Pie in the sky between your thighs

Ladies, there are people who want your menstrual blood. It contains stromal cells, which are a multipotent adult-stem-cell-like population that might be a useful source of fairly plastic, proliferative cells. This distant possibility has prompted one company, C’Elle, to offer to collect, test, purify, and store these cells for you. As they say, these cells “may potentially provide phenomenal life saving treatments and customized therapies in the future“…so you should stash away a supply in cryogenic storage, just in case someone comes up with a use.

There is some serious science here, and Attila Csordas summarizes some of the interesting properties of these cells, but the approach is just weird. This can’t be called fraud — throughout their web site, they plainly admit that there is no practical, applied use for these cells right now, so they aren’t attempting to mislead at all — but they also can’t give a good pragmatic reason why anyone should pay to have their menstrual blood stored away.

That’s right, pay. Fees range from $499 for a single collection, to $1599 for a quarterly collection, with an additional yearly fee of $99-$199 for cryostorage. Yow. And you’ve just been throwing those tampons and pads away, not realizing that that is sludgy red treasure between your legs, and that you ought to be putting it on a high-tech pedestal and preserving it for a lifetime.

We guys are feeling left out, I assure you. I’m hoping we find a multipotent adult stem cell type in mucosal epithelia, so that we too can pay a premium price to honor the potential in our mucky secretions. If there isn’t a company doing this yet, I should start one.

I think I’ll call it “B’ooger™” (pronounced “boo-zhay”, of course).

Later, we may expand to serve a discriminating and exclusively male clientele with “Smeg’ma” (“smay-mwah”). There’s gold in them there slimes!

Once more into the Haeckelian morass; or, Peter Moore is an illiterate fool

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we’ve got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.

I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make demands) will result in his immediate banning.

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Animal research: indispensable

The scienceblogs team seems to be forming a united front on at least one specific issue: in support of research in the face of animal rights extremists. This is prompted by the case of a researcher in drug addiction whose home was vandalized by domestic terrorists, and who has written an op-ed defending the use of animals in research.

I said at length what I think about animal research several years ago, in our biology discipline’s policy statement on dissection. It’s pretty darned simple: we can’t figure out how something we don’t understand works without studying the subject. We can’t learn more about cells without studying cells; we can’t learn more about animals without studying animals; software simulations and thought experiments do not substitute.

Yicaris dianensis

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Early Cambrian shrimp! I just had to share this pretty little fellow, a newly described eucrustacean from the lower Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. It’s small — the larva here is about 1.8mm long, and the adults are thought to have been 3mm long — but it was probably numerous, and I like to imagine clouds of these small arthropods swarming in ancient seas.

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The head limbs are drawn in median view and the trunk limbs in lateral view.

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Student Post: More on Gender Dominance–An Evolutionary Psychological Approach

I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo.

In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class…

Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother’s rank and a mother is willing to engage in physical combat or establish social coalitions designed to elevate their offspring in rank. Because rank determined ability to procure resources, survive and reproduce, and females had high parental investment, there was sufficient evolutionary pressure for females to evolve the capacity to establish dominance even over males on their offsprings’ behalf.

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Evo-devo of mammalian molars

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

I’ve written a long introduction to the work I’m about to describe, but here’s the short summary: the parts of organisms are interlinked by what has historically been called laws of correlation, which are basically sets of rules that define the relationship between different characters. An individual attribute is not independent of all others: vary one feature, and as Darwin said, “other modifications, often of the most unexpected nature, will ensue”.

Now here’s a beautiful example: the regulation of the growth of mammalian molars. Teeth have long been a useful tool in systematics—especially in mammals, they are diverse, they have important functional roles, and they preserve well. They also show distinct morphological patterns, with incisors, canines, premolars, and molars arranged along the jaw, and species-specific variations within each of those tooth types. Here, for example, is the lower jaw of a fox. Look at the different kinds of teeth, and in particular, look at the differences within just the molars.

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This example — the lower teeth of a grey fox — shows the three-molar dental phenotype typical of placentals.

Note that in this animal, there are three molars (the usual number for most mammals, although there are exceptions), and that the frontmost molar, M1, is the largest, M2 is the second largest, and M3, the backmost molar, is the smallest. This won’t always be the case! Some mammals have a larger M3, and others may have three molars of roughly equal size. What rules regulate the relative size of the various molars, and are there any consistent rules that operate across different species?

To answer those questions, we need to look at how the molars develop, which is exactly what Kavanagh et al. have done.

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