Category Archives: biology

Understanding Artificial Life

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You’ll remember the recent announcement about the first synthetic life form, created by team Venter. But what does that mean, really? How truly synthetic is it really? What aspects of Nature needed to be input in order for it to be viable? Too much for it to be called truly synthetic? What dreams are out there to do better? What’s the science behind such a challenge? How did the mechanisms for life that we know know actually evolve, and what steps are adjustable or reproducible?

These questions and many more are addressed in a lovely special edition of BBC […] Click to continue reading this post →

Another Hole in Pandora’s Box?

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05classic05lNo doubt you’ve heard it all over the news. Craig Venter and his teams have created another press storm, this time about “synthetic life”, although I wonder a bit about the meaning of the term. I’ve no particularly insightful things to say about it all, other than to do like everyone else and watch and wonder where it’s all going to lead (probably not exactly where people currently think… is one thing we can say for sure). There’s coverage everywhere so I don’t need to point, but for future reference, here’s a Guardian link to a video of the man himself talking about it in some detail, and a link to a story by Ian Sample in the same paper. There you can find links to the research paper too. (Image at right is of a pithos, the kind of vessel Pandora opened in the Greek myth. The image is from the online component of the Michael C. Carlos museum at Emory university. Click image to jump there.)

Truly fascinating stuff to say the least.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Art and Science

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e.coli image by shardcoreSome time back I wrote a post concerning E.Coli, and illustrated it with an image that I found on the web. The other day I learned more about the actual source of the image. The painting (click on image to enlarge) was from someone working under the name shardcore, and you can visit their site here. Notably, there are several pieces of work there, and a number of them are of science subjects, and scientists. Shardcore writes interesting notes for some of the work too.

The work is overall quite fascinating, striking, and often very aesthetically engaging. I recommend having a good long look around. To tease you to go there, let me point out a (topical) one for some of us with eyes on the LHC. A painting of Peter Higgs:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Gunslinging Bohr

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bohr_einsteinThis 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: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Help from the Bugs

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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.)

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Jane Goodall

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jane_goodall_bovardJust 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.

Have a look at her roots and shoots organization for example. It is very youth driven […] Click to continue reading this post →

Professors Do It Too

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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 […] Click to continue reading this post →

See Oh Two

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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: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Doing Darwin Differently

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hyperbolic crochetThe 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: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Culture is Science

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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.

yeast_cultureYes, 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 […] Click to continue reading this post →

Something to chew over…

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skull of sabertooth cat at page museum…while I prepare the longer post on the Tuesday special visit to the Page Museum at the Tar Pits.

I think it would be just fantastic if domestic cats had teeth like their cousins of 40+K years ago. (Click left for larger.)

Just great!

Would make for a considerably different dynamic while stroking them…

What do you think?

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Pit Stop

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saber toothed catI’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 […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Spiritual Life of Plants

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cvj sowing seedsGiven 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?

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