WARNING. What follows is a a bit of a rant. Worse, it’s an undergraduate rant. If awkward phrases, fallacious arguments and poor grammar offends you, I would suggest skipping this post.

It could be that I’m seeing the world through cobalt-colored glasses– it is winter in MN and very cold and dark– and it is highly probable that the onslaught of medical school rejection letters biases me, but I think today was the most depressing day of school I’ve had in recent history.

It started with neurobiology (Ok…this one’s a bit of a stretch) when we learned about the development of nervous tissue and how progenitor cells literally compete via lateral inhibition with each other to see who will become what. Neuroectoderm cells that “lose” become dispensable support cells while the ones that “win” are lavished with ‘cytoplasmic gifts’ (PZ’s words) and differentiate into a neuroblasts. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, our very cells viciously jockey to establish hierarchies!?” I mean… who wants to be the little peon cell? They lied to us in kindergarden…

Next came ecology. This was a killer. The professor even had a disclaimer before lecture warning us that what would ensue would be upleasant. Yep. It was the global warming lecture. I had seen the “hockey stick” graphs before and the receding glacier pictures and yes, they’re all very disturbing, but what really got me was a picture of the arctic circle in the summer. There appeared to be about half of the ice cover that usually persisted pre-industrial revolution.

Things got worse in ecology lab. We had to calculate our carbon footprint. Apparently I use about 24 acres to support my lifestyle. It would take 4 earths for everyone to live like me (and I didn’t even count this l’il methane producer):

…or these guys…

The final blow was a film screening for my class on human aggression. The movie? Natural Born Killers. It was a double whammy. Even if the self-destructing, unsavory, hopeless nature of the characters doesn’t get to you than the indictment of society’s commodification of violence certainly does.

Man. Days like today almost make me yearn for the good ol’ days when I had my class on” critical pedagogy” with excerpts from Paulo Freire on the necrophilic and dehumanizing nature of oppression.

I… think I need to go hold one of the bunnies…

We can all breathe a sigh of relief. The gunman who killed four people at evangelical churces in Colorado was not a buddhist atheist Jew evilutionist. He was a deranged disgruntled former member.

The gunman believed to have killed four people at a megachurch and a missionary training school had been thrown out of the school about three years ago and had been sending hate mail to the program, police said in court papers Monday.

The gunman was identified as Matthew Murray, 24, who was home-schooled by his family and raised in what a friend said was a deeply religious Christian household. Murray’s father is a neurologist and a prominent multiple-sclerosis researcher.

I suppose they could blame it all on the fact his father was a scientist, still.

Two serious shooting incidents this weekend — one at Ted Haggard’s old church in Colorado Springs, another in Arvada, Colorado — is awfully troubling. No word on motives yet, but I hope the crazies aren’t erupting into random violence against each other.

(I’m getting a lot of email about this, but really, I don’t know anything more than anyone else right now.)

Arthur C. Clarke turns 90 next week — so go leave him a birthday greeting.

My fish have (theoretically) been sleep deprived for three days. I can’t tell much of a difference. If anything they seem more active than the other fish, but they do have to constantly outswim a rotating ruler and their tank is pretty small. There is also a bright lamp on a timer that turns on and off every 30 minutes, so even if I can’t prevent sleep I know they’re regularly disturbed.

This is what the set up looks like:

I’m testing the sleepless group against control fish in a behavioral assay. I wanted to use a T-maze adopted from Mark Antimony’s experiment but the initial results were dismal. It took some fish over ten minutes to find the food reward (during which I once left to find a food reward of my own. Sweet sweet NutterButters…).

So… I modified the test. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that now I’m prodding the fish with a pen and timing how long it takes them to “escape” (go to a protected side of the tank). The results are definitely cleaner than the ones from the maze, but I still don’t think I’ll be able to describe a difference between the groups. What is cool is to see the way fish learn. Individuals generally get faster each trail; I think that trend should be significant.

The holiday season is upon us, and our source of cocoa is going on strike. I hope the US Strategic Chocolate Reserve is well stocked, or Santa will go into withdrawal this Christmas eve.

(We ‘podmas celebrants have no worries, at least, unless the herring supplies are depleted.)

Here’s a horrible story: a man who bears a grossly disfiguring tumor on his face, one that threatens his life and has afflicted him since adolescence, is only now considering surgery to correct the problem.

Why not before? Because it might require (and now definitely would require) blood transfusions. And he’s a Jehovah’s Witness. You have to wonder what wretched, evil excuse for a human being among his church associates has been telling him that he shouldn’t get this life-saving surgery because God wouldn’t like it.

This week is the second to last week of the semester before finals and everything is coming down to the wire, including my neurobio lab project. PZ was so kind as to come in and help me out this past Sunday morning; the morning after the blizzard had quieted leaving everything covered in various quantities of snow. In going over my methods we found that I wasn’t adding a drop or two of water on top of the auger layer with the immobilized zebrafish. The reason this is important is that so after the spinal cord severing is accomplished, the auger layer is separated allowing water to surround the fish immediately and preventing air exposure. The fish can then be pipetted up and put into a dish of water for observations. PZ also suggested using water with an increased concentration of calcium (14g/100mL) to facilitate better fish recovery. The fish should not be left however in the calcium water for an extended period of time because it can adversely affect development.

Repeating my methods and taking into practice the slight changes that PZ recommended, I found that after one day, four of eleven fish were still alive! After slicing up more than sixty fish with a 100% mortality rate after one day and wondering what on earth I could have been doing wrong, I was ecstatic. It’s unfortunate that this success has come so late in the game and the writeup for this project won’t show much for results other than how not to butcher zebrafish. I have learned quite a bit though about the interesting techniques I’ve been using and also about the differences in zebrafish at various stages of development. So with that, back to the lab I go to continue working with zebrafish.

As I’ve mentioned before, my class has been reading Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, which is in large part an account of the amazing work Seymour Benzer accomplished over the course of his long career. Now I’ve got sad news to break to the students tomorrow: Seymour Benzer has died at the age of 86, after a long and exemplary career as a “scientist’s scientist”.

The seed of this mornings discussion in neurobiology was “Time, Love, Memory” by Jonathan Wiener. As has been the norm in past weeks we met in the on campus cafe bringing along with us four insightful questions each to keep the discussion rolling along throughout the hour. Wiener describes later in his book (p192) the three necessary components of living clocks. Living clocks are the basis of circadian rhythms and must have an input pathway so that the clock can be reset by the sunrise and sunset. A good example of why this is important is that humans actually have a twenty-five hour clock that resets itself everyday to correlate to the actual day length of twenty-four hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds for any physicists reading this). People who are blind or people who are not exposed to the sun at all will exhibit a twenty-five hour clock, out of synchronization with the earth’s rotation.

So my question was about animals that live near the poles. How do polar bears or lynxes reset their clocks in the arctic summer when the sun doesn’t set? Some thoughts were that perhaps the living clocks are reset by magnetism but quickly realized that there is no shift of magnetism that corresponds to the length of a day. Another thought was that if it’s always light out, does it matter when the polar bear sleeps? The polar bear could have a period of activity, followed by a period of decreasing activity, and then rest and sleep. Lynxes often hunt at night and rest during the day but if it’s always light out does their clock remain synchronized with the earth’s rotation? PZ mentioned there isn’t much research pertaining to this but If anyone knows of any interesting papers that would enlighten this topic post them up.

References: Jonathan Wiener. “Time, Love, Memory.” Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc. New York. 1999.