Cats, candy, and evolution

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Here’s a small taste of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a sweet story about a poor boy and his visit to an amazing candy factory…you’ve probably heard of it, since the new movie is getting a lot of press.

Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvelous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it. Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble—just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his ten-cent bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month.i-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gif

That’s how it is published, at any rate. What if it read something like this?

Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvelg ynfg, jura ur pbhyq fgnaq vg ab ybatri-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gif, ur jbhyq i-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gifrry onpx n gval ovg bs gur cncre jenccvat ng bar pbeare gb rkcbfr n gval ovg bs pubpbyngr, naq gura ur jbhyq gnxr n gval avooyr-whfg rabhtu gb nyybj gur ybiryl fjrrg gnfgr gb fcernq bhg fybjyl bire uvf gbathr. Gi-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gifr arkg qnl, ur i-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gifbhyq gnxr nabgure gval avooyr, naq fb ba, naq fb ba. Naq va guvf jnl, Puneyvr ji-a420ae8c62e074dde7e2fce0652d306e-tinystop.gifhyq znxr uvf gra-prag one bs oveguqnl pubpbyngr ynfg uvz sbe zber guna n zbagu.

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Hox cluster disintegration

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Hox genes are metazoan pattern forming genes—genes that are universally associated with defining the identities of regions of the body. There are multiple Hox genes present, and one of their unusual properties is that they are clustered and expressed colinearly. That is, they are found in ordered groups on the chromosome, and that the gene on one end is typically turned on first and expressed at the head end of the embryo, the next gene in order is turned on slightly later and expressed further back, and so on in sequence. That the tidy sequential order on the chromosome is associated with an equally tidy spatial and temporal pattern of expression in the body has always been one of the more fascinating aspects of these genes, and they are one of the few cases where we see an echo of phenotypic form comprehensibly laid out in the DNA.

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How to dismantle a body

Don’t be too grossed out, but the University of Wisconsin Madison has put a whole series of high-quality videos of human dissection online. It’s extremely cool, but not for the squeamish—there’s more than just the sight of a cadaver getting hacked up, and the sound of a saw on bone or a chisel being used to peel up the cranium are, ummm, memorable. At least you’re spared the odor and the textures.

I’d almost forgotten how muscular gross anatomy is—it takes some heft and brute force to take apart a body.

(via Mind Hacks)

Palaeos reborn!

First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you’ve got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be NY

Wheee, I’m going to zip into New York again next week. I’m flying in on Monday to talk at the Inspiration Festival on Tuesday. I’m on the Seed slate with:

Chris Mooney – Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine
Lisa Randall – Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Natalie Jeremijenko – Design Engineer / Technoartist, Yale University
PZ Myers – Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota
Randy Olson – Lecturer
Jonah Lehrer – Editor-at-Large, Seed magazine
Pardis Sabeti – Researcher, Broad Institute / Lead Singer, Thousand Days

And here’s my job, in one very short talk:

From Galileo to da Vinci, and, from Einstein to Lichtenstein, such paradoxical contemporaries of their respective ages defy opposition in principal by the very existence of their creative nature. When modern Science and Culture collide, what can we learn about ourselves and the way we see the world? A look at 10 trends set to reveal the future of the future.

I’ll have to leave before the session is over to catch my flight home, but it looks like a good line-up and I wish I could hear it all. I’ll be talking about developmental biology and what it says about us, and I don’t think any of the others will be competing with me on that subject, at least.

Physics made entertaining

Let’s say you don’t want to actually read James Kakalios’s Physics of Superheroes(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—it doesn’t have enough pictures, and the text isn’t in word balloons, or maybe the word “physics” causes an acute case of the heebie-jeebies—well, now you’re in luck. Some of his lectures are on the web via the magic of YouTube, so now you can find out about the Death of Gwen Stacy, or what’s up with Electro & Magneto, or what silly bloopers were made by Superman or The Atom.

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What works, what doesn’t: the futility of appeasing creationists

An old pal of mine, the splendiferously morphogenetical Don Kane, has brought to my attention a curious juxtaposition. It’s two articles from the old, old days, both published in Nature in 1981, both relevant to my current interests, but each reflecting different outcomes. One is on zebrafish, the other on creationism.

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Luskin’s ludicrous genetics

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I mentioned before that IDEA clubs insist that expertise is optional; well, it’s clear that that is definitely true. Casey Luskin, the IDEA club coordinator and president, has written an utterly awful article “rebutting” part of Ken Miller’s testimony in the Dover trial. It is embarrassingly bad, a piece of dreck written by a lawyer that demonstrates that he knows nothing at all about genetics, evolution, biology, or basic logic. I’ll explain a few of his misconceptions about genetics, errors in the reproductive consequences of individuals with Robertsonian fusions, and how he has completely misrepresented the significance of the ape:human chromosome comparisons.

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Carnivalia, and an open thread

We just had one of these!

Well, just to flesh it out a little more with some random links, here are some photos. I was told the second one made someone think of me (warning: body modification!). And, jebus help me, for some reason I thought this photo was very sexy. Or appetizing. I don’t know, something in the midbrain flickered.

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Oh, and several of us sciencebloggers were interviewed for an article by Eva Amsen on “Who benefits from science blogging?” It doesn’t mention the benefit of people sending you pictures that tickle the cingulate.