Olfactory nerves (student post)

Today in class we learned about the functioning of olfactory nerves. It was really quite interesting, especially to find out how the olfactory system is organized. Let’s begin in the nasal cavity. Here, present in the mucus layer, are projections of the olfactory receptor cells. Each receptor cell is only capable of binding to one specific type of odorant molecule. These receptor cells travel through the porous bone separating the skull from the nasal cavity, and feed into a specific glomerulus. Glomeruli are located in the olfactory bulb, and have multiple receptors feeding into them. However, each glomerulus receives input from only one receptor type. In the glomerulus, the receptor neurons make excitatory connections with other cells, whose own axons project into the olfactory cortex in the brain. What is cool here is that there are about 1000 different types of olfactory receptor neurons, which each have their own proteins. This means that there are most likely 1000-2000 genes encoding for olfaction. It has been shown that this is not a combinatorial system like that developed for immunity.

Another cool thing I learned was that every time someone blows their nose, they are losing part of their brain. Seriously though, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. What is really happening is that you are losing the olfactory receptor cells that protrude out into the mucus layer inside the nasal cavity. The neat thing is that these cells are able to regenerate, which is unusual for other human neural cells. I was wondering, if perhaps, due to the organization of the olfactory nerves, regeneration is able to happen because of the interaction between the olfactory receptor neurons and the glomeruli. Perhaps the protruding parts of the cells are able to be regenerated because they are actually only part of the cell, not the entire cell. If this is true, then if the glomerulus were destroyed, would that permanently destroy the sense of smell? Or would the glomerulus be capable of regeneration, like the olfactory receptor cells that feed into it?

Discovery Institute blockbuster evidence in the Gonzalez tenure case!

The DI had their press conference. They unveiled their killer evidence, emails from his university colleagues obtained via a Freedom Of Information Act request. They revealed — oh, horrors! oh, tea and crumpets! oh, I feel a swoon coming on! — that his colleagues had discussed Gonzalez’s involvement with intelligent design in a negative way before the tenure decision was made.

[Read more…]

Point and laugh

We live in a world of lunatics. You want a baby? Then go sit in a chair owned by Saint Mary Frances of the Five Wounds. She was an 18th century weirdo who threw her life away in pointless self-flagellation, so it’s only natural that 21st century deluded irrationalists would think her furniture carries magic powers that would potentiate fertility rites.

Hair shirts and a whip hanging from the walls remind pilgrims of the grim “voluntary penance” the saint adopted after joining the strict order of Saint Peter of Alcantara.

As the religious name she took suggests, she was believed to carry the “stigmata” or wounds of Jesus. She was the first woman saint born in Naples, but there is no hint in her life story as to why her help is sought by childless women in particular.

“Are you married?” Sister Maria Giuliana whispers to a young woman sitting on the armchair, before touching the visitor’s breast and belly with a “monstrance” or reliquiary containing a vertebra and a lock of hair from the saint.

What a ridiculous waste.

Oh, but I forgot. We’re supposed to respect the religious impulse. Screw that—laugh. These jokers are absurd.

Things are heating up all over the place

The NY Times covers the Chris Comer resignationtoday. This story is a wonderful window into the events transpiring within the Texas Education Agency — they are gearing up to shut down biology education in the whole damn state. And why now?

The standards, adopted in 1998, are due for a 10-year review and possible revision after the 15-member elected State Board of Education meets in February, with particular ramifications for the multibillion-dollar textbook industry. The chairman of the panel, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist and Sunday School teacher at Grace Bible Church in College Station, has lectured favorably in the past about intelligent design.

There’s a major standards review coming up, and the guy running the show is a bible-thumping clown of a dentist. Note the hint of the wider ramifications: Texas is a huge textbook market, and what goes down in Texas affects what publishers put in books that are marketed nationwide. It is time to start thinking about ending Texas’s influence. If you’re a teacher, a school board member, or an involved parent, and if you get an opportunity to evaluate textbooks for your local schools, look carefully at your biology offerings. If you’re reviewing a textbook and discover that it has been approved for use in Texas, then strike it from your list. It’s too dumb and watered down for your kids.

Let’s hit the publishers where it hurts. Tailoring their books for the Texas market should cut them out of the national market.

Other news to keep your eyes open for today: the Discovery Institute will be having a press conference in Iowa in a few hours. They claim to have juicy revelations in the Guillermo Gonzalez case; I suspect it will be something along the lines of someone on the tenure review committee called Intelligent Design creationism a mean name in an email somewhere. Anyway, we may hear more from either Tara or an Evil Monkey later today.

The creationist blogs will probably be full of indignant outrage over the Gonzalez case for a while, but don’t expect a whisper from them on the Comer case.

The Golden Compass is carrying a heavy burden here

I’m very much looking forward to the opening of The Golden Compass at the end of this week — and we’re even getting the premiere here in little ol’ Morris. I’m having mixed feelings about the way it’s getting enlisted in the culture wars, though. It’s a fantasy movie, and it’s ultimately going to succeed or fail on its merits as entertainment, not its ideology.

Still, I have to like the attitude in this Mark Morford column.

It’s this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit. Don’t you agree?

The movie is a pawn in the War Against Religion, whether we like it or not. It better not suck.

What is this, a trend?

Now the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal is running an op-ed critical of Ken Ham.

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of science information to thousands of Christians who are throwing away reason and 500 years of scientific inquiry and replacing it with ignorant dogma.

And it just gets fiercer and fiercer from there…

We do not need citizens who are closed-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists who want to see the world move closer to the Biblical prophecies of an Armageddon. (AIG also believes in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) Unfortunately, the creation museum in Northern Kentucky has been very successful at encouraging their non-thinking, anti-reasoning philosophy, especially among young, dinosaur-loving children. Inaction in this matter may come back to haunt us in the future.

Now that’s what I like to see in our media!

We’ve lost a great one: Seymour Benzer

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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”.

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