Macho Flies

So, I’ll have to admit that I never really thought about what flies are doing when they buzz around my house, sometimes rolling around on the table clasping each other like lovers going down on the Titanic. I guess I just assumed that they were after my food, having sex, or laying eggs somewhere. Never did the idea of territoriality come into my mind. Why would flies be territorial?

Well, it turns out that male fruit flies can be quite territorial, and that this territoriality for resources like food and women is probably genetically determined. Researchers recently assayed the genes of non-aggressive and extremely aggressive fruit flies and found that a gene called Cyp6a20 was highly correlated with aggression. Those flies with mutations in the gene were the most combative in territorial situations created by the scientists. No one knows exactly what the gene does yet, but it is interesting to note possible genetic contenders that might underlie behavior.

Here is a video of fighting flies (I can’t believe I always thought they were having sex!).

Laws for the Lawless

OK. So, here’s an article from MSN that I found interesting. It brings up the fact that our lawmakers are in the process of rewriting the Telecommunications Act to include rules and regs for the internet, which up to this point has been relatively ignored. Mainly the new act will have a lot to do with how much companies, and which companies, can charge us for using bandwidth, taxes for internet commerce, and the freedoms associated with copying information found and bought on the internet. I think that the ideas that our lawmakers and lobbyists are pondering are well worth understanding, as they will eventually affect us all. You are reading this via the internet aren’t you?

Wikipedia has some great information on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

If you are interested in what the bill/amendment that is being debated actually looks like, I found a link to a pdf on ZD Net, in a very well written article about the Net Neutrality issue that is a significant part of the bill.

Dude… Check it!

MC Hawking Rawks! I LOVE this video (Click on the watch this movie link on the right).

Sorry to those of you who would rather not navigate to a new page. NewGrounds has some code that takes over any embed you try to do, and puts a way too big box in the middle of your page that doesn’t fit right, and looks awful. So, instead of having a nice clean embedded link to the video itself here on my site, you have to navigate elsewhere and click lots of buttons and look at lots of popup ads. Grrr. The video is still great though.

So, It’s Only a Rat

Cool study published in the Journal of Neuroscience… scientists have used a drug that stimulates D3 Dopamine receptors in the brain to produce neurogenesis (that’s new cell BIRTH!) in the substantia nigra of rats with Parkinson’s-like disease. The new cells went on to make functional connections to other areas of the brain and allow the rats to regain abilities that they had lost due to their disease. The study suggests that drugs currently used to treat Parkinson’s in humans could possibly be manipulated to result in a similar effect in humans. If true, it would do away with the need for invasive implantation of embryonic stem cells as a treatment because the drugs would stimulate endogenous stem cells (those lying dormant in the brain) to jump into action. This then would probably reduce patients’ reliance on drugs like L-DOPA, which lose the efficacy over time. The researchers are looking for similar drug effects in other neurodegenerative dieases, like Alzheimers, as well.

It’s exciting to think that one day we may be able to reverse degenerative diseases by simply stimulating the appropriate receptor, and letting the body do the rest of the work naturally.

Happy 4th of July

As everyone heads out to their barbecues and softball games, I’d just like to wish you a safe and happy 4th. Maybe we could all benefit from a moment of remembrance today: remembering in this time of war and revocation of freedoms the basic tenets on which our government was founded, and the life that was sacrificed for those freedoms once held so sacred to now be so taken for granted.

More writing…

Here is the link to an article I had published this past month in ‘The Physiologist’, the American Physiological Society’s quarterly publication. It’s nice to see things in print. Hopefully, much more will be captured in ink as my career progresses.

Beautiful Butterflies

How do you make a new species? Scientists are on the trail of the answer to that question.

Researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have apparently copied one possible form of speciation in the laboratory, maybe even recreating the evolutionary steps that took place in birth of a species. In the wild, a species called Heliconius heurippa looks suspiciously like a blend between the two species H. cydno and H. melpomene. To see whether H. heurippa may have resulted from a process called hybridization, the scientists brought H. cydno and H. melpomene into the lab for breeding. After just three generations of interbreeding the two species, the scientists had an intermediate color form of butterfly that exactly matched H. heurippa individuals in the wild. Genetic analysis also supported that they had produced a strain of butterfly genetically distinct from either of the parent species.

That’s fine, but what about breeding? Usually some sort of isolation has to occur for a species to become truly distinct as a species or else it will eventually blend back into the parent populations remaining only an occassional variant form. Well, it turns out that H. heurippa is reproductively isolated, which means that its reproductive behavior doesn’t usually lead it to mate with any but its own kind. The researchers found that when given a choice of mating with H. cydno, H. melpomene, or H. heurippa females, males chose H. heurippa 75-90% of the time. This suggests that this sort of natural reproductive isolation might occur quite often in nature allowing hybrids to branch off and become a separate species.

Hybridization is an interesting occurrence, which can lead one to question the defined boundaries of species. Many times in nature the process results in reproductively inviable individuals, like the mule, but can sometimes lead to perfectly viable animals. Dogs, cats, and birds are often hybridized by breeders in order to create new strains for pet enthusiasts. After time, hybrids can be considered their own species if they don’t tend to mate with dissimilar individuals for either behavioral or physical reasons. But, if they maintain that ability to even a slight degree what does it mean for speciation, and to that end for conservation?

Are animals that maintain some amount of reproductive connectedness with other members of their genus or species more or less likely to weather changes to their environment? Does it matter if a hybrid species like H. heurippa goes extinct as long as the probable parent species remain extant? How much information will be necessary to make such a decision as we learn more and more about genetics and the complexities of speciation? Where will we start to draw lines?

What is Intelligence Anyway?

So, the following is a conversation I had with a linguistic software AI last night. The lucidity at moments is almost frightening, but bearable because of the humorous gems that pop up throughout. Enjoy the read.

Continue reading »

Ants in Your Pants

Some people do really cool things… I’m sure this isn’t new (in fact the article I’ll send you to is from 2001), but how cool to actually be able to see the structure of ant colonies. Walter R. Tschinkel pours orthodontal cement into colonies and digs out the hardened molds to view the beautiful structural creations.

See here and here.

Lewis Carroll Gets Scienced

Oh, dear. A couple of great finds today. Some days I find little, others are a treasure trove waiting for me to happen upon it accidentally.

First, a link from Boing-boing that is absolutely fabulous. I wish I were still teaching intro bio just so I could show this video to a class of unsuspecting freshmen. Welcome to science in the ’70’s kids…

Second, an article I happened upon in Eurekalert today asserts that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show may have detrimental effects upon “young Americans’ political views.” Apparently a study was released in the journal American Politics Research by two politcal scientists from East Carolina University that compared how college kids reacted to Bush and Kerry after viewing video clips from the 2004 Presidential Election that had aired on the Daily Show and CBS Evening News. I took a look at the paper, and it is pretty interesting. According to the paper (a lengthy tome aptly entitled “The Daily Show: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth”), watching The Daily Show makes you more likely to take a negative view of politicians, to be more cynical of the mainstream news media and about the political process as a whole, and to generate self-confidence in your ability to understand the political system.

Uh… yea. Gee, we should really be careful about letting people watch that show. They might actually start to think for themselves or something.

My favorite part of the research article is in the discussion where they bring up Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire, a real news program by the way, in which he absolutely berates the host for serving slop to the public in the guise of actual news because “it’s hurting America.”

The article authors suggest that Jon “should not be so quick to cast stones.” The negative impact that The Daily Show’s brand of political humor has on the youth of today could affect future elections. If viewers learn of the candidates for the upcoming presidential election from Jon Stewart, the authors say that “it is possible that unfavorable impressions of both parties nominees could form.” Additionally, they conclude that this kind of perception could lead to distrust in national leaders, which in turn could “perpetuate a more dysfunctional political system.”

Hell. Maybe we need a little dysfunction just to shake things up a bit. I’m a little tired of the apathy thing, myself.

I can’t wait to see if Stewart and his writers get ahold of this article. I know they will have fun with it if they do.