Science Made Cool

Three-Dee Anatomy Challenge

There’s really no getting around it – anatomy is a challenging subject. It’s not just the enormous number of names to memorize. You also need to remember the relative locations of scores of organs and muscles and internal spaces and such, which gets even more complicated when you consider that many of the shapes and spatial relations inside an animal can change when muscles contract. In short, doing 3D reconstruction in your head on the fly is really hard.

                        Alligator cloaca, viewed from above (dorsal).

So when I was doing the research for my paper on male alligator reproductive anatomy, I deliberately dissected the pelvic region of each of my specimens from a different direction: I worked on one alligator from the belly upwards, another from its back downwards, and two from the flank inward. Each direction helped me build a better picture of how muscles wrap around the cloacal space and where tendons and ligaments thread through the system and attach to bone. But I still don’t know what all of those structures look like when the phallus is in its “functional” position. I think that some of those muscles squish the cloacal wall into a different shape, but it’ll take a lot more work, some luck, and really good scientific visualization methods to find out for sure.

That’s one reason I’m excited about Mieke Roth’s crowdfunding campaign. Her goal? -- to spend a year dissecting Nile crocodile specimens in John Hutchinson’s lab at the Royal Veterinary College and turning her drawings and notes into a detailed 3D computer reconstruction of this magnificent beast. All of it. Head to tail, skin to gut lining. Her fantastic octopus reconstruction is a testament to her skills, and I for one would love to see her succeed in this larger (much larger!) endeavor -- and not just because she’ll let me help out when she gets to the cloaca.

Detailed anatomical reconstruction of the sort Roth is proposing is fairly rare for large animals: they're far too big to stick inside a microCT scanner (a technique that's given us high-resolution virtual models of the anatomy of small invertebrates), so detailed reconstruction tends to focus on one 'region of interest'. So we have projects like Larry Witmer's fantastic Visible Interactive Alligator giving us a detailed picture of the head, or Colleen Farmer's beautiful 3D reconstructions of alligator lungs, while other areas of the crocodilian body remain something of a mystery. You can help change that. 

Check it out: Ultimate Croc Anatomy: IndieGoGo - by Mieke Roth 

If Science Books were Pulp Novels

I've just finished several months of intense work, and while I'm pleased with the results (two scientific manuscripts, a grant proposal, and several public talks), that much serious effort leaves me with an intense desire to fool around on the internet.

Easy enough to do, so I'm spending some quality time with the latest internet entertainment phenomenon: the Retropolis Pulp-O-Mizer. A few quick clicks, and you can put anything you like in the style of an early 20th century pulp magazine cover. Most of my friends are Pulping up recent  science fiction novels or classic children's books, but I wondered what works of science fact might look like.

 

 

 

So here are some covers from the sadly defunct Science Stories, the peer-reviewed pulp that dared to publish Darwin's groundbreaking work, the thrilling stories of James Watson and Francis Crick, and the terrifying horror tales of Carl Zimmer.

Which science books would you put through the Pulp-O-Mizer?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprise and Delight

Scientific American just put Parasites Unleashed at the top of their 2012 list of educational sciencey gifts, alongside the fascinating Little Bits kits and a cool flying bird model that I now WANT. WOO! 

Sneaky, Lying Cephalopod

Take a good long look at these Australian mourning cuttlefish. They’re courting – you can tell because one of them (the male) is sporting a set of flashy black and white stripes on his skin. At least, he’s striped on the side the female’s looking at. The pattern on his other side is quite different. In fact, on that side he looks like a she. That’s because there’s another male lurking out of the frame in that direction. To that distant male, this scene doesn’t look like a tryst – it looks like a pair of girls hanging out.

This trick, according to a recent paper in Biology Letters, may let our courting male get intimate with a mate without attracting unwanted (and violent) attention from the other male. But what I found most interesting about the paper was the observation that males only try this sort of deception in very specific circumstances – when a male finds himself in a group containing only one other male and one other female. He won’t send mixed messages if two females are nearby, or if he’s part of a larger group. Which suggests three things about the minds of these cuttlefish:

1. They can count, at least up to four.  

2. They can imagine what the world looks like to another cuttlefish. (Not to go all theory of mind-y, but that's pretty impressive for an invertebrate.)

3. They can figure out when they’re most likely to get away with a lie.

And when it’s a lie that gets a male some undisturbed “us time” with a receptive female, it's a lie that's worth the risk of telling.

 

Reference: Brown, C., M. P. Garwood and J. E. Williamson 2012. It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system. Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2012.0435

Diane Natters On

Last week I shlepped down to Brooklyn, treated myself to a fabulous sushi supper, and waited nervously for my turn to get up on stage and tell a story. The result is now a podcast on The Story Collider's site: they're calling it "Confronting Death on the Road." Have a listen. And if you want to know more about how I wrote it, head over to Last Word On Nothing, where Ginny Hughes does a fine job of summing it up. 

I'm Going to Tell a Story. In Public.

It'll be a story about animals, collecting data, and run-ins with the law. I'm telling it at the next Story Collider show. The theme is "Animals." Next Tuesday, September 25, 8pm at Union Hall, Brooklyn. 

The Art of Anatomy

Here's another style of data visualization from this year's TEDMED -- Lisa Nilsson makes life sized paper sculptures of anatomical cross sections. It's amazing, intricate work -- she rolls thin strips of paper and squishes them into shapes that mimic 19th century medical art. 

Jumping Fish are Beautiful, Information-wise

Last October I told you about a new study that showed some fish were capable of controlled jumps on land. Today I found out that one of the images from the paper has been longlisted for the Information is Beautiful award in Data Visualization. The shortlist will be announced later this week -- so we'll see whether the fish can leap ahead of their competition. Go Alice, Miriam, Cinnamon, and John! And hurrah for clear encapsulations of complex data!

A Meeting With Medusoid

It's not quite artificial life, but it's certainly a step in that direction. As a "proof of concept" for work on artificial hearts and muscle systems, a group of researchers at Caltech (and Harvard) have created what they call a "Medusoid" -- a kind of synthetic jellyfish made of silicone rubber and cultured muscle cells. PhysOrg has the story, including video of the Medusoid swimming around.

Reactions, predictably, are heavy on the "It's ALIVE!" Frankenstein mad doctor electrical zapping hoo-ha. But the real story is that this thing works. It's not very far removed from something that could be implanted in your chest if your heart stops doing its job.

Though if the medical applications don't pan out, this would still be a hell of a fun thing to keep in your aquarium.

Your Humble Correspondent speaks at TEDMED

In April of 2012, I was invited to speak at TEDMED about my research on reproductive systems. I also took the opportunity to tell the audience we still have lots to learn about anatomy.

(Warning: there are some pictures of penises.)

So what's it like to give one of these big public talks? It's certainly different from a university classroom. First off, the audience is bigger. A lot bigger. Average size of my audience when I teach? About 50. TEDMED was held at the Kennedy Center's Opera House, and every seat on the main floor was filled. And that's not counting all the medical schools who were livestreaming the event. Intimidating? You bet. Add in the knowledge that the video was going to be on the internet, maybe forever, and you can understand why I was motivated to put a lot of time into writing and rehearsals.

The talks are also shorter than a class or a seminar. Classes and department seminars usually take about 45 minutes. The TEDMED limit? 12 minutes. Obviously, as Carl Zimmer pointed out in a recent Download the Universe post, that's not enough time to craft an extended argument. When your audience doesn't have any prior experience with your subject, 12 minutes is barely enough time to introduce it. And unlike a class, where you'd get the same audience 3 times a week, you have only one shot to get your point across. So when I planned my talk, I had to pick exactly one result from my research and build the talk around it. No graphs, no statistics, just the story leading up to that result and the reason it was meaningful. 

Fortunately, the audience at one of these events is also more engaged than your average room of undergraduates. There are always some kids in a college class who are there because of genuine interest in the subject, but bigger classes also bring in students who are only there to fulfill a requirement – and they're as likely to be Facebooking their friends about their weekend plans as paying attention to the lecture. Judging from the number of people who stopped me to ask questions after my talk, the audience was definitely paying attention. Thanks, guys.