For example, did you know that male Dayak fruit bats can lactate to feed their young (True according to this article in Nature)? 

Image from “Crime Against Nature”, written and illustrated by Gwenn Seemel.

However, the notion that female spotted hyenas have a “penis” is not entirely accurate. It turns out that high-ranking alpha female hyenas are very aggressive and provide their developing offspring with higher levels of androgen (male sex hormone) than lower-ranking females in late pregnancy. This androgen boost increases the offspring’s chance of survival as it makes them more aggressive at fighting for food and at mating earlier and more often than those receiving less androgen.  The problem is that the high androgen levels damage the mother’s ovaries and cause her clitoris to enlarge (up to 7 inches), thereby resembling a penis. Since the opening of the vaginal canal is at the end of the clitoris, it makes birthing a 2-pound cub through a 2-inch canal dangerous and often fatal for first time mothers. (Source: Michigan State University press release).  

To judge the book for yourself, click here.

Image of atopic dermatitis from www.itchfreepet.com

Dr. Kerstin Lindblad-Toh at Uppsala University (Sweden) who specializes in comparative genomics and Dr. Åke Hedhammar, SLU (Sweden) recently identified a novel gene in German shepherd dogs, PKP-2, that encodes a protein (plakophilin-2) important for regulating proper skin structure and function. This protein was found to be associated with canine atopic dermatitis (i.e. doggy eczema), a condition that affects 3-10% of man’s best friends. Researchers hope that the discovery of this gene relationship may lead to better understanding of, and novel treatments for, eczema in both dogs and the 10-30% of humans who share this condition.

Source:

Uppsala University press release

And, as always from The Onion, so true…

Today’s symposia included a session on “Integrative Cardiovascular and Respiratory Physiology of Non-model Organisms” as well as the August Krogh Distinguished Lecture.

This year’s Krogh lecture was given by Dr. Stan Lindstedt from Northern Arizona University. Dr. Lindstedt is arguably best known for publishing work showing that the metabolic rate of an animal is negatively correlated with body mass. In other words, smaller animals have a higher metabolic rate than larger animals. Knowing that relationship could have saved Tusko the elephant from a whopping dose of LSD (1962, prior to the requirement for all studies involving animals to be approved by an institutional animal care and use committee). Dr. Lindstedt related the history of how past researchers at The University of Oklahoma and LJ West from the CIA had known what dose of LSD would cause rage in a cat and just increased the dose to match the body mass of the elephant without taking into consideration that the elephant’s metabolism is much slower than a cat’s. Regardless of the questionable ethics of giving an elephant LSD, the dose was apparently over 5 times the amount that would have been equivalent to what was administered to the cat. As you can see from the headline below, the outcome was not good:

Had the researchers working with Tusko known what Dr. Lindstedt later discovered about scaling, Tusko may have lived through this ridiculous historical experiment. Dr. Lindstedt also presented data that body size is also negatively related to shivering frequency and the frequency of taking strides. Therefore, a mouse has a faster stride than a cow. Could you imagine seeing a cow scurry?

Dr. Lindstedt is also known for studying the mitochondria of species with muscles that are capable of produce really fast contractions: hummingbirds  and rattlesnakes. The mitochondria is a structure within cells that makes energy. In hummingbirds, the mitochondria are specially structured to allow them to make even more energy than a mammal to help support their super-fast wingbeats. For the rattlesnake’s rattle, their muscles release calcium (needed to produce muscle contraction) more efficiently since they have large stores of calcium within the muscle.

More recently, his work has focused on developing the Eccentron. This is a specialized exercise machine that uses eccentric muscle contractions (lengthening) to build strength. You are probably most familiar with this type of exercise from walking downhill. Eccentric muscle contraction can produce high force with very little energy, so his research showed that it was great for elderly people at risk for falling. After gradually training with an Eccentron machine, their fall risk was dramatically reduced.

Image of Eccentron from: www.morphopedics.wikidot.com

 Congratulations Dr. Stan Lindstedt on being this year’s August Krogh lecturer!

Other highlights included: 

 J. Eme, T. Rhen, K. B. Tate, K. Gruchalla, Z. F. Kohl, C. E. Slay, D. A. Crossley II. Univ. of North Texas, Univ. of North Dakota and Univ. of California, Irvine. Dr. Eme, from Univ North Texas, presented work on turtle embryos that were shown to develop larger hearts, increased heart rate, decreased blood pressure and weigh less when developing in an oxygen-poor environment (hypoxic; 10% oxygen) as compared to turtle embryos growing up in a normal oxygen-rich environment (21% oxygen). With the ever-changing natural environment, this is a concern as the developing embryos can be exposed to hypoxic conditions in the wild. Dr. Crossley expanded on this research and talked about the effects of hypoxia exposure on developing alligators. In contrast to the turtle, developing alligators exposed to hypoxia have decreased heart mass, blood pressure, and heart rate compared to those developing in normal oxygen environments. What this means is that the effects of hypoxia on developing embryos is species-specific. Their most recent work on this topic was just published (PMID: 23552497). These findings are of interest especially in areas that raise these animals for food (fried gator or turtle soup, anyone?).

J. U. Meir, W. Jardine, J. York, B. Chua, W. K. Milsom. Harvard Med. Sch. and Univ. of British Columbia. Dr. Meir presented her work on bar-headed geese. She had actually raised the geese from hatching so they would imprint on her. She showed some really neat photos riding a scooter alongside the birds as they learned to fly next to her. The whole point of these exercises was to train the birds to eventually fly in a wind tunnel and to get them used to wearing a mask that could be used to manipulate the oxygen concentrations the geese were breathing. The bar-headed geese are spectacular flyers and are probably best known for flying over Mount Everest. Extreme hypoxic conditions, to say the least! Her research is really novel in that she was able to measure the amount of oxygen in the bird’s blood and their temperature during flight! Her preliminary analyses of the data suggest that the tissues of the birds are able to adequately extract the much-needed oxygen from the blood very well even while breathing in oxygen concentrations that mimic ~5500 m (10.5% oxygen) or 9000 m above sea level (7% oxygen).

You can watch the development of her research here:

What a great day for comparative physiology!

The Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section held their Scholander Poster competition for young comparative physiologists today! It was exciting to see all of the students present their work.

Here are some of the highlights:

Raffaele Pilla, Dominic P, D’Agostino, Carol S. Landon, and Jay B. Dean from Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. These researchers demonstrated that a ketone body, often thought of as waste products resulting from the use of fats for energy, can have protective effects against seizures caused by exposure to hyperbaric oxgyen.

Jose A Viscarra, Daniel E Crocker, and Rudy M Ortiz from the University of California, Merced (JAV and RMO) and Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA (DEC) were studying the effects of long-term fasting in Northern elephant seal pups that normally fast for 2-3 months after they wean. What they found was that the animals actually became resistant to the blood sugar lowering effects of insulin during this long term fast. In other words, they became more like a person with type 2 diabetes. 

PonTi Tsou, Geetha Koneru, Luiz Finatti, Kara Bobka, James Frisbie, David L. Goldstein. Wright State University, Dayton, OH discovered that freeze tolerant Gray tree frogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) actually increase the ability for glycerol (a cryoprotectant) to be secreted by the liver cells in order to protect the animal’s tissues during freezing.

That question has not yet been definitively answered, but recent research on flying bats shows us what three-dimensional navigation looks like in the brain.

It turns out that fruit bats also mostly navigate in two dimensions, since quite a bit of their flying time involves getting from their caves straight to their favorite fruit trees. But once they get to a tree, they switch to three-dimensional flitting patterns that cover the entire volumetric space around the tree.

To gain some insight into the workings of the bats’ internal mapping system, neurobiologist Dr. Nahum Ulanovsky attempted a feat no one had tried before: seeing into a bats’ brain while it was on the wing. His team spent several years developing a tiny device with electrodes that could measure neuronal activity in the bats’ brains while allowing them to fly naturally. They then let their subjects swoop and dive around some “fruit trees” – poles dangling cups filled with fruit – up inside their oh-so-cool, fully-equipped bat lab.

Image: Dr Yossi Yovel in the lab of Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky, Weizmann Institute of Science

It seems that bat neurons, at least, relate to all three dimensions equally. Their internal maps – as well as ours – are plotted in groups of neurons called place cells. These cells respond to specific locations in the spatial environment. As the bat moves though space, the corresponding place cells send off “you are here” signals. By comparing the bats’ actual locations with the neurons’ signals, the researchers found that each place cell responds to a spherical space – i.e., it has the same resolution in all directions.

Do human place cells map a similar space, or are ours flatter? On the one hand, says Ulanovsky, our nearest relatives probably have place cells very much like those of bats, since they navigate in three-dimensional space through the tree canopy. On the other hand, since we basically walk around in two dimensions, our up-and-down axis may have lost some of its resolution over time, making our internal mapping closer to that of animals that crawl rather than those that fly. This, says Ulanovsky, is a fascinating open question that awaits further experiments.

The split, I think, comes from the fact that Wilson’s comments are coupled to a larger point that is basically unobjectionable: that math alone is not sufficient for science. Scientists working in a particular field need to have detailed knowledge of that field in order to even known what math to do:

In the late 1970s, I sat down with the mathematical theorist George Oster to work out the principles of caste and the division of labor in the social insects. I supplied the details of what had been discovered in nature and the lab, and he used theorems and hypotheses from his tool kit to capture these phenomena. Without such information, Mr. Oster might have developed a general theory, but he would not have had any way to deduce which of the possible permutations actually exist on earth.

Over the years, I have co-written many papers with mathematicians and statisticians, so I can offer the following principle with confidence. Call it Wilson’s Principle No. 1: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.

This imbalance is especially the case in biology, where factors in a real-life phenomenon are often misunderstood or never noticed in the first place. The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail. Possibly no more than 10% have any lasting value. Only those linked solidly to knowledge of real living systems have much chance of being used.

That’s absolutely fine, and the same can be said of a lot of physics. The mark of a useful physical theory is that it accurately describes reality, and that requires math to be constrained by empirical observations. To the extent that the much-ballyhooed “crisis” in physics exists, this is the root of the problem: high-energy theorists have not had the data they need to constrain their models, and that has impeded real progress.

What I, and many other physical scientists, object to is the notion that math and science are cleanly separable. That, as Wilson suggests, the mathematical matters can be passed off to independent contractors, while the scientists do the really important thinking. That may be true in his home field (though I’ve also seen a fair number of biologists rolling eyes at this), but for most of science, the separation is not so clean.

As much as I agree with Wilson’s statement about the need for detailed knowledge to constrain math, even in physics, there is also some truth to the reverse version of the statement, which I have often heard from physicists: If you don’t have a mathematical description of something, you don’t really understand it. Observations are all well and good, but without a coherent picture to hold them all together, you don’t really have anything nailed down. Big data alone will not save you, in the absence of a quantitative model.

Of course, that’s physics, which Wilson exempted from his comments at the beginning of the piece, so maybe we’re just oddballs on the boundary where math shades into science. But the close marriage of math and science pops up even in the life sciences. There’s no small irony in the fact that one of the other big stories of the week in science is a study showing that many neuroscience studies are woefully underpowered, in a statistical sense. This is a hugely important paper, because it calls into question a lot of recent results, and common practices in the field.

It also shows up the problem with Wilson’s contract-out-the-math-later approach. Because, after all, the problematic studies are doing essentially what he talks about– they’re out in the field, making observations of phenomena, and thinking about mechanisms to explain them. The problem is, many of these observations turn out to be of questionable value, because they didn’t do the math right. They didn’t have enough test subjects to reliably test the things they were trying to test. And this has very real negative consequences for the field, as people waste time and resources trying to duplicate results that turn out to be a statistical fluke. To say nothing of the career risks for an early-career scientist who plans to build on one of these results, who not only can’t replicate it, but can’t publish the failure to replicate.

As a general matter, science and math are just not cleanly separable in the way that Wilson asserts. If there’s an exception here, it’s his field, not the handful he airily waves off as inherently mathematical. You need observations to constrain mathematical models, yes, but you also need math to know what observations you need to do, and to determine the reliability of your results. The notion that the two can be cleanly separated, and the scary math bits farmed out to somebody else is not just faintly insulting to mathematicians, it’s flat out wrong. And that’s why people are annoyed.

3D image of a brain made transparent using the CLARITY technique. Image from: Deisseroth Lab as posted in The NY Times

I have to admit I love the science section of The New York Times. The topic today: Dr. Karl Deisseroth and colleagues at Stanford University have developed a technique called CLARITY that uses hydrogel to make the brain look like it is made of Jell-O. They have successfully applied this technique to a whole mouse brain as well as part of a human brain. Using CLARITY, they are able to observe neuronal networks three dimensionally while still maintaining the biochemistry of the brain. This allows researchers to observe recent activity by staining specific pathways and structures with dyes attached to antibodies that recognize specific proteins. The hope is to use CLARITY to understand mental health disorders. Considering this technique also reportedly works well with other tissues (livers, heart, etc), it may revolutionize tissue imaging.

Sources:

The New York Times

Chung K, Wallace J, Kim S-Y, Kalyanasundaram S, Andalman AS, Davidson TJ, Mirzabekov JJ, Zalocusky KA, Mattis J, Denisin AK, Pak S, Bernstein H, Ramakrishan C, Grosenick L, Gradinaru V,  Diesseroth K. Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems. Nature. 2013. DOI: doi:10.1038/nature12107

I didn’t score a copy of it at Science Online, but I did pick up the ebook shortly thereafter, and have been working through it during baby bedtimes for the last month or so, a process prolonged significantly by having to go and re-read a bunch of the Holmes canon for the first time in thirty-odd years (thank you, Project Gutenberg…). Which I was probably going to need to do anyway for the prospective book chapter, so it’s all good. The basic idea of the book is to look at the mental tools and techniques Holmes uses in the stories, and ask how they might be applied in the real world. These discussions are further illustrated with references to cognitive science discoveries that mostly post-date the Holmes canon, and shed some light on what sort of cool things our brains are capable of, as well as what their limits are.

On the whole, this is an engagingly written book covering a lot of interesting territory. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well for me as I might’ve liked, which is why I’m reviewing it on a Saturday, when nobody will read this anyway…

There are two main problems that made this book miss the mark for me. One of them has to do with science writing, the other with Sherlock Holmes, though really, they’re mostly about me and my reactions. Which may not make this review useful to anyone else– another reason to bury it on a weekend– but hey, it’s my blog.

The science writing problem is, basically, that the Holmes stuff squeezes the science more than I would like. This kind of thing is basically inevitable in a short book with a pop-culture hook– the space taken up by describing the pop-culture aspects reduces the space available for describing the science in detail. As a result, the presentation of the brain science material is kind of abbreviated, and lacks some of the detail you find in books with a more straight-up “Let me tell you about some science” presentation, like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, or The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (full disclosure: Chabris is a colleague of mine at Union, so I’m somewhat more predisposed to like his book…).

This problem is particularly acute given the subject matter. There are a lot of glib and superficial treatments of cognitive science out there, and a lot of stories about cool-sounding results that turn out not to be replicated in further studies. Things like the whole Jonah Lehrer mess make me extra skeptical about pop-cognitive-science, and the lack of space problem means there isn’t room in this book for the additional caveats and description needed to allay that.

Please note that I am not in any way accusing Konnikova of the sort of misconduct that laid Lehrer low. As far as I can tell, from having read other books on the topic that go into more detail, the science she presents is pretty solid, and used in appropriate ways. But I need to draw on material from outside this book to make that judgement, which lessens the impact of this specific book for me. Someone with a less jaundiced view of the whole field would probably be more receptive to this approach, and really, those people are closer to the target audience than I am.

The bigger problem, though, has to do with the Holmes material itself, and became clear only because I interrupted the book to go read a big chunk of the Holmes canon, and boils down to this book treating the subject more seriously than I think the source material supports. Reading the original stories left me thinking that they’re not terribly consistent or realistic. I didn’t get the impression that Holmes’s success was associated with any kind of realistic treatment of human mental capacities; rather, his brilliant successes are mostly due to the fact that he’s a fictional character, whose author is on his side.

The best explanation of this problem, ironically, probably comes from another work of fiction, Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay, where Commander Sam Vimes offers his thoughts on police work:

[Vimes] had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way.

And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

Konnikova spends a lot of time extolling the virtues of constant observation and carefully tended memory, which is fine as far as it goes– I agree that the world would be a better place if more people thought more carefully about what they do all the time. Pegging that to Holmes, though, strains credibility a bit. It’s all well and good to say that you should make sure to carefully store away facts that will prove useful to you later, but enough of the stories turn on Holmes knowing some improbable bit of utter trivia that it’s not clear how you’re supposed to decide what it is to store away in your “attic.” And, as Vimes notes, it’s all too possible to misinterpret careful observations– the main reason why many of the conclusions she castigates Watson for jumping to are wrong is because Arthur Conan Doyle wanted them to be wrong. Holmes out-does Watson at every turn because the deck is stacked in his favor, not because they’re realistic exemplars of human behavior.

This is, however, largely a matter of personal tastes. While I enjoyed my Holmes binge, they’re not really the kind of mystery story I prefer– my own tastes run more to the hard-boiled side of the genre– and so I’m less inclined to cut them slack. And that, in turn, makes me less receptive to the central conceit of this book. Someone who’s more a fan of the subgenre would probably feel differently about the whole business.

So, as I said, not a review that’s likely to be of much general use, unless your tastes run close to mine. But it took a fair bit of thought to nail down exactly why I was dissatisfied with the book, and having put in the effort, I might as well get some use of it.

In an effort to end with something a bit more positive, I will note again that I definitely endorse the message of the book: thinking more like Holmes (or a more realistic version of what Holmes represents) is a goal worth striving for, and this book provides some useful tips on how to work toward that goal. The end result of this process would bring a lot of the benefits of thinking like a scientist that I’ve talked about, and the literary hook is another good approach to a worthy end.

I’ve found in my experience, almost everyone carries one really cranky belief that they can’t seem to shake, no matter how evidence-based their other positions are (probably because we are all capable of carrying some overvalued ideas). But it’s worth peering through PPP’s full results to see the nature of some of these associations.

For one, some of these associations I think are spurious, poorly questioned, or just reflect misinformation, rather than conspiracy. For instance:

44% of voters believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about weapons of mass destruction to promote the Iraq War, while 45% disagree. 72% of Democrats believed the statement while 73% of Republicans did not. 22% of Democrats, 33% of Republicans and 28% of independents believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Many have questioned the inclusion of this question because, in reality, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. So the question of whether we were “misled” or “intentionally-misled” puts us in the murky position at having to guess at the motivations of individuals like Bush and Cheney. Mind-reading is a dubious activity, and I tend to ascribe to the Napoleonic belief that you shouldn’t ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence (also known as Hanlon’s razor). Is it conspiratorial to think maybe they were more malicious than incompetent? While I think that administration really were “true believers”, of course I don’t really know for sure, and I don’t think it’s fair to describe such as conspiratorial reasoning. Instead it’s just the dubious but common practice of guessing at the intentions of others. The generally-similar numbers on the Saddam Hussein/9/11 connection, I believe, just suggests ignorance, rather than necessitating active belief in a conspiratorial framework (keeping in mind the margin of error is about 3% these aren’t huge partisan differences like over WMD).

One of the most disappointing numbers was on belief in a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination:

51% of Americans believe there was a larger conspiracy at work in the JFK assassination, while 25% think Lee Harvey Oswald
acted alone.

That’s 51% conspiratorial belief, 24% probably showing ignorance of one of the most important events of the last century, and 25% actually informed. This is pretty sad. The movements of Oswald were so thoroughly-investigated and known, the hard evidence for his planning and involvement are so clear, the conspirators so unlikely (the mob/CIA/LBJ/KGB hiring crackpot loser communists for assassinations?), and the fabrications of the conspiracists so plain (asserting the shots couldn’t be made despite it being easily replicated by everyone from the Warren Commission to the Discovery Channel and even improved on, the disparaging of his marksmanship when LHO was a marine sharpshooter, altering the positions of the occupants of the car to make the bullet path from JFK to Connelly appear unlikely, etc.) it’s sad that so many have bought into this nonsense. The historically-bogus picture JFK, by Oliver Stone, may also play a large part in this, and is an example why Oliver Stone is really a terrible person. People that misrepresent history are the worst. If anyone wants to read a good book about the actual evidence that of what happened that day, as well as destroys the conspiracy position, Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi is my favorite, as well as the most thorough.

But there is one redeeming feature of conspiracy about the JFK assassination. For the most part, conspiratorial ideas on the subject aren’t due to some dark part in people’s souls, as for many other conspiracies, but rather the very human need to ascribe more to such earth-shattering events as the assassination of a president than just the madness of a pitiable loser. The imbalance between the magnitude of the event, and the banal crank that accomplished it, is simply too much. There’s no way that a 24-year-old, violent, wife-beating, Marxist roustabout could be responsible for the death of a man like JFK right? Sadly no. The evidence shows even a man that pathetic can destroy the life of a much greater man with a cheap rifle and a simple plan.

The conspiracy theories embedded within this poll that really disturb me because I think they demonstrate the effect of irrational hate are ones such as for whether President Obama is the antichrist (although is that even really a conspiracy?). 13% of respondents believed this, 5% of those that voted for him still answered this question in the affirmative (really? you voted for the antichrist) as opposed to 22% of those that voted for Romney. Do we really need to elevate political disagreement to the level of labeling people the antichrist? Around 9% thought government adds fluoride for “sinister” reasons, and 11% believe in the LIHOP 9/11 conspiracy theory. They clearly think very little of their fellow Americans, and believe some really demonic things about our government. Our government is neither competent enough, or evil enough, to engage in then successfully cover up either of these things. Our top spy couldn’t even hide a tawdry affair.

Other conspiracy theories seem to indicate their is a baseline number of people, at about 15%, who will believe in just about anything from the moon landing being hoaxed to bigfoot. I would have actually pegged this number higher, given my pessimism about rational thought, but that seems to be what we can read from this. However, without being able to see whether or not it was the same people answering yes to each individual absurd conspiracy from reptilians to “government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals”, it’s possible this number is actually much larger. I would be curious to see the data on the overlap between these questions, as the phenomenon of crank magnetism is well known.

Ultimately, I read this data as saying that Americans have a big problem with conspiracy theories entering our political discourse. We should be embarrassed that as many as 37% of us believe that global warming is a “hoax”. That requires a belief is a grand conspiracy of scientists, policy-makers, journals, editors, etc., all acting together to somehow fabricate data for a single objective – often described as world-government control conspiracy to cede our sovereignty to the UN. Somehow, every single national scientific body, all those national academies, all those journals, and all those scientists, all those governments, all working in perfect secrecy according to some master plan (which I’m often accused of being a part of but I’m sure I’m missing the memo), and this is plausible how? The answer is, it’s not, unless you remain steadfastly ignorant of how science actually works and progresses.

Everyone, of any political persuasion, should be embarrassed by the conspiracy-theorists in their ranks. This isn’t healthy thinking, it isn’t rational discourse, and it only serves to divide us and make us hate. Enough of this already.