Tapeworm Tourism

I may have to move Tokyo up on my list of future travel destinations after reading this Inkling magazine travel piece on the Meguro Parasitological Museum. (Gotta love the headline: “Putting the ‘Ew!’ in Museum.”)

The exhibits include a wide assortment of pickled parasites in jars including one standout specimen, a twenty-nine-foot-long tapeworm (8.8 meters). And the gift shop sells parasite-themed jewelry and t-shirts.

All the President’s Slime Mold Beetles

A few months ago, my boss found something brown and fuzzy growing out of the molding in one of the offices at work. When she called me in to look at the mystery growth, I realized it was a slime mold (I knew there was a reason I took those botany classes in college) and headed off to try to find it on Google.

Before I could figure out what kind of slime mold it was, I got distracted by this Cornell University news release. Apparently two entomologists named three new species of slime mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others:

The entomologists also named some of the new species after their wives and a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, the fictional “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader (“who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head”), Frances Fawcett (their scientific illustrator) and the Greek words for “ugly” and “having prominent teeth” and the Latin word for “strange.”

Strangely enough, the scientists said this was a tribute

Petri Dish Paintings

Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob from Tel Aviv University photographs the patterns made by bacteria growing on petri dishes.

Ben-Jacob’s Web site features a gallery of microbial art. He writes:

While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms. The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature.

(Via Pruned)

Wasabi: Tasty Treat or Toxic Spill?

Once again Discovery News comes through with wacky science news.

Wasabi has been banned from the International Space Station after an astronaut spilled some of the horseradish-like, Japanese condiment. In the weightless environment of the station, the pungent,  green paste flew everywhere, creating quite the clean-up challenge for the crew.

Refrigerator Bestiary

I really have no excuse for not mentioning this sooner, but my sister Mars is brilliant!

Every day during January, she made a refrigerator magnet of a different organism as part of Fun-A-Day, an annual event sponsored by Artclash, a Philadelphia artists’ collective. Participants do a different creative project every day for a month and then exhibit the fruits of their labors at the collective’s gallery space.

To the left, you can see a smaller version of some of my favorites including the paramecium, the okapi and the luna moth (complete with googly eye eyespots).

And here are some links to photos of the rest of the project, which Mars is calling The Felt Ark:

• Paramecium, cardinal, okapi, luna moth (large version) {click}
• Man of war fish (behind bouclé tentacles), okapi, magpie {click}
• Wooly mammoth, hammerhead shark, T. rex, E. coli {click}
• Giant squid (with a bit of tapeworm above), red-winged blackbird, hickory horned devil (aka royal walnut moth) caterpillar, Komodo dragon {click}
• Great horned owl, octopus, black-eyed Susan, star-nosed mole {click}
• Goldfish, polar bear, red-headed woodpecker {click}
• Fruit bat, fly agaric mushroom, blue-footed booby {click}
• Stinkhorn fungus, narwhal, slake moth (okay, so this last one’s fictional) {click}
• House cat, Portuguese man of war {click}
• The entire Ark {click}

And, as if that weren’t enough, Mars gave all her siblings magnets as Christmas presents. My fridge now sports a great horned owl, an octopus and a giant squid alongside the Roquefort cheese magnet I bought in France and the durian and rambutan magnets from a Vietnamese grocery in New York.

Update:

None of the above-linked pictures give you a really good view of the tapeworm magnet, but I found an old picture Mars sent me and uploaded it. You can view it here.

Mantis Vs. Damselfly

I couldn’t help thinking of my sister Mars when I saw this video. It’s got a mantis, a damselfly and even some orchids. Add a cephalopod and a starling and her major biological obsessions would be covered.

Those A-Mazing Cephalopods

Via one of PZ Myers’ infamous Cephalopod Friday posts, here’s a link to a National Geographic video of an octopus sliding through a plexiglass maze. It uses its suction cups to pull itself through the tubes.

Best line: “Can you imagine how much fun it would be to be an octopus?”

Little-known cephalopod fact: Because octopuses’ bodies contain no air bladders or gas pockets they  can live at depths where the pressure is so great a human being would implode.

Meteorite Hits Bathroom

I think the fine folks at Discovery News have been recruiting their headline writers from the tabloids. As if the whole dragon virgin birth thing wasn’t enough, I arrived at work today to find the above headline at the top of the science news feed on my start up screen.

Of course, when you click through, there’s always a serious science story. (I think a part of me is always just the tiniest bit disappointed by this.)

My favorite quote comes from the curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s meteorite collection:

Every meteorite serves as a “poor man’s space probe,” yielding information on how the solar system formed, [Tim] McCoy said.

Today’s little-known meteorite fact:

Apparently fewer than 5000 meteorites have ever been recovered in the entire history of mankind. I know that three quarters of the earth is covered by oceans and that great swaths of the dry land is uninhabited, but I was still surprised by how low that figure was.

Daily Reading Update

You know a science book is compelling when it’s making me think about taking organic chemistry.

Quote of the day from The Secret of Scent:

…chemistry is essentially the study of the mating habits of outer-shell electrons… (112)

Of course, I’d be lucky if my organic chemistry professor were that entertaining.

Another Mystery Solved

I love research.

Well, I should probably be more specific. I love the process of tracking down pieces of information: the twists and turns, how a lucky glimpse of a bibliographic entry or the offhand mention of another researcher can lead you down a completely unexpected path to just the fact you were looking for. It doesn’t matter how trivial that fact is in the grand scheme. Merely finding it feels like a small miracle.

This year for Christmas, my sister Mars gave me a copy of The Secret of Scent, a book on the science of scent by biophysicist Luca Turin. He’s the eponymous Emperor of Scent in one of my favorite books.

I’ve spent most of today reading this book—time I should have spent working on any of a number of school assignments that are due shortly after I return home from vacation in January. I needed to read something entertaining, though. And after reading an entire book about Turin, I felt fairly confident that a book by him would be entertaining and enlightening. And so far, he hasn’t disappointed, even if I don’t always get the science he’s talking about. In my favorite passage thus far, he describes what he calls the “Law of Conservation of Worries”:

As genuine reasons for anxiety, like polio, TB and smoking; recede, [sic] they are replaced by phoney ones, so that the anxiety level is kept homeostatically constant. I can think of no process — save a major cataclysm such as a flu pandemic — that would reset this anxiety to a low level in the developed world. The phrase ’studies have shown’ in a newspaper these days almost always prefaces a new worry to be added to the pile to make sure it does not shrink. (26)

Anyhow, at one point about midway through, Turin is talking about how crystallizing proteins lets scientists determine what the protein molecules look like, how they twist and turn and fold back on themselves in strange structures that confound my normal preference for symmetry. In a footnote, Turin provides the URL for the RCSB Protein Data Bank (An Information Portal to Biological Macromolecular Structures!), where you can see many of these molecules.

If, like me, you don’t have advanced training in organic chemistry, one of the best places to start is their Molecule of the Month page. Dr. David S. Goodsell of the Scripps Institute profiles provides a picture — often strangely beautiful — for each molecule along with a brief description of what it is and how it’s constructed. Featured molecules have ranged from the well-known (DNA) to the more obscure (nitrogenase —well, OK, obscure to me) and from the sinister (cholera toxin) to the sublime (luciferase). Goodsell’s descriptions have a matter-of-factness that’s both reassuring to non-scientists like me and oddly fitting since these molecules are, despite their exotic structures, the workhorses of the biochemical world. His entry on serum albumin opens, “Think about how convenient it is to be able to eat.”

Anyhow, the point of all this, was not to introduce you to a neat science site — although I’m certainly happy to do that. The point was that, thanks to RCSB and Dr. Goodsell, I’ve finally learned what ubiquitin is. Apparently, cells constantly build and discard proteins as they need them for various purposes. Once a cell is done with a protein, it tags the protein with ubiquitin so that it can be identified as obsolete and broken down.

This is not just cool insight into molecular and cell biology. Since ubiquitin signals that something is obsolete and should be discarded, it also lends some sort of metaphorical/semantic support to my idea that the biological term “de-ubiquitination” needs to be appropriated for general use (i.e., what needs to happen to over-hyped celebrities like, say Britney Spears).