SICB 2009, part 2

Sean Carroll gave an excellent talk near the end of the SICB meeting on Tuesday evening. Sean has written several fine books on evolution, one I've even gone so far as to buy! ;) I had never seen him talk, but had heard him interviewed, and admired his prose, so I suspected he would be good, and was not disappointed. He is a real raconteur.

Carroll has two new books coming out soon, which he used as the basis for his talk: Into the Jungle and Remarkable Creatures.

He began with a great quote by George Gaylord Simpson that I must find. It goes something like:

Life is the most important thing in the world. And the most important thing about life is evolution.

If you know where this is from, please let me know in the comments! Google has failed to turn it up for me...

Carroll told stories about the relationship between Alfred Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Henry Bates (he of Batesian mimicry). Carroll started off the talk surprised me with a fantastic story about Wallace that I had, to my surprise, never heard. If I had, I'd never heard it told well. He described how Wallace nearly died in a very dramatic way after coming back from an expedition in the Amazon. And he used that to set the stage for describing Darwin's own expedition, then Bates's work in the Amazon that Darwin thought was one of the best examples of natural selection in the wild. And he talked about the close friendship of these three men throughout their lives.

Carroll ended his talk with a great video that was made in his lab. It was the story of Darwin's trip on the Beagle, with shots of the Galapagos and wonderful animal footage, set to U2's song Beautiful Day. The final bars were so that each note coincided with words fading in from a famous quote by Darwin, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved," followed by Darwin's signature.

It made me totally reinterpret the song (which I was indifferent to). Coming on such great stories of adventure and friendship and evolution, it damn near made me cry.

The next day, I got to ask him briefly about it. Unfortunately, he can't post it due to copyright reasons; he can only show it live. So if you ever have a chance to see Carroll talk, don't miss him.

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Elsewhere...

Someone finds biological inspiration in Boston during SICB.

Carl Zimmer mentions SICB in his Twitter feed.

Candidate for science story of 2009 in first week of the year

This could be huge. A self-replicating molecule. A molecule that copies itself is considered to be the first step towards a living system, but previously, no examples were known outside of existing biological systems.

Details forthcoming in the journal Science.

Carl Zimmer, who I just wrote about mere moments ago, may have pegged it first:

2009 may be the year in which synthetic biology finally goes mainstream.

SICB in review, part 1

Whew.

What a wild, full, fun trip the SICB meeting was. Attendance was way up. The rumour I heard was that least year's San Antonio meeting brought in 1,200, but 1,800 showed up at Boston. The hotel was apparently overbooked by 20%.

I'm going to have to break down my review into several bite sized pieces.

A fairly significant element of running through this year's conference was a launch of a major mew website called Understanding Science and that 2009 was dubbed the "Year of Science." Several speakers were brought in as part of those launches.

One of these was Carl Zimmer (pictured), who blogs at The Loom, was there as part of the Year of Science kick-off. Carl described the changes that he's seen from his days of arguing with editors at Discover magazine that they should get email ("What's wrong with the phone?") to how he came to be blogging. Carl likes the immediacy of the medium, and emphasized several times that he can do things that would have been out of the question for print.

During question period, I jokingly told him that, in the spirit of his talk, I Twittered that I was there watching him. Sadly, I did so specifically to try to get a laugh -- which I did. I asked him what he thought made for a successful blog, and he had a good one-liner: "If you don't have comments, you don't have a blog."

Myelin myth busted

The Neurophilosophy blog has an excellent post on a recent article about sensory hairs involved in crayfish escape responses.

I did see an opportunity to correct a common error. What follows is a repost of my comment from the blog.

"Neuro myth busting" may have to become a blog label. Previous examples include this one on ascidian brains and one on reptilian brains.

Just a quick reminder for those who aren't biologists: Myelin is a covering around many neurons that makes signals travel along neurons faster.

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The crayfish is an invertebrate, and therefore does not produce myelin(.)

Many invertebrates produce myelin (Hartline & Colman 2007). In fact, many decapod crustaceans (shrimps and prawns) have myelinated giant interneurons that are the core of the escape system described here. These crustaceans have the fastest known conduction velocity in the animal kingdom, about 200 m/s. This is about double the typical textbook value given for myelinated mammalian neurons.

It's not clear why crayfish lack myelin. Shrimps and prawns are more basal taxa, and the distribution of myelin suggests that myelination was the ancestral condition. Many decapods (including crayfish) seem to have lost myelin, rather than the shrimps and prawns gaining it (Faulkes 2008).

References

Faulkes Z. 2008. Turning loss into opportunity: The key deletion of an escape circuit in decapod crustaceans. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 72(4): 351-361. doi: 10.1159/000171488

Hartline DK & Colman DR. 2007. Rapid conduction and the evolution of giant axons and myelinated fibers. Current Biology 17(1): R29-R35. 10.1016/j.cub.2006.11.042

SICB, Tuesday

Just a quick one.

Non-stop fascinating stuff. Can't believe there's not much left!

SICB, Part 1

The SICB meeting is very well attended this year. The hotel is actually sold out, and there's about a dozen concurrent sessions going on this morning. It's crazy.

Spent yesterday sightseeing, including a trip to Harvard.

The third draft of Texas science standards

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a news story on the final draft of the Texas K-12 science standards. Although the removal of the "strengths and limitations" phrase is welcome, the article has an important reminder:

In the end, the wording in the final draft may not matter because the board is not required to use it. In May, the board threw out a teacher-suggested language arts curriculum in favor of another that some board members have said they had only an hour to read before voting on it.

Sadly, I am expecting that there will be some sort of last-ditch attempt to abandon the third draft. I hope I am wrong.

Tweeting SICB

I get on the plane tomorrow for Boston to attend the SICB conference. Since the Westin hotel, like so many of the swanky hotels that cater mainly to businesspeople, seems to to increase its profit margin by charging stupid prices for wireless internet access, I may not be blogging much until I get back. Unless, say, there's a Burger King nearby the hotel, since the cheap fast food place gives wi-fi access away for free.

Ahem.

If I don't have net access, I will still try to update via my Twitter feed (visible in the right hand of this blog), since I updates that by texting with my mobile phone.

And that's how I'll fight the hotel profit mongers.

Comments for second half of December, 2009

Byte-size Biology posts octopus and coconut videos. Regular readers can probably guess what my response was, since I’ve written about that very thing.

Evolutionary gems

Nature has just published a freely available PDF about evidence for evolution called, "Evolutionary gems." This is their first official issue of 2009, which will be (in a few hours) the 200 anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his "abstract," On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

And I mention this mainly because it's interesting, but secondarily, by doing so, I reach an nice even number of posts for this blog this year: 300.

Now, I'm off to pick up posters for the SICB meeting.

Dissertation variation

Over at Uncertain Principles, check out the comments section in the post about whether doctoral students should publish papers before defending their dissertation. It's very interesting, because, as I mentioned in my comment, I had never heard of any place that required publication before defense. Yet apparently many do.

I wonder if this is a question of different practices in different disciplines, or whether it's just institutional variation.

A personal review of 2008

Despite a fair amount of good news professionally, it's been a long, tiring year.

Two papers finally came out, after way too many months of me not finishing revision. One is a quite substantial review article on the evolution of crustacean tailflipping that I'm quite happy about, from a writer's point of view. I think the explanations are clear, with good turns of phrase. Figure 1 was a bear that went through many revisions, but I'm pleased with how it finally turned out.

The second paper, on larval ascidian settlement, I'm pleased with because it came from work I did with my former high school intern, Amanda. And it's just cool to have a high school student as an author on a peer-reviewed journal article.

I got a small grant for my Marmorkrebs research. I got good feedback on the Marmorkrebs blog, and the Marmorkrebs research is chugging along well.

I had a set of damn fine research students, and my first Master's student, Sandra, successfully defended her thesis. Working with them has probably been the best thing about the year.

I blogged a lot here, on Marmorkrebs, and for my REU program.

I got tenure. In a year of economic meltdown, the prospect of a little security is welcome. But I still have mixed emotions about it.

And I taught non-stop. I taught in spring, I taught both summer sessions, and I taught through a fall semester that forced me into hiding.

So yet again, I can't wait to see the back end of this year. Roll on 2009.

No limitations in Texas science standards

Just before Christmas, the National Center for Science Education reported that the latest draft of K-12 science standards for Texas has removed the "strengths and limitations" wording found in an earlier draft.

This is a pleasant surprise. Maybe the turnout at the public hearings actually accomplished the change. Hard to say.

Blog in review 2008

Late in 2007, I decided to try to ramp up my blogging. I wanted to do more substantive posts more frequently. While others will have to judge whether I was more substantive, this was certainly the most active this blog has been by far, pushing close to 300 posts.

Of course, it was helped by the amount of stuff going on in Texas concerning the forced resignation of Chris Comer, the efforts of the Institution for Creation Research to offer Master's degrees in science education, and the ongoing review of the Texas K-12 science standards. All three stories focused attention on the relationship between science and creationism. I could have written much more about this, but I wanted to keep focused on those that were occurring here in the place I live.

Some favourite posts of mine from this year follow. Following convention, I've cut it to 10 examples.

January

The point of doubt

February

Deep research
Lecturing doesn't matter

March

Why am I blogging about buying a car?

June

Making mimetics scientific (The one I nominated for the Open Laboratory 2008)
The big four questions

July

Anniversaries: One even number, one odd
A word is needed for an inability to think graphically

August

Tools of the trade

October

Don't hate beauty

Cityscapes and recession

Over at Ockham's Razor, Peter Newman makes a case for urban sprawl being a contributing factor to the current financial recession. Really interesting, one of my favourites on this show for a while.

Briefly, he argues that people will only spend about an hour commuting to work on a daily basis, regardless of whether they walk, take trains, drive, or what have you. The current city design -- expanding circles around a core central business distract -- was made possible by cheap fossil fuels. The far edges of cities were all about cheap housing, so people who moved there were often more economically vulnerable to start with. Now, combine people with mortgages (especially those sub-primes we hear about) with increases in fuel costs. The rise of fuel prices disproportionately squeezed on people who were already struggling to make ends meet, and suddenly a lot of mortgages don't get paid. And that may have helped collapse the whole thing...

Did earthrise change us?

A lot of posts are commenting on the anniversary of the famous picture of Earth from space (here's one, two, and three). Many people claim this picture changed how we view the world. Admittedly, I was only 2 when this picture was taken, but I don't know if it changed things as much as we would like to think.

I think there was sense in the few years of the Apollo missions that this was just the start. But it hasn't worked out that way. True, we have a lot of fantastic robots exploring the solar system. True, India and China have started to pick up the slack left by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But that's a far cry from what we were expecting. People were expecting us to have a permanent presence on the moon and be well on the way to a manned mission to Mars in the first decade of the 21^st century.

People also talk about this picture being the start of the environmental movement. But it's been 40 years, and I only have to say "climate change" to point out that people's goodwill towards the environment hasn't exactly resulted in great outcomes.

Maybe I am just too young to fully appreciate the differences in mindset that occurred 40 years ago. Or maybe this is just my "Bah, humbug" post for the year.

Heroes! Villains!

This article is worth checking out for the title alone: "Science heroes and villains of 2008."

I didn't make either list. Hmmmm. That may be my first New Year's resolution.

Envy

Jennifer Mather gets to speak at TED 2009.

Jennifer is my former boss, from way back in my undergraduate days^*. She helped get me rolling on this research thing.

Words cannot describe how incredibly jealous I am.

Congratulations, Jennifer! I can't wait to see your talk on the TED website!

^* My student Sakshi gleefully reminded me recently this was 20 years ago.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 23: Bad presenter thought

The opposite of a great presenter is a bored presenter, not a scared presenter.

Advent days

Last week was busy. Two students are prepping papers for the SICB meeting in Boston in January. A third student was gathering data that will go onto an abstract for the Texas Academy of Science meeting in March. I try to help...



Yes, that's a heater at right. I know you're thinking, "Why do you need a space heater in southern Texas?" Because the first time it got chilly this month, the building heating didn't work right, and the temperature dropped in the lab quite substantially. And while uncomfortable for us, that's not as important as the animals -- which really don't do well when they're cold.


These crabs don't measure themselves, you know...

Photos by Kevin Faulkes. Thanks Dad.