"Cosmos" reboot to premiere this weekend

Having gone to school in Ithaca for almost three years now, I've noticed there's a lot of feelings for the late great Carl Sagan, who taught over at Cornell. He was on the board at the science museum I worked at, and their planet walk is named after him. (The museum also has Bill Nye narrating the walk when you call the number at each station, but that's aside the point.) Even though I'm not really directly involved with anything else he's done, it's a bit of a point of pride whenever I hear him brought up because it's the same area.

Upon hearing about the Cosmos reboot, I was happy not only for that reason but because we really really need something like the revolutionary documentary series from the 1980s to get us back on track.  It'll be hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is awesome, and even though the executive producer is also the mastermind behind the completely unrelated Family Guy series, Seth MacFarlane seems to be pretty serious about this series. In an interview with NYT, he said the original series meant a lot to him as a kid, as “Cosmos addressed questions that every human being has, whether they think about them on a mathematical level or just as a layman. It presented them in a wonderfully candy-coated way for those of us who are not scientists, and yet it didn’t dumb anything down.”

I think this is where the power of the show is going to be, bringing science to the masses in a friendly way. I know I say that a lot, especially considering that's what I want to do in life, but there's something different about a TV show. I don't want to say it's mindless because this sort of thing certainly isn't, especially with how Sagan and now deGrasse Tyson emphasize the spirit of urgency in our human condition, but the people who desperately need to be exposed to this kind of information are the people who aren't going to be willing to pick up a science magazine or read a book about it. Television reaches people in a different way, and those people who need to see this might be more apt to check it out this way.

And as a Firefly flan, I have to say this: Please don't screw this up, FOX.

Desert whales killed by algal blooms

This sounds about as ridiculous as the idea of aquatic sloths, but I promise both are true and both lived in South America. Thanks to the wonders of plate tectonics, there's a section of the Atacama Desert filled with fossils of marine mammals, including some pretty cool whale specimens; this is where the site's name, Cerro Ballena, comes from (it literally means "whale hill"). The site was uncovered in 2010 when construction workers were trying to build a road in the area, and researchers were able to go in to look at and eventually 3D image the fossils, as the time lapse below shows.


Some of the researchers were able to take this information to come up with a reasonable explanation for the extinction of all these animals in one place. The arrangement of the bones at Cerro Ballena showed that the animals, including whales, seals, and the aforementioned aquatic sloth had all died at sea and washed up on shore. This mimicked another event from the late '80s in which 14 humpback whales died from an algal bloom.

Before you ask, no, it wasn't like the algae formed a giant, amoeba-like mass that strangled the whales. Rather, the mechanism at work here is that of bioaccumulation. A surplus of nutrients can create an algal bloom, and certain types of algae produce neurotoxins, which are obviously bad. Going up the food chain, the problem gets exponentially worse: in the case of a baleen whale, each krill it eats might only have a few units of toxin, but these animals eat a LOT of krill, so the toxin adds up pretty quickly. A slightly different process occurs in top predators: krill might have 1 unit of toxin, a small fish may eat 10 krill, a larger fish may eat 10 small fish, and you get the picture.

So far, this seems to be the most reasonable. A tsunami would've beached a lot more than just big animals, and disease wouldn't have beached so many different types of animals.

Dairy aficionado answers cheese FAQs

I love cheese. I like a lot of foods, but cheese is definitely up there on the list of things that the loss of which would make me very sad. We even have an entire drawer in our fridge dedicated to it: I have string cheese for snacking, sprinkle cheese (or as you adults call it, shredded cheese) for pasta and such, a big hunk of Parmesan for when I feel like being fancy and whipping out the microplane, and even the crappy cheese food slices that aren't technically cheese but are perfect for egg sandwiches.

My own adoration aside, there's now a book all about the science behind one of the best foods ever. USDA research chemist Michael Tunick wrote The Science of Cheese last year, and he wrote a small piece for Wired with a few cheese FAQs he's gotten throughout his career. Here are a few from his list:

• Why is cheese yellow? The plants that cows eat contain carotenoids, which are the pigment compounds that make carrots orange. During the transfer from diet to milk, carotenoids latch onto fat: cheese is yellow because the fat content is high enough. Milk isn't yellow because there isn't enough fat and therefore not enough carotenoids. Fun fact: this only works in cows; goats, sheep, and other dairy animals convert their carotenoids to vitamin A, so their milk and subsequent dairy products are white.
• Can lactose intolerant people eat cheese? Actually, yes. Most lactose is removed from cheese during the manufacturing and aging processes. The mutation leading to lactose digestion arose in Europe between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely as a way to allow people access to vitamin D considering the low sunlight levels, but the majority of the world's population (~65%) is lactose intolerant, especially outside Europe and northern Africa. 

  

  Picture from J.P. Lon on Wikimedia Commons

• Why are some cheeses made in specific places? For some places, there's actually a law preventing certain types of cheeses being made in other areas. I remember watching a special on the Travel Channel about a race in England where they throw a wheel of Double Gloucester down a really steep hill and have participants run down to catch it. It was a pretty big deal, not only because a lot of people get injured each year rolling down a hill that I want to say had a 90% grade on one part, but also because Gloucester cheese is only made in that area. Roquefort, Brie, Emmental, and other cheeses are also only made in their namesake area, and one of the banks in the Emilia-Romagna area uses their parmesan-reggiano cheese as collateral for loans.
• And finally, can you make cheese from breast milk? Apparently this was a very common question that Tunick received, and the answer is no because there's not enough protein in general, let alone casein, which is the protein involved in forming curds.

FDA considering technique for three-parent embryos

I'm pretty sure I've discussed chimerism on here before (I know I've at least talked about mosaicism), but in case I haven't, the idea has nothing to do with Frankenorganisms created by smushing bits of other animals together. A genetic chimera is an organism that has collections of cells with at least 2 different sets of DNA. We get half of our DNA from one parent and half from the other, but normally all of our cells get the same "mom set" and the same "dad set," so instead a chimera has more than one "mom set" and more than one "dad set". Usually this happens when two eggs are fertilized by separate sperm and later fuse, creating an individual with some cells with "mom set A" and "dad set A" from the first fertilized egg and other cells with "mom set B" and "dad set B" from the second.

Currently, the FDA is mulling over a technique for test-tube embryos that involves a sort of chimerism in the sense that the embryo produced would have three parents. This would be achieved by taking just the mitochondria from a donor egg, replacing the mother's egg mitochondria with those of the donor, and then fertilizing the egg and continuing on as normal for in-vitro. It's not quite as obvious a chimera because all that's being added from the third parent is a set of organelles, but mitochondrial diseases are a pretty big problem considering they control energy production. They also house their own DNA, so these diseases are passed on from mother to child. As such, being able to replaced genetically faulty mitochondria in an otherwise healthy egg cell would be a huge help for the child later in life.

What I find interesting is the amount of backlash this is facing. Anything involving embryos is going to get religious groups riled up. Is it natural? Well, no. (Of course, "natural" is a stupid word to begin with, but that's aside the point.) But technically at the point of the swap, the egg isn't even fertilized yet, so you're in no way harming any sort of embryonic form, and this is a procedure that could save kids who would've otherwise inherited these mitochondrial diseases a lot of hassle later on. The other fear is that if we can "tweak" DNA like this, scientists will abuse this to create designer babies by only taking the best DNA from however many parents. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. This is only dealing with a very small subset of DNA that isn't even inherited in the same way that the rest is, so the mechanism is completely different.

I know this won't get far with all the fear mongering going around, but if it were to go through, we'd be doing a lot of people a lot of favors.

ScienceOnline dedicates a weekend to revolutionizing science on the Internet

For my mobile and social media journalism class, we have to keep tabs on journalists and leaders in our beat, and because my beat is science (I know, shocker), I have a list of science people I follow on Twitter and Facebook and such. This week, I've seen a lot of the hashtag #scio14, so I decided to check it out, and I've decided that I needed to hitchhike my way down to Raleigh for ScienceOnline Together.  The event, which started today with tours of various science hotspots in the city, starts with sessions tomorrow and continues through Saturday.

The nonprofit that runs it, ScienceOnline, seeks to gather experts from around the field of science communication (teachers, journalists, researchers, etc) to talk about how to best get their ideas out online. This weekend's event was started in 2007 and has since branched out to additional conferences that cover more specific parts of science communication, such as the brain, climate, and a teen conference. They also run ScienceSeeker, an aggregator of science news and blogs; their current tally is at more than 1,200 sites.

In addition to all the silliness, sass, and snark I'm getting via Twitter from the event (Discover Mag blogger Kyle Hill is particularly fun to follow), I'm enjoying the lineup of sessions they have for this weekend. They have a few on specific topics such as women in science or non-English science communication, how to make science accessible to the average joe (and subsequently how to make the average joe think more scientifically), and how to utilize online resources for science and science communication. If that's not enough of an incentive, they also have breaks in which participants get together for games and even a costume gala.

Unfortunately for me, registration has been closed for a while, as they only take about 450 people. There's also the issue of my lack of money (it's 350 bucks), transportation (more money I don't have), plus that thing called class. But if I can get in next year…

Tequila byproducts can be used to create plastic

One of the major issues we face today is that of waste. We produce things more quickly than we can take care of the trash, and in a society that embraces planned obsolescence, more of that waste is trickier to dispose of safely. Even waste from food production is becoming a problem, but the tequila industry at least may have an option for their future.

A study (heads-up: it's in Spanish) from the University of Guadalajara found that the bacterium Actinobacillus succinogenes, found in cow stomachs among other places, can take the sugars from byproducts of tequila production to create succinic acid. This might not sound too exciting until you know that succinic acid is one of the components of biodegradable plastic. All cells produce it, but it's normally derived chemically from petroleum when used to make plastic.

Model by Ben Mills from Wikimedia Commons via public domain

The main obstacle here is one of scaling: Actinobacillus succinogenes can only produce 20 grams of succinic acid from one liter of tequila production waste, and the lab that did the study only has about 3 liters of acid from their trials. However, plans to increase the volume are in the works once scientists can recreate the small-scale environment in a larger container to support production; a separate plant in Barcelona is already working on industrial-scale succinic acid production.

If this can get off the ground on a reasonable scale, I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure of exact numbers regarding the self-sustainability of it, but if the tequila industry were to at least produce some of their bottles with plastic made from their own byproducts, that would be pretty awesome. That's less plastic that has to be created from petroleum, which is something we have enough problems with already, plus it's biodegradable, which completes the cycle.

STAP cell study to go under investigation

You may remember the post I wrote on Feb 3 about the group of Japanese researchers who turned somatic cells into stem cells by treating them with acid. It turns out that the RIKEN Center  is conducting an investigation on this study because subsequent trials have proved inconclusive in recreating the data.

(Sorry for the link dumping there, but all of the links were related to that one sentence.)

As someone who has gone through many labs in school, I fully understand not being able to recreate the results of a study. Especially in middle and high school, carelessness or other mistakes are usually the culprit, but even correctly measured and conducted experiments flop; sometimes I'm convinced they don't work just to spite you. I've even been in at least one lab in which everyone's experiments flopped for no reason. However, it's unlikely that so many that are professionally done would have come up with inconclusive results.

One of the tenets of research is that it's replicable, and this not-so-good track record is a little troubling. Did they leave out part of the procedure? Were there different measurements? Was there an issue of translation? I imagine these are all things that the RIKEN Center will look into, but the crowdsourcing aspect could also help rule this out. I'm going to avoid a cooking analogy here because I don't really want to associate food with test-tube mice, but the scientists checking this out on their own could pretty easily tweak different material amounts or types to see if the changes produce something worth while.

New kakapo conservation site looks hopeful

I could probably do an entire month on fun animals in New Zealand because there are so many and they are all so awesome, but if there's one everyone should know, it's the kakapo. Kakapo are one of the three remaining species of the parrot superfamily Strigopoidea, which also includes the kaka and kea. They're the heaviest parrot and flightless, but they have very strong legs and are good at climbing and hiking. They're also very hard to find, not only because their mottled green feathers blend in well with foliage but also because there are only about 120 left. What's worse is that 120 is a really good number compared to when they couldn't find any in the 1970s.

Conservation efforts have been ramped up, and now two islands have been established specifically as kakapo sites, Codfish Island and Little Barrier Island. The birds, all of whom are named, are monitored closely and provided with supplementary food when their standard diet of rimu berries runs low. One kakapo in particular, Sirocco, serves as the spokesbird of New Zealand conservation efforts: a respiratory infection as a chick left him more or less imprinted on humans, so he tours the country every so often to promote conservation efforts.


In addition to mating with TV show hosts, kakapo mating is of particular importance because of the small population size. It only occurs once every few years, and egg viability is often a problem with the reduced genetic pool. In 2012, the program transferred a few kakapo pairs to Little Barrier Island to determine its viability as a reduced-monitoring site, and researchers were pleasantly surprised to see that there are eggs at some of the nesting sites on the island this year. The birds here don't receive the supplemental feeding due to the reduced-monitoring trial, but the presence of fertile eggs shows that the site is a success thus far.

Female chemists start boycott of all-male paneled ICQC in June

While it's nice to the extent that it regularly gives me something to talk about, the continuing sexism in science especially obnoxious. I posted a link on Twitter and my personal Facebook earlier in the week regarding the flak female sci-fi writers get for writing about things that aren't sparkles and rainbows and ponies, and female science reporters aren't treated any better, as demonstrated by science blogger Emily Graslie's "fan" mail. It's also no surprise that women are still underrepresented in STEM, but even those who have climbed the academic ladder are facing ignorance.

Salon published an article today about a boycott of the International Congress of Quantum Chemistry, an event held by the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences because all 24 speakers on the initial and now-redacted list were male. This may have been expected, say, 50 years ago when women weren't as prevalent in such a field, but the directory hosted by the Women in Theoretical Chemistry shows more than 300 women in tenured positions or equivalent. Only four of the 110 members of the Academy are women, and only two of the 102 talks in the past three years were by women.

I'm aware that diversity for the sake of diversity is controversial. One of the responses to the boycott was that you can't possibly make every panel equal in all demographics; you pick the best people regardless of who they are. However, the numbers as they stand now aren't representative of the field. There are more women, and these women are of equal standing in their field. Even the "old white guys" that dominate the field think these highly-qualified scientists have gotten snubbed. As University of Minnesota professor Chris Cramer points out:

"What if it's a woman who has the next big breakthrough idea that advances our field dramatically? And, what if she can't get that idea recognized as quickly precisely because implicit bias slows appreciation for her scholarship? You'll suffer, too, as you won't be able to offer your clients a service that you otherwise would have become more rapidly aware of."

I'm not saying this as a STEM-involved female but as a human being who values human rights: give these women (and the rest of lady STEMers) their due. The only thing separating them from the guys is the lack of support.

WaPo stops publishing science and health press releases

This was definitely a post I had to reread. Last week, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT uncovered the Washington Post's practice of publishing press releases from universities as articles in the paper, and today the paper announced that it will cease this practice. I initially misread the headlines and thought that WaPo was cutting all science content, which really upset me, but upon reading the articles, I'm not only glad that they're ending the practice but also a little annoyed that it was a thing in the first place.

One of the things beaten into students' heads - and I'm talking all students, not just journos - is that plagiarism in any form is bad, be it copying, lacking citations, or even just being really bad at paraphrasing. In journalism, this is especially bad because our tenets (such as those of the SPJ) include accountability and independence, both of which are undermined by using the content of others without permission.

These press releases, such as this one from the University of Zurich about attractive features and success, are labeled as being from the respective universities, but it still doesn't make up for the fact that they are more or less presented as original reporting; without the byline, I would've taken it as a review of the study. Of course WaPo wants good sourcing, as stated in the explanatory page for the health and science section, but sourcing isn't exactly the same as taking their content.

Furthermore, the page says they're "fiercely independent from any commercial interest or advocacy group." As the KSJ article points out, that would theoretically include the universities that they're more or less doing PR for when they publish the press releases. If they're independent, they shouldn't be publishing press releases. If they are publishing press releases, they should be getting paid by the universities in question for PR.

In all honesty, this was a bit of an immature practice. I might expect this sort of thing from a less-qualified newspaper, but this is the Washington Post we're talking about, and these reporters aren't dumb or even inexperienced. As much as I don't like the idea of name-slinging just to get what you want, these reporters could easily talk to the actual researchers for original reporting. I mean, if I can get in contact with real researchers as a college student with embarrassingly little clout (and Klout…), a WaPo writer certainly could. All in all, there's no excuse.

Constant bio-monitoring pilot launches in Seattle in March

Bio-monitoring has been commonplace since the advent of medicine. A typical doctor's visit might include checks on pulse, blood pressure, and blood and urine proteins. Small studies based on specific conditions such as cancer use bio-monitoring to track even small changes in vitals and proteins in body fluids, and knowing what kinds of changes occur with these diseases can help doctors diagnose them earlier. One program in the UK used electronic sensors to accurately detect chemical in urine that indicate bladder cancer, a process derived from cancer-sniffing dogs and a lot less painful than the alternative of regular doctor visits to have a tube inserted in the urethra to detect tumors. Now, a study in Seattle is tracking bioindicators in healthy subjects to see if the researchers can find early indicators of illness.

This study, which starts in March, is a little out of the ordinary for a few reasons:

1. The healthy people are the subjects rather than the controls. Usually studies like this look at bioindicators in people who have a particular condition like bladder cancer and compare their findings to those of healthy people to see where the difference is.
2. It seems to break multiple rules of standard experimentation. Not only are the healthy people not the controls, there are no controls. Everything else is blind and randomized. And participants receive feedback through the course of the study, which allows them to change how they eat, sleep, and otherwise go about their day. In a field that doesn't take well to multiple variables, this study sure has a lot of them.
3. With the multiple variables comes a very thorough assessment. It'd be one thing if they just tracked changes in the blood, but that's just one facet of this study. Each of the 100 participants will have their entire genome sequenced for both genetic and epigenetic markers, physical activity tracked, sleep patterns monitored, and bodily fluids (saliva, blood, urine, and feces) examined for proteins and other chemicals.

The results from the constant bio-monitoring will be uploaded to each participant's "cloud," allowing both participant and researcher to look at the changes over the nine-month period. It may seem a bit invasive to look at so much for so long, but I see it as a way to eliminate rogue variables because it's so comprehensive. Human bodies are crazily complex, and a study like this that covers so many factors could provide some very useful information, especially if it were expanded to cover a longer time or larger population.

Cambridge Science Festival makes science fun for the public

I like to think that New England is small enough to allow for big events anywhere in the six states to be common knowledge in the other five. I mean, Connecticut is two hours end to end not counting the inevitable traffic on 95 or 91, and Rhode Island is only an hour. Nevertheless, I didn't find out until a few days ago that there's a decently-sized science festival in Cambridge every spring. It's basically a big happy STEM party for an entire week in April (the 18th to the 27th this year), and it sounds amazing.

MIT, the Museum of Science, and a bunch of other institutions in Boston dedicated to science host this event, which started in 2008 and was the first event of its kind in the US at the time. Activities at the event include topics such as science in Spanish, sound science, and the science carnival and robot zoo, which are features this year. A lot of local nonprofits are involved too, such as the Boys and Girls Club,  the multimedia studio NuVu, and the Women's Coding Collective, to get kids and adults alike interested in STEM. They also recruit local high schoolers to volunteer at the event, which is pretty cool.

Breaking the communication barrier between scientist and civilian

As a science journalist, one of my goals is to make science more accessible to the public. There are a lot of cool things going on that people don't know about, either because they're convinced that science is scary or bad or because they think it's too hard to understand. Science can contain a lot of jargon that someone who didn't specifically take that class might not be familiar with, and even if they did take the obligatory science class, it might've been so long ago that they don't remember. There's also the issue of communication styles: journalists and such are used to the short, sweet, and to the point style of speaking, whereas scientists can tend to go into drawn-out explanations, which are inevitable given the subject matter but don't always help the audience comprehend.

I found this post today on Twitter about the tendency for researchers to explain rather than describe, and the interview that this communication consultant used illustrates the difference pretty well. It took place in January 2013 between a fiction writer and an astrophysicist, and here's what the former had to say:

"…if somebody says why does a clock tell time, you can describe the mechanism of the particular clock or you can say people arrived at a convenient definition of one day, divided it into arbitrary segments, and made a mechanism that would measure those segments because culture required timekeeping with that degree of precision. Now, that's not a complete explanation but it is explanatory whereas the other one is only descriptive."

The astrophysicist responds with the idea that the "this is how it is" tendency of scientific rhetoric because their jobs are based on trying to make sense of the real world, hence the speech about how rather than the speech about why, which is what civilians generally understand better.

The issue of scientific communication and how to interact with the public is a hot topic, and while a lot of research has been done about public opinion of science (we already know that people don't trust science journalists), this weekend's American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston will have a session specifically for scientists' understanding of the public. This can then help determine the best approaches to communicating their information in an accessible way to not only inform their audience but avoid making them less liked.

Tropical sea slug uses its prey against its predators

I imagine you've seen this image before; it's made its rounds of the Internet a few times, and rightfully so because this is a really cool critter.

Picture from Wikimedia Commons under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

This is the blue glaucus (Glaucus atlanticus), a member of the nudibranch clade of invertebrates. Nudibranchs are often generally characterized as sea slugs, but the ones in this clade specifically are very brightly colored, as demonstrated by this one. However, what sets the blue glaucus apart is in its behavior. The streaky blue coloration we see here is actually the underside of the animal: instead of crawling around on the ocean floor like other nudibranchs, the blue glaucus swallows air to fill its stomach, which it uses to float (admittedly upside-down) on the top of the water. The side under the water (the top) is silvery gray, so the varied coloration helps it hide from predators above and below.

If that wasn't enough, the blue glaucus and a few nudibranchs can utilize jellyfish stingers to attack their prey. This one here nibbles on the tentacles of the Portuguese man o' war, but while these jellyfish in particular are well known for their very painful sting, the blue glaucus is protected in a number of ways. Their insides are coated with a mucus that prevents the cells containing the stinger (called nematocysts) from being triggered, and cells lining their stomachs contain spindles of chitin that neutralize the stinger. The nematocysts that do survive intact are then stored and relocated to the blue glaucus' appendages for use against predators that do happen to see through the camouflage. The ability to concentrate the acquired nematocysts onto its appendages allows the blue glaucus to pack a more powerful (and potentially deadly) sting than even the Portuguese man o' war it took them from.

Accidentally threatening one of these animals would probably be like shaking hands with a friend who is wearing one of those hand shocker things from the golden days of practical jokes, except the friend is a pretty blue slug and the hand shocker could kill you.

Around the world study provides evidence of more fish than predicted

While I haven't always appreciated the nudges toward vegetarianism/veganism that come naturally with living in Ithaca, especially when they've come from some of the biology department professors, it is helpful to know about and understand the human culinary impact on the biosphere. In my oceanic islands class in the fall, we watched a documentary about how our appetites via overfishing and unsustainable fish farming are decimating the wild populations, and while it didn't prevent me from stocking up on seafood when I went back home, it was certainly something to think about. Without watching how and what we catch, we could be in big trouble.

Or are we? Some studies show a massive decline in stocks of certain species and locations, such as those featured in End of the Line, but a newly published study in Nature Communication suggests that those numbers are underestimating the number of mesopelagic fish. These fish, which include the highly prolific lantern fishes, live between 200m and 1000m below the surface of the water. Current estimates predict that fish in this zone make up about 1 billion tons of biomass - lanternfish alone account for more than 600 million tons of that

Picture from Emma Kissling on Wikimedia Commons via public domain.

Keep in mind that lanternfish like the one above range from 3 to 35cm, so even if we're talking 600 million tons of lanternfish biomass alone, that would mean at the very least 1.2 trillion fish, assuming that they're each a pound, and I highly doubt the 3cm ones are that heavy. Data from the Malaspinas Expedition (heads up: site is in Spanish) that tracked the biodiversity of the open and deep ocean in 2010-2011 is suggesting that estimate is only a tenth of what's actually out there. I know these fish aren't huge, but 12 trillion fish is a lot for one type of fish.

Moral of the story: start eating lanternfish fillets? Start catching; you're going to need a lot.

Citizen science emerges through gaming

I think it's fair to say that gaming has become a significant part of the human experience, from athletic events and board games to RPGs and video games. Anyone needing recent proof can look at the examples of Candy Crush Saga addiction and the uproar that ensued when the creator of Flappy Bird decided a few days back to remove the game from the market due to the pressures associated with running such a viral enterprise. At the same time, games aren't just the subjects of obsession but a way to socialize with friends (and make new ones), spark imaginations, and even cure cancer.

Alright, so the last one was a bit of a stretch, but Cancer Research UK teamed up with developers from Facebook, Amazon, and Google to create "Play to Cure: Genes in Space," which could lead to a cure later on. The free game, which is available on Apple and Android products, is based on mapping routes through space to gather the valuable Element Alpha. While players fly through space, shoot down dangerous asteroids, and upgrade their ships, they're actually analyzing genetic data that can be later used for developing cancer treatments. The game itself was developed at a game jam last year, just like the one a few weekends ago but specific to the goal of creating a data-analyzing game for cancer research.


The professor I talked to for my Global Game Jam article is currently working on something similar that uses an adventure-style game to perform taxonomic classification. The line that stuck for me from him was that the goal is to create games that allow people to do something while they play, even scientific work, without realizing it.

Without throwing everyone under the proverbial bus, I think the reason why more citizen science hasn't come to the forefront is because of a lack of interest in putting forth actual work; I have SETI running on my computer as a screensaver, so I'm contributing to their database, but I wouldn't get all hyped up about number-crunching that data myself. However, if the scientific aspect is hidden in a fun format like Play to Cure and the taxonomic one, there could be a lot of potential.

Scientists still speculating what makes ice slippery

This one accidentally relates to the Olympics too, but only because there is a lot of ice involved with some of the events. Science Friday did a segment this week about what makes ice slick, but what I found interesting is that scientists still aren't entirely sure what allows us to skate, ski, or throw a big rock across it. The general consensus is that there's a very thin layer of water on top of the ice that reduces friction, but how that layer forms is contested.

The segment's guest, who is a mechanical engineering professor, explained that the reasoning in most physics books is actually wrong: they claim that the water is produced by the pressure created by the weight of the person (or curling stone) because liquid water is more dense than frozen water. In reality, it would take a lot more weight than the average skater to create the pressure required. Currently, there are two other possible explanations for the water:

1. Ice just naturally has a nanoscale layer of water on its surface (we're talking a thousandth of the width of a hair) that provides the slipperiness, or 
2. The friction generated from the initial movement generates enough energy to melt the surrounding ice.

The former may seem a bit farfetched, but it's been shown to exist even tens of degrees below freezing, so it helps to explain why we can slip on ice not only when it's super cold but even if we're not moving, which the latter wouldn't be able to account for.

Of course, in Sochi, the problem isn't making the ice warm enough to produce that layer (because it's already there…) but rather keeping the venues cold enough, between the subtropical location and the not-so-finished states of the facilities...

A quick PSA regarding photos

Regular posting will resume tonight, but I wanted to make a quick announcement. If anyone has archive-binged recently, you may notice that some of the pictures have changed or been deleted. I did this yesterday to correspond to an article I received regarding photo use and copyright. As a more or less broke college student, I don't exactly have the funds to go against a copyright lawsuit, and even though I doubt anyone would go through my stuff specifically to throw me under the bus, it could very well happen. As such, pictures, graphics, and so on on here from now on are either mine, belonging to someone I know, public domain, or via Creative Commons. I have also applied a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license to mine (though I could've sworn I did that earlier, but it appears I didn't).

Thanks for hanging in there. I'll have a full post tonight.

Kicking off the Olympics with science

What else would I do, aside from make corny jokes about how my female axolotl and the host city in Russia are pronounced the same and differ only in one letter?

With the opening ceremony today, I felt it was necessary to have a themed post, and when I found this video about how Olympian body types have changed over the years, I thought that would be a good place to start:

The CBC has a whole playlist of Olympic-themed science videos, including stats on your chances of making it to the Games and what factors impact performance. They make a good point that I've observed watching sports in general. Football players look like they could crush me by sitting on me, baseball players look like they could throw me, and gymnasts/figure skaters look like I could throw them. There's also the question of age: I understand the body works at an optimal level for only so long and therefore prevents older people from competing in certain sports, but it's getting to the point where you'll have middle schoolers competing in the Olympics and retired before they go to college. At least they'll be able to pay for school, I guess.

Popular Science also has a good amount of Sochi coverage from the cover story of their February issue, "Engineering the Ideal Olympian." It includes segments about wind tunnels used for training ski jumpers (which was of significance for this year because this is the first time women are allowed to compete in the ski jumping event), using race car design knowledge to create a faster bobsled (if only it were for the Jamaican team), and a good chart detailing the common injuries that occur in the Winter Olympics.

Plagues helped shape human genomes

Genetics has always been my favorite part of biology. I enjoy Punnett squares more than I really should  (as I explain in this post about my first batch of axolotl eggs), I got to compare my mitochondrial DNA to an international database that included Neanderthal DNA in my genetics class last spring, and overall I find inheritance and genes to be really interesting. As such, this post from IFLS about how the Black Death tweaked European and Rroma genomes was something I wanted to look into.

What these researchers found was that the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for killing off more than 20 percent of the world's population at the time, selected for genes involved in the immune response, specifically a Toll-like receptor that helps in the pathway to tell the cell that it is under attack. As one might guess, people in the 1300s who didn't have these genes were killed by the plague, while those who did survived and passed on these genes to their children. It's natural selection for humans.

The nasty little bacterium responsible for decimating Europe. Public domain photo from the NIH

The cool part? This selection happened in two genetically distinct populations. While Europeans and Rroma both lived in Europe, the Rroma were originally from the northwest corner of India, so their initial geographic isolation from the native European group provided for a greater genetic diversity between the two groups. However, because they occupied the same space during the wrath of the Black Death, both were subject to the natural selection process above, thus picking out the immune people from both populations. Because these genes came about separately (geographic isolation and all), this shows convergent evolution; another example of this process would be how birds, bats, and bugs all have wings, but they all developed them separately rather than inheriting them from a common flying ancestor.

So no, we don't have bacterial DNA in our genome (… alright, technically we do because some of the genes are the same for all organisms, but you get my drift), but this goes to show that even a small organism like this can bring about large changes in human genetic history.

Science and religion go head to head in creation debate

I had all intentions of watching the creation debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham yesterday, but the combination of a Spanish paper and the YouTube page crashing my computer prevented me from watching it and thus covering it until now. I've since caught bits and pieces, and in addition to seeing other commentaries on it, I'd like to address a few things that I feel make this discussion worth having.

Regarding bias, I feel it's pretty obvious where I stand in this debate, between my explicit interest in science and my "not so explicit but potentially assumed" status as an atheist, but I will do my best to keep this as civil as possible because nothing can get done otherwise. Also, for simplicity's sake, I'll refer to the people on Nye's side as "evolutionists" and Ham's side as "creationists" because while Nye is a scientist, there are scientists who may not believe in evolution (which, admittedly, is a stretch, but for the sake of the argument).

1. Evolutionists are more willing to say "I don't know," and creationists need an explanation for everything. This was made apparent in this Buzzfeed article that was in my news feed, in which the author asked creationists at the debate to pose questions to the evolutionists. The lady in photo number 9 illustrates this point very well in her question, "If God did not create everything, then how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?" Evolutionists would say yes, and creationists would say that such an instance couldn't possibly happen, hence the position of God as creator of these organisms.
2. Evolutionists are more open to changing their outlook, and creationists are solid in their beliefs. Part of the scientific process is revisiting old hypotheses and changing them if outcomes or observations refute them; as such, scientists would be willing to accept another hypothesis were evidence to arise that disproved evolution, whereas no amount of evidence supporting evolution will change a creationist.
3. Only a minor thing, but the creationist side can't really claim persecution in education when the educational systems that teach creationism only look at the Christian story. Other beliefs are snubbed, as demonstrated by a quick Google search of "creation story."
   
   This seems to fit in with the bit of not changing what they think when other options are provided.
4. This is probably the most important, but science and religion aren't completely separate. I know people who are comfortable in their faith and still accept evolution as more or less fact, and even though the church system seems to be anti-science in some respect throughout the ages, some of the best science has come out of it. Take Mendelian genetics for example: without it, we wouldn't know how inheritance works, yet Gregor Mendel was a monk.

As always, I'm open for discussion. What are your thoughts on the debate, evolution, or creationism?

Japanese researchers develop new way of creating stem cells

This is pretty monumental, and I'm kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. Stem cells, specifically pluripotent stem cells, are a current scientific target because they have the proverbial "blank slate:" like a theoretical infant that can become a doctor, firefighter, or animal trainer, these cells can differentiate into anything in the future, be they stomach cells, brain cells, or blood cells. As such, they are extremely useful, such as in organ regeneration and transplants (another issue close to home, plus they covered it tonight on the Science Channel), but at the same time, they are surrounded by controversy because for the longest time, the only source was embryonic tissue.

As published last week in Nature, a team of scientists in Japan have found a way to reprogram body cells into pluripotent stem cells. They determined that exposing mammalian somatic cells to a strong external stimulus, like acid, reprogrammed these cells without the introduction of a new nucleus or different molecules to transcribe the DNA into RNA. This was a previously unknown mechanism, but further studies showed that these reprogrammed cells, called STAP cells (STAP standing for stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency), have a lot less DNA methylation. While somatic cells would normally have genes not applicable to their function turned off (i.e. a nerve cell turning off eye-related genes), STAP cells don't have as many genes turned off and can therefore fill different functions.

Admittedly, I'm most excited about the use of this for organ regeneration because this would reduce a lot of transplant-related problems. For example, it can allow doctors to take a donor's heart, take out all of the muscle cells it so only the connective tissue is left, and fill in the heart with the patient's own muscle cells (here derived from somatic cells that were converted into STAPs and induced into being muscle cells). This would prevent any chance of rejection because it's the patient's own cells and thus allow the patient to carry on without having to take anti rejection meds and then be restricted as to what they can do.

NFL experts (finally) recognize the dangers of concussions

Super Bowl football Broncos Seahawks yay rah rah. I spent the game at rehearsal and playing the online version of Cards Against Humanity. I've never been a huge fan of football in general; I only know as much as I do from four years of high school marching band and a gym teacher who was more forgiving to the less athletic among us and gave us comprehension quizzes rather than grading by ability. What I do know is that people care way too much about it (i.e. our HS football team got new jerseys every year while the softball team had to buy their own med kits for crying out loud), and that it is a lot more dangerous than people like to think.

I think it's a false sense of security. Before you even leave the locker room, you drown yourself in "protective" padding, and then you put a big bowl around your head with only enough holes to see through and barely hear through. Because of these extra layers, players think they can ram into each other like bumper cars because they're "protected," yet we're seeing more injuries and deaths related to neurological trauma. Sure, going full-force into another person without the gear would do a lot more damage, but it's not going to protect you from everything.

Finally, the NFL is starting to recognize that hey, concussions and traumatic brain injuries are a real problem. The NFL Head, Neck, and Spine Committee have been working not only to make the game safer but also to spread awareness of the dangers of these injuries. These have included informational posters in middle- and high schools, sideline neurologists, and advocating for a "when in doubt, sit them out"-type law in youth football that has passed in every state but Mississippi. The committee is also working to raise awareness for concussions in all activities using football as a role model of sorts.

Unfortunately, it has taken a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from former players and the deaths of others to bring this to the limelight, but the sooner they deal with this, the better.

FAA approves astronaut training program

I'm still mesmerized by the programming that NASA, ESA, and other space-based research has put out.  I mean, we've put people on the moon, rovers on other planets, and probes beyond the reaches of our solar system. We have telescopes that can see billions of light years away in wavelengths beyond human perception. And now we have astronaut training for the general public.

Waypoint 2 Space, which is based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, just got FAA approval for multiple space training programs. These are broken into 3 parts:

• Level 1: Spaceflight Fundamentals. It's a one-week intro course in astronaut things like suit fittings, G-force and microgravity activity, terrain navigation with rovers, and physiological effects of being in space.
• Level 2: Sub-Orbital Training. This one is three days and covers how to deal with the effects of rocket-powered flight, like G-forces and weightlessness, as well as how to handle any emergency situations like hypoxia or smoke.
• Level 3: Orbital Training. The most intensive part of their offerings, this lasts eight weeks or twelve weeks with training outside the orbiter. It prepares trainees for life in space with an emphasis on test scenarios for situational awareness, like if they were to become disoriented depressurized.

These trips aren't cheap; Level 1 training runs around $45,000, and the other two aren't available to the public just yet. However, I think it's a great opportunity for people to give space training a go, and it's a lot cheaper than the Virgin Galactic trip (though admittedly that would be really cool too).

Spreading ribs help snakes fly

I use "fly" loosely here to mean the ability to remain in the air for a long time without plummeting to the ground, so I guess the technical term for the aerial abilities of the Chrysopelea genus would be "glide." Either way, these snakes have been all over my news feed, so I decided it would be a good idea to share them here. A study printed in the February 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology examined the aerodynamics behind the paradise glider in particular, which can "fly" on average 10 meters when starting from 10 meters in the air; one of the researchers measured a 21 meter glide.

Picture from Alan Couch on Wikimedia Commons under CC Attribution 2.0

What they found was that these snakes, which are native to southeast Asia, spread their ribs when they glide to create lift. It's similar to the way that sugar gliders or flying squirrels spread their limbs to expose their flaps of skin. They also actively jump from their branches using their tails as anchors, and this allows better control over where they're gliding. These factors combine with whipping their bodies, a maneuver that the researchers think functions like a bike racer drafting off the racer in front, for maximum lift.

Aerodynamics tests were conducted with a 3D model of the flattened snake, and even though it's not sleek and smooth as a stealth jet, it still creates enough lift to carry the snake the average 10 meters. After gliding, the snakes' ribs return to their normal position, and they look just like normal, round snakes. While this seems like an intriguing aircraft idea, I'm not sure that having retractable or foldable wings would soften the landing much.

A sad day for salamanders

I consider myself lucky to be able to own one of my favorite animals as a pet. While some people pine after owning a panda or giraffe, I have two axolotls of my own that I get to… well, I can't really play with them, but I can pet them and let them nibble on my hands and otherwise interact with them on a fairly frequent basis. Most of the time I forget that they're technically wild animals because of the huge network of captive axolotl owners and breeders.

This is why I was surprised to see this article from the Telegraph saying axolotls may have gone extinct in the wild. They're pretty common in captivity, and I knew they were endangered in the wild because of limited habitat in the lakes around Mexico City, but I didn't realize their situation had become this dire. Studies from the Mexico Academy of Sciences showed a huge decline from 6000 axolotls per square kilometer in 1998 to 100 per square kilometer in 2008.

Self-generated graph from the article data. This is pretty scary.

Technically the extinction hasn't been confirmed yet, as researchers will begin a survey in February to see if they can find more, but the winter is prime breeding season (as I found out the hard way), so they'll have to act quickly so they can find these animals while it's still cold. Makeshift axolotl shelters have also been constructed in Lake Xochimilco with plants, rocks, and clean water to protect the animals from invasive carp and low water quality.

The joke in my circles is that my two kept breeding because they had to rebuild the population, but having brother and sister as the replenishing pair would be horrible genetics, so I think the researchers should stick to finding the wild ones.

Biohacking lab opens in Austria

As someone who lives in a green and crunchy town but has also taken a good amount of biology, I'm often stuck in an unforgiving place in terms of GMOs. I think they're fine, and the science behind them is not only solid but extremely useful, but a lot of people here think they're the devil's spawn. Europe has been proactive about banning foods made from GMOs and has done so for several years (a policy I feel is a fear monger rather than a protective service, but I digress), but the Ministry of Health in Austria has agreed to  allow access to Open BioLab, a one-year-old lab space dedicated to independent tinkering.

In Austria, people need permits to do genetic experimentation outside of a professional setting, but even universities don't allow biohacking, so Open BioLab provides a space for people interested in biotechnology to do more creative work. The lab features a homemade bioreactor made of spare computer parts for growing GM bacteria, and the founders (who are biology students in the city of Graz) hope to produce bacteria that can make Taq polymerase, a crucial but very expensive ingredient for amplifying DNA.

Of course, the USA isn't as afraid of GMOs (yet…) and has been playing with them in the lab to do many things, such as producing indigo for dyeing jeans and making them smell pretty as an indicator that they've finished growing. Because who wouldn't want a banana scented bacterium?

DIY housing gone high-tech

Two innovations that have been getting a decent amount of press lately include 3D printing and tiny houses. The former can (in theory) produce anything you can design on your CAD software of choice, including chocolate (and dragons…), while the latter is a movement that is building momentum as people are becoming more efficient with the space they have, like this 100 square meter house designed by a firm in Madrid. The natural next step? Combining the two: Wikihouse.

Alright, so printing plastic bricks individually would take forever and a day, but their plan is pretty clever:

Picture courtesy of Wikihouse under Creative Commons

1. Design your house using Google SketchUp, use one of Wikihouse's designs, or combine the two using the Wikihouse plugin on SketchUp.
2. Find a CNC mill (these are large, automated machines that cut materials based on CAD input, so basically a 3D printer for wood) or a machine shop to give the designs to.
3. Partake in some massive-scale Ikea-style setup. One of the Wikihouse prototypes uses a wedge and peg system, borrowed from classical Korean architecture, to stick the pieces together. 
4. Install other house necessities like plumbing, electrical, walls, etc.

While access to these kinds of resources might be limited, I like the premise because it allows homebuilders to design exactly what they want and have a lot more control over what is built. The company also acknowledges that the process still requires lawyers, contractors, and the like to make sure everything is safe and legal, but it's a good start.

And the verdict is...

Rorschach!

The famous ink blot tests have now been brought to the video game world by the lovely people at the Global Game Jam site at my school. "Rorschach," for which a friend of mine was lead developer, creates patterns that players have to recreate as a mirror image (like the test), and then they have to analyze the last test. The traditional psychiatric test reflects the theme pretty well, plus it's a cool idea. At the bottom of the page, there's a link to download the zip file containing the game.

Here are some frames from the game's site.

Title screen. I like the design on this one.

This one is delightfully creepy.

And the final result.

Our site also created another game based on the changing dynamic of the American family by having players match up families of various ethnicities and orientations. You can see the full list of the 4177 games submitted here.

Exclusive event coverage

For this week's issue of our school paper, I wrote an article about the Global Game Jam and how it's being held here for the first time. GGJ is an international event in which people gather at jam sites at universities and such around the world to produce a game based on a given theme in about 48 hours. I've been told that the themes are typically weird but workable, like the image of an ouroboros or the sound of a heartbeat; this year's theme is the quote "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

I decided to stop by our jam site on the comp sic floor to say hi and check out what everyone was up to, which honestly wasn't terribly exciting; as such, liveblogging the jam was out. A friend of mine was testing out code, while others at the table were making sprites, creating theme music, and building the clock for the timing aspect of the game. I like the premise of their game, but as to prevent any possible plagiarism, I'll wait until they release it tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's my article (official link here):

The appreciation for video game culture is ingrained deep in the Ithaca College community. Clubs such as the Gamer Symphony Orchestra, IC Gamers and IC Game Developers embrace student interest in the music, the creation or the playing of video games. This weekend, IC Game Developers is sponsoring the college’s first event as part of the Global Game Jam, a meet in which teams around the world gather at universities and other locations to create games in 48 hours. The college’s Global Game Jam will take place at 5 p.m. Jan. 24 on the third floor of Williams Hall.  

Born from other similar events and the International Game Developers Association, the Global Game Jam was founded in 2008. According to globalgamejam.org, more than 1,600 participants in 23 countries produced 370 games for the first event in January 2009. In 2013, more than 3,000 games were produced by participants at 309 jam sites in 63 countries.  

Each year, participants form small groups at jam sites, which are typically chosen for their access to technology support and security, and collaboratively create a game based on a theme the organization chooses. Past themes have included “extinction” in 2011, the image of a snake eating its own tail in 2012 and the sound of a heartbeat in 2013. While students at the college have joined the Global Game Jam in previous years, junior Kate Wareham, president of IC Game Developers, is hosting the event on campus for the first time this year.  

“Last year, me and a bunch of the other kids in the group went to New York [City] to do it, and it was really cool,” Wareham said. “We met a lot of cool people, and we got to work with them to make a game happen.”  

Junior Jordan Riley, who got involved with the IC Game Developers during his freshman year, decided to join the Global Game Jam after hearing about past experiences from other club members. He said creating a local jam site in Ithaca also provides more opportunities for newcomers to participate.  

“I think this might have a decent draw-in for other people on the college campus that have a little bit of interest in game development and might have never really set foot into making them but may actually find that they have a talent,” Riley said.  

The event begins with keynote speakers in the field of game development. This year’s speakers include Jenova Chen, co-founder of thatgamecompany and creator of the critically acclaimed game “Journey.” After the keynote speeches and theme announcement, teams have until 3 p.m. Jan. 26 to produce their games, and each team presents its game to other groups at their jam site.  

As a veteran game jam participant and faculty adviser to the IC Game Developers, computer science professor Nathan Prestopnik is organizing this year’s jam site with Wareham. He said while some of the games produced at the Global Game Jam have attracted attention outside the development community, their creators often don’t aim to release the games into the marketplace. Instead, they are shared among friends, which further promotes the collaborative goals of the event.  

One of the Global Game Jam’s sponsors, GameSprout, is a game development site that complements the collaborative spirit of the event by allowing developers to upload their demos, art, music and more for playtesting and feedback from their peers. Jill Sciulli, director of marketing of GameSprout, said the partnership with the jam is mutually beneficial.  

“Global Game Jam participants could get the experience of putting their games on GameSprout and seeing them grow,” Sciulli said. “In return, GameSprout would have all the exposure to all of these game developers.”  

Global Game Jam’s organizational mission is to educate people about game development and get them interested through this event. No experience is necessary, and while registering ahead of the event is helpful, anyone can stop by and check out the progress of the teams.  

“My main hope is for everyone to have a good time,” Wareham said. “It’s for people to get together, see what game development is like, try it out. Some people may even find that that’s what they’re interested in. I mean, if I hadn’t tried it out, I definitely wouldn’t have known if that was what I wanted to do or not.”

An update on the kids

As mentioned in my first post of the year, I embarked on a lovely adventure of raising axolotl eggs. And by lovely I mean that everything went wrong. Due to the shipping schedules being messed up by snow and holidays, I didn't get the food for the hatchlings until they had been in the fridge for a week; naturally, the extended cold killed all of the ones that had hatched. I was able to find a few unhatched ones that survived (I think the end count was 10), so I put those in a Tupperware container and fed them baby brine shrimp that I had to raise myself.

I think natural selection was reversed in my case because the healthy ones would've been the ones to hatch early, so the fridge actually killed the good ones. Some of the survivors were a little defective swimming, but they were also small. They were about ½ inch or so, so it was hard to determine exact color genetics, but I think there was one white one (albino or leucistic), one golden albino (these ones have light eyes so it looks like they don't have any), and some that were either wild or melanoid.

And as the use of past tense may suggest, our house got too cold the last Monday I was home and all of the hatchlings died. It wasn't great, but I wouldn't have had the time and space to raise them all anyway.

But never fear; I had the kids together in their transport container for about a half-hour before I decided to separate them for the trip back, and apparently that was enough because there was another batch of eggs in my tank this past Sunday. Those are currently in another Tupperware container on my dresser, so we'll see how that batch comes out.

Chromosome X

As addressed in the intro of this article by the New York Times, the coining of the name for the X chromosome is fitting for such a mysterious biological component. While inherited like the rest of the chromosomes (one from mom, one from dad), its products set it aside from the others, and research is showing that it's a lot more complex than we might have thought.

X (and Y) chromosomes are the bundles of DNA responsible for determining one's biological sex: in humans, XX usually means female, and XY usually means male, with other combos of chromosomes and genes to change that up from time to time. The two chromosomes, unlike other pairs, don't contain the same genes, and as such, XX individuals have to deal with having two times the genes that an XY individual would have. This is accomplished by X inactivation, in which a cell (seemingly arbitrarily) picks one of the two Xs to condense into an unusable state. When a cell divides, the daughter cells retain the same pattern of condensation, producing what is called mosaicism.

Picture from Michael Bodega on Wikimedia Commons by public domain release

As you can see in this tortoiseshell, some patches of cells in an XX individual turn off the X chromosome inherited from the mother, and other patches turn off the one inherited from the father. Despite one being turned off, the presence of both increases the genetic diversity of an XX individual, as an XY individual has only the X from the mother, and this occurs on varying levels. Tissues can be an even mix of mother X and father X, or they can be skewed toward one side or the other; research with mice showed some animals with eyes containing almost all cells expressing one of the Xs.

The mechanism behind this differentiation is still in testing, but scientists are working with a series of molecules that perform the condensation, which is led by the molecule Xist. Xist molecules latch onto the chromosome being condensed and signal for the rest of the molecules to come over. While the swarm of molecules might sound a little scary, cells that didn't have Xist were more likely to develop cancer due to the additional proteins being made by the second X chromosome.

A very cold field trip

My astronomy professor last spring spent a good portion of class one day telling us about his trip to Svalbard a few years back. Apparently the territory of Norway is not only the site of Norway's seed bank (though I doubt that's why he was there), it's also a very good place for astronomy observation, though a very cold place for it. I believe he was there over the summer solstice, so he would have been there for the 24-hour daylight, and he said that the high latitude (700 miles from the North Pole, after all) made it so the change in daylight hours each day was a lot more drastic than it is here (12 minutes or so per day versus one or two here in the Northeast).

I'm not exactly in the market for a similar trip (mostly due to the school and money thing), but Discover Magazine is sponsoring a trip to Svalbard for the total solar eclipse in March 2015. The path of this particular eclipse will pass right over Svalbard, so people would be able to see the eclipse for almost two and a half minutes; as a comparison, the site of the greatest total eclipse, near the Faroe Islands, would see it for 2 minutes and 47 seconds, so this is pretty close.

Picture from NASA on Wikimedia Commons by public domain

The trip would start and end in Oslo, and during the four-night stint in Longyearbyen, it would include adventures in dog sledding, glacial spelunking, aurora sighting, or just exploring the island in addition to the eclipse on March 20. Each day would also have an education session about the flora, fauna, geology, and more on the island. Prices sit around $6000 for the week-long trip, but considering what you're getting, it sounds like a pretty neat opportunity.

One size does not fit all

(So much for posting daily… though to be fair, I was coming back to school yesterday and my ride was ~1 hour late.)

Mannequins have been receiving a good amount of press lately. Last month, Pro Infirmis premiered a line of mannequins modeled after famous people with physical disabilities as part of their "Because Who Is Perfect? Get Closer" campaign. The organization worked with individuals with different disabilities, such as brittle bone disease or spinal malformations, to create figures that looked like them, and the finished models were put on display in storefronts in Zurich's main shopping area for International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

Now, an Estonian company has created a shape-shifting mannequin that can adjust bodily dimensions to give consumers a better idea of how an article of clothing may fit on their body types. Robotics workers at the University of Tartu and an ergonomics firm from Germany teamed up to develop a figure with panels that move to simulate different chest, hip, arm, and waist measurements. When coated in the same material used in prosthetic limbs, the mannequin provided a more realistic simulation of how clothing would lay on a given person than a computer rendering.

Currently, only high-end retailers are adopting the technology: the staff at Fits.me take samples from these companies, put them on mannequins with different dimensions, and take a picture to add to the database and show what each article of clothing would look on a given person. However, if all it takes is a few clothing samples, I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to pick up, and it would help reduce the amount of clothing articles that are returned. It may also be the kick in the pants that some companies need to realize that not everyone comes in the same shape and size (something that manufacturers of juniors' clothing don't understand).

Smellophone

Back when I used to sit with my parents and watch Emeril Lagasse work his cooking magic on Food Network before I went to bed, he'd occasionally bring up the idea of "smellovision" in his show. Alongside "BAM" and other isms, "smellovision" was one of his iconic words, referring to his dream to share the wonderful smells of his TV kitchen with viewers at home. While smellovision would be great for cooking shows, it would pose problematic for, say, Dirty Jobs, plus it's a bit far-fetched to be able to transmit specific smells through cable, satellite, or the air.

Enter the oPhone. Instead of smellovision, this olfactory communication device enables users to send smells to each other. The oChip inside the phone contains the information for hundreds (and eventually thousands) of different smells that you can send to yourself or another oPhone user. These smells can also be combined to create more complex messages, and the plan is to package two oPhones together so users can receive more than one smell at the same time.

The developers admit to their new technology being a little clunky, but the value in being able to send smelly texts is the connection between smell and memory. Smells can conjure up emotions, like the happiness of a freshly-baked cookie or the horror of finding old food in the fridge, and people can relate to each other based on these memories or thoughts. The company is also working to create a universal oChip, into which you can program whatever smell you want. I have a feeling that this feature would end up being used more for pranks than for productive uses, but a whimsical idea like a smellophone has to come with some fun.

A useful reality show

I've seen bits and pieces of shows like Shark Tank that profile inventors and their creations, but they're few and far between. Like anything, some of the ideas are pretty awesome, but a lot of the ideas are pretty horrendous. Somehow, this makes shows like American Idol hits - there are even entire episodes of the most awful entries - but not when it comes to shows that could lead to something useful. Today's public radio adventures included a segment about the intellectual booms in other countries, and the hosts discussed a show called Stars of Science that features inventors around the Middle East.

The show, which just finished its 5th season, is sponsored by the Qatar Foundation, a non-profit started by the royal family in 1995 to foster education, research, and community development to grow the "knowledge economy." Sixteen contestants go through the development process for their inventions, with a few people getting cut each show until the final four present their ideas to the panel, and the audience ranks the finalists. The top four ideas from last season were camel racing diagnostic boots, a mechanical Braille editor, a speech synthesizer for the language impaired, and a machine that provided automated scoring for when football (soccer) scoring gets fought over.

I think a show like this is a great idea because it provides a great opportunity for young innovators to develop and promote their ideas. Each episode goes through an important step in the process, like design, engineering, marketing, etc., and it gives a great outlet for sponsors for these great projects. (Plus it gets the guys on the shows to think twice about not speaking to the women out of fear of "disrespecting" anyone because the women have had great ideas too.)

Wins and losses

The fact that Congress actually agreed on something is a win in itself, but with the spending budget comes shifts in how that money is distributed. The scientific community is divided in terms of approval of the appropriation, with some departments seeing increases and others seeing cuts.

Picture from NASA on Wikimedia Commons via pubic domain

NASA came out as an unexpected winner in the budget with $17.65 billion granted until September 2015, which was an $800 million increase over last year and much higher than the $16.1 billion that estimates had suggested. The bill also established specific allotments for various projects: the James Webb Space Telescope (a collaboration between NASA, ESA, and CSA set to launch in 2018) will get $8 billion, programming for a mission to Europa will get $80 million for planning, and the Orion and Space Launch System will get a total of $3.1 billion for transporting astronauts.

Unfortunately, the NIH wasn't so lucky. While it will receive $29.9 billion, $1 billion higher than during the sequester, it's still $714 million below what it was pre-sequester. It also doesn't help that when adjusting for inflation, the allotment is lower than it was in the early 2000s, and this is starting to put us behind the 8-ball on medical research. The National Institute of Aging got an $80 million increase, which will help support research for Alzheimers', but beyond that, medical research got the short end of this stick.

And in a perfect world, the defense budget would go toward battle wound treatment and mental health programming, but I digress.

Dinosaur fish?

This week had a lot of fish-related news, especially in terms of offbeat aquatic animals.

The first was a study showing that fish can jump out of the water and eat birds right out of the air. I know that flying fish jump pretty high out of the water, and I wouldn't be surprised if a shark could catch a bird while breaching, but I wouldn't expect a successful catch from anything smaller. It turns out that African tigerfish, which live near the Botswana and Zimbabwe borders with South Africa, go after barn swallows. Scientists originally went out to observe migration behavior but tracked around 20 successful attacks on birds, thus proving a regional myth that previously hadn't been given much validity.

Since the first filming of a live giant squid in 2012, sightings and catchings are still few and far between… until a Japanese fisherman accidentally caught one while fishing for yellowtail. It's not the radioactive squid that inevitably proved to be an urban legend, but this one was a good 13 feet long and 350 pounds, so it's still pretty darn scary. It didn't survive much past its capture, but the catch might help scientists study these creatures considering how difficult they are to catch.

And finally, fish markets have become an unlikely but increasingly common place to find rare species; in proper coelacanth fashion, a shark species thought to be extinct was found at a fish market in Kuwait. The first (and only) specimen of the smoothtooth blacktip shark was found in 1902, and another wasn't identified until 2011 at the eastern fish market in Kuwait. Other rare and locally protected species, such as sand tiger sharks, whale sharks, and green sawfish, have also been found at fish markets around the Arabian peninsula, despite legislation preventing shark fishing.