What do scientists do over summer break?

Well, today Mary and I scrubbed up the genetics lab all morning, I cleaned out a lot of fly bottles and emptied the incubator, and now those bottles are sitting in the autoclave getting a super-sauna. The lab is now mostly sparkling clean and ready for the next class in the Fall!

This is what I get paid to do, and what my degree qualified me for. Mary, unfortunately, doesn’t get paid, although she too has an advanced degree, and helped out so I wouldn’t have to spend all day in the nasty drudgery. So many dead flies and pupae!

This is exactly what it looked like, after we got done cleaning it.

No, I’m not done!

I got out of the house to celebrate the end of the semester yesterday, but it was slightly premature. Next week is finals week. I have to slap myself to attention and buckle down and write the genetics final and post it on Canvas.

It shouldn’t be too bad. I’m planning to take full advantage of the Canvas autograder, so I mainly have to invest time this morning in setting up the problems with discrete answers and plugging the answer key into the software, and then grading next week will mainly involve updating the grade sheet.

I slept in until 7am this morning! The stress is fading already!

Kinda sorta almost done with classes

The end is in sight! Then…SPIDERS!

This week is in a curious kind of limbo. It’s the end of the semester, which means the students have lost focus, and I’ve helped them do that. Here’s my general grading strategy:

  • The final exam is cumulative and optional. Whatever score they get on the final replaces the lowest midterm exam score. The point of that is to give students an escape hatch if they unavoidably missed or screwed up on one of the exams.
  • Their final lab report is due today, but lab scores are independent of exam scores, and the grade they get on it won’t influence their final exam grade.
  • They had their last midterm last Friday. I’ve already graded it and gotten it back to them.
  • They are all smart upper-level students. They have all their exam and homework and lab scores, less this one lab report, and I’ve told them exactly how to estimate their final grade.

They’ve got all the information in hand right now to know whether they need to show up for class, and whether anything they learn will be at all helpful in improving their grade. I also announced that Wednesday will be just for administrative sorts of things — final chance to scavenge a few points by arguing with me, or just to discuss whatever they’re curious about in genetics.

So less than a quarter of the class showed up today, I expect it’ll be even less on Wednesday. I’m hoping it’s a calming, quiet part of the term that they can use to study hard for their other classes.

I’m not quite through myself, though. A pile of lab reports will be thrown over the virtual transom at midnight tonight, and I have to get them all graded by Wednesday morning. Then I have to write the final exam, which I expect only a quarter of the class (again) will take, and which will be due on Thursday the 12th, prompting a final, brief flurry of grading, and that’s it. Really, I’ll be officially done next week, but it’s mainly just coasting along for me. Then SUMMER BREAK.

I have plans for that, too. I’m going to be doing some regular spidering stuff, and I have also vowed to strip all the wallpaper from our dining room and master bedroom and repaint by 31 May. It helps to give myself deadlines for the mundane boring jobs.

Vulcanized fossil spiders

And they fluoresce, too!

Part and counterpart of two fossil spiders shown in plain light and under UV illumination.

These are part of a well-known invertebrate fossil bed, 22.5 million years old, in France. It contains lots of well preserved insects and spiders, and one question is…why? What makes this particular place so good at preserving these delicate specimens?

The fluorescence was a clue. They dug into the chemistry of the fossils, and figured out that the glow was produced by the sulfurization of chitin, that as the dead spiders sank in the diatom-rich waters of an ancient pond, the sulfur in the diatoms reacted with the chitin carbohydrate to produce a tough carbon polymer, inedible to the microbes, that could last for millions of years.

Cartoon shows the entire proposed pathway: spider becomes entrained in planktonic diatom mat. Pieces of the diatom mat, both with and without spiders entrained within fall to the sediment floor against a background sedimentation of other diatoms and algae (gray dots). With time, these sediments become compressed and preserved into the rock record. a Chemical composition of chitin. Two chains of chitin are illustrated, organized in anti-parallel. Gray boxes indicate the carbonyl functionalities on the chitin. b Sulfonate-containing molecule, which are common in diatom EPS, can undergo microbial sulfate reduction (MSR), leading to the production of sulfide. c Chitin molecule after sulfurization. C–S bonds could potentially replace the carbonyl functionalities, and S–S bridges could form across the chitin chains. d Idealized molecule representing a chitin polymer after further diagenetic alteration, which could result in the formation of aromatized carbon.

I thought that was kind of neat. It’s also a reminder to biology students that you never know where that organic chemistry we make you take might be useful.

Prairie dogs speak

When my granddaughter lived in Colorado, there was a sprawling prairie dog colony just a few blocks away, and we’d take walks there. The prairie dogs were very attentive, and would react with a chorus of continuous yips and squeaks as we strolled through their neighborhood. Little did we know, they were having a conversation about us.

Con Slobodchikoff, PhD, has been studying prairie dogs for over 30 years. His studies have focused primarily on Gunnison’s prairie dogs, whose natural habitat is just outside the doors of Northern Arizona University, where Slobodchikoff is a professor emeritus.

After first observing how a colony of prairie dogs reacted to the presence of predators, he discovered that they didn’t just give the same alarm call each time – it sounded different depending on what type of predator the prairie dogs saw.

But that wasn’t the full extent of the calls’ complexity. Slobodchikoff also noticed that even though the calls signaling a certain type of predator would follow a distinct pattern, they contained small nuances that varied with each individual predator of that type.

For instance, the prairie dogs had a similar call for all coyotes, but there were subtle differences for each different coyote. Based on this observation, Slobodchikoff had a sudden insight: “What if they’re describing the physical features of each predator?”

A bit of experimentation soon proved his suspicions. After putting dogs, humans, and simple shape cutouts of all different forms, sizes, and colors within sight of the prairie dogs, analysis of the prairie dog calls revealed that the unassuming squeaks of alarm were rich with information.

“They’re able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun… In one 10th of a second, they say ‘Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.’”

I don’t want to know what those dogs were saying about me, but they better have been making flattering comments about Iliana. “Small cute human toddler, awwwww.”

My terrible awful horrible no good day

I give up. I’m going home early.

To start the day, we had more soggy wet snow come down overnight. Come on, Nature, I want my spiders to emerge!

I went to teach my class. This involves setting up a little camera to record the lecture for the students who are taking it asynchronously, and then connecting my computer to the video projector, two routine tasks that take only a few minutes.

I couldn’t get the camera to work. It crashed, and crashed hard, and wouldn’t restart. Yikes. I’ve got the in-person students waiting! So I charged ahead sans camera, figuring this means I just have to record a voice-over at home. More work, but I can do it.

Then the evil idiot classroom projection system gets flaky on me. I log in to the class software, which involves firing up the projector and entering a code into the software on my laptop, which then displays my video. Worked fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. I do so, works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code.

You get the idea. I was getting nowhere. I finally told the students this wasn’t going to work, go home and we’ll try again Monday. There was much weeping and wailing and tearful moans about really, really wanting to learn about maternal effect inheritance and imprinting today, but I was strong…no, I’m lying. It was all laughter and smiles. I should do this every day.

Except we’re just starting to get into the really fun stuff in genetics! I need to get past this so I can talk about developmental genetics! And signaling! And cancer genetics! Maybe a little bioethics, too!

Oh well. I’m gonna go home and dismantle a camera. Or maybe swap in the backup camera I’ve got. And finish grading. It’s not like canceling class means I get any free time.

How about if we just call it “The Homophobic Space Telescope”?

I learned three disappointing things about NASA today. There’s been an ongoing kerfuffle over the name of the James Webb Space Telescope, because Webb presided over a remarkably homophobic culture at the agency. Now internal documents about the debate over naming it have been revealed.

Internal NASA documents obtained by Nature reveal fresh details about the agency’s investigation last year into whether to rename its flagship James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A group of astronomers had led a community petition to change the name, alleging that the telescope’s namesake, former NASA chief James Webb, had been complicit in the persecution and firing of gay and lesbian federal employees during his career in the US government in the 1950s and 1960s.

I already knew all that. Those aren’t the new disappointments.

One was that this problem goes all the way back to 1969, when a judge ruled on a firing case.

Although the documents reveal that key decisions were made in meetings and not over e-mail, they still show agency officials wrestling with how to investigate the allegations and control public messaging over the controversy. As early as April 2021, an external researcher flagged wording from the 1969 court ruling to NASA officials. It came in the case of Clifford Norton, who had appealed against being fired from NASA for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct”. In the decision, the chief judge wrote that the person who had fired Norton had said that he was a good employee and asked whether there was a way to keep him on. Whomever he consulted in the personnel office told him that it was a “custom within the agency” to fire people for “homosexual conduct”.

“I think you will find this paragraph to be troubling,” wrote the external researcher to Eric Smith, the JWST’s programme scientist at NASA in Washington DC. “‘A custom within the agency’ sounds pretty bad.”

Troubling? You think? The NASA personnel office considered it customary to fire anyone exposed as gay?

That’s old news, you say. What isn’t old is how the modern agency carried out their investigation.

The second disappointment is that they contacted 10 straight astronomers who said discrimination against gay people wasn’t a problem, and that was part of their ultimate decision to bury the controversy. Does anyone else see a problem with their methodology?

And then the third surprise.

The revelations about NASA’s decision regarding the JWST come at a time of increasing concern over the way the agency handles issues of identity. Earlier this month, employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were told that they would no longer be able to include pronouns, such as she/her or they/them, in their display names in agency computer systems. After the move was discussed on Reddit and the astronomy community reacted negatively on other social platforms, NASA put out a statement that employees could continue to include pronouns in their e-mail signature blocks.

How authoritarian of them. So this month the administrators were openly transphobic, while pretending that oh no, they were never ever homophobic? I don’t think I believe them, especially since they tried to hide their findings.