The Oyster’s Garter

I’m proud to be at a (g)rad school where scientists not only figure out secrets of the earth (and the universe) but often employ interdisciplinary approaches to get the job done (IGERT cohort represent!). But, full disclosure: I’m even prouder to be from a school with more astronauts and a football team that didn’t dissolve after its first season. (This is because nerds from the Midwest love a solid running game as much as running regression analyses.) Between kicking as-trophysics and taking games, my alma mater scores $500M in research funding each year, and uses it to get mad interdisciplinary and high…Tech.

From my old A-town stomp-ing ground comes a high-profile example of the option offense, as executed by marine organisms. Chemists and biologist at Georgia Tech collaborated to study the secondary metabolites on the surfaces of marine algae using a new technology called desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. (Can this please be the name of a new hair product, too?) The tool allows scientists to map the chemical properties of an intact biological surface to determine where on the organism a chemical is being used, not just that it’s “in there somewhere, doin’ something.” (This had long been standard protocol in chemical ecology.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m more a fan of Maslow than of Freud or Skinner. I’m pretty sure humans are innately programmed to seek beauty and truth and emotional growth through their behaviors rather than live constrained by the subconscious id or the conditioning of their past. But there’s no optimistic, forward-looking philosophy of motivation that can handle more than a few electric shocks before it collapses into a pile of hatred for the world and aversive behavior. (My sister and I agree not drinking coffee on Saturday does the same thing to a person. Self-caffeination beats Self-actualization anyday.)

I went to Curacao last month to help start a new multidisciplinary research project. As suggested by my trip nicknames— “Microbe Girl” and “K-Party”—it was my job to spend the entire trip inside a container lab doing obscure microbiology tasks while everyone else was scuba diving, and then it was my job to not complain about it later on because it was time to drink beer and watch an amazing sunset. Yay…sunsets are way better than scuba diving? Read the rest of this entry »

Engage cute-appreciation apparatus:

(Thanks JeByrnes!)

What’s as excruciating as waiting for corals to grow into a whole reef? I’d argue it’s knitting. In either case, the same thing has to happen over and over and over, without interference, before you get something to house biodiversity or wear for the winter, and then you run the risk of ships crashing into it or moths eating it, or if you decided to knit an iceberg, I guess, both. (Knitting icebergs: it’s like rearranging deck chairs.)

Crocheting the coral rubble is extra-tedious

If you’re an artist, there’s a beautiful symmetry here: why not make something slow-growing out of something slow-going? Yesterday, Eric saw a nice review of the Coral Reef Crochet Project, an art exhibit about corals, by crafters (AC/BC?). Then he remembered something about me and corals. Handicraft handoff.

Read the rest of this entry »

…but lean a little bit closer, see, roses really smell like…stinky tee-shirts?

Biology is complicated, but most experimental design isn’t. Thanks to the t-test and its descendants, we scientists end up telling a lot of binary “less vs. more” stories and it ends up being hard to tell what really matters in the grand scheme of stuff. (Flu from animals? Hate on food from animals.)

So I was delighted this weekend when one of my favorite “less vs. more” laboratory results—interesting but of questionable relative importance—turned out to be substantiated by surveys of the larger human population, and was therefore applicable to my everyday life of not eating meat, waiting for football season, and judging things by how they smell.

The major histocompatibility complex (“It’s just major right here, y’all know what I’m sayin’?”) is a region of human chromosome 6 that codes for a bunch of cell-cell recognition capabilities involved in reproduction and immunity (finding cells that your cells like, or don’t like, and responding accordingly). I’ve long been a fan of what came to be known as “The Sweaty T-Shirt Study,” which demonstrated that women prefer the smell of sweat from men whose MHC regions are least similar to theirs, the implication being that the resultant offspring from such a scent-match would have the most “go-getta” immune systems. To me, the study approach—”Here, smell.”—seemed kind of anachronistic, but the conclusions were revolutionary enough to start a whole field of sniff-and-tell research. Scientists later showed that there was no significant preference (p>0.05 = T-Pain) for the smell of outcast-MHCs among women using hormonal birth control; they preferred the smell of men with the most similar MHC. Read the rest of this entry »