anthropometaphors

When I was hunting for jobs this spring, a search with “animal” in the subject field returned a listing for a position as a Field Biologist.  One of the requirements was familiarity with native California birds.  Thinking I could use my ornithological bent for more than a hobby, I was intrigued…until I read on: the position included monitoring, identifying and tracking all wildlife found injured and killed beneath wind turbines. My heart dropped.

Bats, a flying animal near and dear to me, are at greater risk of death by wind turbine than birds.  Despite the large number of bat carcasses found near turbines, the recovered bat bodies have no external injuries or visible cause of death (in contrast to birds which are killed by direct contact with the blades).  Bats adequately detect and avoid contact with turbines using sonar, but are dying from an unknown secondary impact of flying near windmills.

As an investigation into how wind turbines are killing bats, researchers in Canada collected and autopsied nearly 200 dead bats from wind farms to determine cause of death.  Of the bats investigated, 90% showed signs of internal hemorrhaging.   The results of these necropsies indicate damage to the bats’ delicate lung tissue.  The movement of turbine blades causes a drop in air pressure around the blade tips.   When bats fly through this pressure vortex, their lungs suddenly expand, bursting the tissue’s blood vessels.  Also known as barotrauma, these bats are dying from the bends.

there is such a thing as a cute bat

For some time now, I’ve been admiring word clouds.  They are simple, ingenious ways to graphically depict word distribution for rapid communication.  Given my fondness for word clouds (and graphic visualizations in general) it should come as no surprise when I say: Wordle is better than Christmas.

Wordle creates word clouds from a snippet of text, url, feed aggreggator or del.icio.us user name.  The fun begins after the wordle has been generated; the user can customize their cloud with many available tweaks (i.e. font, color palette, organization, word exclusion).

Here’s the first wordle I created, based on the text of anthropometaphors:

wordle!

And here’s the second one (created after I posted the above bat entry):

same, same, but different

Back in the days of my First Job Out Of School, when money was as scarce as my laboratory experience, my holidays away from work were spent on the cheap. I’d pack up some dehydrated food (in a bear canister), a sleeping bag, a tent and way too many changes of clothes and hike into the wilderness for a week. I traded frequent sightings of cars and people for a chance encounter with a family of grouse, a harem of mule deer, a surly brown bear or a rock-inhabiting pack of marmots. I’d read earthy books, finding it easy to relate to Frodo and Sam as they wandered ceaselessly through their Shire wilderness. Mostly I’d just take in the trees and marvel at the intact, self-sustaining ecosystem.

With the accumulation of laboratory — and later managerial — experience came the accumulation of wee amounts of disposable income. Backpacking in the Sierras gave way to backpacking in Europe and Central America. Still on a shoestring, I could finally afford airline tickets. Happily, I put many stamps into my passport.

Now I’m saving up to put dual-pane windows into the house (hopefully before winter!), so it’s back to cinching the proverbial purse strings. And to be honest, after several years of exploring different versions of wilderness, I missed the Sierras. When a last-minute opportunity to take a week off came up at work, I pulled my field guides off the shelf and prepped for a week spent between Yosemite and Mono Lake. I posted a few snapshots on flickr, if you’d like to check them out.

I wonder, though, which is the true face of Yosemite — the well-known scenic vistas or the construction, RVs and traffic found everywhere else? I’m reminded of the difference between San Francisco’s Pier 39 (the well-known scenic vista) and The Tenderloin (the hard life found everywhere else).

Pier 39

The Tenderloin

Apparently I can absorb more information than I can communicate. Either that or I’m actually busy…

I’ve been collecting slinks to write about, and fear they will pile up before I get a chance to share them. So here’s a roundup of neat discoveries that have hit the press recently:

1. Keeping up with the evolution of cancer (as first mentioned in Tasmanian devils): A team of researchers used a combination of pre-existing phylogenetic trees and newly generated sequencing data to explain cellular evolution in human B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia cells. A short review of the PNAS article can be found here.
2. On the bioengineering front: UK Scientists at the University of Reading have equipped a robot with a biological brain. Formed from cultured neurons, a multi-electrode array and a bluetooth connection, the robot moves through it’s environment controlled soley by receiving sensory information from it’s brain. An exclusive review of the technology is available on ZDNet. Similar work was previously done at the Georgia Institute of Technology, resulting in the creation of a hybrot, an entity defined as:
   

   “an entirely new type of creature constructed from organic and artificial materials. It’s perhaps helpful to think of the hybrot as “semi-living”".

   

   the hybrot

3. As a bat lover, I was saddened to hear vampire bats are a likely vector spreading of an unknown, fatal illness through South America. Coverage of the topic can be found at New Scientist. Vampire bats have previously been shown to spread rabies between animals in humans. I happen to side with the bats, so I wonder how much population growth and the spread of development contribute to the spread of bloodborne illness. But that’s a touchy subject I won’t get into here.
4. Recently I’ve picked up interest in the interface between molecular and neuro- biology. A recent Science publication presents results from a cleverly designed study investigating the relationship between the perception of social behavior (in this case, trust and distrust) and functional-MRI brain scans in people with and without Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)*. The results of the mind game indicate those with BPD may not recognize or correctly interpret behavioral cues that communicate distrust. If this is the case, BPD can be somewhat depathologized as our understanding reframes the diagnosis as a profound alteration in perception and interpretation of (unspoken) social cues. Along these lines, what is the difference between the social behavior of a person with BPD and that of someone born and raised in a dramatically different culture?
5. Lastly, I’ll post a few links about recent bipolar** news. Genetic Future has an excellent post reviewing genetic studies — and our current understanding — of the disorder. An artilce in today’s issue of Nature was quite the hot topic, as shown by an abundance of media posts discussing the implications of the news. Here’s the Nature abstract, a review in the New York Times, and a post on 23andMe’s Spittoon. In short, researchers report a collaborative, genome-wide association study that identified two SNPs as candidates for bipolar disorder. Both SNPs are related to ion channel regulation. Investigators hope to understand the biological cause(s) of bipolar to improve treatment modalities, like more effective, targeted medication.

I’m off to the Sierras, so hopefully this glut of information will tide you over for a week. In the meantime, please feast your eyes on the tufas at Mono Lake until I return and post some original pics of my own.

tufas!

look up!

*The diagnosis of BPD is typified by long-term, profound difficulty maintaining interpersonal relationships and cooperation. People with BPD generally have difficulty with impulse control and keeping friends.

**Bipolar disorder is a diagnosis describing a range of mood imbalances defined by the presence of one or more instances of atypically elevated mood (also known as mania). Several types of bipolar classes are recognized, including those with or without the co-occurence of a major depressive episode.

Over the weekend I took a wee trip to the Oakland Zoo.

I recently read about the two female tigers at the Oakland Zoo, rescued from circus life (where they were housed in 3′ x 6′ enclosures). Upon learning about my proximity to two tigers, I made it a priority to get myself to the zoo and see what I could of these striped ladies.

Much has changed for these tigers since leaving the big top. Their enclosure in Oakland is spacious, with living trees and bamboo to provide shade as well as a waterfall that drops into a sizable lagoon. I also saw several large trees holding various toys and ropes for what I guess is the tiger equivalent of playtime.

I spent the majority of my time at the zoo gazing at the tigers, who were surprisingly active during the day. Of the two, one was noticeably smaller and leaner, with a bit more spunk. The other tiger was clearly larger – everything from her tail to strong legs were thick with power – and projected confidence in a 15-foot radius around her.

Through the chain link fence I managed to snap a few pics, which are currently up on my flickr (1, 2). I’ll be returning to the Oakland Zoo soon enough, and will figure out to how manually control my focus so the tiger, not the chain link fence, is in view.

Today I will write about farts.  My brain is having one, so I’m going to simply link to a (very well written) summary about how our genetics may affect our ability to interact with grumpy old ones.

To quote a post over at Origins Genome Resources:

Indeed, learning how to manage one’s response to the negative emotions of others and stay out of trouble is an important life skill. At some point, most of us learn to just avoid angry, mean or melodramatically negative people and save ourselves the strife.  Roy Perlis and colleagues, in their recent paper, “Association of a Polymorphism Near CREB1 With Differential Aversion Processing in the Insula of Healthy Participants“, show how the transcriptional regulator CREB might exert an influence on this learning process. By having subjects view images of various facial expressions, the investigators found that individuals with the TT genotype at rs4675690 (C/T) showed less negative activation in the left insula, a brain region that is known to activate when subjects feel disgust, but not happiness, desire or fear.  Subjects with the TT genotype have been shown to require more effort in the management of negative emotions and are at greater risk for suicide when being treated for depression.  In the Perlis et al., study, TT subjects showed less of an effort (as measured in key presses) to avoid viewing emotionally distressing pictures. The known role of CREB in neural plasticity suggests that this gene may facilitate neural changes associated with memory. Unfortunately, 23andMe does not cover this SNP, so I’ll just have to hope that (during the upcoming election) my insula keeps me on the path to enlightenment.

While the Perlis et. al. paper contains very interesting information, I feel it’s important to point out the study size was N = 28.  As a genetic association requires a very large population sample size to have confidence in, my puttering brain considers this a preliminary result, interesting though it may be.  Hopefully further studies will follow, so we may avoid as many farts as possible.

The world’s smallest snake was found, and it fits on a quarter.  This guy is adorable:

on a quarter!

And for cuteness overload, here is the world’s smallest lizard – a gecko that fits on a dime:

on a dime!

To learn more, check out this article over at New Scientist.