This story has come along at just the right time, given that my last post was about Einstein. Seems that Niels Bohr (another giant from the same period, and another one of the founders of the quantum theory) was a big fan of cowboy movies, and thought a lot about gunfights. Yes, really! (There he is in the photo on the left hanging out with his friend Einstein in later years, perhaps 1925. Perhaps they’re at a drive-in movie? I got this photo here.)
It turns out to be all relevant to new studies about reaction time. The fastest person to draw does not necessarily win the gunfight: Continue reading ‘Gunslinging Bohr’
On NPR’s Morning Edition the other day there was an interesting piece by Nell Greenfieldboyce about a lovely piece of research on the effects of various cultures of microbial organisms in our stomachs on how we extract nutrients from food. The key point is that what lives in our stomachs and how it interacts with what we eat is a key consideration in worrying about issues like nutrition, obesity, and other issues. I recommend listening to the audio of the piece, which you can find (along with a transcript if you prefer) here. (Actually, while searching for the audio for the story I found a related story by Robert Krulwich from almost exactly a year earlier. You can listen to that here.)
Just went to a marvellous talk by Jane Goodall here on the USC campus, in Bovard auditorium. She’s signing her new book as we speak! Among the many things she said, she emphasized one of my favourite themes with regards the environment (and so many other things, like community, education, etc): Act locally.
Remember a couple of weeks ago I was mentioning an outbreak of schoolboy(-like) giggles from my physics 408b class due (it turns out, if you did the homework on the equation) to some audience-perceived off-colour hidden joke in some of the material I was presenting? (I’m still a bit embarrassed since I had no intention of making the joke they saw.) Well, just a couple of days later, I was witness to it again, but this time it was in a lecture by someone else, and the audience was mostly professors, and it was one of my esteemed colleagues who couldn’t help himself and broke out giggling. Well, actually, there was a short loud guffaw which burst out. So you see, even the fine upstanding citizens can submit to juvenile giggles.
Let me tell the story. We had the eminent evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty (UCLA) give an excellent talk entitled “Darwin and Gender”, as part of the College Continue reading ‘Professors Do It Too’
Remember the Culture? Not the Iain M. Banks civilization, interesting as that is. I mean the yeast from last week’s post Culture is Science.
You’ll recall I mentioned that its primary role in the whole baking business is the production of carbon dioxide. Well, you only see that indirectly via the results of the baking, of course, but while it was going through the ten day growth phase, I got the chance (after feeding it on day 5) to get some nice pictures of the swollen bag that results from its generation of the gas after its munching down on flour and sugar: Continue reading ‘See Oh Two’
The next Categorically Not! is tomorrow, Sunday April 19th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole - of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Image above right is discussed in an earlier post here. The last paragraph of the description below made me think of it.)
The theme this month is Doing Darwin Differently. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
Well, on my way home on the bus just now I was the one responsible for the strange smell. Guilty as charged.
Let me explain.
This morning, a colleague, one of our teaching lab managers Joe, came by with a surprise gift. It was in a black bag, which I opened. Inside was a transparent bag with a quantity of mysterious looking goop in it. From it came the strong and very familiar smell of yeast. Along with it was a piece of paper with instructions.
Yes, it was/is a living yeast culture that Joe wanted to share with some friends. It was this that was with me in my bag on the bus just now. The idea is that you let it grow over ten days or so, and then you either make it all into a batch of bread, or you leave some over to make new cultures that you hand on to others after ten days and/or bake another batch of bread. What a remarkably unusual (these days) gift! (Thanks Joe!)
I’d actually been planning to start up my bread-making again (I used to do it a lot as a student, postdoc, and young professor-with-more-time-on-his-hands), and had Continue reading ‘Culture is Science’
I’m going to another interesting College Commons event today. It’s an away mission. We’re off on a specially arranged tour of the La Brea Tar Pits! This is part of the 1859 celebration series, and of course Darwin is the focus here to some extent. We’re going to be taken around the famous Pit 91. I shall try to take some pictures and report later. The image on the left is a painting of the saber toothed cat, by John C. Dawson. (It is in the LA Natural History Museum.) (By the way - yes, the “Los Angeles 20059 B.C.” on Continue reading ‘Pit Stop’
Given all the gardening I’ve been doing over the last week or so (there’s some seed-sowing action going on to the right - more later), it may be fitting to go and sit and participate in the event coming up today. It is another of the College Commons events I’ve been mentioning here.
It’ll be a round table discussion and workshop to kick off a series, and here’s the summary:
“The Spiritual Life of Plants” series, arranged by Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari of French and comparative literature, aims to reunite urgent contemporary conversations around ecology and the built environment with an early modern past — a past in which plants existed both at the limits of being and at the frontier of new forms of knowledge. What might these animated plants have to tell us about the ways in which humans experience, regulate, and are transformed by the non-human beings that surround them? How can we carry these conversations forward into the present and the future?
I presume you’ve heard the news by now, concerning stem cell research in the USA. If not, listen to and read some of the NPR reporting on it here (by Julie Rovner Continue reading ‘The Great News Of The Day’
Well, as you’ve read here and elsewhere, this is a big year for (among other things) Darwin celebration. There are all sorts of wonderful essays, documentaries, discussions, lectures and so forth all around. Be sure to look at some of this work, and get involved. In addition to it being the 150th anniversary of the release of the Origin of Species, it is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday year, and the actual birthday date is today, the 12th February.
You’ll begin to notice a lot of discussion of Charles Darwin soon. Why? It is his 200th anniversary, and also 150 years since his Origin of Species was published, and so many people and organizations will be celebrating those landmarks. I did a couple of posts last year on Darwin that are worth a look, one about Darwin’s presentation of the evolution idea to the Linnean Society (150th anniversary of that last year) and the other about the wonderful Darwin Online project. See here and here.
Earlier this week I noticed that BBC Radio 4’s excellent series In Our Time (which I’ve mentioned a number of times here and will again) did a four part special documentary on Darwin. I’ve not listened to it yet, but I’ve a feeling it’ll be good. (I’ll be dropping all four parts onto my phone for listening to in those idle moments on some travel I’m about to embark upon.)
Don’t forget to be looking out for the other Nobel Prizes announced this week. Monday saw the Physiology or Medicine Prize go to Harald zur Hausen for work on the human papilloma viruses (which cause cervical cancer), and to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for work on the human immunodeficiency virus. Announcement and more details here. Meanwhile, today’s Chemistry Prize was to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. Details here.
No, no, no. The Chemistry prize was not for the discovery of a substance that’s just pretty and sparkly-glowy. (Although, you know… maybe that is a good reason on its Continue reading ‘Prize Watch’
Not long ago, science writer Carl Zimmer spoke at the Zócalo series. He was talking about the subject of his new book, E. Coli, and wove a lovely story of how the E. Coli have taught us so much about life over the years, and how they continue to do so. So much of what we know about the workings of DNA, for example, came down to studies of a very clear model system, and E.Coli was the system chosen by Biologists (and Physicists interested in fundamental issues surrounding the nature of life, DNA, etc.) (Image left from foodpoisonblog.)
The talk, for a general audience, is highly informative. It is only about an hour long, and worth your time. It was broadcast last night, and I found it rather good indeed. I Continue reading ‘E.Coli Stories’
On NPR the other morning, I heard a piece about the Darwin Online Project. It sounds just amazing. I hope you find time to explore the site.
It has all sorts of fascinating things that you can download or view in the above (click for larger view) manner (your very own copy of the Origin of Species, perhaps, or parts of his diaries and notebooks…), and is quite a treasure trove of one-stop-shop (but free) Darwin data. (There are even some of (his wife) Emma Darwin’s recipes.) The site is here.
Well, I learned recently* that the BBC wildlife program makers have done it again, breaking new ground in scientific discovery while making a new series. Quite amazing this time. From the Daily Telegraph website:
The BBC will today screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution.
Also:
The programme is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: “We’d been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come.
“But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.”
I find this a bit sad, although most people will say “they’re only bees”. They (and lots of other beekeepers with their bees on trucks) were in the area to help with pollinating crops. I’m very enamoured of the idea that we still need bees to be brought in to perform such a crucial task for our agriculture, which makes it all the more sad to me to hear of the accident befalling the dutiful drones. Millions of bees were released on Sunday (and apparently hundreds of thousands probably killed) after a truck carrying several of their colonies overturned near Sacramento, California. You can listen to the NPR story (here) about the resulting chaos (and the emergency call-out to beekeepers in the area for help) and sting-fest that followed.
You can also read more on this in the local newspaper in the area, er… The Sacramento Bee. (No, really!)
Continuing a bit about the microbiology to be found in the garden, I did a post not so long ago on Correlations giving an update about the composting system I started a while ago (post on that here). You might find it interesting, and so I thought I’d let you know about it. It is here.
All’s looking well for an exciting Spring season of gardening!
Not surprisingly, there’s been a lot of interesting chatter about the recently announced stem cell research results I blogged about earlier. I did a longer blog post over on Correlations that might interest you (I managed to think of the pun for the title that I knew was in there somewhere, but could not manage it this morning over here). (Right: an image from the Wisconsin-Madison group. These are human skin cells.)
Mentioned there are two more NPR items I thought were of note:
You may have heard about the new stem cell breakthrough in the news. It seems to be quite significant - researchers (at Kyoto University and at Wisconsin-Madison) have managed to make human skin cells into stem cells (following on work done in mouse some announced some months back). If interested in the details (as I’m sure you are) you can read more about it in an AP story on the NPR web site here. (Yahoo’s version has pictures, such as the nerve cells above left from the Kyoto group. - try and spot the odd one out in their 14 image slide show.)
There was also a very informative chat about it with one of their science correspondents, Joe Palca, on Morning Edition, and you can listen to it here. There’ll Continue reading ‘Stem Cell News’
News report on research into the fundamental constituents of little boys. It seems that the “frogs, snails and puppy dog’s tails” model may not stand up to experiment:
I spotted an interesting article by Faye Flam in the Philadelphia Inquirer about research into left-handedness. I confess that I do not know really what to make of it, but it is an interesting survey of some research in the area, with several surprising facts. Thought I’d pass it on to you. The article is here.
Last night’s Categorically Not! - Inside Out event was just great. The three topics contrasted really nicely, were very well presented as individual topics in their own right, and there were resonances between the different topics through the main umbrella theme - “Inside Out”.
Science writers Sandy Blakeslee and her son Matt Blakeslee did a sort of tag team presentation, taking turns to build up several aspects of the subject (covered in their new book “The Body Has a Mind of Its Own”) of one’s sense of self and that all-so-important division between inside (ourself) and outside (the rest of the universe) that we make with our minds. It’s very dynamic, of course - you extend it a lot when you use tools, from a fork when eating to the car you’re driving in (everyone grunted in recognition when Sandy mentioned how you have the instinct to duck when driving under a low ceiling in a parking garage….). One of the things that I think resonated most with the audience is the description of the work on showing how many celebrated “out of body” experiences that people get have a foundation in Continue reading ‘Inside Out from the Inside’
The next Categorically Not! is a Blue* one! It’s on Sunday October 28th (tomorrow). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole - of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area.
Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Above right: The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Paul Stein demonstrating “small differences” on the violin, in the event with that theme.)
The theme this month is Inside Out. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:
There’s something ever so romantic (not in the hand-holding-under-the-moon sense) about deep sea exploration. It occupies the roughly same part of one’s emotional landscape as space exploration, I think, but it’s maybe even more exciting in some ways, because there’s something about the utterly weird and unknown being just under the surface of the familiar, while space seems so far away (actually, in one sense it isn’t, if you go straight up, but in terms of logistics, it seems and is far…). It also very much has the feel of a 19th Century adventure, with explorers going off and bagging the weird and wonderful specimens to bring back for museums and entertainment. This was seldom good for the specimens involved, of course, and we Continue reading ‘Under the Sea’
Sheril had a post about this over on the new blog Correlations, but it is so interesting (and so potentially far-reaching) that I thought I’d point to it here too.
Craig Venter’s been at it again. This time one of his teams of scientists has apparently created a synthetic chromosome in the laboratory. As he said to the Guardian:
this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.
So finally I completed the project that began with the chicken wire matters I spoke of a while ago. Work and such things have a way of intervening for weeks, preventing a good idea from going from conception to completion in what should be a day or two. The plan? To stop throwing away lots of wonderful organic matter and keep it instead, turning it into compost. This makes sense because so much of my garden has rather poor soil, for a start, and for a second matter it just seems wrong to not do it. for a third, it’s fun to do experiments with some microbiology for a change. Microbiology? Well, the object of the exercise is to let nature turn any organic material that you have into compost - full of nutrients for growing new things. Compost is also good for moisture control, good drainage, and a host of other things that are beneficial to plants in the garden. How does nature do this? Bacteria, mostly. But for the bacteria and other microorganisms to do their job (digesting the material), one needs to give them good conditions to live in. Conditions involve the right amount of moisture, air, and food, and the point of my project was first to prepare containment for the compost manufacturing process, and then to prepare a good combination of raw materials, place them properly, and then leave the little organisms to their own devices to do their thing. Here’s a good webpage at Cornell about the various stages of composting, the temperatures involved, and the various organisms (bacteria of various sorts, actinomycetes (a kind of filamented bacterium), fungi (various molds and yeasts), protozoa) that come into play at the various stages.
So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius followed by a quick computation () to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I Continue reading ‘Composing Compost: Fun with Microorganisms’
How can I resist such topics - among everyone’s favourites, right? No, I’ll stay away from my own take on the subjects and move straight on to pointing you to two rather amusing pieces.
This is simply fascinating. I heard about it on NPR. While it is well known that birds are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, and use it to navigate, apparently it’s only been recently shown that this sensitivity is connected directly to the visual system (at least in some birds). The idea seems to be that the bird has evolved a mechanism for essentially seeing the magnetic field, presumably in the sense that magnetic information is encoded in the visual field and mapped to the brain along with the usual visual data. (Image: A garden warbler, photographed by Tommy Holden. I found it on the British Trust for Ornithology website, here.)
Have a listen to the NPR interview with Henrik Mouritsen (professor of neurosensory science at the University of Oldenberg in Germany - and among other things also a keen wildlife photographer, I learned from his website), and learn more about his Continue reading ‘Magnetic Vision?’
Just thought I’d let you know that the blog of ScienceWoman (that I talked about in an earlier post) has now moved. Her blogging about her day to day experiences and thoughts as an early career woman scientist will be getting a whole lot more attention now that it is under the ScienceBlogs umbrella. Go and have a look at her new digs. She’s already started off nicely with a post asking readers to name their favourite woman scientist, with the resulting interesting contributions and discussions you’d expect in the comments. Go and add your two cents.
Let’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then - though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).
It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.
I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an Continue reading ‘They’re Out There (Probably)’
I’ve been sitting here for the whole evening building a set of slides for my talk here at the Cambridge conference (that I still have not got around to telling you about because I’ve been, well, attending it). My talk is at the start of the Wednesday session and so I’m starting early (yeah, I know) so as to build up all the introductory slides with the fancier graphics to lull the viewer into that comfort zone before bombarding them with technical results. You may well know the sort I mean. (image above right: click-to-enlarge-able “scan” of Homer Simpson’s brain, which I got from here.)
Anyway, I was sitting here thinking that what I could really do with right now (what with the jetlag, the sitting through five one hour talks - all great) is a rapid hike up to the top of Runyon Canyon or up to the top of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park - two of my favourite pick-me-ups (or is it picks-me-up…?). This would get the blood flowing and give me that jolt I need to stay smart and alert for a few more slides before packing in for the night (and then panicking tomorrow that I did not do enough). All of this was running through my head when an email arrived* with this article about how exercise can boost mental function - actually promote the growth of new neurons. The studies Continue reading ‘Brain Building’
Remember Flora? The Komodo dragon? I blogged about her here and here. She produced offspring using parthenogenesis while in captivity last year. Well, there was a news story earlier this week about a bonnethead shark in in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska giving birth to a pup. (Interestingly, zoo-keepers and news reporters seemed uninterested in giving our subject shark a name, as happened for the reptile.)
It was a puzzle for a while as to how she did it (as I learned in a BBC article):
At the time, some theorised that a male tiger shark kept at the zoo could have been the father - but the institution’s three bonnethead females had none of the bite marks that are usually inflicted on their gender during shark sex.
Some even suggested that one of the females could have had sex in the wild and stored the sperm in her body - but the three-year period in captivity made this explanation highly unlikely.
Chuck Stevens’ visit went very well indeed. The talk was excellent, and well attended by faculty and students from both Physics and Astronomy Department, and the Neurosciences Research Institute. I’ll tell you a bit more about what he said in a subsequent post, along with pointing to video and slides from the talk, I hope. (Click on left for larger view.)
By the way, when I got to the Steve Reich concert venue, there was a huge line of people waiting to get in. They eventually turned a lot of us (myself included) away due to lack of space.
So I got on my bike and cycled rapidly up Figueroa Street to downtown and found the restaurant where some of my colleagues had taken the guest for dinner. Excellent conversation instead of excellent music. A good trade.
Gosh, where do I begin? It’s going to be a hugely busy day on Monday. I’m excited about Monday first and foremost because of the colloquium. Charles (Chuck) Stevens from the Salk Institute generously accepted my invitation to come and visit USC and give a special colloquium to an audience made up of people from both the Physics and Astronomy Department and the Neuroscience Research Institute. This is because his talk is going to be about thing of interest to both camps! He’s applying physicist approaches -the sort that I do- to biological problems. This is a big deal to me because it is very hard to know when problems in biology actually really need or care about the sorts of things that physicists care about. The last thing you need as a biologist… when you’re happily gathering all those juicy data on various systems and finding out all sorts of highly specialized context-dependent mechanisms… the last thing you need is some arrogant physicist coming in an babbling stuff like “symmetry Continue reading ‘Looking Ahead To Tomorrow’
This story has come along at just the right time, given that my last post was about Einstein. Seems that Niels Bohr (another giant from the same period, and another one of the founders of the quantum theory) was a big fan of cowboy movies, and thought a lot about gunfights. Yes, really! (There he is in the photo on the left hanging out with his friend Einstein in later years, perhaps 1925. Perhaps they’re at a drive-in movie? I got this photo here.)
The next Categorically Not! is tomorrow, Sunday April 19th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios
Continuing a bit about the microbiology to be found in the garden, I did a post not so long ago on Correlations giving an update about the composting system I started a while ago (post on that 
So, phase one: Containment. Well everything is going to be kept together with a cylinder of chicken wire, and so measurement of the desired radius 
followed by a quick computation (
) to give me the length I needed to cut, and I was away. Shortly after I realised that my measurements were to be determined by the size of the mouth of the large trash bags I’d bought to add as the liner of the containment cylinder. So I ended up readjusting everything to fit that. I cut everything a bit big to allow for the overlap I 
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