Think you're having a rough day? Try being a wasp larva, destined never to fully develop, but instead to sacrifice yourself to save your luckier siblings. Welcome to the twisted world of the wasp Copidosoma floridanum, a species whose bizarro reproductive strategies were recently elucidated in research out of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. A female wasp will lay her one or two eggs inside of the egg of a caterpillar known as a cabbage looper, according to New Scientist:
"One egg might not sound so bad, but [this wasp egg] is no ordinary egg. It is polyembryonic, meaning that the single embryo cell at its heart can repeatedly clone itself. As a result, just one egg can produce up to 2000 offspring."
The wasp larvae develop inside the caterpillar; there can be thousands of the wasp usurpers in a single caterpillar. The larvae that will later become adult wasps, known as reproductive larvae, survive by feeding on the caterpillar's blood. The other larvae are there just to fend off larvae from other wasp eggs that might have been laid in the same caterpillar egg:
"The second caste is the precocious larvae. These develop earlier than the reproductive larvae – hence their name ...

National Geographic has a trio of shows coming up on Sunday May 16, 2010 you will want to see.

The first is called “Cosmic Fire”, and airs at 8 pm ET/PT.   The episode explores solar storms and talks a great deal about the Carrington Event.  Probably the best treatment of that event I’ve seen.  If you have any interest in the aurora this is a must see.  As for the part in the middle of the show talking about lightning and cosmic rays that’s a little out there (IMHO) but interesting none-the-less.   Like they say in the episode, it’s not a matter of “if” it’s a matter of when.  What might the consequences be?  The answer is explored and it is not good and they aren’t kidding either.   By the way, they mentioned the solar storm of 1989.   I remember that one specifically.  The aurora was seen horizon to horizon and so bright I could read a newspaper by it  and yet,  it was nothing compared to the Carrington Event.

In case you couldn’t tell, I really-really like the aurora.  While I was watching the episode poor Marian was getting emails about every 5-minutes with “hey did you know….” or “oh wow”  She was a good sport about it  

“Alien Wind” follows at 9pm ET/PT.  NatGeo takes us to the outer planets and to the surreal world of Titan.  We are introduced to the exo-planet HD 80606b, a thoroughly nasty place in the binary star system of Struve 1341 and features some of the pretty cool observations that have been done.

Finally at 10pm ET/PT:  “Deadly Dust”.  I never considered dust to be all that interesting, but you know, after seeing this I have a new appreciation.  I mean, while I am complaining about the coating of “Smead Road” that appears all too regularly in my house, I can think – it could be worse.   And I’m sorry, chasing down dust devils in the desert has to be fun!  They give us a “what if” scenario of a Mars sized dust storm here on Earth, be glad it won’t happen.

Carl Zimmer asks “Will Anyone In Alabama Speak For Evolution?” The story is that a Republican candidate for governor in Alabama is being accused of not being a Creationist, and he is asserting that he is a Creationist. Some people might be surprised by this, but this is Alabama. It is famously well known that the general public tends to split down the middle in regards to evolution, and that there is a class aspect to the division. But what’s the breakdown by region? The GSS can help.

Let’s look at two variables:

SCITEST4: In your opinion, how true is this? Human beings developed from earlier species of
animals

REGION, which you can see on the Census Division map below:

And the chart below shows the responses by region:

Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi are in the “East South Central,” and that’s the most Creationist region of the country. To come out and support evolution in that region you need to either be a Yankee, or the president of Auburn university!

This weekend, I'm going to be teaching some science journalism at the following event hosted by Johns Hopkins and the Smithsonian: Science Writing: From Eureka Moment to Digital Publishing
All Day Seminar -- Saturday, May 15 - 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. From cells to stars, from evolution to swine flu, writing about diverse and complex scientific topics is an engaging, challenging endeavor requiring special skills. Today, well-known practitioners discuss how to find ideas, develop essential skills, and thrive in the digital age. Their ideas resonate with people currently working in the science or medical fields, writers who want to re-direct their work toward science or medicine, or anyone interested in how scientific information is communicated to the public. 9:30 to 10:45 a.m. Getting Started Challenges of science writing. How to target audiences and choose an area of concentration. Ann Finkbeiner, writer, columnist, critic, and director of the Master of Arts in Science Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University; Chris Mooney, author and Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT; Nancy Shute, contributing editor and blogger for U.S. News & World Report and vice president of the National Association of Science Writers. 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Finding and Developing Ideas Writing about advances in science ...

One of the consequences of having a blog is that people occasionally offer to send you free stuff. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, for the most part; rather, because they’d like some free publicity in return. Usually it’s a book of some sort, and usually I just decline; I can’t possibly get through all the books I hope to read on my own, much less other books that people want me to read.

So when I received an email from Kimberly Moniz at SHIFT Communications asking if I’d be interested in receiving a free sample to possibly mention on the blog, I almost replied automatically in the negative. But then the nature of the product sunk in, and I paused — this wasn’t a book, this was booze! Specifically, Canadian Club whisky.

I’ll admit that I’m an occasional Scotch drinker, but not much of a Canadian whisky fan. To be honest, the mention of Canadian Club conjures images of something my grandmother would have been drinking (while smoking her Pall Malls), although that seems to be changing. I suspect the marketing people recognize that, and thought it would be good to freshen their image among a younger, hipper crowd. And what better way to do that than by reaching out to science blogs? (Especially ones that occasionally rhapsodize about the perfect martini.) This is some new-media marketing savvy I can get behind. Also, free booze.

But our honor is not sold so cheaply — we’re not going to provide free advertising just because someone sends us some loot. We have our scruples, and everything we post must adhere to the guiding principles of our Mission Statement. But then I remembered that our Mission Statement says we post about whatever we feel like posting about. Still, we like to convey at least the illusion of integrity.

So I hit upon the perfect solution: talk about the whisky, but do so through the lens of Science! That is, we would accept the free booze, but only under the understanding that we would subject it to a rigorous taste-test in comparison with other comparable whiskies, apply the time-honored techniques of the experimental method to the results, and publish whatever they might turn out to be. Kim was up for this adventure, so we set the wheels in motion. Results below the fold.

We were sent a bottle of Canadian Club’s super-special 30-year-old whisky, as well as a bottle of their slightly-special 12-year-old offering. I judged that it would make the most sense to put them up against a variety of other kinds of whisky, so we assembled a worthy array of adversaries from around the globe. (Note that the Scots and the Canadians spell it “whisky,” while the Americans and Irish use “whiskey,” so there’s no consensus choice in this case.) From left to right, we have the two Canadian Club entries; a bottle of Jim Beam Distiller’s Series, a Kentucky bourbon; Jameson, a classic Irish whiskey; and Glenlivet, a well-known single-malt scotch. I wasn’t smart enough to keep track of the prices for the different bottles, but you should imagine that the 12-year CC is about $18, the Jim Beam is about $18, the Jameson is about $23, and the Glenlivet is about $35. The 30-year CC is apparently a collector’s item that will set you back about $200.

Then, to the experimental procedure. I rounded up a few friends (8 people in all), none of whom were really whisky experts, but none of whom were really averse to the idea, either. One of them was Risa, who was passing through town for other reasons, so it was a true Cosmic Variance event. We disguised the bottles by putting them all in plain brown bags and assigning numbers to each. All of the testers were given samples of each whisky, as well as a score card where they were asked to give each entry an overall score between 1 and 5, as well as to write down more specific impressions.

And here are the results! Complete with error bars (at least, standard deviations computed from the raw data), so that makes it science, right?

And the results are — inconclusive. Well, that’s not exactly true. We learned a lot, actually. It’s true that all of the scores ended up being within the error bars of each other. So we didn’t technically learn a lot about whisky. But we learned a lot about the proper experimental protocol for conducting a whisky tasting! Mostly, I don’t think we gave people enough of it. That is, more than one person remarked that it took more than a couple of sips to really start to appreciate the merits of any individual liquor. If we were to do it again, we’d take more time, offer lots of food, and let people really enjoy each of the offerings, so that their individual ratings were more reliable. In the meantime, if you’d like useful insight into the nature of these different drinks, you’d be better off checking out Drinkhacker or similar sites. They actually know what they’re talking about.

The other thing we learned is that, despite the obvious scatter in the numerical results, people did have somewhat consistent reactions to the different whiskies. Both kinds of Canadian Club were judged as sweet, mellow, vanilla; the Jameson was lighter and thinner; the Jim Beam was a bit more harsh; and the Glenlivet was thought to be more complex but softer. It’s just that different people liked different characteristics. So perhaps there is no absolute scale of whisky achievement, but rather a subjective relationship between the liquor and the imbiber? Of course, down that road lies moral relativism and nihilism, and ultimately the Taliban will win, so we should probably avoid that path.

Most of all, we learned that we like getting sent free stuff that doesn’t require hours of our time to read and think about. Other good possibilities for this category might include: iPads, trips to Vegas, and Tesla roadsters. You know where to find us.

Finally, here’s the scientific explanation behind the production of Canadian Club whisky. Thanks to Kim Moniz for sending this, as well as the whisky, and for playing along. And apologies for my usual tardiness — it took a while to put the tasting event together, and then I went and lost the score sheets for a matter of months. But science eventually triumphs!

Production Process of Canadian Club

Canadian Club is made from a blend of corn, rye, rye malt and barley malt. Once the grain arrives at the distillery it is split up: the corn is milled and put in a premix tank where water is added to prepare it for cooking. The other grains are milled together, mixed with water and the product, called mash, is then transferred to the batch cooker. The cooked mash is moved from the batch cookers to conversion tanks where malts are added to change the starch into fermentable sugars. Once the malts are added it produces high sucrose mash, which is then transferred from the conversion tanks to the fermenters. There are 39 fermenters in the distillery, each stands over three stories high and is able to hold up to 218,000 liters. Once the fermenter is filled with the high sucrose mash, two types of yeast are added to the mix –commercial yeast is added to the corn mash, while a specially developed yeast patented in 1858 by Hirman Walker is added to the blender grains mash. After 72 hours of fermentation, the product is 11% alcohol and is referred to as “distiller’s beer”. The fermented mash is pumped into a whisky still where it flows through horizontal filtration plates. Steam is injected at the base of the still and as it rises, it causes the alcohol to evaporate out of the mash. The alcohol is then carried to the top of the still and condensed into liquid form called “new whisky”(this is the process of distillation). The “new whisky” is then run through other stills in order to remove unwanted elements, such as fusel oils. The removal of these items is what makes Canadian Club have a light, smooth flavor. The corn distillate is now 95% alcohol per volume, colorless and odorless. The blended grains are distilled through the column still, but at a lower alcohol strength in order to produce a higher grain character in the taste of the whisky. The grain mash is further refined in a copper still, enhancing the flavor of the whisky. After quality control checks, each whisky is then pumped into large blending tanks prior to aging. This process is referred to as pre-barrel blending (blending the corn and grain mash), a unique process to Canadian Club. The colorless new whisky is then pumped to drain and fill where it is tapped into the once used American oak charred barrels for its aging process.

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

The two robots are the stars of two new papers that describe the latest advances in making independent, programmable nano-scale robots out of individual molecules. Such creations have featured in science-fiction stories for decades, from Michael Crichton’s Prey to Red Dwarf, but in reality, there are many barriers to creating such machines. For a start, big robots can be loaded with masses of software that guides their actions – no such luck at the nano-level.

The two new studies have solved this problem by programming the robots’ actions into their environment rather than their bodies. Standing on the shoulders of giants, both studies fuse two of the most interesting advances in nanotechnology: the design of DNA machines, fashioned from life’s essential double helix and possessing the ability to walk about; and the invention of DNA origami, where sets of specially constructed DNA molecules can be fused together into beautiful sheets and sculptures. Combine the two and you get a robot walker and a track for it to walk upon.

At Arizona State University, Kyle Lund’s robot (which he does actually call a spider) can move about completely of its own accord. Its program is completely written into its landscape. The spider’s body is a molecule called streptavidin and each of its legs are single-stranded ‘DNAzymes’ – one half of the famous double helix, with the added ability to cut other DNA strands. In doing so, it shortens the length of any strand that it happens to walk on.

The spider walks along a sheet of DNA origami, with sequences that match the strands that make up the spider’s legs. As the spider takes a step, its leg sticks to one of these complementary strands and cuts it, shortening that bit of track. This shortened surface interacts with the spider’s legs less strongly than a full-length piece of track, and that’s the key to herding the spider in a single direction.

When the spider steps, it leaves a trail of cut, unattractive DNA behind it, with paths of fresh, enticing strands ahead of it. Its legs could land anywhere but they stay for longer on a piece of track that hasn’t already been stepped on. Even if it steps randomly, it should eventually move to new terrain and by making the track narrow enough so that it can only go in one direction, Lund could steer its steps. It’s a fiendishly clever system – the walking spider shapes its environment in a way that controls its own behaviour.

Only three of the legs are for walking. The fourth is an anchor that leashes the robot to its starting post and it takes a special short piece of DNA to unleash it. This small trigger sticks to the starting position instead, ousting the robot’s fourth leg, and freeing the other three to carry it onwards. The robot follows the curve of the track until it reaches a pre-determined finishing line, a stretch of DNA that its legs cannot cut.

Meanwhile, at New York University, Hongzhou Gu has also built a DNA robot that walks on a DNA origami landscape. His walker isn’t quite as independent as Lund’s and needs the right triggers to take its steps. But what it sacrifices in autonomy, it makes up for in complexity. This robot is part of a nano-factory, a miniature assembly line that can manufacture eight different products.

Like Lund’s spider, Gu’s triangular robot has single-stranded DNA for limbs, but his has four legs and three arms. The legs walk along a specially designed DNA landscape but they don’t cut the strands they step on. Instead, the robot needs anchor strands to link its legs to the tracks, and fuel strands to displace them. By sequentially adding these strands, Gu can make his robot walk. So far, this seems like a less impressive and elegant system than Lund’s autonomous walker.

But Gu’s robot isn’t alone. It’s accompanied by three more DNA ‘loading’ machines, each carrying a different cargo of gold particles – a small 5-nanometre one, a pair of these, and a large(r) 10-nanometre one. Each of these loaders can be set in an ‘on’ of ‘off’ position. As the robot walks, it encounters each loader in turn and those that are switched on transfer their cargo to it. By tweaking the settings of the loaders, Gu can create eight possible products, forged of a combination of the three types of gold particles.

Now this is impressive – in a related editorial, Lloyd Smith from the University of Wisconsin says, “This is the first time that systems of nanomachines, rather than individual devices, have been used to perform operations, constituting a crucial advance in the evolution of DNA nanotechnology.”

Neither robot quite scales the heady heights of science-fiction nanotechnology. One is autonomous but simple, while the other is complex but requires much in the way of human intervention. And both are quite limited in the things that they can do. But these robots are taking tiny but important steps towards greater things. They are a sign that the field of nanotechnology is set for great strides in the future.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09012 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09026

Image: 3D artwork by Paul Michelotti

More on nanotechnology:

• DNA sculpture and origami – a meeting of art and nanotechnology
• Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword
• Carbon nanotubes could behave like asbestos

I haven’t done a contest in a while, but this one was worth the wait: I have some very cool Mythbusters swag I’m giving away!

Here’s the loot:

To wit:

• A ginormous Mythbusters swag bag from the San Diego Comic Con 2009,
• An autographed hardcopy of the cover of the September 2009 Popular Science magazine that had contributions by Jamie Hyneman and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™,
• A t-shirt, size medium (though it’s a bit small for me and I’m average in build, so consider it a small), from Comic Con 2008. The shirt has a drawing of Jamie on the front (with the caption "METHODICAL") and Adam on the back ("IMPULSIVE"). This shirt is also autographed by both Adam and Jamie. The sleeve has the SDCC and MB logos on it. And…
• … what the heck: I also have a lot of miscellaneous cool stuff I’ve picked up over time, and I’ll throw a pile of it into the box. Stickers, buttons, things like that.

So how do you win this fabulous prize? Here’s the deal:

0) This contest is free.

1) This contest will be held on Twitter. Unlike in previous contests, leaving comments here will not enter you in the contest.

2) On Wednesday, May 12 at 11:00 a.m. Mountain time (17:00 UT), I posted a tweet that says:

Mythbusters giveaway: pic, bag, & shirt signed by Jamie & Adam! Retweet to enter. Rules: http://is.gd/c63E9 #BAMyth

The #BAMyth hashtag is critical! See #4 below.

3) To enter the contest, you must retweet that tweet.

4) All retweets must be posted between Wednesday, May 12 at 11:00 MDT and Friday, May 14, at 12:00 MDT. After that time, I’ll pick two random numbers, and then search Twitter for all instances of the hashtag #BAMyth. The first random number will be the search page result (using 50 results per page), and the second will be the number of the retweet on the page (1 – 50). That person will then win the Mythbusters swag!

5) Anyone on Earth is eligible, except (to be fair) for people who know me in real life. I’ll leave that up to you to decide if you count or not. People who know me can certainly retweet it, but they cannot win the bounty. Those retweets will count in the random numbers I pick (in other words, if my sister retweets it, I won’t give her the prize, but her RT will be counted in the search results). Please don’t retweet it more than once. That’s a tasing.

6) Just so’s you know, this is not an official Discover Magazine or Discovery Channel or Mythbusters contest. It’s just me playing around and having some fun. I’m doing this out of pocket because I love you guys, and because I figure in some way it’ll net me followers on Twitter, solidify my übernerd status, and eventually let me rule the world. The WORLD! Mwuhahahahaha!

So retweet that tweet, tell your friends, win something cool, and support my global domination. It’s win/win!