Summer Assignment 8.4

• Ebola virus has been in the news quite a bit lately, and being the virus fan that I am, I can't let the opportunity pass. But instead of the usual stuff here are some good reasons not to worry too much about it.

• It's not a global pandemic.
• Even the patients coming to the US are not that big of a deal.

•  I wouldn't normally link to a Cosmo post, but since this one has a picture of flesh-eating beetles, I can't resist. Oh, and it is also the great story of an artist turned scientist/science educator.

Summer Assignment 7.22

Just one story this week; a longer piece on why we have blood types by one of my favorite science writers Carl Zimmer. You probably (hopefully) remember something about blood types from previous classes, and may even remember how to do the genetic crosses to figure them out. But have we ever thought about why we have different blood types? I know I never had until I read this article. Lots of interesting stuff in here, and overall it highlights a very important fact of evolution: If it exists, it most likely has an adaptive advantage.

Summer Assignment 8.20

• Ants may help predict the future of Facebook. I wouldn't hold my breath that Facebook will take the advice and get smaller in order to survive. I would say in 5 years it will be gone the way of Friendster and MySpace.
• Coffee and the brain. I disagree that there is such a thing as too much coffee. Maybe just not enough time to drink it all.
• The "scientifically accurate' version of Finding Nemo sounds so much better than the original.

Summer Assignment 8.13

• Pro: Generating your own food supply. Con: Wearing this thing on your face.
• Newly discovered protein may be key in memory formation. How much would you pay for a few shots right before AP week?
• So they lied to me about carrots helping with night vision. But they did it in order to win WWII, so I guess that is ok.

Summer Assignment 8.6

Really easy assignment this week. Of the below proposed scientific "breakthroughs", which one do you
      a) think is most likely to occur in your lifetime.
      b) most want to see occur in your lifetime.

Via Doghouse Diaries

Summer Assignment 7.30

• Brain control is here, and it sounds really cool and somewhat complicated.
• Spiders have personalities? 
• What is the evolutionary advantage of laughter?

Summer Assignment 7.23

Great comments on the first post last week. Remember that sometimes there may be a short period of time between when you post your comment and when it shows up on the blog. The only time you should worry about your comment getting lost is if posts show up that were not there when you submitted yours. Then, just re-post and it should be fine.

Links for the week:

• If you require iv morphine in order to move your hair, I would say yes, that is a Special Brand of Horror. 

• Turns out women knew how to cure Down's Syndrome all along.

• There is GMO wheat popping up in Oregon fields, and no one seems to know how it got there.

I will be out of town this weekend (Thurs - Tues) so comments will likely not be posted during that time frame. If your comment does not show up by Tuesday night/Wednesday morning then you should repost it.

Summer Assignment 7.16

Welcome to the first official post of the 2013 AP Biology Summer Blog. The rules are simple:

1. Check out the links I include in the post.
2. Make an intelligent comment on them.
3. Or respond in an intelligent way to someone else's comment.
4. Earn points!

Just a note, you don't need to read all of the links I post when there are multiple stories linked. You can always pick the ones that seem most interesting to you.

On to the links:

What You Thought About T. rex Was Wrong, But May Be Right Again

Most people probably envision Tyrannosaurus rex behaving something like this. Basically being a top predator and chasing down its prey. However, a few years ago some researchers postulated that T. rex may have acted more as a scavenger. This was based on the postulated population size of T. rex, and the fact that ecosystems cannot support large populations of top predators. Since behaviors don't fossilize, paleontologists have to look for other clues about how dinosaurs lived their lives. The article describes a T. rex tooth found embedded in a bone from another species. The bone shows signs of healing around the tooth, indicating that the dinosaur survived the T. rex bite. It seems to me to be a bit of a stretch to extrapolate an entire species behavior from one example. Imagine if some future or alien society got one piece of data from one current human, and decided "All humans did this." Scarey idea, depending on who the data came from.

Using Manure on Crops is a Really, Really Old Idea

Interesting point in there about how agriculture may have lead to social stratification and social classes. I always suspected that was all based on poop, now I guess there is evidence.

MIT Researchers Printing New Heart Muscle

If there was any doubt that we are officially in the future, this pretty much erases it.

Summer Assignment 8.17

• Using science to dispel an internet myth.Not that McDonald's burgers are any good, but they don't defy any laws of biology. What is the next internet/urban myth you would like to see overturned by science?
• A blogger posts her experiences before, during and immediately after open heart surgery. WARNING: if you don't want to see pictures of an actual human heart during surgery  DO NOT click the link.
• No more Olympics, so you get three science links this week. Will viruses some day power our cell phones (or other electronic devices)?

Summer Assignment 8.3

• Continuing last weeks item about artificial life, scientists have created a synthetic jellyfish-like organism using rat cardiac cells. Video below.

• Even Usain Bolt wouldn't stand a chance if the Olympics weren't so species-centric.
• I am not really surprised that more effort and money is spent developing new weight-loss drugs rather than on efforts to simply get people to eat better and exercise more. Not sure I agree that a "junk-food tax" is the way to fix it, though if that is working in other countries, it may work here as well.
• So apparently this is real. Weird. Just remember, unexplained is not the same as inexplicable.

Summer Assignment 7.27

Early post this week. I am leaving tomorrow morning for a camping weekend, so I probably will not have internet access again until Monday. That means that comments may take a while to show up on the site. If you post a comment over the weekend and don't see it by Tuesday morning, shoot me an email, or just try reposting.

And now, the links:

• Parkour and orangutans. Not orangutans doing parkour, which would be awesome. If you are unfamiliar with parkour, you can watch the short video below.
  
  
  
Researchers were interested in finding out more about the energetics of orangutan movements in the jungle. The use of parkour athletes to simulate the movements allowed direct measurements of oxygen consumption, rather than using mathematical models. You can hear the guys from one of my favorite podcasts, Science...Sort Of, talk about this research at the 47 minute mark of their latest episode.
• When I was in grad school, a fellow student in my lab and I had a few discussions about whether we would ever be able to recreate a living cell via computer simulation. I was on the side of it being impossible, since there was no way to know how all of the proteins interact with each other. The other student felt that it was just a matter of time before computers became powerful enough to process all the data, and since there are a finite number of proteins in a cell, there must be a finite number of interactions. Looks like I was wrong. Though to be fair (to me), this is a very simple cell; one of the simplest known in fact, with only 525 genes (humans have around 30,000 protein-encoding genes).
• So this exists. Biology is weird. Not sometimes.  All. The. Times.

Summer Assignment 7.20

Thanks for all the great comments last week. Remember, if you are going on vacation and don't think you will be able to access the site to comment, please drop me an email with the dates.

• With the Olympics around the corner, this article looks at the bio-mechanics of sprinting, and if the 9-second mark will ever be broken in the 100 m sprint. Interesting that swing time (the time between steps) is equivalent for all runners at top speed. The men's 100m final is August 5th; the women's is the day before.

• What are the most important science questions the presidential should answer? Here is a list of 14 good ones. Four years ago, the McCain and Obama campaigns posted responses to science questions. I wouldn't hold my breath for a science-themed debate, but if you go here you can vote for your choice for moderator. This guy is winning, and would be awesome.

Slime molds and evolution

Interesting story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times about slime molds. They really are fascinating organisms, and can tell us a lot about evolution. And I love the practical uses people are finding for them, like designing highways, or planning how to reroute highways in case of a nuclear meltdown.

Summer Assignment: 8.23

Fatal Attractions: Sex, Death, Parasites, and Cats

More mind-controlling parasites, this one in rats. Toxoplasma, a single-cell parasite, infects the brains of rats and changes their behavior. Rats are normally afraid of cats, and will avoid their urine. Infected rats, however, do not avoid cat urine sprayed areas, and may even be attracted to it.

You Can Be a Citizen Scientist

Great chance for people to become more involved in science, and help out researchers. The protein and RNA folding "games" look pretty interesting, I will probably check those out.

Summer Assignment: 8.16

A couple articles about interesting evolutionary adaptations in animals this week. The first one is about Müllerian mimicry in a butterfly species. This type of mimicry involves one species mimicking a bad-tasting species. This particular butterfly species can mimic a wide range of species, and the genes for these differences were all mapped to one chromosomal region, or "super gene."

The second article is about behavior in a spider species called whip spiders, or whip scorpions. If you don't like spiders, I suggest only looking at the first article. These spiders have evolved a vibration-based communication system which they use to peacefully resolve male-male conflicts. Researchers wonder if this system is used by other arthropods, since the detection hairs are conserved across the group.

Links:

These Butterflies are "The Transformers of the Insect World" — And the Answer to an Evolutionary Mystery

The Threatening Vibes of Whip Spiders

Summer Assignment: 8.2

Before we get to the articles this week, I thought that this was too funny not to share.
























Anyway, two related links this week about bird/dinosaur evolution.

Xiaotingia zhengi

Earliest Bird was Not a Bird? New Fossil Muddles the Archaeopteryx Story

A new discovery of a fossil which sits somewhere between feathered dinosaur/early bird has changed the position of Archaeopteryx from the earliest bird to more of a distant bird cousin, or maybe just a dinosaur with feathers that watched the birds evolve. Adding this new fossil to the evolutionary tree moves Archaeopteryx out of the bird lineage and into a group of dinosaurs along with the new discovery named Xiaotingia zhengi.



Most importantly, this new discovery illustrates an extremely basic and important aspect of science which is often lost in public education. Science is an ever-changing, fluid entity. Just because Archaeopteryx has been moved from the position of earliest bird, does not mean it is gone, or not an important fossil. And it certainly doesn't mean that evolution is wrong. Science is about putting forth hypotheses, and seeing if the data support them. If the data do not, they are discarded or revised. It is not correct to say that these hypotheses were "wrong." They simply reflected an earlier set of data. Science is full of examples of this.