The newest edition of the Tangled Bank, Tangled Bank #62—Travel Bingo edition, is now up at the Hairy Museum of Natural History. The editor went all out for this one and made custom icons for each entry: don’t you wish you’d submitted something now?
May I direct your attention this way? If you really want to make a case that GW Bush has been hurting American science, look where it really counts: follow the money. The Scientific Activist has the numbers, and it’s rather dramatic how research funding has dwindled over the years.
This week, my students are thinking about SIDS,
aging,
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard,
oncogenes,
hunger,
individuality,
worm movies,
obesity,
sunscreen, and whether to
divide or die. A fairly typical set of undergraduate concerns, right?
They’ve all also been reading chapters 3 and 4 of Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and their summaries are here: α,
β,
γ,
δ,
ε, and
ζ.
If you missed it, here’s Last week’s digest and a brief explanation of what it’s all about.
I’m a little surprised at the convergence of interest in this news report of a conserved mechanism of organizing the nervous system—I’ve gotten a half-dozen requests to explain what it all means. Is there a rising consciousness about evo-devo issues? What’s caused the sudden focus on this one paper?
It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. It’s an interesting observation about how both arthropods and vertebrates seem to partition regions along the dorso-ventral axis of the nervous system using exactly the same set of molecules, a remarkable degree of similarity that supports the idea of a common origin. Gradients of a molecule called Bmp may be the primitive mechanism for establishing dorso-ventral polarity in animals.
Both Proper Study of Mankind and Thoughts in a Haystack have summaries of this bizarre paper that was published in Science last week, showing a connection between a sense of cleanliness and ethical thought. I guess it’s not surprising that physical sensations impinge on unconscious decisions, but it is interesting in that it hooks into some cultural rituals. I’m not at all clear on what it means, though: should I skip out on taking a shower so I’ll feel more compelled to do good in thought and deed to compensate, or should I do pre-emptive washing so I won’t be hindered from skullduggery?
I’ve been tinkering with a lovely software tool, the 3D Virtual Embryo, which you can down download from ANISEED (Ascidian Network of In Situ Expression and Embryological Data). Yes, you: it’s free, it runs under Java, and you can get the source and versions compiled for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It contains a set of data on ascidian development—cell shapes, gene expression, proteins, etc., all rendered in 3 dimensions and color, and with the user able to interact with the data, spinning it around and highlighting and annotating. It’s beautiful!
Unfortunately, as I was experimenting with it, it locked up on me several times, so be prepared for some rough edges. I’m putting it on my list of optional labs for developmental biology—3-D visualization of morphological and molecular data is one of those tools that are going to be part of the future of embryology, after all—but it isn’t quite reliable enough for general student work. At least not in my hands, anyway. If one of my students were to work through the glitches and figure out how to avoid them, though, it could be a useful adjunct to instruction in chordate development.
If you want to play with it, I’ll give you a quick overview of what’s going on in the dataset. A paper by Munro et al. has used these kinds of data to summarize key events in the transformation of a spherical ball of cells into an elongate, swimming tadpole larva.
The latest issue of Science has a fascinating article on Exotic Earths—it contains the results of simulations of planet formation in systems like those that have been observed with giant planets close to their stars. The nifty observation is that such simulations spawn lots of planets that are in a habitable zone and that are very water-rich.
Dynamics of Cats has a better summary than I could give, and it leads in with this lovely illustration of an hypothetical alien organism on one of these hot water worlds.
The only thing cooler than a cephalopod has to be a tentacled alien cephalopodoid. There’s a high-res version of that image at Dynamics of Cats—and I’ve got a new desktop picture.
Since I saw this meme at Dr Crazy’s place, I thought I’d toss it up here for the commenters to make suggestions.
” If I were designing a Pharyngula Halloween costume, it would consist of…”
It’s actually relevant. I just put out a call at my university for volunteers for Cafe Scientifique, which we will be holding on the last Tuesday of each month…and the October calendar puts that on Halloween. I’m going to be trying to organize a panel session on “Mad Scientists and Monsters” as the topic that day, and ask the panelists to show up in costume. So let’s see what suggestions you might come up with!
I’m having second thoughts about the virtues of proximity to my colleagues of that other discipline after watching this video of people plunking alkali metals into water. Cesium looks…interesting.
Fortunately, my chemistry pals aren’t British, or I might have trouble understanding their comments. What the heck does “the dog’s nuts of the periodic table” mean, anyway?
