Carnivals for November 2010

The Carnival of Evolution #39 is up at Byte-Sized Biology.

Carnival of the Blue #42 is up at The Beacon.

Meanwhile, Circus of the Spineless celebrates its 59th edition at Cephalopodcast with a sweet redesign of their logo...

Tuesday Crustie: At ease!

I liked last week’s soldier crab picture so much, I couldn’t resist having a second look at one of these guys.

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

B.A.N.T.E.R.

I am not going to the mega-massive Society for Neuroscience meeting this year. (No, not because I’m wondering about their blogger choices.)

But if I was, I would probably be planning to be here:

You can read more about this event here.

Fingers in the pie

Previously, I wrote about some of the laws that the Texas legislature passed that affect universities. This got me wondering if other states pass more or fewer laws concerning universities than Texas does. The administrative creep seems high to me. But again, I don’t have much to compare it to.

A few examples.

• Texas requires all students to take two classes in Texas history as part of their core.
• Texas decided that since accreditation agencies required a minimum of 120 credit hours to get a bachelor’s degree, that most degree plans shouldn’t go even one credit hour above that minimum.
• The “six drop” law that prevents students from dropping more than six classes in their undergraduate career. 
• And, as mentioned Monday, requiring us to put up a syllabus for each class a few months before the class starts. And our CVs.

There’s a joke that makes the rounds that state universities have moved from being state supported, to state funded, to state tolerated, to state located. I think there’s one more step that could be taken: state regulated.

University education and critical thinking skills are sort of like alcohol, tobacco, and firearms – you better keep that stuff contained, because it can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Additional: Here’s an article in the Austin American-Statesman describing more stuff that Texas wants to do to universities.

Comments for second half of October 2010

Biochem Belle, over at There & (Hopefully) Back Again, asks about people’s experiences blogging under their own name versus blogging under a pseudonym. I find it interesting that the vast majority of bloggers in the comment thread are blogging under an assumed name.

Outdoor Science asks for advice on blogging basics.

Andrea Kuszewski, writing at The Rogue Neuron, thinks scientists used to be more creative.

I run a poster blog, so you know I can’t resist a thread about posters at Tales of the Genomic Repairman.

ScienceLine recycles a neuromarketing press release that I talked about here.

Gerty Z tells a spooky tale of the tenure track job application stack! It grew.. and grew! Until it threatened to consume everything in its wake!

“We won't be there to be blamed...”

Happy Hallowe’en...

MythBusters and the ultimate neuromyth

The myth that you only use 10% of your brain is pervasive, but I never expected to see it on MythBusters. After all, it’s a very – dare I say it? – cerebral myth. I didn’t see much chance for blowing stuff up.

On this week’s episode of MythBusters, it was tested and busted. But I was puzzled by the way they interpreted their results to bust it.

For the second test, they gave Grant and Tori questions while they recorded the brain using magnetoencephalography. (Forgive me if I write that as MEG from here on in.) This is a brain imaging technique that isn’t used as commonly as, say, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but as far as I can understand, the logic of how it works is somewhat similar.

In brain imaging studies, brain “activation” is usually the difference between a task where you’re asked to do something, and a control situation where you’re asked to do as little as you can. The important thing is that you’re making a comparison to some baseline activity. And that baseline isn’t zero. I fully admit that I may be misunderstanding this, and MEG may just be that much different than fMRI.

The segment made it sound like we use only about 30% of our brain, rather than 30% of our brain was more active than normal when given these tasks.

It’s like comparing your heart rate during exercise to your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate isn’t zero, because if it was, you’d be dead.

In some sense, I suppose it doesn’t matter, since the original myth is about how much of our brains we “use” – which is a surprisingly slippery wording. And it’s still good to have information out there that might help make a dent in the undisputed heavyweight champion of neuromyths.

I’m do worry, though, that people will end up thinking that 70% of our brain is just filler. It isn’t.

P.S.—The dramatic tablecloth pull on the same episode also flubbed the explanation of the physics.

Growing big brains

We think that good environments make for good brains, particularly when people are young. Parents have been known to obsess a little about whether their kid is getting the right kind of experiences.

If this is true, this guy must have read a looooooot of books.

Joking aside, we normally think about early experiences as influencing subtle things about the brain. Those early experiences might give you some extra connections, tweak a little wiring here and there. But would you expect someone’s brain to get significantly bigger, a la The Leader?

Brain size is normally the domain of comparative vertebrate neuroanatomists rather than developmental psychologists. It’s actually a major preoccupation for comparative neuroanatomists, who typically trying to explain differences in brain size of different species, usually by relating some aspect of brain size to the differing ecology and behaviour patterns of those species.

But that differing ecology might not only affect brain sizes of different species, but brain size within the same species: individuality.

We know that being in natural environments can affect the formation of new neurons (here). It’s less clear if that could make for significantly bigger brain regions, or overall brain size, though. And “lab versus wild” is a fairly crude comparison. It would be nice to narrow down to a couple of relevant ecological factors.

Gonda and colleagues are working on this problem with these little guys and gals:

These are tadpoles for Rana temperaria, a fairly common frog in Europe. The experiments are pretty simple. Divide up a group of tadpoles into four tanks, a simple two by two matrix:

• Half the tanks with predators (contained, so it could not eat the tadpoles) and half without.
• Half with 50 tadpoles and half with 10.

Let simmer for three and a half weeks. Then, check bodies and brains.

Tadpoles in low densities grew larger than those in high densities; predators also made for smaller tadpoles. All tanks were given the same amount of food per tank, not the same amount of food per capita, so this may just reflect food availability.

Brain size is more complicated. The smallest brains were in animals kept in low densities with predators. This is a bit of a surprise, since one might expect that little competition would mean more food for brain growth. Different effects occurred at different brain regions, too. The authors say, “tadpoles had relatively larger optic tectum and smaller medulla oblongata at high tadpole density.” This suggest these two regions have different roles in processing the cues that occur in high versus low density situations.

How general might ecological effects on brain development be? I wonder if the amount of plasticity might be greater in amphibians than many other animals. Amphibian tadpoles may be particularly liable to have their brains reshaped. They grow fast, and their brains still have to undergo a metamorphosis. These factors might make tadpole brains more plastic than species where the little one are basically miniature adults.

Reference

Gonda A, Trokovic N, Herczeg G, Laurila A, & Merilä J. (2010). Predation- and competition-mediated brain plasticity in Rana temporaria tadpoles. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 23(11): 2300-2308. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2010.02066.x

Photo by Paul and Jill on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Rally ’round your nerd

Regular readers may already know Nerdy Christie Wilcox. I am a big fan of hers. And it’s not just me: she’s been in Open Lab twice, a finalist in 3 Quarks Daily contests twice, and much more.

Christie is a finalist in another blogging competition, but this one is different: this one has cold hard cash dollars up for grabs. $10,000, to be exact.

Now, in case you don’t know, Christie is based in Hawai’i, which is probably not exactly the cheapest place to live. She’s also a grad student, not exactly known for high wages, either.

But the scholarship is determined by an online poll. Which means this one is all about networking.

You should vote for Christie right now by clicking here.

And spread the word!

P.S.—As of this moment, the leader in this poll is a cosmetics blog. This prompted this musing at A Leaf Warbler’s Gleanings.

Shell shock, revisited

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a device being marketed as the “Crustastun” that was touted as being a more human way to kill a lobster than the traditional boiling. Today, a new article updates the story and talks more about the evidence that the device kills rapidly.

Professor Douglas Neil of the University of Glasgow said that studies he has performed for the company that makes the machine demonstrate that electrocution is the quickest way of ending any signs of nervous activity in edible crustaceans – an indication of a clean death.

"It eliminates all activity that is truly from the nerves. The story becomes quite simple: we see silence in the nervous system, both the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system," Professor Neil said. ...

A study this year by Bjorn Roth of the University of Bergen in Norway compared many different methods of killing crustaceans, such as superchilling, gradual heating, boiling, gassing and salt baths. He found that electrocution produced the quickest death.

I recognize the name of one of the researchers mentioned, but, as is too often the case, there is no indication of whether the studies mentioned have been published or not.

An editorial comment by a chef is completely skeptical.

The Crustastun sounds like another gadget that's going to get broken and relegated to the back of a kitchen cupboard. ... The old-fashioned ways are a sign that a chef is confident in their skills.

I have never experienced objections to having lobster on the menu.

The constant peppering of questions about boiling lobsters, though, suggests people aren’t entirely cavalier about the whole thing. I also think that there’s a certain amount of self-selection going on in this person’s comments, since he is a fairly highly rated chef. (A Michelin star is good, right?)

A companion piece is... well, I’m not sure what to make of it.

According to Professor Douglas Neil of the University of Glasgow, electrocution is the most humane way of dispatching crustaceans. All the other methods, apparently, result in a protracted death for the creature.

Professor Neil deserves our gratitude for establishing this. But would it be unreasonable to hope that he does not turn his attention next to the most humane way to peel a potato? Some of us are too set in our ways to cope with further ethical revolutions in the kitchen.

Hat tip to Graham Farmelo.

Who are the Society for Neuroscience bloggers?

My eyebrows went up when I saw the list of officially sanctioned bloggers for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting.

I didn’t recognize a single solitary one.

I don’t pretend to read all the neuroblogs, but I would have thought that I would have recognized somebody.

Luckily for me, Tideliar has investigated these bloggers, thus saving me an afternoon and evening of obsessive work. And his results are much like my first reaction: “Are you serious?”

As a dues-paying member of the society, I thought, “I wonder who I could give my input to to improve this?” But there doesn’t seem to be any clear contact point on the society’s committees.

Tuesday Crustie: Ten-hut!

Solider crabs (Mictyris longicarpus, I think) on the march.

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

Don’t feed the BEAR

The Wall Street Journal has a nice article on moves made to increase transparency and accountability of universities.

It focuses on Texas, and starts with one of the most controversial acts so far. Texas A&M publicly posted a “cost / benefit” analysis of each department and faculty. The implication seemed to be, “Everyone should be pulling their own weight, and that means each professor should bring into the university more money than they cost.”

We’ve had similar documents internally at our institution for some time, and I imagine other universities do to. Ours is called the break even analysis report (BEAR). I came out fairly well in one of our last ones, because I teach introductory biology. Biology in general comes out well, because we have a lot of majors.

I don't like the attitudes I've seen such reports engender. They do not promote collegiality.

I don’t know that any business operates under a scheme where every item must be equally profitable. In every business, some items subsidize the rest. Not every movie in the theater recoups its costs. Not every TV show is a hit. Some things fly off the shelves, while others sit there unsold even when there’s no other choice.

Another potential problem with releasing such a report publicly is that it doesn’t emphasize variation over time. Just like a business, some times are profitable, and some are not. If one department is down a million dollars this year, it might be in the black by an equal amount the next.

The article also discusses other laws the Texas legislature (which is, you might recall, largely dominated by a party that advocates small government) has imposed on universities.

As someone working under these new laws, some of them are well intentioned but I’m not convinced they will help either students or taxpayers more generally. For instance, we now have to have a class syllabus up months before the start of classes. We have until next Monday to get ours up for the spring semester.

It's questionable how important students think a syllabus is. Put something up that far in advance often means that you can't put in very much detail. Because we're busy with the current semester, we don't have a heck of a lot of time to figure out what we're going to do next semester. So it encourages a minimal, generic syllabus.

Similarly, we now have to put up a curriculum vita. Again, I wonder what the average undergraduate, or their parents, for that matter, is going to get out of a listing of my publications. I have no problem with people knowing (it's all over my home page), but how does it help them? How does it help the typical student pick classes, or decide what university to attend, or any of the other routine decisions that they make?

Picture by jepoirrier on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

When is yawning contagious?

It’s a little embarrassing.

Despite being about as familiar and as commonplace as you can get, we still don’t have a clear understanding of why humans yawn.

We know we start yawning early. We know we yawn when we’re tired. We know we yawn when we’re bored. And we know that yawning can sometimes be contagious. But the function, the why, has been elusive.

A new paper by Giganti and Zilli ties together a couple of yawning’s features: that the amount people yawn varies throughout the day, and that yawns can be contagious. But does the contagiousness of yawns vary throughout the day?

First, their got subjects to record their sleepiness and yawns over several days in a logbook. Now, self-report data always has concerns about accuracy (do people remember right, record immediately, or write things to make themselves look good), but because this is just baseline data on a fairly neutral subject, we’ll move on.

Second, they tested their subjects several times on a single day, showing them either people yawning or smiling, and recording the yawns generated in response.

Most of the results are not surprising. More yawns when people report their feeling sleeping. More yawns when people are shown pictures of yawns compared to smiles. The main finding of interest is that they claim there is a significant interaction between the time of day and how contagious yawns are.

Yawns are most contagious at 7:30 pm.

At every other time they tested during the day, the spontaneous yawns (determined from the logbook) were greater than the yawns triggered by the experimental stimulus of watching yawning people. Only in the early evening did the triggered yawns exceed the expected rate. They didn’t perform any post-hoc tests on their groups, however, so it’s not clear if any of the other four times had significantly more spontaneous yawning than induced yawning.

Interaction effects have a reputation as being unstable, so it would be very interesting to see these results replicated.

These results might nudge us a little closer to understanding why we yawn. The paper suggests there are at least two kinds of yawns. A spontaneous yawn and a yawn in a social setting may well be entirely different beasts that need different explanations. Maybe the reason yawns have thwarted our efforts to understand them is that a single explanation for yawns you make alone completely fail when you try to apply it to yawns you make around other people.

P.S.—Yawns during the writing of this post: At least three. I hope that if you yawn during this post, it’s a contagious yawn, and not one triggered by boredom!

Reference

Giganti F., & Zilli I. (2010). The daily time course of contagious and spontaneous yawning among humans Journal of Ethology. DOI: 10.1007/s10164-010-0242-0

Tiger photo by by Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr; baby photo by Twob on Flickr. Both used under a Creative Commons license.

Interesting is overrated

Scientists are usually cerebral people. We live in our heads. As Randy Olson has argued, that doesn’t help us. One of his main pieces of advice is, “Don’t be so cerebral.”

Bono helps make this point in this interview:

If you take musicians away from the stage too much, they become quite abstract in their heads. They start to use words like “interesting.” But people don’t want to see you do something interesting. They want something passionate or wild.

“Interesting” is the moment musicians scratch their chin. It ruins great and dramatic music. You listen to the Sex Pistols or Nirvana or the first MGMT album and you don't scratch your chin. You say, “Wow, that’s extraordinary.”

And I know that scientists are always saying something is interesting. I’m guilty of it myself, and I know because one of my research students told me flat out, “‘Interesting’ is overrated!”

Sharp edges and soft science

I was vaguely aware that some store tried to change its logo, and it backfired. This is not surprising. These things happen. New Coke, anyone?

What is surprising are some of the reasons that a consulting firm, which is supposed to be informed by neuroscience, offered for why the new logo failed. I was stopped dead by this one:

Our brains, being hard-wired to avoid sharp edges, react negatively to the sharp edges of the blue cube cutting into the round curve of the letter "p".

What evidence is there that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp edges? What would that even look like?

I tried looking in Google Scholar for "sharp edge avoidance" and I got ecology papers about animals avoiding the edge of their habitats. "brain sharp edges" gave me a mish-mash of articles, none on target. Can anyone provide references that would support this claim?

Now, it is definitely true that many visual systems are wired to be very good at edge detection. Keffer Hartline won a Nobel prize for showing how the eyes of horseshoe crabs would enhance edges using lateral inhibition, mutual inhibitory connections between parts of the eye. Similar things happen in mammalian eyes, which I might say suggests that our brains think sharp edges are not sharp enough! But detection and enhancement of visual edges is not avoidance.

To take another tack, our ancestors got us where we are in part by careful creation of sharp edges, making tools of flint and obsidian. Would that have been possible if we were hard-wired to avoid sharp edges?

It’s also a little insulting to argue that our brains are so stupid that we can’t distinguish visual overlap from actual, physical, cutting objects.

Other elements of the analysis of the logo are better. But if this is representative of the level of science offered by this consulting firm, it’s not encouraging. That this is being put out by a press release is also indicative of what’s going on here: someone with a start up is trying to drum up business. Pity that New Scientist took the bait.

Additional: Mo has another take.

Science editorials and buyer beware

(With sincere acknowledgments to Sts. Murray and Kern)

If you are a science reader, you hope that scientific journals are grounded in fact. As scholars publishing in scientific journals, we value the importance of known authors providing empirical evidence that has been vetted by peer review. We know, however, that journals are interested in retaining their readership and may resort to various manipulations to increase their so-called “Impact Factor.” By extension, editors could inflate Impact Factors by explicitly publishing controversial articles; mundane articles could result in a reduction of impact. The practice of looking for papers that are known to be of interest to the general media is well known. I firmly believe that this system does not serve science well and has to tendency of corrupting scientific literature.

The lay public – people outside the scientific profession – receives a murky mixed message from scientific journals. The usual empirical papers may be mixed with opinion and conjecture and policy recommendations, sometimes only peripherally related to science. We science scholars should be very concerned about how the others might perceive these ideas.

Given the above, the current phenomenon of “editorials” should be of serious concern to scientists. Editorials often allegedly present the journal’s “position” (more properly, random stuff). With the increasing move of journals onto the internet, these unvetted rantings can find a much larger audience than was possible in the past. The issues with credibility are obvious: a) They often have no references. b) They are often anonymous. c) In some journals, they refer to breaking events that occurred in the previous week, which hardly makes it plausible that they have gone through a thorough peer review process. Who fact-checks these? They could be written to promote an agenda—to encourage insane working hours, to denigrate trainees for their lack of “passion,” to make sweeping generalizations about the quality and reliability of writers using particular kinds of software, etc.—without the constraint of truth. Where are the journal’s feedback loops the publish criticisms of the positions that border on the laughable or outright balmy? A letter that is often limited to a tiny fraction of the original article?

I would warn everyone to beware. But I’m a blogger with no published cancer research, so am clearly unreliable and uncommitted.

Tuesday Crustie: Valleys and mountains

Valley folds and mountain folds, that is: the basic origami folds that were probably used many times in creating this lovely paper hermit crab.

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

Octopus awareness with Jennifer Mather

My former undergrad supervisor, Jennifer Mather, is interviewed at Cephalove.

Scientist’s oath

Of all the many, many forensic crime shows on television right now, Bones is my favourite.

I recognize more of myself, and the people I work with, and the jobbing scientists I meet at conferences, in the characters in Bones than in any other police procedural. Sure, the show’s characters are caricatures of scientists, but like all good caricatures, they work because they accentuate what is genuinely there.

I get Temperance Brennan and her literal-mindedness and her bluntness. I get Hodgins and his slightly goofy excitement over running the experiment that gives you the answer.

The Bones writers have a better grasp on the mentality of scientists than most other shows. On most other shows, the scientists seem more like a mouthpiece to show off the writer’s clever research. Sometimes they’re good characters – even great and engaging ones – but they don’t generate that same feeling of recognition that I get all the time watching Bones.

Case in point: The most recent episode, “The Body and The Bounty” (Season 6, Episode 4), has a B story where Brennan is asked to appear on a kid’s science show with Bunsen Jude the Science Dude (a clear nod to Bill Nye the Science Guy). In the end, we see the show, and Brennan leads an audience of kids in a “scientist’s oath”:

We see big stars
Tiny atoms, too
Because that’s what scientists do
We get the facts
And say what’s true
Because that’s what scientists do
We use our minds
And praise what’s new
Because that is what scientists do

And damn it if that didn’t get to me just a little bit. They got it. They managed to encapsulate a lot of the things that matter to me as a scientist.

You can watch the episode online. It’s worth watching all the way from the beginning to get the payoff at the end.