Author: Discover Main Feed

Once again: If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to download or stream my fourth (and so far, I think, best) Point of Inquiry program–with Eli Kintisch on the subject of geoengineering. All this week on the blog, I’m going to be discussing issues raised on the show–so having heard it will be kind of an essential baseline. I’m always trying to become a better interviewer, so with this next post, I want to zoom in on an area where I failed to press my interview subject as I probably should have. And that is the relationship between religious beliefs and opposition to geoengineering. At around minute 9:15, I asked Eli about religious opposition to geoengineering–basically, about the folks who say that we shouldn’t “play God.” He gave a very detailed answer, essentially signaling that, hey, yeah, this is a lot like genetically modified foods–some people think the impulse to interfere with “nature,” to remake it in the way that only “God” is supposed to do, is wrong. I have no doubt this impulse is out there. But I don’t find it to be at all a rational argument, or a sound basis for public policy. When it comes to the genetics of …

In January through April of 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in the Antarctic.

This was a huge sheet of ice, about 3250 square kilometers (1250 square miles) in area, roughly equal to a square 57 km (34 miles) on a side. There had been a series of warm summers that weakened the shelf, and then the very warm summer of 2002 spelled doom for it.

The Landsat 7 satellite took many images of the collapse, but the Earth Observatory Image of the Day just released two dramatic shots of its impact:

The top image was taken on April 6, 2002 — about two months after the shelf collapsed — and the bottom one on February 20, 2003. What you’re seeing is the Crane glacier which flowed out into the ice shelf. See how the end of the glacier has retreated so far back into the bay? The Larsen B ice shelf helped stabilize the glacier, but with the shelf gone, the glacier was free to break off as well. The end result is the glacier edge effectively retreating up the channel. You can see icebergs floating in the bay, some hundreds of meters across.

It’s hard not to wonder about climate change when looking at this. As we reality-based folks are fond of saying, weather (short-term, local environment) is not climate (long-term, larger environment). On the other hand, how many episodes of weather over how large a region does it take to add up to climate?

One of the great things about evolutionary theory is that it is a formal abstraction of specific concrete aspects of reality and dynamics. It allows us to squeeze inferential juice from incomplete prior knowledge of the state of nature. In other words, you can make predictions and models instead of having to observe every last detail of the natural world. But abstractions, models and formalisms often leave out extraneous details. Sometimes those details turn out not to be so extraneous. Charles Darwin’s original theory of evolution had no coherent or plausible mechanism of inheritance. R. A. Fisher and others imported the empirical reality of Mendelism into the logic of evolutionary theory, to produce the framework of 20th century population genetics. Though accepting the genetic inheritance process of Mendelism this is original synthesis was not informed by molecular biology, because it pre-dated molecular biology. After James Watson and Francis Crick uncovered the biophysical basis for Mendelism molecular evolution came to the fore, and neutral theory emerged as a response to the particular patterns of genetic variation which new molecular techniques were uncovering. And yet through this much of R. A. Fisher’s image of an abstract genetic variant floating against a statistical soup of background noise variation persisted, sometimes dismissed as “bean bag genetics”.

We’ve come a long way from the first initial wave of discussions which were prompted by the molecular genetic revolution. We have epigenetics, evo-devo and variation in gene regulation. None of these processes “overthrow” evolutionary biology, though in some ways they may revolutionize aspects of it. Science is over the long haul after all an eternal revolution, as the boundaries of comprehension keep getting pushed outward. A few days ago I pointed to Sean Carroll’s recent work, which emphasizes that one must think beyond the sequence level, and focus on particular features such as cis-regulartory elements. Here we’ve been tunneling down to the level of the gene, but what about the traits, the phenotypes, which are affected by genetic variation?

It is well known that the sparest abstraction of genotypic-phenotypic relationship can be illustrated like so:

genetic variation → phenetic variation

But each element of this relation has to be examined greater detail. What type of genetic variation? Sequence level variation? Epigenetic variation? The second component is perhaps the most fraught, with the arrow waving away the myriad details and interactions which no doubt lurk between genotype and phenotype. And finally you have the phenotype itself. Are they all created alike in quality so that we can ascribe to them dichotomous values and quantities?

A new paper in PNAS examines the particulars of morphological phenotypes and physiological phenotypes, and their genetic control, as well as rates of evolution. Contrasting genetic paths to morphological and physiological evolution:

The relative importance of protein function change and gene expression change in phenotypic evolution is a contentious, yet central topic in evolutionary biology. Analyzing 5,199 mouse genes with recorded mutant phenotypes, we find that genes exclusively affecting morphological traits when mutated (dubbed “morphogenes”) are grossly enriched with transcriptional regulators, whereas those exclusively affecting physiological traits (dubbed “physiogenes”) are enriched with channels, transporters, receptors, and enzymes. Compared to physiogenes, morphogenes are more likely to be essential and pleiotropic and less likely to be tissue specific. Morphogenes evolve faster in expression profile, but slower in protein sequence and gene gain/loss than physiogenes. Thus, morphological and physiological changes have a differential molecular basis; separating them helps discern the genetic mechanisms of phenotypic evolution.

Morphology here refers to gross anatomical features. The sort of traits and characteristics which a paleontologist or anatomist might take interest in. Physiology is more about function, and the physical structures which enable that function. It is naturally closer to the scale of molecular biology as physiology melts into biochemistry. Of course at the other end physiology also merges with anatomy as physiology occurs within features of interest to the anatomist. By way of generalization perhaps physiology may be considered more granular, while morphology more gross, in the context of this paper.

They used the mouse because it’s a species which has long served as a model organism, and there are a host of well known and characterized mutations for both physiology and morphology. Utilization of mice in these fields in the context of evolutionary research dates back to the early 20th century. So systems biologists have a lot of research that’s already been done to work with. They found 5199 mouse genes with known phenotypes in the Mouse Genome Informatics database. 821 affected only morphological traits and 912 affected only physiological traits.

Figure 1 shows the breakdown by Gene Ontology:

Going by what little I know about these topics the second to the fourth panels aren’t surprising. Morphological traits are built from molecular structures, while the transporter activity classes are a more cellular scale, and so would seem to be below the threshold of salience for morphological traits. The first panel is not something I’d expected, but it makes sense after the fact. Figure 2 clarifies. The right panels have proportions, the left counts.

The primary point is this: morphogenes seem to affect more traits than physiogenes, and, their affect is less tissue specific when it comes to a particular trait. When this pattern is highlighted the enrichment toward transcriptional regulation makes more sense to me it is transcriptional regulation might allows for more trait by trait level control of variation. If there is a relationship of many traits to one gene that would probably impose a constraint on the sequence level to a greater extent than if the gene was implicated in variation on one trait. The gap in pleiotropy is closed somewhat when you constrain to essential genes, those whose mutation results in decrease of fitness to zero (through death or lack of ability to reproduce). Pleiotropy presumably is constraining the genetic landscape toward particular fitness peaks. Tissue specificity seems understandable when you consider the localization of many physiological processes, and their biochemical complexities (I’m thinking of the vagaries of gene expression in the liver here).

But they looked at more than how the traits and genes distribute now, they tried to sniff out if there were differences in the rate of evolution of morphogenes and physiogenes contingent upon the class of genetic variants. Remember that you have sequent level changes on exons which can alter proteins. You have cis-acting elements as critical cogs in gene regulation. And you have more gross genomic features such as gene duplication or deletion.

Figure 3 shows the differences between mice and humans on particular genes in relation to sequence level substitutions as well as gene expression profiles. Specifically in the case of the former you want to know the rate of nonsynonymous substitution, those substitutions at base pairs which change the amino acid translated, standardized by the overall mutation rate. So panel C is the one to focus on. Note that physiogenes seem to have evolved more since the last divergence between human and mice lineages than morphogenes. Why might this be? An immediate thought that comes to mind is that tissue-specific expressing physiological processes are liable to be modulated more often than gross morphology, which might be controlled by genes with a lot of pleiotropic effects and so constrained. Even when you control to tissue-specificity the pattern remains, as evident in panel D. The pattern seems somewhat inverted in relation to rate of evolution when it comes to gene expression profiles, as you can see in the last three panels. Evolution happens, but by somewhat different genetic means in these cases. The authors finger pleiotropy in particular as the problem for sequence level evolution in morphogenes, as changes in proteins are much more likely to be problematic if those proteins are upstream from many more traits.

In a way these results show that evolution has to be a versatile designer. When it comes to physiogenes the illustrator is in charge, creating new traits from the most basic genetic raw material, changes in a base pair here and a base pair there. But for morphogenes evolution has to use the tools and tricks of photoshopping, making recourse to extant elements and rearranging or tweaking things here and there so as not to upset the complex applecart while modulating on the margins.

What about cis-acting regulatory elements? In the paper they allude to the argument of Sean Carroll that cis-acting regulatory elements are critical for the evolution of morphological traits. That would imply that morphogenes should be enriched vis-a-vis physiogenes for changes on these elements. They didn’t find that in figure 4. On the contrary.

But I don’t think they perceive their result as a rock-solid refutation of Carroll because it was somewhat indirect. I’ll quote from the paper:

…Because experimentally confirmed mammalian cis elements are few, are likely to have been confirmed in only one species, and are potentially biased toward certain classes of genes,we tested the above hypothesis by using cis-elements that were predicted exclusively by motif sequence conservation among a set of vertebrate genome sequences and recorded in the cisRED database (20). In cisRED, 8,440 predicted mouse cis-elements and 7,688 predicted human cis-elements were found to be in the proximity of 586 mouse morphogenes and their human orthologs, respectively. Similarly, 7,082 mouse cis-elements and 7,215 human cis-elements were predicted for 621 physiogenes….

I’m inclined to accept this result and its generalizability, but there’s a layer of analysis and modeling in this case which doesn’t exist in the others. Additionally, Carroll’s thesis is about the whole animal kingdom and a mouse-human comparison may be atypical.

Finally they wanted to look at gene duplication. They found:

Together with the D_fam result, our analyses show that, whereas physiogene families expand/contract faster than morphogene families, the rate of expansion/contraction is relatively constant across lineages for a given family.

I wonder if the duplication here might have something to do with modulating dosages of various substrates in biochemical processes. This may have more direct relevance to physiological processes.

It is important to note as they did that the category “morphogene” and “physiogene” is somewhat artificial, as is the distinction between morphology and physiology. Nature is fundamentally one, and we break it apart as particular joints for ease of our own abstractions and categorizations. Additionally all genes presumably have some effect on morphology and physiology, and though this exploration looks under the hood a bit more than some of the older abstractions it too is a simplification. The key is that the argument here seems to be that these breaking apart of categories and processes gives us useful marginal return in comprehension of evolutionary dynamics. A trait is not always just a trait. Different classes of phenotypes may have different evolutionary genetic implications by their very nature. Some of this is common sense, those traits which are less functionally significant will exhibit more genic variation. But distinctions in terms of form and function themselves are at a further level of detail. And, I presume that generalizations that we make from mouse-human comparisons as here have some limitations across the tree of life.

Citation: Liao BY, Weng MP, & Zhang J (2010). Contrasting genetic paths to morphological and physiological evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20368429

The masked birch caterpillar creates its own home by weaving leaves together with silk. Once built, it vigorously defends its territory but, like many animals, it prefers to intimidate its rivals before resorting to blows. To display its strength and claim its territory, it drums and scrapes its jaws against the leaf. It also drags its anus across the surface to create a complex scratching noise. This “anal scraping” message seems utterly bizarre, but its origins lie in a far more familiar activity – walking.

Warding a rival off with your anus might seem unseemly to us, but caterpillars that do this turn out to be rather civilised species. The scraping is based on the same walking movements that their ancestors used to chase after rivals. The other parts of their signalling repertoire – drumming and scraping jaws – are ritualised versions of fighting moves like biting, butting and hitting. While their earlier cousins might resort to such fisticuffs, the anal-scrapers conduct their rivalries with all the restraint of Victorian gentlemen.

These signals and their evolution have been decoded by Jaclyn Scott from Carleton University. They a great examples of how ritualised animal communiqués evolve from much simpler actions that have little if anything to do with communication – walking, breathing, hunting and the like. Crickets, for example, sing by rubbing their wings together, which may originally have been done to release pheromones or to prep the wings for flight. The whistling of wind through the feathers of crested pigeons has turned into an alarm. The competitive knee-clicks of eland antelopes are made by tendons that slide as a natural part of their gait.

Often, these origins are hard to test and scientists need to be careful if they aren’t to rely on fanciful just-so stories. To avoid that, Scott analysed 36 species of caterpillars from two different families. Some of them had simple struts called “pro-legs” on their end segment, which they use to inch their way along. Other species lacked these structures and in their place, they had a pair of “anal oars” – thicker, harder, spatula-shaped versions of the caterpillar’s normal hairs. These are the instruments that the larvae use to scrape their leaves.

These two groups of caterpillars put their bums to different uses – walking and talking – but the movements they make are the same. They lift the anal segment forward, place it on the leaf and their push backwards against it. The big difference is that in the walkers, the end stays put and the front half launches forward, while in the talkers, the front stays attached and the bum moves backwards. When the masked birch caterpillar makes its anal scrapes, it is essentially talking by walking on the spot.

To confirm this analogy, Scott sequenced DNA from her three dozen species and built a family tree that charted their evolutionary relationships. She found that the species with the pro-legs – the walkers – came first. They solve their conflicts with violence, crawling towards intruders and physically attacking them.

Those with anal oars – the talkers – are an offshoot that descended from this larger group and lost their anal pro-legs. In this group, all the aggressive movements on their cousins have become ritualised into signals. Instead of a confrontational crawl, they do an anal scrape. Instead of biting, hitting and butting, they scratch and drum the leaves with their jaws instead.

Scott also found that the original movements already had the foundations of a good signal. The crawling and pushing movements of a defensive caterpillar produce vibrations that you can pick up over background noise. As these movements became ritualised into signals, they became simpler too, so that caterpillars that send messages by anal scraping produce much larger and more repetitive vibrations using fewer body movements. This is exactly what you’d expect to happen over time – as messy but informative behaviour evolves for use in communication, it becomes clearer and less ambiguous.

Reference: Nature Communications http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1002

More on animal communication:

• Bee-ware – bees use warning buzz to refute the waggle dance
• Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell’s monkeys combine just six ‘words’ into rich vocabulary
• Orang-utans use leaves to lie about their size
• Cats manipulate their owners with a cry embedded in a purr
• Camouflaged communication – the secret signals of squid
• Singing fish reveal shared origins of vertebrate vocals

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to download or stream my fourth (and so far, I think, best) Point of Inquiry program–with Eli Kintisch on the subject of geoengineering. All this week on the blog, I’m going to be discussing issues raised on the show–so having heard it will be kind of an essential baseline. This post is to raise the first issue, which has to do with Eli’s response to my question around minute 6, where I ask about the geoengineering techniques that scientists consider to have the most promise. In response, Eli provided a fairly encyclopedic answer that essentially broke geoengineering schemes into two categories: 1) carbon capture/removal techniques to get the stuff out of the air, by sucking it into machines, into the ocean, into trees and plants, etc; and 2) sunlight blocking techniques, which essentially reduce the total solar radiation being absorbed by the planet. My problem is that the carbon removal techniques (with perhaps the exception of iron fertilization) are relatively uncontroversial. Whereas the sunblocking techniques–and especially what Kintisch calls the “Pinatubo option”–are wildly so. So is it really wise to group them both together under the rubric of “geoengineering”? Don’t we have a pretty big …

Even enigmatic eclipsing binaries are thrilled to appear in Beetle Bailey. Sinatra would have killed to appear in Beetle Bailey, am I right?

These photos were taken at Cape Point, one of the southernmost points of Africa (the actual honour belong to Cape Agulhas several miles to the east). This area is periodically wracked with strong winds and so it was when we visited. Nonetheless, that didn’t stop these kamikaze cormorants from trying to fly among the turbulent waters.

We found these cormorants at a different location – the pier to Robben Island, the infamous prison island where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were kept.

The antivaxxers are getting more media attention, and it’s not good for them. NPR has a story about measles being on the rise in Vancouver, and make it clear that it’s due to antivax fear-mongering. Money quote:

CDC officials are watching the Vancouver outbreak closely, as neighboring Washington state has sizable populations of vaccine refusers.

“If measles crossed the border into those populations, there’s a potential for a sizable outbreak,” says Dr. Jane Seward of the CDC.

The antivaxxers are nothing if not ironic: they say they want to protect our health, and yet put it at grave risk, and the fear they monger about vaccines is the exact opposite of what we really should be afraid of: outbreaks of preventable and potentially fatal diseases.

Tip o’ the syringe to Evan Wilson for the NPR story.

For the past year I’ve been having periodic discussions with a friend who has a nice amount of money which he invests (he’s a single male cresting up to his peak earning years after receiving an advanced science degree from an elite institution). He is pessimistic about the long term prospects for the American economy, and believes that the current run of stock market gains are simply a bear market rally. Even when he made his assertion last year I pointed out that if it was a bear market rally it was unprecedented in its magnitude. Of course I wasn’t too confident about appealing to historical precedents after what’s happened in the past few years. Look at the comments I elicited after mooting fears of a recession in May 2007. I know some of the commenters are regular readers to this day, so I hope everyone enjoys watching the frankly moronic confidence. I use the term not as an aspersion but as an accurate description of the hubris and complacency on display. I myself told a friend that the credit crisis was overblown in the summer of 2008, relying on moronic conventional wisdom from overeducated morons that the Great Moderation was in effect. I was wrong, and I don’t have a word to capture the contempt which I have for the likes of me, a fool who relied naively on the foolish. I am reckoned a young man by some, so that’s the excuse I’ll give.

With all that stated then as to my profound uncertainty I have to say I’m a bit perplexed by green shoots of economic optimism which seem to be sprouting here and there. Ultimately I would dismiss this, but the stock market performance is mystifying to me. We know from historical precedent that market run ups presage economic growth in the future. This is presumably because investors are pricing information which they receive before the rest of us, and the NBER, and so give us a more accurate crowd-sourced preview of the future. But like my friend I have a hard time understanding where the fundamentals are which could give rise to a robust cycle of growth. We are, thankfully in my mind, being weaned off of consumer credit. So we can’t fake the growth through debt fueled consumption, we have to produce. But what new technologies are causing structural changes in the economy? I don’t see it.

But it is important to remember that most people didn’t see the internet being of economic relevance in 1994. Deep into 1995 Microsoft was “all in” on the next big technological breakthrough…interactive television! And while the .com bubble was blowing up no one had any idea of the awesome investing potential represented by the revolutionary economics of 21st century homebuilding…oh, oops! But let’s just assume that the stock market is telling us something real, that growth which is not fueled by consumers or the state taking on more debt is in the offing. Where does that growth come from?

I have no idea, so I’ll offer a speculative theory: in the next few years we’ll see the rise of magic, which will revolutionize modern economies with supernatural green forms of transport. Screw the Segway, imagine how efficient magic carpets will be as personal vehicles! Not only do they run on supernatural fuel which has no carbon footprint (all the waste is emitted in magicland, which is parallel to the real world), but they take up very little space, and are multipurpose as well as aesthetically customizable. The main downside is you’re exposed to the elements, and velocity has to be modest so you don’t fall off the carpet.

You might think this is a silly prediction to offer. So what’s your theory? Peter Thiel has billions, invested in PayPal and Facebook, and claimed that the markets are not so retarded that they’ll invest irrationally in a new bubble for a generation after being burned twice in the past 10 years. Is Thiel wrong? Are the markets not-so-efficient. Or are we going to have to get ready for some magic?

I seek a true guide to the perplexed, not platitudes from latter day kleptocrapts.

See here. There has been great response so far to the latest podcast, and the guest has now answered a large bunch of listener questions online–and is promising to do more soon. I think we’ve gotten a real dialogue going, so if you want to join in, please visit the Point of Inquiry forums!

• The unveiling of Australopithecus sediba was covered by some excellent journalism from Carl Zimmer at Slate, Kate Wong at Scientific American and Brian Switek at Laelaps. Meanwhile, Ivan Oransky covers the embargo farrago that surrounded this story, and I suggest to the world’s journalists that the only acceptable use of the phrase “missing link” is this.
• Grisly video of a hyena eating a giraffe while sitting in it. Not for the squeamish.
• A great piece by Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational, talking about why businesses don’t experiment and why they should (instead of relying on consultants)
• An incredible story by Abel Pharmboy from Terra Sigillata about a blog reader who was a former homeless addict and turned her life around. Amazing, life-affirming stuff.
• Colin Schultz discusses whether science journalism is caught in a reinforcing cycle of niche reporting, with views from me, Carl Zimmer, Ferris Jabr and more, and a great comment discussion developing
• Crittercam reveals a great fight between a sealion and a giant octopus. I say “great”. I really mean “quick”. Poor octopus.
• The best infographic of all time
• From Lifehacker, a study showing that touching an object for longer increases our perception of its value. It explains why we hold onto our clutter, and also why arrogant people are such w*nkers…
• The always excellent BPS Research Digest tells us that people lie more in email than when using pen and paper and that emailers feel more justified in lying. I choose to believe them.
• Christine Ottery discusses the future of investigative science journalism following interviews with me and other participants at City University’s Science and the Media debate.
• PLoS ONE has an interesting paper about how positive results increase down the hierarchy of the sciences, from physical sciences to social ones.
• The scientific community is abuzz with news that everyone’s favourite black-bellied dew-lover Drosophila melanogaster might have to be renamed. Nature News has the story. Brendan Maher has already set up a #savedrosophila hashtag on Twitter.
• In the Atlantic, Lane Wallace has an excellent piece about the bias of veteran journalists – essential reading for anyone who thinks that journalists are the only people capable of impartial, independent reporting.
• A PNAS paper about beautiful insects preserved in Cretaceous amber prompted a fascinating blog fight between Alex Wild of Myrmecos and the paper’s authors. Alex has since conceded but the entire issue makes for fascinating reading.
• Ever since Titanoboa, the world’s largest ever snake, was discovered, every fossil in the surrounding area became destined to be described in relation to this mega-serpent. As an example, see Wired’s piece about a fossil turtle that had an extra-thick shell to fend off Titanoboa.
• National Geographic has a piece about a rare breed of super-taskers who can juggle driving and using mobile phones without an increased risk of accidents. But can they juggle phones while driving?
• The New York Times had an interesting piece about gay behaviour in animals. Jonah Lehrer gave his take on it, and Vanessa Woods followed it up with a post in Psychology Today claiming that a story about gay sex in animals without bonobos is like an article about big ears without elephants.
• Mind Hacks has a post about how rates of yawning change throughout our lives, which will almost certainly make you yawn.
• Will the iPad change journalism or publishing? Who cares? The big question is will it blend?
• In the NYT, Natalie Angier says that even among animals, there are leaders, followers and schmoozers
• Phil Plait shares one of the most incredible astronomy photos of all time – the International Space Station flying through the aurora
• New Scientist covers research that suggests Archaeopteryx may have been nocturnal
• And finally, I started a Posterous account to mock a piece of hilariously bad PR which suggested that atoms are conscious and that I am Jennifer Ouellette. Neither is true.

Having now been here a couple of weeks, I can say that Austin is possibly the best place I’ve lived–or at least ranks alongside New York. I’ll wait a few months to decide for sure, as it doesn’t count until I’ve made it through the summer heat. So far I’ve been exploring town on foot and meeting all sorts of friendly people. Breakfast tacos are the staple and there are fresh avocados everywhere. Dogs and bicycles are popular, flip-flops are ‘the Austin work boot’, and wildflowers abound thanks to Lady Bird Johnson. I’ve been hanging out with a lot of great folks involved in energy and recently toured a coal power plant. I also visited Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge which offers great birding opportunities. And since it’s Austin, it was easy to find a group of talented guys to play music with. Something about this place already feels like home. CM’s on the way over to visit, so I’m hoping the city inspires him to pick up his guitar again…

Trying to find the perfect gift for the Trekker in your life? Why not try Tiberius cologne? Or, if you’re feeling the love, maybe the scent of Pon Farr will do the trick… though maybe smelling like a frisky Vulcan may not work out so well. Of course, anything’s better than Red Shirt.

Honestly, though, I have to admit I’d much prefer this.

Tip o’ the VISOR to BABloggee Lindsay F.

Chris Mooney points me to some data on scientific knowledge indicators published by the NSF. There’s a controversy whereby evolution and Big Bang related questions seem to have been removed because American religious Fundamentalism tended to produce a rejection of sane consensus in these areas. Science pointed to the unedited chapters which have some international comparisons. I’ve reformatted a figure from page 103 below. No surprise that American comes out badly on evolution and the Big Bang, but what always strikes me when Russia is included in the list is how skeptical citizens are to conventional science. If you poke around the World Values Survey you don’t find the Russians to be a particularly religious nation, at least compared to Poland or the United States, despite a general shift back toward nominal Orthodox Christian affiliation after the fall of Communism. Rather, I suspect Russian rejection of mainstream science probably has its roots more in a broader skepticism of institutional elite knowledge. After all, the Marxist ideology under which they were tyrannized for 70 years made the pretense of being scientific and positivistic.

The line in the middle of the bar graph is 50%, and all the bars represent correct responses.

Many children have a “bug period”–a time of life when bugs and creepy crawlies are a source of endless fascination and learning. Naturalist Edward O. Wilson jokes that unlike other kids, he never grew out of his bug period.

Luckily for this biologist, his lifelong passion for ants has yielded a career rich in accomplishment and accolades. He is not just the world’s preeminent expert on the social behavior of ants, but also the recipient of the National Medal of Science and two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction. Now, at the age of 80, Wilson has taken a stab at fiction. His first novel, Anthill, combines two of his greatest loves–his childhood home, Alabama, and the ants that have been his lifelong friends.

Described as an “six-legged Iliad,” Wilson’s Anthill draws parallels between human and ant societies. Though there are no ant symphony orchestras, secret police, or schools of philosophy, both ants and men conduct wars, divide into specialized castes of workers, build cities, maintain infant nurseries and cemeteries, take slaves, practice agriculture, and indulge in occasional cannibalism, though ant societies are more energetic, altruistic, and efficient than human ones [The New York Review of Books].

The book’s first and third sections deal with the adventures of an Alabama boy named Raphael Semmes Cody, called Raff. The boy grows up poking around the lush pine savanna of the Nokobee Tract; he’s drawn to its natural wonders, and uses the forest to escape from his parents’ toxic marriage. In this pristine woodland he literally leaves no stone unturned as he discovers the forest’s rich flora and fauna. Raff grows up and heads to Harvard to study law, returning later in life to protect the Nokobee from feckless developers. But fans of Wilson’s science will be most interested in the book’s middle section, where the author inserts a mini-novella describing the trials and tribulations of the ants living in the endangered forest.

In this second section, “The Anthill Chronicles,” the reader embarks on an epic entomological journey that’s told from the ants’ point of view. In an ant colony called Trailhead, the worker ants realize that their queen dead. She has been dead for several days, but the ants don’t realize it until they smell the death chemicals; this is one of the many ways Wilson shows how pheromones drive behavior and life in the colony. Without a queen at its head, the colony faces its next trial–an attack from the neighboring colony of Streamside. Luckily for the Trailhead colony, nature steps in, producing a genetic mutation that results in the birth of many queens or queenlets. Without giving much of the plot away, suffice to say that what ensues is Wilson’s depiction of how balance is restored to the natural order.

Reviews of the book have been mixed. Writing for the The New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood praised Wilson for his first novel, saying that his love for his subject shows in the exuberance of the prose, and in the inventiveness of the plot. And—with the exception of small stretches of awkwardness and preachiness—the reader will have a great time reading it [The New York Review of Books].

The Washington Post stomped on the book, calling it clumsy, heavy on exposition, and full of digressions. However, that reviewer suggested that Wilson might have produced a masterpiece had he just stuck to writing about the ants, and declared that in “The Anthill Chronicles” section almost everything we learn of the ants’ enemies and friends, their memories and emotions and ways of communicating, their divisions of labor mirroring our own, is oddly engaging, even riveting [Washington Post].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Discover Interview E.O. Wilson
DISCOVER: E. O. Wilson Says Ants Live in Humanlike Civilizations
DISCOVER: The Man Who Found That “Genes Hold Culture on a Leash”
DISCOVER: The Most Incredible Things Ants Can Do (photo gallery)
80beats: A Novel That Laughs Along with Climate Change: Ian McEwan’s Solar
80beats: How Henrietta Lacks’s Cells Became Immortal and Changed Medical Science

Image: W.W. Norton and Co.

“Erotic stimulation by the use of vacuum cleaners or electric brooms appears to be a common form of masturbation. Unfortunately, and contrary to apparent public appreciation, injury due to this form of autostimulation may not be unusual. Five cases of significant penile trauma resulting from this form of masturbation are presented, with a spectrum of severe injuries, including loss of the glans penis.”

Image: flickr/Nevada Tumbleweed

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A vacuum device for penile elongation: fact or fiction?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Oily balls.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does ass size correlate with penis length? The answer may surprise you!

Shaggy dogs do it, snakes do it, and now a new breed of sheep will do it–molt, that is. A British breeder has created the country’s first self-shearing sheep, which will shed its wool once the weather gets warmer, thus saving farmers the time and bother of shearing.

The new sheep is called “Exlana,” which is Latin for “used to have wool.” It was created by crossing exotic breeds like the Barbados Blackbelly and the St. Croix.

The result was a sheep with a thin wool coat that it sheds in the spring. Breeders say it produces substantially less wool than the typical British sheep, making the process quicker: While a normal sheep produces almost 20 pounds of wool, the Exlana yields just one pound.

You might think that farmers would be opposed to a sheep that yields less wool, but the breeder behind the Exlana says the sheep will be a great boon for the many British farmers who now raise sheep only for their meat. Breeder Peter Baber told The Telegraph:

“We used to have normal, woolly sheep at the farm and had to spend hours shearing them in the spring. But the value of wool has reduced so much recently that it’s no longer economically viable to produce. Shearing has just became a necessity and, quite frankly, a nuisance.”

The thin wool coat, Baber told The Telegraph, resembles felt, and drops off in pieces over the course of a few days. Baber says that the wool falls in the fields, where it composts easily or is carried away by birds.

“I imagine that the birds on our farms must have the cosiest nests in Britain.”

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Image: BNPS

“Memristors” are four decades in the making, but it turns out that this fourth kind of circuit element (beyond the inductor, capacitor, and resistor) might have more potential to change computing than even its creators first believed.

In a study this week in Nature, researchers with Hewlett-Packard report that they’ve achieved “stateful logic” with their memristor, whose name derives from a mashup of “memory” and “resistor.” In a nutshell, stateful logic means that the ’state’ of the memristor acts as both the computer and the memory. That’s a pretty big change from current computers, which typically load data from memory, perform operations on it, and then send it back [Nature]. In addition, memristors can store information even in the absence of electrical current.

While an engineer named Leon O. Chua theorized memristors back in 1971, they remained strictly theoretical until HP researchers created the first one two years ago. But while the researchers previously thought of it as just another kind of memory, this study’s find—that they themselves can perform logic—suggests memristors could go much further than that. Such a discovery can pave the way for chips that can both perform calculations and hold data, potentially eliminating the need for a traditional core CPU [CNET].

The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device [The New York Times]. And the device’s speed is equally impressive: Stan Williams of HP, one of the lead authors, says they can turn on and off in a nanosecond.

Memristor development currently isn’t close to competing with ordinary silicon, but the ever-confident Williams and this team argue that they could overtake flash memory within three years, and someday surpass the phase-change memory of their competitors. For Chua, the dream goes further. “Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains” [The New York Times].

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Image: Stan Williams / Nature

The first light in the universe, the light used to push spacecraft, and the light produced by kicking the head of a walrus.

What is this—a fairground toy? A contemporary sculpture?

This balloon is in fact an element of military defense. Russian balloon maker Rusbal is working on an order from the country’s defense ministry to supply full-scale inflatable military models. The realistic-looking hardware is used in battlefield positions and to protect Russian strategic installations from surveillance satellites, distracting snoops and protecting real combat units from strikes. They can look like real vehicles in the radar, thermal, and near infra-red bands, so they’d even look right through night-vision goggles. The units are light and can be set up in few minutes.

Image courtesy Rusbal