Dick in a dish

The team lead by Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine as been highlighted on the bayblab before for growing a functioning bladder in a dish. Well they outdid themselves this time by growing a functioning rabbit penis in a dish, and grafting it back on males which conceived with it. Think of the possibilities! The paper is not yet available on pubmed but there is an article here about the discovery:

"Dr Atala's team first created a scaffold using the penis of a rabbit, and removed all the living cells from it, leaving only cartilage. They then took a small piece of tissue from the penis of another rabbit and grew the cells in a lab dish. Dr Atala says the work has taken his team 18 years to complete. "We had to find the right growth factors, the right soup to grow the cells in," he said."

Of note to our female readers, he has also been successful in growing clitoral tissues in the past.

Can you Spot a Fake?

Do you think you can tell when somebody is happy versus just faking it? Can you tell a genuine smile from a forced one? Take this test from the BBC to see how well you do. There are 20 videos of people smiling - some real, some fake - each viewable only once. The differences are subtle, and explained at the end.

How did you do?

Cell Size and Scale

Do you need some perspective on small biological units? How big is a cell compared to a coffee bean? How big is a virus compared to a cell? Now you know qualitatively with this great zoomable window.

Homeopathy in the Hospital

Cancer Carnival #27

The 27th edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival is now up at MolBio Research Highlights. Go check it out!

Forest ignorance

I have heard horror stories about the devastation in the forests of British Columbia, Canada caused by the Mountain Pine Beetle. I just moved to the West Kootenay region and I was astounded by the amount of dead trees I could see from my window. Picture below.

Not the best picture but in a sea of evergreens there are lots of bright orange coloured trees, to me these looked a lot like dead pine trees and assumed that this was mountain pine beetle damage. Much like that in the picture below.

Of course, I'm wrong, the trees in the previous picture are Tamarack Larch, a deciduous coniferous tree while the bottom picture is of mountain pine beetle infestation. I actually thought that the terms deciduous and coniferous were mutually exclusive taxonomic catagories. My ignorance knows no bounds.

Feces ID

Found this scat in my backyard. This is one of three piles near an apple tree. Any experts out there? I'm thinking it's a large cuddly vegetarian rabbit.

Fruit Bat Blowjobs

This has been making the rounds, but hasn't made an appearance yet on the Bayblab yet.

A recent paper in PLoS ONE has found that fellatio amongst fruit bats increased copulation time. The image, from the paper, shows an artist's rendition of the act. Supplementary info also includes a video of the act - complete with weird soundtrack - if you're into bat porn.

Genital licking roughly doubled copulation time. The researchers aren't sure why the bats engage in fellatio, but offer a few speculations:

"First, genital licking may lubricate the penis or increase penile stimulation, prolonging the duration of copulation. Prolonged copulation might assist sperm transport from the vagina to the oviduct, or stimulate secretions of the pituitary gland in the female and hence increase the likelihood of fertilization. Second, prolonged copulation might be a method of mate-guarding, because the mates would normally segregate after copulation to form unisexual groups which persist throughout the non-breeding season. Third, fellatio may confer bactericidal benefits and assist in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) both to females, and to males that lick their own penis briefly after copulation. Saliva has a protective repertoire that goes beyond antibacterial activity to include antifungal, antichlamydial, and antiviral properties as well. Finally, genital licking may facilitate the detection and identification of MHC-dependent chemical cues associated with mate choice."

Addiction Treatment and Research

There's an interesting conversation going on at Scienceblogs about the politics and funding of addiction treatment and research. Interesting to me, at least, because they in some ways mirror conversations I've had with friends in the past.

It starts with a thoughtful post by Jessica Palmer at BioEphemera who discusses the double standards when it comes to smoking (and here I would probably add alcohol) versus treatment for other substance addiction.

That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.

Maybe it's because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts - probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. [...] We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people - not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they're "bad," or because we can't relate to them. They're real people. They have families.

Part of the problem, as raised in the comments there, is that drug addiction is often viewed as a moral or personal failing. Worse, watch the video at the end of Jessica's post and notice how the Fox reporter describes a few "crazy" studies. There's some serious othering of the subjects going on. The fight against drug treatment and research is a fight based on race, socio-economic status, sexual preference and gender. It's as though we aren't supposed to care about 'latino pot smokers', 'low income women' or 'homosexual fathers.' (Yes, not all of those studies are drug related, but it demonstrates some of the targets of anti-funding campaigns)

On the subject of the moral failing argument, Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science makes the case for funding research that people don't approve of.

The implication of the view that taking drugs is a moral failing is that if you make this wrong choice, you fully deserve everything that follows from this choice -- and you ought not receive any assistance in undoing the mess that your wrong choice got you into. [...] Science can ask all the questions it wants about drugs, then, but not on our dime. We already know everything we need to know about drugs. Using them is bad ... which must mean only bad people use them. Bad people deserve punishment, so the nasty effects of drug use are entirely appropriate.

She argues that there's already a public cost for the outcomes of drug addiction, so why not move that cost to helping people stop? Further, she makes the argument that the best way to develop good strategies and effective interventions is, duh, scientific research.

Both posts are worth reading, and both are important calls for understanding, compassion and funding dollars.

Call for Posts: Cancer Research Blog Carnival

Don't forget, the Cancer Research Blog Carnival will be appearing this Friday at MolBio Research Highlights. Submit your recent posts for inclusion here. If you don't have a post to submit, it's not too late to start writing!

The Cancer Research Blog Carnival is a monthly round-up of writing on cancer and cancer-related issues from around the blogosphere. Previous editions can be found here.

Various Events for November

November is upon us, and with it there are a few goings-on that our readers may be interested.

First of all, the beginning of November also means the start of Movember and we invite our male readers to throw away their razors and shaving cream and start working on their moustaches. This annual whiskerino aims to raise awareness and money for men's health issues, notably prostate cancer. So start working on those majestic moustaches. Send us your pics at the end of the month and we'll feature them on the blog.


Several months ago, I was in NYC and covered the opening of a new exhibit on Extreme Mammals. That exhibit will be continuing until the beginning of January, if you're in the area, and will be eventually coming to Ottawa in Summer 2011 if you're waiting. This month - November 14 - a new exhibit is opening: Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World. They invite visitors to travel with them on 'the internet of the ancient world'. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make this opening, but it promises to be a cool, interactive experience with many hands-on actvitities and live perfomances.

Visitors will watch live silkworms spinning cocoons in the section devoted to Xi’an; wander through a replica of the desert markets of Turfan, complete with the sights, sounds, and smells of exotic spices, luxury goods, and precious raw materials; meet a life-sized camel model in Samarkand and explore the ancient skills of papermaking and metalwork. In Baghdad, visitors will track the “stars” using a working model of an Arab astrolabe and discover the achievements of Islamic sciences and engineering.

More locally, this week, November 4-7th, marks Fashion CURES a la mode. This is an Ottawa fashion event rasigin money for Ovarian Cancer Canada. Tickets for the runway shows, photo exhibits and after parties can be purchased here.

Brain Teasers

Found these in an article about how IQ is overrated: First one to get all 3 right gets a pat on the back.

"When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?"

and

"Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?"

yes/no/insufficient information

scary pumpkin

Fashion Accessories From the Lab

Before some nut job sends me death threats again, I'm joking, and I think this is gross, but in a very entertaining kind of way... More pictures if you follow the link and have a strong stomach...

How Physicists Always Get it Wrong

A few months ago, Nature Physics published an article about an eventual overthrow of evolutionary theory. It's seen often enough - and in different fields. Sometimes there is legitimate grounds for strong skepticism, sometimes it's contrarianism masquerading as skepticism and often, as in the aforementioned publication, it's a case of experts speaking outside their expertise (something we do at the Bayblab quite often). In a humourous paper entitled "A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution" [free pdf] the authors explain how it can happen, using an explosion of evolutionary models made by physicists as an example:

The question presents itself: why are we being deluged with such models? In the spirit of the field, we present a simple evolutionary model of this process.

1. A physicist runs across or concocts from whole cloth a mathematical model which is simple, neat, and contains a great many variables of the same sort.
   
   
2. The physicists has heard of Darwin (1859), and may even have read Dawkins (1985) or some essays by Gould, but wouldn’t know Fisher (1958), Haldane (1932) and Wright (1986) from the Three Magi, and doesn’t dream that such a subject as mathematical evolutionary biology exists.
   
   
3. The physicist is aware that lots of other physicists are interested in annexing biology as a province of statistical physics.
   
   
4. The physicist interprets his multitude of variables as species or (if slightly more sophisticated) as genotypes, and proclaims that he has found “Darwin’s Equations” (cf. Bak et al. (1994)), or, more modestly, has made an important step towards eventually finding those equations.
   
   
5. His paper is submitted for review to other physicists, who are just as ignorant of biology as he, but see that it’s about equivalent to the other papers on evolution by physicists. They publish it.
   
   
6. The paper is read by other physicists, because at least it’s not another derivation of specific heats on some convoluted lattice under a Hamiltonian named for some Central European worthy now otherwise totally forgotten. Said physicists think this is cutting-edge evolutionary theory.
   
   
7. Some of those physicists will know or discover simple, neat models with lots of variables of the same type.

They continue:

[O]ur model predicts that simple statistical-physical models of evolution will continue to proliferate until either (a) all the available models are exhausted, or (b) they become as common and as boring as any other subject in the statistical physics literature, or (c) physicists learn some actual biology. We are not entirely confident that the third limiting factor will become operational before the others.

So there you have it: this will continue to be a problem until everybody learns more biology.

Of course, as much as we would like to think so, this isn't limited to physicists, even if they aren't as humble as us bio-types. And it's really just an extension of what we often lament in science writing (and other journalism) - poor understanding of the subject and headline grabbing, like the title of this post.

What's The Most Boring Molecule in the Cell?

The knee-jerk for many of us raised on the Western blot loading control is actin, but biologically speaking, it's far from it...

But surely not everything in the cell is such a barrel of monkeys?????

What's your pick for the cell's most boring molecule?


(Video is from Michael Way's lab. Even boring molecules do cool things when viruses are in the house!)

How Fast is Your Internet?

A couple of weeks ago, Larry at Sandwalk posted the results of an internet speed test on his blog. If he was living in South Korea, Japan or Sweden his results would probably be quite different - these countries are the top three in terms of average internet speed. (The USA ranks 28th, no word on Canada) Likewise, if he lived in South Africa, we may still be waiting for that post to appear.

Earlier this month, a carrier pigeon was used to transfer data faster than South Africa's leading internet provider, Telkom. The bird successfully flew a data card 80km to it's destination in 1 hour, 8 minutes. Transferring the 'conventional' way, including download, took 2 hours, 6 minutes and 57 seconds - a time which apparently only accounted for 4% of the data.

Strangely, CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) data transfer isn't a new idea. It started as an April Fool's joke almost 20 years ago, and the first actual implementation happened in 2001.

No word on how to adapt avian carriers for bittorrent distribution. If only those massive flocks of passenger pigeons hadn't gone extinct.

Another Nobel for Non-Coding RNA

By now you have heard that Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have won the Nobel for their work leading to the discovery of telomeres and telomerase - the eukaryotic solution to the end-replication problem. Other than gawking over "THE SECRET OF AGEING" and all the other shit journalists are copying and pasting into each other's newspapers, now would be a good time to take a moment and remember what a badass enzyme telomerase is. A cellular encoded reverse transcriptase, with structural homology to viral RTs, viral RNA polymerases and phage DNA polymerases. That is also composed of an ncRNA component which functions as a sort of a primer.

The molecular secret of ageing could have been something boring like actin. Is it just a coincidence that it's also cool?

Avalanche Testing

Here's a quick video on how to test the snowpack for the presence of avalanche conditions. And here's another quick video on some of the basic science behind avalanches hosted by Bob McDonald of the CBC (warning: this footage is OLD.)
Another video with some avalanche information including your chance of survival should you get caught in an avalanche.
Here is an AMAZING video from a skier wearing a helmet camera getting caught in an avalanche. He is buried alive. If you watch this whole video without fast forwarding it will disturb you, but it is definitely worth it.
This video makes me think that this snowboard season I should take up skootching (aka cross-country snowboarding) to avoid the mountains and the associated avalanche dangers.

2009 IgNobel Awards

This is usually AC's department but since he's MIA - working on some improbable research of his own, no doubt - I'll cover for him.

On October 1, the 2009 IgNobel awards were handed out at Harvard University. The winners:

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

An interesting and entertaining crop as always. Links to papers and other information can be found here.