Summer Assignment: 8.26

Tools Let Public Contribute to Massive Interactive Online Biodiversity Encyclopedia

Short update on the progress on the Encyclopedia of Life, an effort to catalog all of Earth's species. A very ambitious and worthwhile project. Another similar project is the Tree of Life, which focuses more on the phylogenetic (evolutionary) relationships between species.

Chris Jordan Photographic Arts

A blogger at Ready Made Magazine is trying to survive for a week without plastic. Very interesting concept, I have seen this done a few times before with other materials. But it reminded me of the artwork of Chris Jordan, who creates mosaics using certain numbers of items.



The example above is made of 10000 dog and cat collars, which represents the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the US every day. The gallery at his website features close-up views of the work, and most of his others, so that the individual pieces can be seen.

Very powerful work, I highly recommend visiting the site and checking out the two Running the Numbers galleries. A great visual statement on our disposable culture in America.

Summer Assignment: 8.19

The Long and Short of It

Short essay about the evolution of size in animals. There are many factors at play here, and the process is not very well understood.

I found this to be very interesting

Take a salamander. Let’s say it’s a certain size, and it has a certain number of cells. Suppose you double the size of the cells. Do you get a salamander that is twice as big? No. You get a salamander that’s the same size as it was before. But it has half the number of cells. Somehow, the salamander’s body can measure how big it is and stops growing when it gets to the right size.

(These animals look like regular salamanders, and are perfectly healthy. However, they are a bit stupid, apparently because they have half the number of brain cells. They’re less good than regular salamanders at solving mazes.)

Poor salamanders, not only are they small, they can't find their way home.


Early Risers are Mutants

I always knew there was something weird about morning people. Well, I shouldn't point fingers, I usually do just fine on 5 hours of sleep a night. But still, being able to tell a morning person that they are a mutant is nice.

Summer Assignment: 8.12

Babies' Brains Churning With Activity

The idea of "mirror neurons" is very interesting...as you watch someone doing an action, your brain works as if you are doing the action yourself. Could be a very important part of learning motor control.

Tumor Suppressor Pulls Double Shift as Reprogramming Watchdog

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) could potentially be the key to the future of stem cell based therapies and research. They can provide patients with a population of stem cells that are an exact genetic match, without the moral/ethical issues surrounding other methods of obtaining stem cells.

Vertical Farms

I thought that this was an interesting method to address the food problem in the world. Not sure if they took into account the price of real estate in NYC....

Summer Assignment: 8.5

Microbes 'R' Us

Interesting ideas about the role of intestinal flora in human evolution. Why do specific groups have specific bacterial signatures? Do the diets fit the bacteria, or vice versa? Could this play a role in one of the posts from a few weeks ago about humans eventually evolving to be able to handle high-fat diets and not become obese: Since bacteria can evolve so much faster than humans, it is probably much more likely for a fat-metabolizing bacteria to arise than the human genome changing.

How Happy is the Internet?

Very interesting use of the internet in social research; the results from Twitter should be even more enlightening. Some interesting questions raised about popular music too: Is there a relationship between happy lyrics and popularity? As someone who listens to both "sad" (Radiohead, Elbow) and "happy" (Jack Johnson....umm, that's the only happy artist I can think of right now. Maybe I only like sad music...) artists, I think maybe the popularity of the artists may be a reflection of the overall mood of time. Happy mood = happy popular music.

But anyway, how can the internet not be happy when there is stuff like this on there. And this.