of the Creation Museum (and I can only assume he is the supporter that Ken Ham mentions in the post about my talk). He was very civil, and I thank him for that, but he did repeat the same creationist arguments that we hear over and over again. My favorite part is at the 1:09:00 mark. At the very least, watch it for my friend doing a literal *facepalm* twenty seconds later.

Though, the thing that made my talk totally worth it? My former Human Genetics professor (you can see her behind the Pastor) who’s 80-something, super liberal, intelligent, hilariously witty, a fan of Stephen Colbert, a non-theist, and a Holocaust survivor came up and shook my hand for about five minutes straight, saying how we needed more people like me who were brave enough to speak out against this stuff. Coming from someone I respect so much, that meant a lot.

Oh, and the tiny little blip about 50 minutes in isn’t us hiding something, it’s us changing the tape, haha.