Mary told me I should mention this app, Merlin Bird ID, in case you don’t already have it. You fire it up, click on a button, and it just listens and tells you what birds it hears. I got it a while back because the crazy early morning bird cacophony was bugging me — at least I ought to know who’s shrieking at me early in the morning. I can sit in my office and have it inform me what all the noise is about. This morning it was black-capped chickadees chattering away, blue jays and redwinged blackbirds making a ruckus, and an American robin fussing about. It’s not as bad as it was earlier this summer, because we also have a Cooper’s hawk hanging about in the neighborhood. When it squeaks, it gets quiet, briefly.

Hey, I’ve noticed fewer squirrels making pests of themselves lately. I wonder if I should play recordings of a Cooper’s hawk when they start climbing the bird feeder and scrabbling at my window. (Before you say squirrels are pretty clever and will just learn to ignore the noise, that’s part of the plan: they’ll become more vulnerable to hawks then.)

If you’re more of a visual person, I’ll also recommend Seek from iNaturalist. Put that on your phone, aim it at any organism, and it’ll use the iNaturalist database to let you know the scientific name of what you’re seeing. It’s very handy. It even works on spiders, unlike the Bird ID program.

Two and a half weeks until classes resume, so I’m shifting brain gears to get excited about cell biology again. One of the tools I use to get into the right mindset is reading more biochemistry, and lately that means reading more Nick Lane, who is one of those biochemists who is obsessed with evolution and does a marvelous job of integrating the finicky little details electrons and protons and small molecules and chemistry with the big picture of where all this comes from and how it has shaped life.

I’ve read and reread Lane’s latest book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and recommend it highly. I’ve been struggling with how to explain it’s contents, and it’s not easy — in my class, I spend weeks just gradually building up the background needed to understand the chemistry of the cell, which makes it hard to dump on a blog or a single video as anything but a huge indigestible bolus. And of course it took Lane 400 pages in a densely packed book to cover it all.

I should have known I could just let Nick Lane do all the hard work.

“KREBS CYCLE” is not a phrase that usually gets students excited — I know from experience — but this is juicy stuff. The talk itself covers a huge amount of ground, giving the basics of metabolic cycles and going into the origins of life and the great leap forward provided by mitochondria in endosymbiosis, and the diverse ways various organisms have taken the basic toolkit of the Krebs cycle and used it in novel ways. That’s all good solid science, and I don’t understand how anyone can have any doubts about the general chemistry that leads to life (well, I sorta do — they don’t know any biochemistry. All the YouTube debates about the origin of life are a waste of time, given that creationists are disgracefully ignorant of even the most rudimentary understanding of biochemistry).

Near the end, he gets farther out into weeds with speculation about aging, cancer, and consciousness. It’s interesting and he could very well be right — he’s a smarter man than I am — but the ideas range from very likely (metabolic shifts as agents of senescence and cancer), to potentially revolutionary but still on the fringe (the role of calcium and membrane potentials in Alzheimers), to some that, well, sound like how a biochemist would view neuroscience, for instance claiming that consciousness is a product of the electrical potential across the membrane of a cell, which is rather too reductionist for me.

Watch the video, though. If there are bits that you find heavy slogging, or just too out there to grasp, let me know in the comments. That’s information I can use to present these ideas to a class of second year students. And if you find it really deeply enlightening, go out and read Transformer. It contains a lot of the ideas about cellular metabolism I’d like to get across to my students.

It would make my life a whole lot easier if I could just show a one hour video that explains everything, then say, “Well, that’s all done then. We spend the rest of the semester reading poetry and dancing and playing video games! Yay!” I suspect I should probably fill in a lot more background and talk about the details, but maybe the video would be a nice dessert for the end of the semester. I’ll have done my job if all the students can watch it and say they already knew all that, but that Lane did a fine job of tying it all together.

I was amused by this comic explaining why people actually become scientists, until the last frame.

Did you mention “spiders”? Do you want to know more? Let’s go find some spiders!

Yesterday’s short video clip of maggots has turned out to be surprisingly popular, second only to my most recent video about Jordan Peterson. This means that I seem to have found my YouTube niche: making videos about horrible, repulsive creatures that make viewers want to vomit. I’ve also gotten requests to make more. This was not expected.

Making more Jordan Peterson videos is too much for my stomach, so now I’m thinking about ways to lower a good camera into the slime pit without risking wrecking a good lens. Maybe a cheap old kit lens with some extension tubes? I’m also going to have to puzzle out a way to adapt a tripod to look downward, because I don’t want to do it hand-held for a half hour.

You never know when someone might want some good quality B-roll of maggots, you know!

Many spider papers feature detailed closeups of their genitalia, because genitals are often diagnostic of the species. They’re often weird and twisty and convoluted, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they often focus exclusively on the palps, the male genitalia because they’re entirely external and easy to see and the female side of things get short shrift. It’s the same for humans!

So here you go! If you ever wondered about the internal shape of the vagina, it’s been done.

How strange. It’s roomier than I expected. There’s also a series of photos that show the variations. Neat!

The Carina Nebula.

Not bad, not bad. Could use some space spiders, though.

Here’s that image from the NASA press release yesterday.

That’s spectacular, even as reduced for the blog. You can see the whole full sized image at NASA.

What’s amazing about it is that the gravitational lensing is so obvious that even a biologist can see it. Notice those stretched and curved galaxies that form a kind of whorl around the center of the image? That’s not a camera artifact, it’s caused by a galaxy in the foreground bending light making the 4 billion light-year trek from the source to the telescope. This is beautiful stuff. Phil Plait explains it far better than I can, even if in that article he’s using a blurry image from Hubble. Blurry compared to this one, that is.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn that from the press conference. I picked it up from all the astronomers and physicists talking about it on Twitter. The press conference was incompetence personified.

After 45 minutes of waiting with the most irritating hold music NASA could produce, the screen opened on a group of people with a poorly resolved black square in the background, the image above. You couldn’t see much of anything, because most of the screen space was dedicated to making sure you could see the old people talking about it. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden said some platitudes that mainly amounted to being so proud that the speckled black square in the distance was the product of American ingenuity, while NASA Administrator Bill Nelson talked about how very far away those lights were. It was soul-deadening stuff that told me nothing about what I was looking at. See that short paragraph about lensing that I scribbled out above? Pitiful as it is, that says far more about the image than anything in the press conference.

I watched a little bit of NASA TV before they put me on ear-grating hold, and one thing I learned is that a bunch of engineers, politicians, and administrators are terrible at putting on a show. I’ve seen better production values from amateurs (not me, of course, I suck) putting home-produced videos on YouTube. They also seem to think that crackly fuzzy flattened audio on everything makes them sound authentic.

A suggestion to NASA: next time you advertise a dramatic reveal of some gorgeous discovery, tell all the bureaucrats to stay home. Don’t book any of the politicians, who won’t know what they’re looking at, and will think it’s reasonable to delay the whole event for some other issue of statecraft (they should do that, and shut up about science). Instead, bring on a small team of scientists who will express their blissful joy at what they see, and will help us understand why this is so cool.

That’s Science Communication 101. NASA doesn’t get it. It’s a bit embarrassing how bad they are at it.

I tell my students that they are not allowed to cite Wikipedia in their papers. Sure, you can browse it to get a general idea on a topic, but then you have to do the work of delving into the scientific literature to figure out what’s actually happening. There also doesn’t seem to be much validation of what Wikipedia does cite. The article on non-coding DNA still cites Nessa Carey! I read her book, and my god, it is a muddled mess of badly written pop pseudoscience.

Larry Moran is confident that Wikipedia is a useful resource and that it could be made better, so he waded into the morass and decided to try editing that non-coding DNA article. He’s a more optimistic person than I am. He decided to fix a lot of bad references made by people who don’t have a tenth the expertise on the subject he does…and discovers how they deal with interlopers.

The introduction has been restored to the version that talks about the ENCODE project and references Nessa Carey’s book. I tried to move that paragraph to the section on the ENCODE project and I deleted the reference to Carey’s book on the grounds that it is not scientifically accurate [see Nessa Carey doesn’t understand junk DNA]. The Wikipedia police have restored the original version three times without explaining why they think we should mention the ENCODE results in the introduction to an article on non-coding DNA and without explaining why Nessa Carey’s book needs to be referenced.

Nowadays, the only people I see citing ENCODE are creationists, so I am unimpressed that Wikipedia does not like people who can put the study in context. It seems to be official policy that no experts are allowed to edit bad wikipedia articles — they have a point of view, which is very bad.

Here is an editor, Ramos1990, explaining the rules to him.

There is no way to verify who you are on wikipedia. Many people claim to be famous people here so that is not an argument that is valid or carries any weight on wikipedia. And merely claiming it is not a reason for anyone to believe what you are saying either. On top of that if you really are Larry Moran then there is conflict of interest issues where you cannot push your POV on an article. Especially since there are other viewpoints on the matter, for instance Carey and Pennisi whom you want to get rid of an censor out of the article.

Hmmm. Larry was not claiming that you should believe him because he’s famous; Kim Kardashian is far more famous, but I don’t think she knows much about biochemistry. He’s saying he’s a reputable authority on a narrow topic. What wikipedia is saying is that they won’t do anything to verify a source, and if they did, they’d have to reject him because he has a POV. Which means that wiki editors are all fundamentally anonymous, and they have to pretend they don’t have a POV even when they patently do. It’s a weird situation.

Here, for instance, is the bio for Ramos1990.

The Sciences (esp. Chemistry), Engineering, Mathematics, History of Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Archaeology, Philosophy, Secularism/Religion, Atheism and other related stuff. The world has lots of good stuff to study.

That is not a catalog of their expertise. That’s a list of ‘stuff’ that interests them. They could be a bumbling dilettante or a brilliant polymath, and there’s no way to tell. But, apparently, all that matters is that they have no POV and can put up the illusion of impartiality, even on subjects where expertise is needed to sort out the complexities and make a reasonable assessment. The epistemology of Wikipedia is a very strange thing in which it is official policy that you are not allowed to know how anyone knows what they claim to know.

This comment on Larry’s site is worth noting:

The “corrections” at Wikipedia and the statement by the head of the NIHGR are certainly depressing. The both reflect the consensus among genomicists and molecular biologists. That in turn is based on their very limited grasp of molecular evolution. On the other side is the near-unanimous consensus among molecular evolutionists that there is lots of junk DNA. That is based on their actually understanding the processes of inserting junk and removing it. Unfortunately there are many more genomicists and molecular biologists, so the vote is still heavily against junk DNA. Wikipedia has the strength and the limitation that it is a dominant-consensus view, and we can see that in a case like this it serves to reinforce a wrong dominant consensus. Perhaps someday soon there will be a page on “Junk DNA controversy” in which the pro-junk side will get to edit the description of what we say. When the 2012 ENCODE disaster occurred, I predicted gloomily that it would take the field 10 years to get back to where it was. Those 10 years are nearly done, and things still look bad. I have more recently started telling people that it will take more like 20 years. Actually, 30 might be more like it.

Unfortunately, that was said by Joe Felsenstein, a world-renowned authority on molecular evolution, so it’s invalid in Wikipedia’s eyes.

I’ll be continuing to tell my students that Wikipedia is untrustworthy, and that they shouldn’t cite it, ever.