Here’s a neat video that I found on YouTube. It’s from the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (posted back in 2012, but who’s keeping track?) Somebody clever – probably several somebodies – has created and narrated a 3D animation of how DNA leads to proteins. In fact, there are a whole series of these animations from the DNA Learning Center, so there goes my evening. These kind of videos make me excited to go back and read my old biology textbooks (but not really, because they are absolutely ancient at 12 years since publication)!
Biology
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Pareidolia Play Along 3: The Reveal
This is a post by guest blogger Ellen Bulger.
In this installment, Ellen reveals the answer to last week’s Pareidolia Play Along.
It’s a bee, a blue bee! The genus is Osmia, the species probably pumila. The disk-like thing in the center of the shot is called a tegula and is positioned just above where the wings attach to body. If I’d been the one to name that particular bit of bee anatomy, I would have called them epaulets.
When I took the shot, I thought my oh my, this looks like a painting.
Mystery Post
Over at The Wandering Post Doc, Ralph has been musing over this stuff for whole minutes:
Know what it is? To learn more about the photo above you can visit Ralph at The Wandering Post Doc: An Archaeologist’s Life After Grad School.
Mitosis and Meiosis Songs
Entering “Biology Songs” as a search term in YouTube can suck a solid hour from a Biodork’s life.
This video gets points for actually having decent sound quality and getting the information across. If you watch it to the end, they wrap the story up with meiosis, death and reproduction. Also a picture of a guy giving death the finger. And I really think I’m going to be humming “Iiiinterphase. When you grow, I’ll help you grow.” all day.
There are several versions of this class activity, but this one had better camera angles than others.
For real nerdery, though, I recommend this square dance meiosis video:
The Poinsettia Mystery
I was a biology major in college. During that time I was a student employee and I got stuck with the mind-numbingly boring and frustrating task had the opportunity and challenge of gluing hundreds of friable, sometimes paper-thin plant specimens into specimen books. I also took a botany course, but it was only one semester long and I believe that the most I’ve retained from that class is an understanding of the differences between deciduous and coniferous trees. Actually, that was one of my big SCI-ENCE! moments. I remember being hugely impressed with needle-bearing evergreens’ adaptive strategies for surviving in nutrient-poor soil, and arid and low-sunlight conditions. Rah! Rah! Evergreens!
Anyway, that’s just a side story. The point is, I’m not a botanist, but I do imagine myself to be a bit of a naturalist and appreciator of ecological science. And what I’m…. Well… Hmmm… What I’m trying to say is that I learned something new, something that’s probably common knowledge and I’m a little embarrassed to have not known this, especially having studied a bit of botany. But on the other hand we all make assumptions about little things that don’t have much to do with out day-to-day needs or experiences, and it’s neat to have those misconceptions or ignorances cleared up. Here’s the story:
We, like many work offices, acquired a poinsettia over the holiday season. You know, one of these:
And as is the fate of so many under-appreciated and ignored office plants this one didn’t get nearly as much water as it needed. Eventually all of the green leaves blackened and curled and fell off to their final resting place on the dry soil. For some reason, after the last of the green leaves dropped, the officemates and I were spurred into action. We became poinsettia paramedics, determined to bring this abused plant back from the brink of destruction to which we had driven it.
As we were considering the poinsettia several days later I had this conversation with my office mate, R.
Me: Isn’t it weird that the leaves fell off before the petals did?
R: I think the red ones are leaves too, not petals.
Me: No way! Why have two different types of leaves on a plant? And leaves have chloroplasts, and don’t those cause the leaves to be green?
R: (A PhD in virology and rather far removed from his own botany course) I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think it’s necessary to be green if you have chloroplasts.
Me: I don’t know either. I bet the concentration of chloroplasts is less in the red parts than in the green leaves. I wonder how long the plant is going to live without the green leaves. Will it be able to produce enough energy to survive?
R: Hmm. [goes back to his computer]
Me: You know, if only there was someplace where we could easily look all of this stuff up.
R: [Playing with a ROC curve and only half listening to me ramble anymore] Have at it.
To the interwebs! As I knew it would be, the answer was immediately presented:
From the website BiologyReference.com
At first glance one might come to the erroneous conclusions that all leaves are green, and that which is green in nature is a leaf. While often this is the case, there are numerous exceptions. Plant organs are green because of the presence of chloroplasts in the cells near the surface, which reflect green light and absorb other wavelengths as a source of energy for photosynthesis. Certain cells in many leaves contain these organelles , but chloroplasts are also found elsewhere in other organs, such as the stems of cacti of the desert and twigs of sassafras trees in the deciduous forest. In addition, flowers such as the head of broccoli, and fruits such as watermelons also contain chloroplasts.Conversely, many leaves are not green. The winter holiday season brings potted poinsettia plants into many homes. The bright red or pink organs on these plants are not the flowers; they are specialized leaves called bracts, with cells that contain so much pigment that the limited amount of chlorophyll in the chloroplasts is obscured from view. Some poinsettias are white; usually a close look reveals that they have a green tinge due to the presence of a few chloroplasts. Poinsettias do, however, produce flowers. They are less conspicuous small, round yellow and green organs nestled at the apex of the stem, surrounded by the colorful modified leaves.
So – one mystery solved! But why bracts? Wikipedia says that the colorful red leaves serve the function of attracting pollinators. And an article on e-how provided some fascinating insight on why the poinsettia in our office is the way it is:
Why Colored Bracts Form: In nature, the poinsettia plant is deciduous and drops its leaves in the winter. Some of the leaves change color before they fall. Growers carefully control the light exposure of poinsettias cultivated for the home market to mimic this natural cycle and the topmost leaves, or bracts, turn color in response.
Special Breeding and Cultivating: Although all poinsettias have descended from the tall perennial Mexican plant, plant cultivators have bred and selected plants over decades to produce poinsettias with a height and appearance appropriate for inside decoration. In addition to shading leaves to induce color change, growers pinch the plants to produce side shoots for a fuller poinsettia.
Controlling Light Exposure:The amount of light a poinsettia receives controls its ability to produce colored bracts. Growers manipulate this natural process, called photoperiodism, to create colored leaves in time for the Christmas season, by giving the plants at least 12 hours of darkness for eight to 11 weeks.
Thanks, internets. I love when you prove me wrong get me the information I’m seeking!
And our Poinsettia is still hanging in there, although we’ll probably toss it out when it comes time to torture the poor potted Easter Lily that will show up in a couple of months.
Academic Animal Dissection, FY!
This morning I saw one of my Facebook Friends showing off a t-shirt that really annoyed me:
Image shows a cartoon frog with the words “cut class, not frogs!” and “Don’t dissect.” “peta2”
Of course it’s a PETA shirt, which is one mark against it, but it’s the joyous anti-intellectualism of the message that first slapped me in the face. The cutesy message about cutting class makes me want to take a shower. Remember this summer’s marketing disaster for JCPenny – the “I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me” t-shirt? Same sort of thing, but more gender-inclusive; Everyone can be anti-learning with this shirt!
I’m making a lot of assumptions in these next couple of sentences, but they’ve held true in my experience. Don’t skip class – you miss out on interesting, important information. I’ve found that when I skipped classes, it was harder to grasp the big picture, and so the subject seemed more out of my grasp. Once this downward spiral starts, it’s easy to just pretend that the material is boring or irrelevant because you’re missing an entire hour’s worth (at least) of facts or information! Also, whatever you’ve missed is probably going to be on the test, and you’ll feel a lot less stressed and like more of a superstar if you do well on the test…you know, rather than failing it.
Second – do dissections! It’s not gross, it’s not weird, it’s cool as hell! You are looking at the internal workings of the machinery that drives a living being! The National Science Teacher’s Association supports animal dissection and believes that it can help students develop skills of observation and comparison, discover the shared and unique structures and processes of specific organisms, and develop a greater appreciation for the complexity of life.
The wet lab portions of my high-school and college A&P classes were amazing! Seeing how fine the nerves were, how intricate the cardiovascular system, with all of the tubes going into and out of the heart and through the lungs, and understanding how long the small and large intestines really were as they moved through my gloved hands for a length of time that seemed to go on forever – these experiences fueled my interest in anatomy and inspired me to ask questions in ways that I doubt a computer program would have. So much of what we do these days is digital, and I suspect performing a necropsy on a computer screen would be just another game for me.
So, I was feeling a little grumpy about the “cut class, not frogs” shirt. But this morning on Twitter I found a perfect way to raise my spirits. A teacher at Gaffney High School in Gaffney, South Carolina is requesting donations to help fund dissections in her classroom:
My Anatomy and Physiology students attend a high poverty school that has limited resources and monies available. They are juniors or seniors who have identified their career path to be in the health science field. Some have set goals to be lab technicians while others strive for their doctorates. All of them want to learn and are interested in the structure and function of the human body. We have an enormous amount of fun learning and utilizing the limited resources we have.
My Project: Future nurses, health care professionals, and doctors will be inspired to pursue their dreams by having hands on experience with preserved specimen dissections. Dissection tool kits, virtual dissection tutorials, and basic specimens of sheep eyes, hearts, and brains will create a curiosity of the structure and function of the human body that will last a lifetime.
Science is a difficult and intimidating subject to many teenagers. My goal is to remove these obstacles by providing lessons that motivate my students to learn and strive for a college degree. Hands on activities and labs are the pathway to see my students excel not only in science, but also in their life.
If you can spare $5 (or a few $5!) and you’re feeling sentimental about your old frog dissection days, why not stop by her website and help out? At the time of this posting, Mrs. Greene is only $109 away from meeting her goal.
Biodorks…We’re multiplying.
Look – there’s another biodork! Only she’s BioDork, so you don’t get us confused.
I found this BioDork blog on tumblr because I have a Google Alert set for “biodork”. One day, there she was – thanks Google Alerts! She’s a biology student and her blog is brand new, but already she’s got some really cool links to science new stories, science art, video and quotes.
Of her recent links, I think one of my favorites is this carbon cycle shirt. Do want!
Biodorks…We're multiplying.
Look – there’s another biodork! Only she’s BioDork, so you don’t get us confused.
I found this BioDork blog on tumblr because I have a Google Alert set for “biodork”. One day, there she was – thanks Google Alerts! She’s a biology student and her blog is brand new, but already she’s got some really cool links to science new stories, science art, video and quotes.
Of her recent links, I think one of my favorites is this carbon cycle shirt. Do want!
Biology Pareidolia
Forget Mary in the grilled cheese sandwich Jesus in an MRI scan; my officemate and I saw a seriously spooky image today. We both saw something, but we can’t agree on what exactly we saw.
What do you think: Does this sunlight reflected off of a glossy-covered industry journal onto the ceiling looks more like a golgi apparatus or an endoplasmic reticulum?
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Biology Funs!
It’s such an icky disease. Can somebody just make it go away, please?
A cure for a disease that can up to 90% of infected individuals? A cure for a disease that makes people bleed out of every orifice in their body and can kill them 2-21 days after the onset of symptoms? I mean sure, the potential Ebolavirus cure has only been demonstrated in animal models, and there’s no real market for an Ebolavirus vaccine (which doesn’t offer a lot of financial payoff for development by private companies), but…
Oh wait, I’m sorry, did you say EBOLA CURE? That’s wicked cool biology!
From a report in the Vancouver Sun by Chad Skelton:
At a high-security military lab at Fort Detrick, Md., [Dr. Thomas] Geisbert infected several rhesus monkeys with a high dose of the Zaire strain of Ebola, one of the deadliest and fastest-replicating forms of the virus. Then, over the next seven days, four monkeys were given a single daily injection of the drug…by Day 10 of the study, the two “control monkeys” who hadn’t been given the drug were already dead, and the four treated monkeys were perfectly fine. Among a second test group, given only four injections, two of three monkeys survived.
Wow! I won’t bore you with all of the molecular biology, but if you’re interested, Wikipedia has a decent mid-level explanation of Ebola’s pathogenesis, transmission, signs and symptoms, treatment, prognosis, etc.
The original article by Dr. Geisbert can be found at thelancet.com under the very user-friendly title Postexposure protection of non-human primates against a lethal Ebola virus challenge with RNA interference: a proof-of-concept study. Or just go to thelancet.com and search for “Ebola”. You have to sign up for a free registration, but it’s quick and they don’t ask for a lot of personal info. It’s worth muddling through the medical-ese if you want to know about the study methods, or about the science driving the potential cure. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and stable nucleic acid-lipid particles (SNALPs). You know you do, you big nerd!
Right now it sounds like the most important reason for having an Ebola cure would be in the case of a biological attack using the virus. Because naturally-occuring Ebola is rare, there aren’t any immediately apparent financial incentives for a private development company to invest in the necessary R&D and clinical studies. The funding for Geisbert’s study comes from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a “Combat Support Agency for countering weapons of mass destruction” run out of the US Department of Defense.
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On to a couple of more local and more macro biology funs:
Pretty spider web found outdoors in Chaska, MN:
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My friend found this skull in the alley behind her South Minneapolis home. Is it a bird – crow or raven? The bone looks porous like bird bones and the jaw portion has got to be some sort of beak, wouldn’t you think? We do have a lot of big black birds in this area…
