In need of narration

I'm a molecular biology nerd so I got a huge kick out of this movie. It's an animated look at some of my favorite proteins, including those important for cell motility and structure. There's also a sequence on protein translation, including vesicle transport to the cell membrane! Unfortunately there is no narration!! I've been thinking about making a cytogenetics movie but I quickly realized it would be very difficult to explain anything sub-cellular without diagrams (and animation to keep things moving). And here's someone who really has a handle on the animation stuff completely skipping the part where anyone can learn from what they're seeing. Argh. I hope they make more with optional captions at least.

On a semi-related note, scientists have converted amino acids to musical notes creating a signature song for each protein. Check out the sound of your favorite protein here.

UPDATE: This video is part of a textbook package, when you buy it you get narration.

Reflectance Detectors (aka Eyeballs)

Color blindness may be more troublesome now than ever due to our reliance on computers and graphic images for conveying information. But, according to this article in the Boston Globe, Tenebraex Corp. has come up with a relatively simple solution. The company designed a computer program that allows users to interact with the colored areas in an image in a variety of ways. Here's a flash animation of the program.

On the other side of the spectrum, researchers may have located women that are able to perceive more than the normal range of colors. Normally humans are able to see well in three areas of the light spectrum (blue, green and red) using three types of cones (light-detecting structures in the eye).

Color detection genes reside on the X chromosome which is why color blindness is much more common in men. Men have only one X and therefore only one copy of each gene. Check out this great post over at damninteresting.com.

I've always wanted to be on the same wavelength as the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees- all of them can communicate using ultraviolet signals. Birds have feathers that reflect in the ultraviolet range and receptors to receive those messages. Flowers also display UV-reflectance to lure insects (including bees) for pollination.

Two can play at donkeys.

A Distinction with a Difference

My lab recently got a sample of a mystery animal from another campus lab. Well, not completely mysterious. The sample was from the baby of a donkey. But they weren't sure if it was a hinny or another donkey. Hinnys are hybrid animals produced by breeding a female horse and a male donkey. Mules are the opposite of hinnys, their mothers are donkeys. Like many other hybrids, mules and hinnys are typically sterile because they have an odd number of chromosomes (see chart). Hinnys and donkeys can usually be distinguished by appearance but if the animal is too young they can be distinguished by counting their chromosomes. Donkeys have 62 chromosomes and hinnys (and mules) have 63.

Zedonkey

The liger is probably the most famous hybrid animal. But it also has an lesser known "opposite" called the tigon. People went crazy with zebras as well creating zorses, zonies, zetlands, zebrasses and zedonkys.

I don't know what this one is called though.

Mom	Dad	Offspring	# of chromosomes	Sterile?
Female Horse (Mare)	Male Donkey (Jack)	Mule	63	yes
Female Donkey (Jenny)	Male Horse (Stallion)	Hinny	63	yes
Female Horse (Mare)	Male Horse (Stallion)	Horse	64	no
Female Donkey (Jenny)	Male Donkey (Jack)	Donkey	62	no
Female Mule (Molly)	Male Horse (Stallion)	?	?	?
Female Hinny	Male Donkey (Jack)	Dragon Foal	?	?

Willy Wonka and the Space Elevator

To tell the truth, the first time I heard about space elevators it kind of blew my mind. I couldn't get away from the image of launching a tethered object to just the right height and then having it stay there. For some reason it was a lot harder to wrap my mind around that than plain old satellites even though floating should seem more unnatural.

The space elevator has been proposed as a permanent route to space. Instead of launching rockets over and over to get people and things into space, the tether will acts as a road vehicles to climb, carrying people and materials.

The space elevator is way cooler than a base on Mars or more star wars defense projects but as I was looking around for fresh abstracts to link to this post I didn't find anything newer than 2005 in Google scholar. However, I did find a competition planned for fall 2007 to improve the design. The prize is $1 million.

There are several technological hurdles to the creation of the space elevator. Most importantly is the design of the tether which must be miles long and incredibly strong. Most groups are focusing on carbon nanotubes and a ribbon-like tether. Nova has a GREAT video on the subject with nice graphics and some video of the creation of nanotubes.

Autistic/Artistic

Autism and autistic spectrum disorders are among the most heritable of mental disorders as demonstrated by twin studies and family histories. Some of the heritability may be related to super genetic traits like expanded number of repeats in certain segments of the chromosomes as opposed to inheriting a gene for autism. The Autism Genome Project has been investigating some of the genes involved in autism and has come up with a few according to this news article.

Prevalence
Recent studies have disputed the perceived prevalence of the disorder. Some believe thr increasing incidence can be explained by better measures, better reporting and the expansion of the definition of autism into the autistic spectrum.

Savants
Check out this amazing video (5 mins) in which an autistic man takes one helicopter ride over Rome and then accurately reproduces a huge swath of the city on paper (Originally hosted by the Wisconsin Medical Society.)

Besides having some autism in the family [[ UPDATE: Diagnosis changed!]], I've read a few great books on autism: Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars and Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures. I have to admit, Sack's book is a collection of essays on different interesting neurology cases, one of which is Temple Grandin, so they are two closely related tomes. Sacks writes about autistic adults and children and Temple Grandin writes about her own experience with autism. Both focus on the special talents that come with the deficits of autism. Grandin believes her experience of the world is closer to that of animals, not that she lacks intelligence but that her emotions are more like those of species other than humans.

Finally, here's an article on a group show of works by autistic artists.

Which came first, the lazy chicken or the lazy egg?

Abstract ahoy.



This study looked at the relationship between fitness and urban or suburban living. Not surprisingly, urban-dwellers tend to be in better shape. It could be because of all the 24-hour gyms they have in those big cities. But there is a possibility that people move to the suburbs so they can drive their cars everywhere. It's not location, location, location it's parking, parking, parking.

... these associations don't prove that sprawl causes laziness or weight gain. Most of the studies provide only a snapshot of different people at a single time. Such studies can't prove that living amid sprawl leads to inactivity; it may also be that inactive people choose to inhabit areas where driving is the easiest way to get around.

(from Science News)

While I was expecting city dwellers to be healthier it is a little weird. When you go to the suburbs you see parks and trees and bikes all over the place. When in the city all you notice are cars and buildings.

Fruity

This week's abstract is in honor of the news of the closure of PEAR.

PEAR, or Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research operated for almost thirty years. PEAR's studies looked at the ability for human consciousness to interact with the physical world. In some cases they used machines that use various schemes to create random numbers. The researchers asked people to influence the outcome of binary events controlled by these random machines. Using statistics to analyze extremely large samples, they came up with some indications that the conscious intentions of their subjects could affect the physical world. There are a lot of objections to these experiments, both methodological and theoretical.
















The main objection to these experiments, beyond their methodology, is the idea that scientific research should build on what came before; new experiments and hypotheses should be formed in the context of current understandings. However, others argue that we don't have to accept the idea that these are paranormal phenomena, and the rejection of all evidence and study on these topics is based on certain beliefs that also cannot be proven.

An article in today's New York Times on Carl Sagan brings up some interesting points on the intersection of science and religion but somehow tows the line that investigation is more important than confirming our beliefs.

“It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.”