Replace “old” with “rich”

At some point during Science Online 12, Maggie Koerth-Baker (in middle of picture) asked,

Do you think the public communication conflicts have to do with older scientists vs. younger scientists?

Ah yes, the old joke: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Let’s play a game. Think about some aspect of the way science is conducted know that you think needs reform: valuing outreach to the community (as in Maggie’s question above), promoting open access, not paying so much attention to journal impact factor. I bet that for each of those, someone who has written:

“Things will change as the new generation of scientists comes in.”

Try this: any time you see a statement about the culture of science where someone invokes age, replace “age” with “money.” When you hear people talk about “senior scientists,” replace it with “funded scientists.” ^* To be even more precise, “institutions with funded scientists.”

Institutions value money, and they value it in a way that is amplified and greater than the way individuals in that institution value money. Some institutions have gotten good at extracting money from research. The greater the money prospects, the more stultified and problematic the reward system becomes.

I’ve certainly seen a shift at my own institution. When I interviewed here, I was told by one administrator, “It’s not publish or perish here.” That was just at the start of a push to get more research here. As we have grown our research program, events were held to recognize people who publish in tier one journals and bring in more than a million dollars in grant money. I’m starting to hear things like, “We need to start paying attention to the impact factor of journals where people publish.”

Even when I hear administrators talk about “getting kids excited about science,” sometimes it feels like there’s a subtext of, “so they will be tuition paying students at our university in a few years.”

When you talk about how to changing academic and scientific culture, you’re talking about how to break the allure of money rather than dealing with people who are recalcitrant.

With funding flat for the foreseeable future, it may be that the scientific reward scheme will change if the prospects for money become less predictable. Unfortunately, I think it more likely that there will be a greater push to adopt a dubious reward system that focuses on getting money, creating more prejudices against public science communication rather than less.

^* Obviously, age and funding are correlated. In the United States, the average age of getting a research grant has been going up. I think it’s now somewhere in the 40s in many federal agencies.

Photo by _ColinS_ on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Once more into the cave

Caves. There’s a whole series of things that tends to happen in creatures that become cave-dwellers. Over and over and over again, animals that live exclusively in caves tend to be blind compared to their closest living relatives.

This makes cave species great for studying evolution, because each cave is a “natural experiment.” Mexican cave fish are a particularly cool case, because we have in the same species both cave dwellers, which are blind, and surface fish, which are not. And they can interbreed.

This new paper looks purely at the genetics of these cave fishes, trying to figure out just how many times they have invaded caves and lost developed the “cave” phenotype. This new paper by Bradic and colleagues is an extensive crunching of gene samples, and concludes that while there were two ancestral populations, those ancestral populations in turn invaded caves several times: a total of five introductions to caves, all told.

Furthermore, although these animals can interbreed in the lab, this seems to be unlikely in nature. Their results indicate low gene flow between the surface population and the cave populations. Still, while low, it’s not zero, suggesting that there is a genuine fitness advantage to the blind cave-dwelling form.

Reference

Bradic M, Beerli P, Garcia-de Leon FJ, Esquivel-Bobadilla S, Borowsky RL. 2012. Gene flow and population structure in the Mexican blind cavefish complex (Astyanax mexicanus). BMC Evolutionary Biology 12: 9. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-12-9

Photo by Joachim S. Müller on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Links

Turning light and going blind: A tale of caves and genes

Males have bigger brains than females, if those males are sticklebacks from Iceland

This supershort paper contains an interesting fact: there is a population of male stickleback fish out there with big brains. The males fish that have brains 23% larger than the females of approximately equal size.

This is a bit of an unfair characterization. The paper does talk a little bit about how the look for differences in brain size according to the local eco-type that they found the fish and: mud or lava. the nails from allow the environments have bigger brains than those from muddy environments, but there is no such difference in the females.

This is an interesting difference, because so few animals have differences in brain size mispronounced between males and females. Kotrschal and colleagues say that this is the biggest difference in overall brain size in males and females to date.

What are we to make of this one interesting fact? The team speculates that this might be because the males make complicated nests, and compete for females through courtship displays. But it seems that there are many other animals that have similar differences in behavior without the differences in overall brain size. Maybe the real question is not why male brains are so big, but why are female brains in this fish so small? The authors speculate that this might be because the females are investing energy in egg production. Again, it doesn’t really answer why it should be so specifically strong in this particular population of this particular fish when all sorts of females invest energy in making eggs.

While the fact that this paper presents is interesting, a fact in isolation is mainly a curiosity, to borrow a phrase from psychologist Ernst Hilgard. I would’ve liked to have seen this fact presented slightly longer paper with a few more experiments and a little more context. There will surely be some interesting follow-up studies to do.

Reference

Kotrschal A, Räsänen K, Kristjánsson B, Senn M, Kolm N. 2012. Extreme sexual brain size dimorphism in sticklebacks: a consequence of the cognitive challenges of sex and parenting? PLoS ONE 7(1): e30055. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030055

Photo by Noel Burkhead on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: Fresh ink

Keeping with last week’s hydrothermal vent crustaceans...

This is another hydrothermal vent shrimp, Alvinocaris komaii. The tattoo belongs to one of the authors who formally described it for science, Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News. It was completed last week at the Science Online 2012 conference, by Dogstar Tattoo.

This shrimp lives near hydrothermal vents just north of New Zealand, where they normally are found on beds of mussels. They are probably generalist feeders.

One of the recurring questions with hydrothermal vent animals is that given that the vents are so separated, how do the animals living at them disperse from vent to vent? The paper alludes that that when it discusses the relationships between the shrimps in this genus. The geographic locations of the species don’t seem to make well with the relationships, which would be consistent with animals that have to disperse widely and live in short-lived habitats.

It’s interesting to compare this artistic rendition to the formal figure from the paper:

Reference

Zelnio K, Hourdez S. 2009. A new species of Alvinocaris (Crustacea: Decapoda: Caridea: Alvinocarididae) from hydrothermal vents at the Lau Basin, Southwest Pacific, and a key to the species of Alvinocarididae. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 122(1): 52-71. DOI: 10.2988/07-28.1

The disembodied tail

When things are bad, and I mean really bad, horribly you-are-in-the-jaws-of-death bad, sometimes you have to let go of something.

Like a tail.

This leopard gecko (Eublepharis macularius) can, when hassled, have its tail fall off. Losing a limb (autotomy) is not a particularly unusual trick for this species. Lots of animals can drop legs and tails if necessary. But this one is noteworthy because if it does so, the tail doesn’t just come off, but it will continue to twist and writhe for up to several minutes after the tail has been separated from the rest of the body.

We’re not just talking about simple twitching here. We’re not talking about something regular, like a horror-show heart that beats after removal from the body. Higham and Russell show that that the tail is doing at least two things. One is a slow, rhythmic swinging, and occasionally, much faster contortions that made the tail flip or jump around. The flips tend to fade out faster than the slower swinging, though.

When we think about vertebrates movements, we normally think that the brain is involved somehow. But here, the tail has been completely severed from the brain, so how are these movements generated and controlled?

Taking the information from the muscle recordings they made from the tail, Higham and Russell think that the slower rhythm is generated by neurons left in the spinal cord of the tail. We’ve known for a long time, probably since the 1970s, that the spinal cord in vertebrates holds a lot of the neural circuitry needed to generate basic locomotor motions.

Higham and Russell argue that the gecko’s tail the faster movements are more interesting. They think that these flips are not controlled by a set of neurons in the spinal cord that out a rhythm. They marshal a few pieces of evidence for their hypothesis. First, they note that the flips only occur for a couple of minutes after the tail’s been removed, whereas the slow movements continue for up to half an hour. Second, the flips are extremely variable compared to the slow movements, even after you take into account the fact that they’re shorter. Third, when a flip occurs, the muscles along the tail are active simultaneously, compared to the slow movements, where the muscles along the tail are activated one after another.

They don’t know yet what the mechanism of these fast flips might be. Higham and Russell note that working on the neural basis of this behaviour has an advantage: you can do neurophysiological experiments on the spinal cord without having to kill the animal. I’m sure that the gecko appreciates this, but I still bet it will miss that beautiful tale it used to have. They never grow back as nice as the original one.

Reference

Higham T, Russell A. 2012. Time-varying motor control of autotomized leopard gecko tails: multiple inputs and behavioral modulation The Journal of Experimental Biology 215(3): 435-441. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.054460

Photo by A. Jaszlics on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

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Logo study: Texas Academy of Science (rejected version)

Last year, the Texas Academy of Science announced they were interested in a new logo. I could see why when you looked at their previous logo. It looks a bit complicated and a bit dated to me.

I submitted one, which was not selected, but I wanted to show it off anyway.

The original announcing the competition suggested that people might want to consider incorporating the “pillars” of teaching, research, and service in the logo. It also recommended that simple designs were often effective.

As a general state society, you’re sort of limited in what you can do, because you need something that conveys the geographic location. Fortunately, Texas has an advantage there. Its border cuts a distinctive shape. It’s the Lone Star state. It’s virtually synonymous with the old west.

Normally, I don’t sketch much on paper when designing, but this an exception. I decided to make the state outline the point of the design.

I toyed a lot with trying to work the curves of the southern border into something like a molecule, or something else related to science. In the top sketch, you can see I tried to play with the idea of bringing in math by putting in some right angle symbols. Along the southern border, you can see some dots that I think were meant as half a DNA molecule.

One idea that was too high concept, but that I played with for a long time before abandoning, was to work in the shape of an orbiting spacecraft, in reference to Texas’s important role in the great NASA missions.

You can see in the lower sketches the other idea that I pursued, though, which was to work the shape of the “T” into the state border. My original plans were to use a typeface that was a more traditional “Old West” slab serif, but they didn’t fit the shape as I wanted.

I wanted something that was a simplified version of the Texas map, rather than realistic one that showed every little jag. I wanted lines of varying thickness for a bit of visual interest, and ended up with brush strokes, which I made by traced over a state map in CorelDRAW.

Since I had the brush strokes for the map set, I played with my options for the text. I set the letters in place, then scrolled through almost every text font I had installed on my computer looking for a good fit to the space. And I found one that was not what I had in mind, but was a better fit than what I had in mind.

I loved how the center lines in the letter forms lined up with the strokes I had made for the state borders. The horizontal bar in the “A” also was pretty much bang on the northern border, strengthening the closure of the brush strokes.

I also liked this design because it would hold up well at any size, from a small black and white logo on a letterhead, to a big colourful conference banner. I liked the state colours in the logo (right).

I’m very proud of this design. The only thing that I do see as a problem is that it doesn’t contain any elements that say, ”science.” But many logos have no connection to the thing they represent, so I didn’t worry to much. How does the Nike swoosh say “shoes,” or the Pepsi ball say “cola”?

Apparently, the logo contest was crowdsourced to 99 Designs (see the designs here). I missed the announcement, which I guess was made after my submission. This is the society’s new logo.

The society website comes with this explanation:

The three colored sections represent the focal areas of the Academy: Research, Education & Service. The color green represents our early foundations in the biological sciences and our attention to research impacting the environments of Texas. The color yellow serves to encourage wisdom, enlightenment and mental stimulation. The color grey indicates our long-standing history as an institution and the stability of our practical approach to mentorship and training of the next generation of Texas scientists.

To me, explaining a logo is like explaining a joke. If you have to do it, you’re missing the point of the exercise. You should just get it.

I also worry a bit about how well this will reproduce at small sizes, and in black and white. I do think it is an significantly more contemporary looking logo over the old one. I like that the designer spelled out the society’s name, which I think I toyed with for mine, but abandoned, because I went for simplicity.

Logo love external links

Todd Klein’s logo studies
Tony Jay’s blog

Föreign länguaje

I’ve been watching some of the highest rated episodes of the original Mission: Impossible television series. I was watching part 2 of “The Bunker.” This episode is set in an unspecified foreign country, where a rocket scientist is being held hostage.

Everyone in this foreign, presumably non-English speaking, country speaks English with an eastern European accent to show that they are not in the United States. It’s much easier than teaching actors to speak a foreign language and sub-titling everything.

What language are they supposed to be speaking? I didn’t pick it up on this ignition button...

But a few minutes later, when they showed this, I noticed that the signs were not exactly convincing...

I thought, “Wait... did ‘Master control’ just become ‘Master kontröl’?”

And as the episode progressed, I spotted more “foreign” signage that looked a lot like misspelled English with surplus diacritics.

By the time we were near the end of the show, I was laughing out loud at this:

There’s more umlauts in this episode than in a heavy metal festival! (Though, come to think of it, “Füel Mix Dänjer” wouldn’t be a half bad name for a heavy metal band...)