I’m not sure if it was something in my dinner tonight or if Nature is just really funny this week. A few noteworthy picks:
Carl Zimmer is talking crazy talk:
The scientists propose that several centuries ago, a histiocyte cell in a dog or a wolf turned cancerous. A mutation may have caused the cell to become abnormal–perhaps that LINE-1 element that marks Sticker’s sarcoma cells today. But natural selection would have favored other mutations as well that allowed its descendants to become more effective at growing into a tumor. During mating, some of the cancer cells managed to spread to the dog’s partner, where they could continue to proliferate.…
So here’s the big question which the authors don’t tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? If so, then it resembles HeLa cells, a line of cancer cells isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951. After her death, scientists have propagated her cells, and in that time they have have adapted to their new ecological niche of Petri dishes, acquiring mutations that make it grow aggressively in the lab. One biologist even suggested that the cells should be consider a new species.
Seriously, read the whole thing.
Here’s a neat post at Gene Expression about the roles of three different calcium ion sources in long-term potentiation.
More good descriptions of parasitic bugs from Zimmer:
If you keep a vegetable garden, there’s a fair chance you’ll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor catepillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in a most grotesque way. A wasp has zeroed in on the catepillar and injected eggs into its body. The eggs hatched, and the larvae devoured their hosts from within, keeping it alive until they were ready to emerge.What makes this sight all the more grotesque is the fact that the plant the catepillar is sitting on may have been an accomplice to the crime. When catepillars nibble on plants, the plants sometimes respond by releasing a distinctive cocktail of chemicals. This odor then attracts parasitic wasps. The plants are not just releasing a sort of chemical scream. Wasps are very precise in the species of catepillars they choose, and they can tell these odors apart.
The post is really about a new article in PLoS Biology which suggests that the caterpillars also pick up the wasp-attracting chemicals, and cleverly avoid eating the plants at times when they are likely to emit those particular chemical signals.
Someone should let me know if I’m the only one who thinks this weird bug stuff is neat.
Way cool article posted on neurodudes.
If ever there was a paper that would bring tears to one’s eyes, this is it: a previously hidden mental process has now become subject to experimental study. The mental process is the covert movement of attention, the selective focussing of attention to subregions of the visual field, but without eye movement. The movements of covert attention were hypothesized based on psychophysics, but the authors can now follow it using a vector field derived from a population of neurons in the parietal cortex. The monkey has been trained to use covert attentional shifts to solve a maze task. The major finding is that the vector derived from the population of parietal cells follows in time the path through the maze, as the monkey solves the maze.
Eide Neurolearning Blog has an MRI of love. I’m not an expert, but I think Love has a brain tumor.
As will soon become apparent, I spent a hunk of yesterday afternoon setting up a new RSS feed reader. After a bit of searching, I chose a program called BlogBridge, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is written in java, and therefore works on my Windows laptop and my Linux desktop. Another is that it allows me to easily “synchronize” preferences and feed subscriptions between the two, offering the convenience of something like Bloglines or Google Reader with the beefiness of a rich client application.
Anyway, the upshot is that now I can bring you links from blogs other than Pharyngula. Such as this, from Carl Zimmer.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.
As I believe the kids these days say, read the whole thing.
A reading course in computational neuroscience at Berkeley has a webpage up with a really handy reading list of neuroscience and AI papers, for the most part complete with links. Of course, a lot of the links will be useless from non-campus networks, but many of the papers are probably available from professors’ websites nonetheless.
I, for one, will start with the paper that has the best title: Churchland, Ramachandran, and Sejnowski* A Critique of Pure Vision.
[*] Screw you, UCSD, and your “standards.”
When Christmas rolled around last month, and my family wanted to know what to get me, I emailed them links to PZ Myers’ Updated Book List for Evolutionists. As a result, I came home with copies of Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautifu and Andrew Brown’s The Darwin Wars.
Myers describes The Darwin Wars as “a study of the sociology of evolutionary biology.” In reality, it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of the ‘war’ between Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould on the one hand, and E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett on the other. It is, here and there, a lot of fun. He describes the birth of Richard Dawkins as having been attended by a pair of fairies.
The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.’
Elsewhere, he quotes biologist John Maynard Smith descirbing a theory as “Absolute fucking crap,” and the footnote attributes this to “Personal communication, walking back from the pub.”
Since we don’t get cable, Ruth and I don’t watch a lot of television. Many days, the only time we do so is while eating breakfast before work. Even then, it’s mostly just something noisy to fill up the room while we wait for our coffee to sink in.
However, this morning a bit rolled past the ticker on the bottom of the screen and caught my eye. Apparently the president held a press conference and spoke out in support of teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.
I thought to myself, “My oatmeal needs more raisins.” And then, “I can’t wait to hear what P. Z. Myers is going to have to say about that.”
He seems a bit more incensed than usual, which is saying something.
On Monday the president said he favors [equal time in the classroom] for intelligent design “so people can understand what the debate is about.”Here’s what the debate is about.
Scientists have established the fact of evolution with thousands of lines of evidence and the work of hundreds of thousands of researchers. This idea is based on material evidence and repeated experiment, extensively documented in the scientific literature.
This evidence flatly contradicts literal religious accounts. Religious conservatives have mounted a long running social and political campaign to get their falsified dogma treated as the truth, despite the absence of any material or logical support for their position.
This debate is not about assessing the evidence, but about getting faith-based bullshit taught as science.
And that is what should be taught: teachers, we need to get in front of our students and expose them to both sides. We need to stand up and plainly state that creationism is a lie and any attempt to incorporate faith and the supernatural into science is as destructive to the enterprise as would be requiring religion to provide concrete, repeatable tests of their beliefs.
Word.
I wish I understood why religious politicians feel the need to prescribe the course of study for high school biology. There are only two possible outcomes: they create a populace with a stunted understanding of biology and the nature of the scientific endeavor, or they are revealed as single-minded baffoons.
All of this may sound like the hubris of the establishment, and you may wonder why all of the revolutions of science in the past haven’t taught us anything. The point is that intelligent design is not science, has nothing to do with science, and cannot be understood as a scientific theory. Even if an alternative understanding of speciation were to be developed (it’s not clear to me that such a thing is possible, but I’m not an evolutionary biologist) it would not be a victory for the Discovery Institute.
If they really want to protect their notion of the creation of man, they should be rounding their children up for Sunday school and spoon-feeding them some kind of gobbledy-gook about God setting evolution in motion and leaving fossil evidence to test our faith. Then we would have to pity their children, but at least ours would be safe.