Cheese curds and pigeons and butter sculptures

Oh, my. I spent Saturday—yes, pretty much all of it—at the Minnesota State Fair with friends. I have to admit, it was impressive. The livestock barns were bio-geeky fun, and the food (sampled strategically, in moderation) was uniformly good, especially the milkshakes at the dairy barn. Deep-fried cheese curds are amazing, and I do not want any more until next year.

Anyway, I've finally gotten around to weeding through the photos I took, so here you go. Check out the QR code made out of seeds from the "seed art" competition (which is far from the most peculiar and specific competitive category we encountered) and the sheep in vaguely sinister protective coveralls.

Making themselves at home: Spider mites disable plant defenses, then spin their own

Tomatoes, one of many plants that play unwilling host to red spider mites. Photo by sylvar.

Plant-eating insects must overcome some of the cleverest weaponry in the living world—from poisonous latex to sticky hairs—just to find a meal or a place to lay eggs. Many deal with their host plants' toxic defenses by digesting them or sequestering them safely for personal use, but the red spider mite Tetranychus evansi simply turns them off.

Tetranychus evansi eats a wide range of plants, from tomatoes to potatoes. One female mite can eat enough to lay 50%-70% of her weight in eggs every day, and while that isn't much on the scale of a single, miniscule red mite, it adds up quickly when colonies build into dense clusters on host plants, sucking them dry and covering them in webs of spun silk.

Most host plants respond to such an onslaught by ramping up production of chemicals that make them unpalatable to herbivores, or that interfere with the mites' ability to digest plant tissue. However, a team of Dutch and Brazilian biologists recently found that T. evansi somehow short-circuits this response [$a].

Science online, did the earth move for you? edition

Beerquake. Photo by dongga BS.

Boy, did I ever pick the right time to visit North Carolina. If only there were some sort of widely-available medium through which working geologists could explain what shook up the East Coast on Wednesday ...

• Darwin and Boyle were way into dice-playing. Biology and chemistry are more than just extra-complicated physics, because they deal in randomness.
• Introducing Ms. Homunculus. Scicurious discusses a new map of brain regions activated by stimulation of the vagina.
• Mad science in a good cause. A proposed new treatment for malaria would work by microwaving the patient.
• Maybe what they need is a well-written Wikipedia page? People who grew up with Internet search engines don't know how to use them effectively. (See also.)
• One thing's for certain: there's more taxonomizing to be done. A new study suggests that taxonomy isn't endangered after all; but see also.
• The "underwater view" will haunt my dreams. Lampreys really, really hate the smell of rotting flesh.
• It comes in pints! The new Sam Adams Boston Lager Glass (TM) may not be the paragon of beer-containment that it claims, but it is the latest in a long history of cups, beakers, and tankards.
• Defining a new adaptive zone for evolutionary ecology. The observation that anoles living in different micro-habitats had different body types, and that those body types might be related to life in the micro-habitats, was first published fifty years ago.
• That burbling sound is "Thus Spake Zarathustra" playing underwater. Now dolphins are using conch shells as tools.

Finally, from a compilation of timelapse videos of plants, here's climbing morning glory. Tropisms in action!


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Science online, hard at work edition

Yes, I've actually kept busy enough this week to make it all the way to Friday without compiling the weekly linkfest. So, er, here's the best thing not related to next-generation sequencing I did manage to see all week: Julia Child explaining the Miller-Urey experiment, then making her own "primordial soup."



Video via Ferris Jabr. That original experiment turned out to be more successful than originally known. ◼

#NGS11 day one: The wrath of Moore and Kryder

The future is in the cloud? Photo by Extra Medium.

Biologists are about to have access to all the genetic data we could ever want. Unfortunately, once we have that data, we have to figure out where to put it—and some way to sift out the bits that answer the questions we want to answer.

That's the first day of the NESCent workshop in next-generation sequencing methods in a nutshell.

Brian O'Connor, who gave the morning lectures, framed the immediate future of biology as a race between technologies for collecting genetic sequence data and technologies for storing and analyzing that data. Moore's Law is that computer processor speed (really, the number of transistors packed into a single processor chip) doubles about every two years; Kryder's Law is that computer storage capacity roughly quadruples in the same amount of time. But in the last few years, and for the foreseeable future, DNA sequence collection capacities are growing on the order of ten times every couple years.

In other words, there may very well come a day when the cost of storing and using a genome (or genomes!) belonging your favorite study organism will exceed the cost of obtaining those data.

Sequencing: The Next Generation

Sighted in the woods near Northgate Park, Durham. For real. Photo by jby.

I'm spending the next two weeks in Durham, North Carolina, for the NESCent workshop on next-generation sequencing. Which is to say, a workshop about collecting great big genetic datasets, and what you can do with them once you have them. I'll be stretching my programming skills to the maximum, and hopefully getting a head start on some ideas I've had for good old Medicago truncatula.

If time permits, I may take a page from Carl Boettinger's literally open lab notebook and post some notes and thoughts here as the workshop progresses, but it's looking likely to be a full two weeks, and time may very well not permit. ◼

Science online, gluteal symmetry edition

Is that a tennis ball in your pocket, or asymmetric hypertrophy of your iliopsoas? Oh. It's a tennis ball. Photo by Steve9091.

• Quick, tell Coach Schtitt to change up the drills. Something about the athletic demands of tennis leads high-level players to develop asymmetric bums.
• Nothing revolutionary comes easy. Engineering grain plants that can host nitrogen-fixing bacteria would be an historic breakthrough for agriculture, but it won't be simple.
• Try not to forget. Memory really doesn't work the way most people think it does, in a lot of important ways.
• Like my relationship status with "food miles." Even when you do the math, figuring out what lifestyle choices are most sustainable is complicated.
• But even so ... It's pretty clear that biking to work is the greenest choice available.
• Fitness measures are harder to get than you'd think. A large-scale experiment in Nebraska will finally directly test the hypothesis that light-colored mice are better camouflaged on light sand dunes.
• Oops. Pheromone-based traps for Japanese beetles not only don't work, they attract more beetles.
• Question left begging: which is scarier, a brown recluse, or MRSA? Lots of reported spider bites might actually be soft-tissue bacterial infection.

Another one for the reading list

So, I've known for some time that On the Media co-host Brooke Gladstone has a new book out, and that it's a meditation on media in quirky graphic-novel form, but I didn't really know I needed to read it until I saw this trailer. ◼

Flowers stay open for pollinators, not daylight

A honeybee explores the depths of a dandelion, one of the species used in Fründ et al.'s experiments. Photo by je-sa.

If you've ever stopped to admire morning glory flowers opening first thing in the morning, then noticed they've closed by evening, you're at least dimly aware of one of the longest-established ideas in plant biology: that flowers open and close on a reliable daily schedule. Different species are open at different times of day, of course, but each flowering plant has its preferred open period, and it sticks to that schedule during its flowering season.

This idea led Carolus Linneaus, the father of modern biological taxonomy, to propose an Horologium florae, or "floral clock" using plantings of species with known flowering times to mark the hours. You can find his table of proposed species in the online version of Linneaus' 1783 treatise Philosophia Botanica, if you're not averse to Latin. Studies of flowers' daily schedules go back to well before English was the language of international science, and continue to the present day [$a].

Yet no one seems to have spent much time considering how flowers' schedules might respond to the activity of their very reason for being: pollinators. Flowers don't open just to be open in a particular kind of sunlight—they're open to attract animals that can carry pollen to another plant, and maybe leave some, too. If a flower receives enough pollen to make seeds by noon, why would it stay open until two o'clock?

According to some new experimental results, the answer to that question is that they don't [$a].

#ESA2011 #ESA11: Who to follow

Update, 9 August 2011: I seem to have picked the wrong hashtag--there's more activity at #ESA11.

Western scrub jay. Photo by Minette Layne.

The annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America is underway in Austin, Texas, this week. If, like me, you're not anywhere near Austin, do not despair. There are people who will use the Internet to tell you what is going on at the meetings anyway, out of sheer enthusiasm for ecology! Here are the ones I'm following:

Thanks in part to readers like you, Sarcozona will be covering the meeting at Gravity's Rainbow. Zen Faulkes of NeuroDojo has apparently been there since Day 0. And Jeremy Fox has been anticipating the meeting for the last week over at the OIKOS blog. Finally, you can follow the official ESA twitter feed and the hashtag #ESA2011 #ESA11 for continuous updates. ◼

Paying up

So one major credit rating agency has announced it has a bad feeling about the long-term value of U.S. government debt. Whatever could our government—which is to say, we, the U.S. public—have done to warrant that? How about refusing to collect revenue that could pay down existing debt:



(Via.)

Sure, government spending increases debt, and the U.S. government spends money to do lots of things I'd be happy to stop doing. But government does lots of things that any sane person agrees are necessary—paying for police and firefighters, building roads, preventing people from pissing in my drinking water—and even if we cut all those basic services to zero, we still wouldn't have a balanced budget. (Non-defense discretionary spending for 2010 ≈ $530 billion; 2010 federal budget deficit ≈ $1,294 billion. Everyone can agree that 530 is not larger than 1,294 ... right?)

When the government borrows, it borrows against tax revenue that it could, theoretically, collect to pay off the debt. Our collective decisions as U.S. citizens, expressed via elections—with admittedly varying degrees of accuracy and wisdom—have run up historically high national debt while driving the proportion of national income collected as taxes to a historical low. If you were loaning more and more money to a friend who kept working fewer and fewer hours a week, wouldn't you start to get a bit edgy?

And if all this sounds a bit abstract, here's a nice concrete number: the increased cost of U.S. debt associated with that credit rating agency's bad feeling comes to about $322 per U.S. citizen. If I'm not mistaken, that's a pretty big chunk of the refund I got back when the last round of big tax cuts took effect, ten years ago—and it's just the start. ◼

Science online, migrating sushi edition

You must admit, it doesn't look comfortable. Photo by Soller Photo.

• A movable feast. The neurochemical explanation for those viral videos of dancing squid sushi.
• Or, you know, don't fragment the habitats. To offset the effects of habitat fragmentation and help natural populations adapt to changing climate, just add gene flow.
• The knight's burden is a heavy one, literally. Was medieval chivalry undone by the sheer weight of knights' armor?
• Coming soon: age-defying low-iodine diets. Axolotls are neotenic salamanders, meaning they become sexually mature without developing the "adult" characteristics other salamander species typically have—unless you dose them with iodine.
• Reviving, not revived. After being fished nearly to extinction, the Atlantic cod population—and rockfish, and haddock—may finally be reviving.
• We traded guts for brains. Compared to other mammals, humans have unusually big brains for our body size, which means that we also have rather odd bodies.
• And we're not talking about "Tag" body spray. The African crested rat deters predators by slathering itself in poison.
• These congratulations will not be withdrawn later. Retraction Watch completed its first year of following up on post-publication reviews and refutations this week—well done!

Carnival of Evolution, August 2011

Grizzly bear. Photo by Alaska Dude.

The latest edition of the Carnival of Evolution, a monthly collection of online writing about evolution and all its ramifications, is online at Sandwalk. Check it out to learn why genetic testing for grizzly bears is important, what new fossil may have taken the place of Archeopteryx in the evolutionary history of birds, and what pioneer of evolutionary biology will soon be on a U.S. postage stamp.