I fucking detest IFLScience. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it started as a Facebook page, “I Fucking Love Science,” that later expanded into an independent web site, and it has always specialized in presenting bright colorful images and gushing enthusiastically over them with little understanding and gives the impression of a kid squealing at a cool picture. It’s Facebook science. It’s awful.
That’s a photoshopped image. It’s about a technique for inserting red fluorescent protein in a spider silk gland to make silk that can glow. It has an excitation wavelength of 558nm (so you shine a green light on it) and an emission wavelength of 583 (greenish yellow). You have to use a microscope with excitation and emission filters, and the emission filter has a long tail that lets longer wavelengths through, so what you actually see is a dark background with, in this case, a strand of silk glowing a dark red.
That is obviously not a fluorescent image.
The text is even worse.
One of the reasons why this has never happened before is that spiders themselves are difficult organisms to work with within the laboratory. They are a diverse group, have a complex genome structure, and their cannibalistic nature means that they have to be reared individually, otherwise their cage neighbors would be gobbled up. Despite this, new developments in Parasteatoda tepidariorum have allowed this species to become a research model.
That’s bullshit. I’ve found spiders easier to work with than, for instance, zebrafish, and zebrafish are far easier than mice. The cannibalism is routine. Zebrafish will line up behind a female laying eggs to suck them up as soon as they leave the oviduct; anyone who works with mice know that stressing the mothers can induce them to chow down on their newborn pups. This was written by someone with zero knowledge of actual hands-on biology.
For the record, when a spider egg sac hatches, the spiderlings can scamper around their mama with negligible risk that she’ll eat them. The babies will eat each other, though.
Of course, this summary is made from reading a real paper. It’s a techniques paper, just demonstrating the feasibility of KO (knockout) and KI (knock-in) mutations in Parasteatoda. This is what the real fluorescent images look like:
mRFP fluorescence within the major ampullate gland. a) Red fluorescence could be detected in the offspring of the KO mutant spiders in the major ampullate gland (scale bar: 277 µm). b) The cartoon recreates the major structures of the major ampullate silk gland: tail, sac, and spinning duct. c) The highest fluorescence intensities could be observed between the tail and the sac (scale bar: 140 µm).
That’s not sexy enough for IFLScience, though, so they cobbled up a stock photo of a spider and drew a bright red laser line shining out of its butt. That’s just what IFLScience does.
It’s a shame. They’re summarizing what isn’t a great paper, but a useful one, and making a mess of it.
No, it’s not. It’s a spider with frickin’ laser beams!
OTOH, they might be raising awareness and piquing people’s interest – isn’t that a good thing? If it gets someone who isn’t scientists thinking and deciding that, “okay, that’s cool lets find out more,” Does that make it worthwhile even if IFLS has a very flawed approach getting some things – even many things – wrong?
@2 StevoR
More likely is that it gets the attention of someone who could already tell it was a badly manipulated photo and convinces them that it was made by the researchers in an attempt to fake the data. It destroys credibility by proxy.
@ ^ Talking of people who have destroyed their credibility here, well, that’d be you beholder.the de facto Trump voter & enabler.
StevoR @2:
From what I’ve seen, people are more likely to see something ‘cool’ and just pass it on as fact, rather than try to learn more about it.
When I saw this site appear in results before I had thought there was some FL institutional affiliation. Did not know what the acronym actually meant. UFL sites would probably carry more weight, depending on the department or affiliation, than IFL. Eg- Florida Museum of Natural History
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/
Cyanide & Happiness (via RationalWiki)
PZ:
An interview with the writer
[meta]
What a bullshit claim. Whoever wrote that should have used the personal pronoun, not the second person.
I can damn well love some aspects of something and hate other aspects. Perfectly doable.
BBC does science in their news reporting: Decades-long mystery of ginger cats revealed
@5. Rob Grigjanis : “From what I’ve seen, people are more likely to see something ‘cool’ and just pass it on as fact, rather than try to learn more about it.”
Yeah, I gues sthat’s true of alot of people and I do hate seeing misinfo spread. OTOH, its certainly not true of everyone and if it inspires some people to get intrested and become scientists? Anyhow, I agree it would be vastly better if it was more accurate.
@ 8 Morales
“Literalism is for me, and not for thee!” quoth the troll.
Then you don’t love the “thing”, do you Morales? You love “aspects”.
P.S. I don’t hate you. I hate “aspects”.
@5 Rob Grigjanis
Unfortunately, Peter Sagal of NPR weekly news quiz show Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me is one of those people. He is notoriously gullibe on low quality science articles.