Pointy Teeth| Tigers Sniffing Catnip

jtotheizzoe:

Some Budding Yeast I Used to Grow

A Gotye parody by UC Berkeley’s Nathaniel Krefman that is not only 100X less annoying than the actiual song, but could teach you some real biological vocabulary and lessons about how tiny organisms like yeast are used for genetic studies that even apply to humans.

Of course, the people who give money to scientists don’t always agree with that last part, which is what inspired this song in the first place.

(by skarefamena)

explore-blog:

How enzymes catalyze the chemical reactions in your body – an animated primer from TED.

jtotheizzoe:

How We See Color

One of the most mind-boggling parts of color theory is the observation that two different colors of light, when mixed, can create a new color. For instance, red and green light shining together, like from the pixels of a TV or computer screen, give the perception of yellow. This is a phenomenon called “additive color” mixing, illustrated below:

It turns out that the word “perception” is the key there. Different colors of light each have their own characteristic wavelength and the yellow coming from your monitor is still red and green wavelengths traveling simultaneously toward your eye. The perception of yellow, or any “in-between” color, comes from simultaneously activating more than one kind of “cone” color receptor in the back of your eye. See how yellow, which by itself would have a wavelength of around 570 nm, falls between the red and green cone receptor ranges:

That explanation up there is thanks to another great video by the folks at TED Ed. Check out my previous vision posts here, including OK Go and Sesame Street explaining primary colors, a fun test of your ability to tell colors apart, and an exploration of the idea that Vincent Van Gogh may have been colorblind.

Also, XKCD did a really fun color survey to discover what people in different cultures and from different backgrounds called different hues. The results are amazing (below), be sure to read about the whole project here.

jtotheizzoe:

Wheeee!

(If you’re curious, this relates to the old analogy of gravity warping spacetime like a bowling ball on a waterbed. Comic via xkcd, of course.)

explore-blog:

Björk sexifies geology in this new video for “Mutual Core,” from her sublime recent album Biophilia, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang.

(↬ io9)

bemusedlybespectacled:

secrethistoriesproject:

22. Mary Anning

If you went down to the blue lias cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset on a freezing winter day in the 1820s or 1830s, you might have seen a thoroughly bundled-up figure scratching in the shale and examining the stones. A scientific gentleman of the Royal Society, making important discoveries about fossils that would later lead to, among other things, the development of the theory of evolution? 

Well, almost. 

You’d actually be looking at Mary Anning, a working-class woman from a religiously-dissenting family who wouldn’t have been allowed to scrub the front steps of the Royal Society — and a damn fine scientist nonetheless. 

Anning’s family were Congregationalists, members of an unpopular religious minority. They lived in the village of Lyme, so close to the sea that their house flooded in bad weather, and they were pretty damn poor. Her father, Richard Anning, was a carpenter who supplemented his income by picking up and mining interesting stones — then called ‘curios’, later to be known as ‘fossils’ — from the beach and selling them to tourists (who initially bought them because they were weird or pretty, not for any scientific interest). 

Anning and her brother Joseph (the only two of the family’s ten children to live to adulthood) helped their father at this work. After he died in 1810, 11-year-old Mary and 14-year-old Joseph (and their mother, Molly) all continued to work at fossil-collecting in order to keep their family afloat. In 1811, when Anning was twelve years old, they discovered what would later be identified as the first complete icthyosaur skeleton — Joseph dug up the skull, and a few months later, Mary found the rest of the skeleton. They sold the find to Henry Henley, a local aristocrat, who sold it on to collector William Bullock who displayed it in London — causing people to begin to ask serious questions about the Biblical account of Creation.

Anning continued to work as a fossil-hunter into adulthood, eventually opening her own shop in Lyme in 1826, ‘Anning’s Fossil Depot’. It wasn’t particularly safe or easy work, either - in 1833, Anning was caught in a landslide that nearly killed her (and did, unfortunately, kill her dog Tray, pictured in a sketch above).

Despite the fact that she had had limited access to schooling (she learned basic reading and writing at Congregationalist Sunday School), Anning was deadly serious about educating herself as a scientist. She read as many scientific journals and publications as she could get hold of. She conducted dissections of modern animals in order to better understand the fossil ones she was researching, and made careful copies of diagrams and illustrations that she found in books. Among many other discoveries, she also uncovered the first plesiosaur and the first British example of a pterosaur: her notes were also key to the discovery that coprolite stones were in fact fossilized animal dung (a discovery for which scientist William Buckland ended up getting most of the credit).

As interest in the new sciences of geology and palaeontology grew, Anning was not permitted to join the Royal Society, nor the Royal Geological Society. This effectively meant that she could not be recognised as the maker of any scientific discoveries, as she had no means to publish her work. Many of the wealthy fossil collectors who bought items from her published Society papers on their purchases: some of them appear to have ripped off her descriptions of the fossils wholesale and passed them off as their own. A friend of Anning’s, Anna Pinney, wrote: 

She says the world has used her ill … these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.

And damn right, too! Although those ‘in the know’ do seem to have recognised the value of Anning’s work to some extent, collecting a subscription to pay her medical bills and making her a member of the new Dorset County Museum, she still  doesn’t appear to have got anything near the scientific credit she deserved. In 1847, she died of breast cancer — and the President of the Geological Society spoke at her funeral (why yes, that was the same society that wouldn’t let her join while she was alive). The eulogy was published in the Society’s quarterly transactions, an honour that no other woman would receive until the Society began accepting female members in 1904. 

Anning has received much greater recognition after her death, and is a relatively famous figure nowadays — there are a number of fictional novels and kids’ books about her, and her story is even reputed to be the basis for the tongue twister ‘She sells seashells…’. The third image above is a display that now hangs in the Natural History Museum in London showing information about her life beside a plesiosaur skeleton. However, I think it’s important to remember not only her discoveries, but the sheer effort of will that it must have required for a person of her gender and class and religious background to have been taken even as seriously as she was by the scientific community during her lifetime. Surviving and thriving as an academic from a working-class background isn’t all that easy in 2012… and yet nearly 200 years earlier, Anning was doing it despite some pretty terrifying odds. It’s also, of course, important to remember how little credit she got for it, and how her findings were misappropriated by her so-called superiors — which is, of course, what happens when some people are forcibly barred from taking part in academic discourse.

Somehow, a museum plaque and a tongue-twister still don’t seem like enough to make up for that.

More: 

Bio at the Natural History Museum: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/biographies/mary-anning/index.html

Bio at Lyme Regis Museum: http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/in-the-museum/mary-anning

Essay by William Sargeant, ‘The Three Mary Annings’: http://www.whaton.uwaterloo.ca/waton/s008.html

BBC primary-school kids’ page with images and a game: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/famouspeople/mary_anning/

Bio from San Diego ‘Women in Science’ series: http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/anning.html

Wikipedia biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning

Images from the ‘Literary Lyme’ walking tour: http://www.literarylyme.co.uk/maryanninggallery.html

I did a report on Mary Anning my freshman year of high school. I had to dress up as her and everything. She was so badass.

jtotheizzoe:

The Mississippi River delta, as imaged by Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite. As 17,000 cubic meters of water pump out every second, vegetation (here colored red) is fed by the rich sediment. The fractal nature of its branching is a natural property that emerges from finding the most efficient branch pattern to feed a large surface area.

Earth, you damn fine.

(via Unpopular Science)

jtotheizzoe:

The Known Universe/The Amazing Journey

The American Museum of Natural History takes you on a trip from the here and the now, to a time and place beyond the distant edge of the universe, a view existing only in the eye of the mind of a single species on a speck of illuminated dust playing the role of anchor in this cosmic journey of scale.

This is a four-dimensional experience, and your soundtrack is Hans Zimmer, remixed. This journey through time and space is best experienced in full-screen 1080p and with those headphones cranked.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the corner with my happy science tears.

(fantastic work by stormeindustries)

jtotheizzoe:

Oh Rayleigh?!

So the sky is blue because short wavelengths of light coming from the Sun (blue, etc.) are scattered more than long ones (yellow, red, etc.), reflecting the short wavelength light into our eyes instead of it passing through the atmosphere as part of white light. Sunsets are red for the opposite reason … but yeah, why isn’t it violet?

Violet has an even shorter wavelength than blue light. So does indigo, whatever that is. There’s a good logical case for a purple sky, right?

Want to know the answer? Why the sky isn’t violet?

Do ya? 

The truth is that the sky is both violet and blue. But the color receptors in our eyes don’t see violet very well, so we get the (incorrect) impression that the sky is just blue. Some birds actually see well into the violet and ultraviolet, so the sky must look trippy as hell to them.

(via xkcd)

jtotheizzoe:

This is why we study science!

(via IFLS)

jtotheizzoe:

What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn’t

Everyone who has ever looked at a pretty fMRI scan or read a popular science article linking some sexy human behavior to a blob on a pretty brain scan (so, “nearly everyone”) needs to read this blog entry at The New Yorker:

…a lot of those reports are based on a false premise: that neural tissue that lights up most in the brain is the only tissue involved in some cognitive function. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. Different emotions, for example, rely on different combinations of neural substrates. The act of comprehending a sentence likely involves Broca’s area (the language-related spot on the left side of the brain that they may have told you about in college), but it also draws on the parts of the brain in the temporal lobe that analyze acoustic signals, and part of sensorimotor cortex and the basal ganglia become active as well. (In congenitally blind people, some of the visual cortex also plays a role.) It’s not one spot, it’s many, some of which may be less active but still vital, and what really matters is how vast networks of neural tissue work together.

Don’t lose faith. Techniques like fMRI have unlocked some amazing science about the workings of the brain, but they are still pretty low-resolution, and can only take snapshots. What about the actions of individual neurons that fMRI can’t see? What if some processes are explained better using dynamic observations instead of snapshots, like video instead of photos?

Considering that dead salmon can show brain activity on fMRI, we need to be pretty careful when saying that “Blob X” is linked to “Condition Y”. It doesn’t say that everything you’ve heard is false, just that…

…simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood.

Considering it’s the most advanced biological computer ever created, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, right?

(via The New Yorker)

jtotheizzoe:

explore-blog:

Fantastic 1970s cartogram-like visualization of the elements of the periodic table based on their relative abundance.

(↬ Radiolab)

Compare that with this image of the elemental composition of the human body:

jtotheizzoe:

DNA Lego Bricks To Produce Nano-sculptures

But using tiny loops of DNA as “bricks”, Harvard (of course) scientists have developed a Lego-like set of nucleic acid building blocks. The sequences in each loop only stick to certain neighbors in certain orientations, just like real Legos. Those rules are defined by all the standard base-pairing rules that you learned in biology class. You can see some of the shapes that they’ve developed above.

DNA molecules are the building blocks of life, of course, but this take that to a new level. Take a look at some previous DNA construction projects: DNA origami and a DNA “genotypeface”.

Ed Yong digs deep into the blocks at Not Exactly Rocket Science.