This Friday marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Accordingly, in SprogCast #5, the elder Free-Ride offspring marks the change of season by describing a local release of trout-fry.
You can download the sound file and pretend that the bathtub sounds are the gentle tides of the lake. The discussion is transcribed below.
Category Archives: Biology
Crystal jellies.
One of the jellies we saw during our February visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium is especially important to biologists. The crystal jelly (Aequorea victoria) is not only an interesting critter in its own right, but also serves as a source of green fluorescent protein (GFP), used to mark genes.
Passing thoughts on nature documentaries.
We’ve been watching some episodes of Blue Planet here, marveling at the beautiful cinematography, as well as at how emotionally gripping they can be.
Especially in the Frozen Seas episode, I found myself feeling almost wrung out by the dramatic roller-coaster. This is definitely nature red in tooth and claw (and blood-soaked maw), although as my better half points out, there’s actually rather less on-camera carnage than you might expect from the narration.*
Cross jellies.
Back in February when we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my communing-with-jellies time included an interval gazing at the cross jelly (Mitrocoma cellularia).
Purple-striped jellies.
During our second day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium last weekend, I finally got my much needed jelly time. I also had occasion to notice that their jelly exhibits have shrunk significantly since their height a few years ago, and that some of my favorite varieties are no longer on display. Booo! MOAR JELLEES PLEEZ!
Ahem. Where was I?
Anyway, there are still some pleasing jellies on display. One of these is the purple-striped jelly (Chrysaora colorata).
URGENT: Help fund a biology proposal that expires at the end of the day!
This is a project in Brian Switek’s DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge, and if it doesn’t find full funding by the end of today, it’s not going to happen.
From the other end of the pipeline: views of science from Yale’s MB&B entering class of 1991.
There’s an article in the 19 September 2008 issue of Science (“And Then There Was One”) [1] that catches up with many of the 30 men and women who made up the incoming class of 1991 in the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) Ph.D. program at Yale University. The article raises lots of interesting questions, including what counts as a successful career in science. (Not surprisingly, it depends who you ask.) The whole article is well worth a read no matter what stage of the science career pipeline you’re at (although it’s behind a paywall, so you may have to track it down at your local library).
Because there’s so much going on in the article, rather than try to distill it in a single blog post, I thought I would point out a few thought-provoking comments contained in it:
Citizen scientists help track bee populations.
Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists’ knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.)
But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts of citizen scientists to fill in some of those gaps.
Cell phones, DNA damage, and questionable data.
While other ScienceBlogs bloggers (notably Revere and Orac) post periodically on the state of the scientific evidence with regard to whether cell phones have biological effects on those using them, I’ve mostly followed the discussion from the sidelines. Possibly this is because I’m a tremendous Luddite who got a cell phone under protest (and who uses a phone with maybe three functions — place a call, receive a call, and store phone numbers). Possibly it’s because in my estimation the biggest health risk posed by cell phones is that they shift the attention of the maniac driver shifting across four lanes of freeway without signaling.
What has me jumping into the fray now is a news report in Science about fraud charges that have been raised against a group of scientists whose papers offered evidence of the potential for biological harm from cell phone use. From the Science article:
There are days when having a body is inconvenient.
Do you know that feeling one gets that is characteristic of “about to come down with something”, where you have an off taste in your mouth and your head feels fuzzy, and it seems like the very best thing you could possibly do is just lay your head on your desk for a few moments and close your eyes?
Yeah. I’ve had that feeling all day.
However, I have absolutely zero time to actually come down with something at this particular juncture. Therefore, I will be conducting a Mind Over Immune System experiment (not a very scientific one, I’ll admit) in which I see whether telling myself sternly not to get sick keeps me from actually getting sick.
Indeed, I feel extra-motivated not to succumb to whatever bug is trying to get the upper hand given that I learned from a reliable source this morning that it is possible to vomit through one’s nose (indeed, to be woken up by doing so in one’s sleep). That in itself sounds like a good reason never to get sick. Ever!