“The authors report a field experiment with skateboarders that demonstrates that physical risk taking by young men increases in the presence of an attractive female. This increased risk taking leads to more successes but also more crash landings in front of a female observer. Mediational analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. In addition, skateboarders’ risk taking was predicted by their performance on a reversal-learning task, reversal-learning performance was disrupted by the presence of the attractive female, and the female’s presence moderated the observed relationship between risk taking and reversal learning. These results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.”

Thanks to Anne for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/fotologic

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Earlier I pointed to the possibility of biophysical constraints and parameters in terms of inheritance shaping the local trajectory of evolution. Today Olivia Judson has a nice post [link fixed] on how the existence of two sexes in many species results in a strange metastable tug-of-war in terms of phenotypic evolution:

In sum, the traits that make a “good” male are often different from those that make a “good” female. (Note: I’m only talking about “good” in evolutionary terms. That means a trait that improves your chance of having surviving offspring.) Since many of these traits have a genetic underpinning, male and female genes are thus being sculpted by different forces.

But — and this is the source of the tension I mentioned — males and females are formed from the same underlying set of genes. After all, in humans, whether you’re a boy or a girl comes down to whether you have a Y chromosome or not: boys do, girls don’t. The rest of the genes occur in both sexes.

The X choromosome in mammals spends about 2/3 of its time in females and 1/3 in males.* And obviously the Y is found only in males. But the rest of the genome is found in both males and females. Judson notes that traits which may be attractive in males may not in females, and which may be attractive in females may not in males. There’s a fair amount of evolutionary psychological work in humans in this vein in regards to the heritability of testosterone and estrogen levels in females and males and how it effects the same and opposite sex (in short, there is suggestive data that “sexy” individuals of one sex, those who exhibit strong secondary sexual characteristics, may be prone to having less sexy offspring of the opposite sex).

Of course you can overcome the balancing tug of war; that’s why you have sexual dimorphism in things like size or facial proportion. But these sorts of traits emerge very slowly because of the equilibrium described above, modifier genes and sex-specific gene expression have to slowly engineer around the overwhelming problem that males and females are genetically no different on a sequence level aside from the Y chromosome. Some estimates put the rate of evolutionary change of sexual dimorphism, that is, trait differences between sexes, between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude slower than conventional population level evolution. Ergo, one would expect that sexual dimorphism differences varying across populations have great time depth, and are probably more interspecific than intraspecific (for example, gorillas vs. humans).

There is naturally a whole field devoted to the study of the origin of sex. But whatever its ultimate rationale and utility an evolutionary context, its existence as a background condition in many taxa may result in a constraint of the exploration of phenotype space, as species divided into two sexes characterized by strong phenotypic differences dance between two sex-specific phenotypic optima.

* Sex determination varies by taxon.

Fascinating post by Bayes, Phylogenetics, cultural evolution and horizontal transmission:

For some time now, evolutionary biologists have used phylogenetics. It is a well-established, powerful set of tools that allow us to test evolutionary hypotheses. More recently, however, these methods are being imported to analyse linguistic and cultural phenomena. For instance, the use of phylogenetics has led to observations that languages evolve in punctuational bursts, explored the role of population movements, and investigated the descent of Acheulean handaxes. I’ve followed the developments in linguistics with particular interest; after all, tracing the ephemeral nature of language is a daunting task. The first obvious road block is that prior to the invention of writing, the uptake of which is limited in geography and history, language leaves no archaeological record for linguists to examine. One particular note I’d like to make is that when Charles Darwin first formulated his theory of natural selection, he took inspiration from linguistic family trees as the basis for his sketch on the evolutionary tree of life. So it seems rather appropriate that phylogenetic approaches are now being used to inform our knowledge regarding linguistic evolution.

Like many other attempts applying evolutionary thinking in culture, phylogenetic approaches are, at times, met with contempt. This stems from assertions that cultural evolution and biological evolution differ greatly in regards to the relative importance of horizontal transmission….

…

I guess the general points to take away from this post are: 1) Do not necessarily assume horizontal transmission is dominant in shaping culture; and, 2) Even with certain levels of reticulation, it does not necessarily invalidate a phylogenetic approach in investigating cultural and linguistic evolution.

I think the point that horizontal transmission may be less important relative to vertical transmission than we’d previously thought in regards to the spread and diffusion of cultures may explain some of the recent findings from DNA extractions which suggest that hunter-gatherers were replaced in Europe by farmers. The standard model before the recent wave of extractions was that farming spread through cultural diffusion, with a minority view championed by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza of “demic diffusion” whereby demographic growth from the point of origination spread a culture, though the initial distinctive genetic signal became progressively weaker through dilution via admixture. But if cultural practices such as agriculture were much more vertically transmitted, from parent to child, rather than horizontally across societies, the genetic pattern of replacement becomes more comprehensible.

Of course, the main caveat is that intermarriage has been very common between neighboring groups. The rape of the Sabine women may reflect a common practice on the part of migratory males; the Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean was almost all male, so the subsequent generations were biologically the products of Greek men and native women (though culturally they were fully Greek, as evidenced by the term “Magna Graecia” to refer to Sicily and southern Italy). It is not atypical for vertical transmission of culture to occur from one parent, and in particular one sex. More recently the descendants of the pairings of Iberian men and indigenous women in Latin America tend to speak Spanish and avow the Christian faith. Though aspects of local identity, such as cuisine and clothing, may retain an indigenous stamp it is no coincidence that these populations are labelled “Latin American” despite their mixed genetic provenance.

Note: In the United States children have traditionally been more often raised in the denomination of their mother than father, so there isn’t always a male-bias in vertical transmission when the parents are not concordant for a cultural trait.

In autumn, as green hues give way to yellows and oranges, some leaves develop mysterious green islands, where life apparently holds fast against the usual seasonal decay. These defiant patches still continue the business of photosynthesis long after the rest of the leaf has withered. They aren’t the tree’s doing. They are the work of tiny larval insects that live inside it – leaf-miners.

The larvae were laid within the leaf’s delicate layers by their mother. They depend on it for shelter and sustenance, and they can’t move away. If their home dies, they die, so they have a vested interest in keeping at least part of the leaf alive. These are the miniature landscape architects that create the green islands, and they don’t do it alone – to manipulate the plant, they wield bacteria.

Wilfried Kaiser and scientists from Rabelais University discovered this partnership after realising that some bacteria and fungi can also cause green islands. He reasoned that microbes might be helping insects to achieve the same ends. So he searched for them in one particular species, a tiny moth called the spotted tentiform leaf-miner, Phyllonorycter blancardella. Its larva makes its home in the leaves of apple trees.

Kaiser found that the leaf-miners are host to just one detectable type of bacteria – Wolbachia. That’s hardly surprising. Wolbachia infects around 60% of the world’s insect species, making it a strong candidate for the title of world’s most successful parasite. Without exception, every leaf-miner that Kaiser tested, from all over the Loire Valley, carried Wolbachia in their tissues.

The bacteria were the true agents behind the green islands. When Kaiser cured the leaf-miners of their infections using antibiotics, they seemed perfectly healthy. But they completely lost the ability to stem the yellowing of leaves. As a result, 85% perished before adulthood; for comparion, the typical mortality rate of Wolbachia-carrying larvae is just 10%. Worst of all, since Wolbachia is passed down from mother to offspring, later generations also suffered the same lack of beneficial bacteria, the same inability to produce green islands and the same high odds of an early death.

The bacteria manipulate the leaves using their own signalling chemicals – a group of plant hormones called cytokinins. These substances perform many tasks in a leaf: they maintain the supply of chlorophyll; they prevent the leaf from dying; and they control the flow and storage of nutrients. They’re the barrier that stands between a living leaf and a rotting one. Stick cut plants in cytokinin solution and they’ll stay green for longer. What better tool for a bacterium or an insect looking to prolong the life of its leafy home?

Inside a typical mine, levels of cytokinins are much higher than usual. But when Kaiser cured the leaf-miners of Wolbachia, he found that the levels of cytokinins in the mine plummeted to levels typically seen in yellow leaves. Without these hormones, the insects failed to protect their homes. And if Kaiser injected cytokinins into leaves directly, he could create green islands on his own, without the need for either Wolbachia or a leaf-miner.

We know that the bacteria are necessary for the cytokinin flood that maintains the mine, but the exact source of these chemicals is unclear. It’s possible that the bacteria secrete them directly, or allow the leaf-miner to do so. Indeed, Wolbachia has a gene that’s important for the creation of cytokinins, and a paper published four decades ago found large amounts of these hormones in the salivary glands of a leaf-miner. The other alternative is that the bacteria encourage the plant to over-produce its own hormones. Of course, all of these possibilities could be working together.

Of course, many insects have their own beneficial resident bacteria, or symbionts. These tenants provide them with valuable nutrients that they can’t make themselves, and they can even offer protection against enemies and environmental challenges. But this is the only known example of an insect using a bacterial symbiont to directly manipulate a plant, and it seems to be a successful strategy.

By all accounts, leaf-mining is an evolutionary success story, and hundreds of species have adopted this lifestyle. Their partnership with bacteria might be the secret of their success but Kaiser will only know that for sure once he works out how widespread the use of bacteria is, and what these microbes actually do to the plant.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0214

Images: by Kaiser

More on insects and bacteria

• Life-shortening bacteria vs. dengue mosquitoes
• Butterflies evolve resistance to male-killing bacteria in record time
• An entire bacterial genome discovered inside that of a fruit fly
• Virus and bacteria team up to save aphid from parasitic wasp
• Museum butterfly collections chronicle evolutionary war against male-killers
• Leafcutter ants rely on bacteria to fertilise their fungus gardens

Another year, another round of diverting April Fool’s submissions to the ArXiV.

Can you spot the astro-ph paper containing the following?

Calculation of the new figure of merit entails calculating elliptic integrals of the second kind, which makes the method more scientific;

If it helps, it’s the same paper which refers to:

Lorentz violating Chuck Norris in space, breathing aether and watching galaxies with his naked eyes.

The final line of the orthographic correlations paper was a nice slow burn of a joke as well.

Influence of the epicanthal fold on the perceived direction of gaze.

“Judged direction of gaze from straight and turned heads is known to be biased from its true direction. We have tested the additional influence of epicanthal folds on the perceived direction of gaze. Western observers (U.S. residents of Western appearance) and Eastern observers (native Japanese) judged the direction of gaze from cathode ray tube-imaged heads with and without epicanthal folds (Japanese vs. Western models) when the heads, both straight and turned, gazed in different lateral directions… When the gazers’ heads were straight and gave eye contact, both Western and Eastern observers judged the gaze to be giving eye contact. However, with straight heads and gaze to the side, epicanthal folds produced significant differences in the judged direction of gaze. Observers judged the right and left eyes to be gazing in nearly the same direction when the gazer had the eye appearance that the observers were used to viewing within their own country, but in very different directions when the gazer had eyes typical of the other country. When the gazers’ heads were turned, the Western and Eastern observers judged the direction of gaze of the Western gazer’s right and left eyes similarly, but both judged large differences in direction of gaze between right and left eyes for the Eastern gazer. CONCLUSION: Direction of gaze from eyes that have epicanthal folds is judged very differently than gaze from eyes that do not have epicanthal folds. This difference is sensitive to the cultural experience of the observers.”

Bonus figure:

“FIGURE 1. Photos of the Western and Eastern models that provided the background over which we layered their eyes as they looked in different directions of gaze. Top left—Western gazer, head straight. Top right—Western gazer, head turned 30° to the observer’s left. Bottom left—Eastern gazer, head straight. Bottom right—Eastern gazer, head turned 30° to the observer’s left. The observers viewed these images in color.”

Photo: flickr/himenohogosha

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When it comes to picking up clever tricks and learning to do something the way everybody else does it, social animals like humans, birds, and monkeys excel. One individual looks at what others in the group are doing and quickly learns to follow suit—an invaluable skill that scientists previously thought evolved in step with communal living.

But what about an individual that doesn’t live in a group and spends most of its life in solitude–would it still have that ability to watch and learn? Cognitive biologist Anna Wilkinson set out to answer that question by studying the red-footed tortoise, one of the loneliest beasts on the planet. These South American tortoises grow up without parents or siblings, and adults rarely cross paths. If a head-bobbing display determines that a stranger is of the opposite sex, the two will mate perfunctorily–otherwise they just ignore each other [ScienceNOW]. Yet in a new study published in Biology Letters, Wilkinson showed that even these hermits possess the ability to learn by watching others.

In her experiment, Wilkinson set up a V-shaped wire mesh with a bowl of treats placed inside the point of the vee. She then let a tortoise named Wilhelmina try to get to the treats, but the tortoise couldn’t figure out how to get around the mesh and instead tried unsuccessfully to go through it. After weeks of arduous training and about 150 attempts, Wilhelmina finally learned to go around the mesh to get to the treats.

Then the researchers let four other tortoises try the navigation test. Like Wilhelmina initially, they all failed to find a way around the mesh–but when they watched the trained tortoise maneuver her way to the bowl of goodies, they quickly picked up cues. Two tortoises caught on the first time they watched Wilhelmina, and two, including [Wilkinson's pet tortoise] Moses, managed on at least 11 out of 12 days [Science News] (but he could not part the mesh to get to the other side).

The antisocial tortoises’ remarkable accomplishment suggests that social learning, rather than a unique ability that evolved in social animals because it makes them more successful in group living, is simply another dimension of general learning, which depends only on an animal’s cognitive abilities, Wilkinson says [ScienceNOW]. Louis Lefebvre, an animal behaviorist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, added: “Information in the environment is information in the environment, whether it’s given to you by an animal” or not…. “This study confirms it in a nice way” [ScienceNOW].

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Image: Martin Krondorfe

What’s to be done with the waste oil left behind in fast food restaurants after all the French fries, onion rings, and chicken nuggets have been sizzled to perfection? While many enterprising tinkerers use the stuff to run modified cars, one group of scientists is hoping to use fast food waste oil in an entirely new way: They want to turn it into a “smart roof coating system” that would help keep houses warm in winter and cool in summer.

Presenting the idea at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, project leader Ben Wen from United Environment and Energy says the waste oil can be turned into a high-tech polymer that reacts to the environment.

Wen notes that most houses traditionally have light or dark roofs, depending on their geographic location. People who live in warm locations typically have white roofs (think of those Grecian islands) to reflect the sun’s heat and help keep the homes cool. Colder places typically have houses with darker roofs to absorb heat in the winter and warm the home. But what about those people who live in regions that have both punishingly hot summers and frigid winters? For them, Wen set out to make a roof coating that changes function with the seasons.

To make the roof coating, fast food waste oil is processed into a liquid polymer that hardens into a plastic after application. At a certain temperature, the roof coating undergoes a “phase change,” and switches from heat-absorbing to heat-reflecting. (Wen wouldn’t go into more detail about the science behind this cool trick, to the frustration of one science reporter.) The non-flammable, non-toxic material is also odorless–in contrast to some waste oil biodiesel blends that can have a distinct odor of fried foods.

CNET reports:

When tested the new roof coating showed a decrease between 50 and 80 percent in warm weather when compared to regular asphalt shingles, and an increase in roof temperature by 80 percent in cold weather.

PhysOrg adds:

The coating can be applied to virtually any type of roof. Wen expects that the coating can last many years and can be reapplied when it wears off. If further testing continues to go well, he estimates that the coating could be ready for commercial use in about three years.

Calling it the “most innovative and practical roofing coating materials developed to date,” Ben Wen added that the new technology would also “provide a new use for millions of gallons of waste oil after it is used to cook French fries and chicken nuggets.”

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Image: Ben Wen

We’re getting closer to the premier of Doctor Who… and here’s the trailer the BBC released. Spoilers, of course:

Hmm, hard to say what’s what here, but it looks like the gravitas and buffoonery are both still there, which are the two aspects I really like about the character. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks: the premier is Easter in the UK and a week later (April 17) here in the States!

And… "No, they’re scared of me." Awesome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something a little different for today.  I quite enjoyed the video.

About:

A lonely man’s search for the existence of life outside our universe takes a remarkable turn when he connects with a recently bereaved family.

Starring: Matt Berry, Flora Montgomery, Tim Plester

Director: Mark Buchanan
Producers: Colin Bell, Mark Buchanan
Writer: Gregor Barclay
Director of Photography: Jean-Louis Schuller
Editor: Nathan Haines
Production Designer: Elizabeth Schuch
Music: Gregor Barclay, Gavin Thomson
Colourist: James Willett

Used by permission and thank you Mark for a great video.

Source.

Offshore oil and gas drilling is coming to much of the east coast. Today President Obama announced plans for energy exploration through 2017 that would open up drilling in coastal areas off the southeastern United States, and potentially some areas near Alaska.

Under the proposal, 167 million new acres in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to Florida, as well as new swaths in the Gulf of Mexico, would be opened to energy development. Parts of the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea, both of which are north of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean, could see drilling after 2013 if viability studies give them the go-ahead. But not all areas that energy companies would like to explore are available in the plan.

No areas off the west coast would be made available. Obama also said proposed leases in Alaska’s Bristol Bay would be canceled. He would also limit any oil and gas drilling off the coast of Florida to no closer than 125 miles from the shore [USA Today]. Bristol Bay has been off-limits since the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989, when the tanker spilled at least 10 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. President George W. Bush’s energy plan, which Obama overturned upon taking office, would have opened the bay to drilling.

In his announcement, Obama stressed that the United States should allow oil and gas drilling in new areas to reduce foreign dependence and add to the country’s energy portfolio. But just how much energy is down there is unclear. There could be as much as a three-year supply of recoverable oil and more than two years’ worth of natural gas, at current rates of consumption. But those estimates are based on seismic data that is, in some cases, more than 30 years old [The New York Times]. The first results could come from the waters off Virginia, as the first new lease could be sold there next year.

More than the country needs that oil, it might be that Obama needs the political support from drilling advocates. With health care finished, the President’s next major task is to drum up support for a bill to address climate change. The administration is pushing expanded offshore exploration as a bargaining chip in its attempts to enact sweeping legislation to curb oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions [Los Angeles Times]. As another part of the energy push, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week (viewable free on the DOE Web site) praising nuclear power, and specifically the potential for small nuclear reactors.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

A few antivax links for your amusement:

1) When challenged about their bizarre and provably false beliefs, a lot of antivaxxers claim that they have personal experience with their kid. That’s anecdotal and uses a small sample size, and so is prone to all sorts of logical failings. But what if the sample size is much larger and uses scientific reasoning? Then you get something like this good spanking of antivax nonsense by an actual pediatrician.

Tip o’ the syringe to David Whalley.

2) The Australian Vaccination Network is one of the most pernicious and awful of the antivax groups, as regular readers know. They may be on their way out — science, apparently, can inoculate us against such infections — but it’s still worth keeping up with the sort of offal they spew, since other groups do it as well. This article by The Australian Skeptics is an excellent exposé of AVN mendacity.

3) Healthday has an alarming article about the San Diego 2008 measles outbreak which exposed over 800 people because one family decided not to vaccinate their kid. Yes, one family started an minor epidemic that cost over $170,000 to contain and nearly killed one infant. I hope antivaxxers are proud of that one.

4) Orac once again leaps into the fray with a magnificent exposure of some bold antivax lies. It’s amazing to me just how low some antivaxxers are wiling to go — cheating, twisting, distorting, and out-and-out lying — to promote their agenda of bringing back preventable diseases.

They say they care about kids. Maybe they do. But making sure children get measles, rubella, pertussis, and other life-and-limb-threatening diseases is sure a funny way of showing it.

Imagine filming a movie hundreds of thousands of times with an infinitely patient crew. Every time you shoot it, you remove just one thing, be it an actor, a line of dialogue or a crew member. By comparing the resulting films, you’d soon work out which elements were vital to the movie’s success, and which could be lost without consequence. Beate Neumann, Thomas Walter and a group of scientists known as the Mitocheck Consortium have taken just such an approach to better understand one of the most fundamental processes of life.

Some directors employ inanimate objects like Keanu Reeves, but Neumann and Walter wanted to work with far more dramatic stars – DNA, proteins and the like. Their task was to work out which genes were vital for the process of mitosis, the immensely complicated operation where one cell divides into two. To do that, they systematically went through each of the 21,000 or so genes in the human genome and inactivated them, one by one, in different cells. They then filmed these subtly different actors as they divided in two.

This incredible library of around 190,000 films, all shot in time-lapse photography, is publicly available at the Mitocheck website. It’s a treasure trove of data, whose doors have been left for the entire scientific community to walk through, and no doubt they will. Name a gene, any gene, and with a couple of mouse clicks, you can find a movie that shows you what happens when it’s knocked out. You can work out if your favourite gene is essential to cell division, and you can even find other genes that have similar effects.

The study’s leader Jan Ellenberg says, “The response of human cells to silencing each gene is already pre-recorded and scientists can simply log in to our database to check the result, rather than spending weeks or months of time in the laboratory to obtain the data.”

The movies are certainly useful, but they are beautiful in their own right. For a daily and microscopic process, mitosis is an astonishingly beautiful dance. It begins with cells creating the right number of partners, by duplicating all of their chromosomes. At first, the dancers haphazardly mingle with each other but as things get underway, they separate and line up in a neat row. Then, dramatically, they shimmy across to opposite ends of the room, following long spindles of protein. Once the partners split up, the cell pinches down its middle and separates them forevermore. Without this courtly dance, you would never have been anything more than a fertilised egg. Life simply wouldn’t work.

Clearly, mitosis already has all the makings of a good drama. Neumann and Walter just needed to develop the right filming techniques. To prep their actors, they used short RNA molecules designed to silence individual genes. To sort out the cinematography, they set their microscopes to automatically record time-lapse movies as soon as the nullifying RNA molecules were introduced into cells. Finally, to get the lighting right, the duo labelled all the chromosomes in their cells using proteins that glow in the dark.

The video below shows mitosis working normally, when no genes have been silenced. Each cell is green and its chromosomes are decked out in red. It’s all very festive. Two days are condensed into 36 seconds, and two cells become eight. Once things happen, they happen very quickly, so the series of screengrabs below the video shows what happens to the bottom cell.

This next video shows the chaos that ensues when a single gene called OGG1 is turned off. No longer is mitosis the orderly tango of before; this is more like a rave. Cells fail to separate properly, leaving multiple bundles of chromosomes jangling about in the same space. Just look at what happens at 00:16.

For each inactivated gene, Neumann and Walter shot footage of around 67 cells over the course of two days, capturing an astonishing total of 19 million cell divisions. Analysing so much data would be unfeasible for a human scientist, even a graduate student, so that work fell to computers. The group created a program that analysed all their footage. Whenever mitosis wasn’t quite happening in the usual way, the program flagged the video, and even grouped together genes that had similar effects.

In the end, Neumann and Walter identified 572 genes that play a role in mitosis and less than half of these had been linked to the process before. The rest were new, and they reveal just how much we still don’t know about this most fundamental of processes.

To check that their new candidates are actually involved in mitosis, the team shoved the mouse version of each gene into the deficient cells. The mouse versions are different enough from ours that the silencing RNA molecules ignored them, but similar enough that they managed to restore some decorum to the disordered mitotic dances. These sorts of experiments are crucial because RNA-silencing experiments can sometimes go astray if the molecules deactivate genes other than their designated targets.

So the researchers have a list of 600 or so mitosis genes. The movies provide a rough idea about what these players do and which stages of mitosis they influence. Now, the real work begins in trying to pick apart their individual roles.

If there is one caveat to this study, it’s that it was done in HeLa cells, an immortal line of human cancer cells that’s commonly used in laboratory work. Being cancerous, HeLa cells already have a few faulty genes. Their style of cell division might not quite represent the “normal” situation and it’s important that the team confirms their results in other cell lines.

But already, the sheer scale of the data that have been collected is a tremendous boon to scientific research. There implications for cancer alone are huge. Cancer cells divide all too often and many cancer drugs are designed to stop them from doing so. Scientists could use the Mitocheck data to find new targets for tomorrow’s drugs or to better understand how existing drugs work. They could also work out the genetic differences that cause cancer cells to divide differently from normal cells. “Now that we have narrowed down the gene set relevant for cell division to about 600, we can systematically investigate those differences in a number of different cell types, which would not be possible across the entire genome,” says Ellenberg.

Even cell division is just the tip of the iceberg. The movie library also contains shots of cells growing, moving and dying and they can be used to understand the genes that underlie these processes too. The Mitocheck team are even working on next-generation technologies that will allow them to watch proteins interacting in living cells, revealing the dances of not just mitotic chromosomes but of all a cell’s molecular characters.

For years to come, scientists will be watching, poring over, and adding to the movies that have been unveiled today. There has surely never been a more informative or intimate video collection of our lives.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08869

Images and videos: Thomas Walter & Jutta Bulkescher / EMBL

More on molecular biology:

• Stem cells produce new tissues by recruiting executioners to damage their DNA
• ‘Brainbow’ paints individual neurons with different colours
• Molecule’s constant efforts keep our memories intact
• Dinosaur proteins, cells and blood vessels recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus
• Vaccinia virus tricks its way into hosts by mimicking dead cells

Is the Vietnamese government following China’s example, and muffling online dissent to pursue its own political ends? Internet giant Google seems to think so. Writing on the company’s online security blog, Neel Mehta of Google’s security team has revealed that tens of thousands of Vietnamese computers were subject to a potent virus attack this week–and that the attack targeted activists who are opposed to a Chinese mining project in Vietnam.

Google writes that the activists mistakenly downloaded malicious software that infected their computers. The infected machines could be used to spy on the users, and were also used to attack Web sites and blogs that voiced opposition to the mining project. This cyber attack, Google says, was an attempt to “squelch” opposition to bauxite mining in Vietnam, a highly controversial issue in the country. The computer security firm, McAfee Inc, which detected the malware, went a step further, saying its creators “may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment [Moneycontrol].

Google’s current spat with China began with a similar accusation, when the company accused Beijing of hacking into and spying on Chinese activists’ gmail accounts. Just this week, journalists in China said their email accounts were compromised because of yet another spyware attack.

In Vietnam, activists were angered by state plans to allow Chinese mining company, Chinalco, to start mining in the country’s central highlands. Bauxite is used in making aluminum and is an important natural resource for Vietnam, but critics have argued that the new project will have serious environmental consequences and will also displace ethnic minorities. Online discussion of the project soon erupted. Although the discussion was mostly centered on social and environmental concerns, it veered into sensitive territory when bloggers started tapping into the country’s latent Sinophobia [Financial Times]. Some bloggers worried about the influx of Chinese workers, while others were distressed that a Chinese state-owned company would run the project. Vietnam was a tributary state of China for 1,000 years and was invaded by China in 1979, and the two countries continue to joust for sovereignty in the South China Sea [The New York Times].

Several prominent Vietnamese Internet activists have already been thrown into jail for voicing their dissent. McAfee added that the current cyber attack underscores that not every attack is motivated by data theft or money, saying: “This is likely the latest example of hacktivism and politically motivated cyberattacks, which are on the rise” [The New York Times].

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80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave

Image: iStockphoto

At age 90, James Lovelock is a bit misguided. He's a quirky character and has had some good ideas in the past, but I hope he retires from the limelight soon and stops giving Drudge fodder for links by saying ridiculous things like trying to save the planet is 'a lot of nonsense.' But then again, this doomsday stuff always gets loads of press. The truth is that the world's not ending, it's changing. And we can still save the planet James--we just have to stop being so damn cheap and lazy about it.

On Facebook, the Farmville updates are impossible to avoid–someone is looking for a cow, someone else is watering their crops. People who have never played the game may not understand how addictive it is, but here’s some proof. The game can not only suck away large portions of your day, it can also, as one councilmember in Bulgaria’s second largest city found out, get you demoted.

While many distracted politicians twiddle their thumbs during meetings or frantically jab at their Blackberries, city councilors in Plovdiv were apparently playing Farmville during budgetary debates.

The Escapist writes:

Council Chair Ilko Iliev “strongly scolded the eager internet farmers,” who nonetheless continued to spend time on their farms while attending council meetings.

Finally, during a meeting last Thursday, in order to send a message to the rest of the Farmville-playing community, one councilmember was given the boot. Councilor Dimitar Kerin was voted off the budget committee, said fellow councilor Todot Hristov, because “he needed more time for his virtual farm.”

The Escapist added:

But he’s not leaving without a fight. “The troubled councilor has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants,” according to a report by Novinte.com. “He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.”

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Image: Farmville

The wave of high-profile seismic activity so far in 2010 has been another reminder that we humans could use all the help we can get in predicting earthquakes. This week in the Journal of Zoology, biologist Rachel Grant suggests a new way: Watch the toads.

Taking cues from the animal kingdom is not itself a new idea (not by a long shot): Reports of animal earthquake prediction are legion and they date back to at least 373 BCE, when historians record that animals including rats, snakes and weasels flocked out of Helice just days before a quake devastated the Greek city. More recently there have been reports of catfish moving violently, bees leaving their hive in a panic, and fish, rodents, wolves and snakes exhibiting strange behaviour before earthquakes [Nature]. While these anecdotes grab the imagination, the scatter-shot nature of earthquakes previously prevented anyone from documenting such animal behavior before, during, and after a quake.

But Grant did, and by sheer luck. Her team was studying common toads in Italy in April 2009 when the amphibians began to disappear from the study site. This didn’t make much sense to her, the toads abandoning a breeding site in the midst of breeding season. So the researchers tracked them. They found that 96 percent of males — who vastly outnumber females at breeding spots — abandoned the site, 46 miles (74 kilometers) from the quake’s epicenter, five days before it struck on April 6, 2009. The number of toads at the site fell to zero three days before the quake [Washington Post]. Grant says her initial reaction to the mass toad dispersal was annoyance—their flight was holding up her research. However, when they began to return the day after the earthquake, things began to make more sense.

Even in this study, where scientists happened to be in the right place at the right time to catalog this long-rumored animal activity, one can’t know for sure that seismic activity is the direct cause of the toads packing up and taking off. In an evolutionary sense, though, it seems logical: If the toads can pick up environmental clues that a quake is imminent they could flee to higher ground, someplace safer from rock falls and other hazards. Says Grant, “Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system” [BBC News].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Gang65

Today President Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar will announce plans to end the moratorium on oil exploration. An expanse for lease would become available from Delaware to central Florida and also include parts of the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. From the NYTimes:
But while Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. The Senate is expected to take up a climate bill in the next few weeks — the last chance to enact such legislation before midterm election concerns take over. Mr. Obama and his allies in the Senate have already made significant concessions on coal and nuclear power to try to win votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. The new plan now grants one of the biggest items on the oil industry’s wish list — access to vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling.
My ...

I’ve already posted some beautiful closeups of Phobos, a moon of Mars, taken by the Mars Express space probe, after the European Space Agency aimed the spacecraft at the tiny moon. The closeups are beautiful, but now the ESA has posted a stunning full-body shot of Phobos:

[As usual, click the pix to embiggen.]

The resolution is an amazing 9 meters (30 feet!) per pixel. Clearly, Phobos has been through a lot. Mars orbits near the inner edge of the asteroid belt, which may explain how battered its surface is. The grooves were once thought to be ripples from a big impact that created the whopping crater Stickney (not seen in this view, but you can see it really well here), but are now thought to be from boulders rolling around in the low gravity of the moon, perhaps ejected rocks from various impacts landing back down in the feeble gravity.

Note the one winding path going from the upper left to lower right: that looks very much like a boulder bounced its way across the surface! The curvy path is an indication of the changing gravity field of Phobos: it’s not a smooth sphere, but a lumpy potato, so the surface gravity — what you’d think of as "down" if you were standing there — changes greatly depending on position.

They also put together this stunning 3D anaglyph. You can really see the depth of the craters and grooves on the surface. Run, don’t walk, to get a pair of red/green glasses for this one! Phobos really pops out of the screen. The depth and clarity of the 3D is amazing!

This pass of the moon was designed to obtain as much scientific data as possible before the launch of the Russian mission called Phobos-Grunt, which will land on the moon and send a sample of its surface back to Earth for study. Phobos looks an awful lot like an asteroid itself, and its origin is still something of a mystery. More data like these — and obtaining a sample of its surface material! — may clear up its story once and for all.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Ever prodded at an injury despite the fact you know it will hurt? Ever cook an incredibly spicy dish even though you know your digestive tract will suffer for it? If the answers are yes, you’re not alone. Pain is ostensibly a negative thing but we’re often drawn to it. Why?

According to Marta Andreatta from the University of Wurzburg, it’s a question of timing. After we experience pain, the lack of it is a relief. Andreatta thinks that if something happens during this pleasurable window immediately after a burst of pain, we come to associate it with the positive experience of pain relief rather than the negative feeling of the pain itself. The catch is that we don’t realise this has happened. We believe that the event, which occurred so closely to a flash of pain, must be a negative one. But our reflexes betray us.

Andreatta’s work builds on previous research with flies and mice. If flies smell a distinctive aroma just before feeling an electric shock, they’ll learn to avoid that smell. However, if the smell is released immediately after the shock, they’re actually drawn to it. Rather than danger, the smell was linked with safety. The same trick works in mice. But what about humans?

To find out, Andreatta recruited 101 volunteers and split them into three groups, all of whom saw coloured shapes. The first group received a moderately painful electric shock six seconds before the shapes flashed up. The second group were shocked eight seconds after the shapes appeared and the third group were shocked fourteen seconds afterwards. This last time gap should have been long enough to stop the recruits from forming a link between shock and shape.

Later, everyone saw the shapes without any accompanying shocks. When asked to rate their feelings, most people felt negatively towards the shapes, particularly those who had been shocked just afterwards. That seems fairly predictable, but Andreatta wanted to find out what they really thought.

To do that, she flashed the shapes up again, paired them with a loud burst of noise, and measured how strongly they blinked in response. This is called the startle reflex; it’s an automatic response to fear or danger, and it’s very hard to fake. The strength of the blink reflects how fearful the recruits were feeling.

Sure enough, those who saw the shapes before they were electrocuted showed a stronger startle reflex than usual. To them, the images meant that something bad was about to happen so when the noise went off, they reacted particularly strongly. But the recruits who were shocked before the shapes appeared actually showed a weaker startle reflex. It seems that despite their ratings, the lesson they had taken away was that the presence of the shapes was a positive omen.

Other studies have found that rewarding experiences can soothe the startle reflex – in flies, a sugary liquid works and in humans, news of a monetary windfall will do the trick. Andreatta thinks that some of her volunteers behaved in the same way because they had come to associate the coloured shapes with the rewarding feeling of pain relief.

For the moment, despite my introductory paragraph, it’s not immediately obvious how this relates to our daily lives. Andreatta suggests that the pleasant after-effects of otherwise scary or painful affairs might explain why we’re so drawn to dangerous or terrifying pursuits like rollercoaster rides or bungee jumping. More importantly, it could affect the way we think about mental disorders like addiction or anxiety.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0103

More on pain:

• The placebo effect affects pain signalling in the spine
• Doctors repress their responses to their patients’ pain
• Rowing as a group increases pain thresholds
• Itch-specific neurons discovered in mice
• Thinking about money soothes sting of social rejection and physical pain