Furious curiosity, mutagenesis screens, and prosopagnosia

And my blog returns! This is important to me because I'm trying to make writing a habit, since it stimulates thought. In the past it's been really hard to keep up new habits (even the ones I feel strongly about) but I'm slowly becoming better at it. So while this might be dangerous, I will go ahead and announce my goal: two blog posts per week for the rest of the month. No matter what.

You know what else stimulates thought? Talking to people in completely different fields than your own. I just had a really good 45 minute conversation with a fellow patron at the Espresso Royale cafe. He's a humanities grad student, so given that I'm an MD/PhD student in biogerontology, it shouldn't be surprising that it was pretty varied in terms of topic (really interesting topics, to me anyways). One might think that because neither of us knew that much about each other's fields that the conversation would be superficial. But that's not what happened. I think that because we both approached the topics as beginners, our minds were working with furious curiosity, and the ideas just started flowing. Soon enough, I was explaining the nuances of the evolutionary theory behind lifespan determination, as well as how to calculate the chances of double hits in C. elegans mutagenesis screens. He understood the intuition as well as any scientist. Meanwhile, I was also taking in ideas on the influence of postmodern thought in the humanities, the origins of musical genres, and public choice theory. I ended up sometimes sticking scientific labels on things, like emergent properties and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but that only goes to show that the tools and concepts of one field equips you to understand other fields (cross-pollination :) ). Conclusion? The position of a beginner may be an uncomfortable place, but it's a fantastic place to grow.

Speaking of mutagenesis screens, tomorrow I get introduced to another high-throughput method in the C. elegans roundworm. I will be trying out a BioSorter, which is capable of sending worms (or zebrafish, or fruit flies, or clusters of mammalian cells) through an analyzer that can assess size and fluorescence and count and sort them (i.e. exactly like flow cytometry and FACS). Handy tool for handling large numbers of animals and systematically searching for manipulations that impact the biological process you're studying (e.g. aging).

Finally, I'll leave you with a couple of cool facts from the last book I read, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, which is a collection of essays from all scientific fields (environmental science, astronomy, physics, biology, medicine). One essay by Stephen Hawking. My goal is 20 books by the end of the year, which I'm tracking on Goodreads, a social book site where you can see what your friends are reading.

1) About ten million songbirds (warblers) are killed each year in Cyprus by poachers. They are served as a delicacy called ambelopoulia. Lots of other birds can caught in the process and are simply killed. The poaching is technically illegal, but the law is minimally enforced (even prominent politicians will eat it on camera). Most interestingly, because it is illegal, most of the poachers are armed criminals somewhat analogous to drug cartels, so police officers are wary of going after them. Another example of how banning something doesn't necessarily help a situation, but instead creates a black market that is unregulated.

2) A black bear must consume 200,000 calories per day in order to have sufficient fat stores for winter hibernation.

3) Laysan albatrosses have permanent mating pairs and together nurture an egg each year. They don't stay together throughout the year but somehow manage to find each other again when mating season arrives. About 1/3 of the "mating pairs" are actually female-female pairs, as both females are fertilized by a quick mating with a male from another pair.

4) Prosopagnosia is a specific inability to recognize faces and places (agnosia is the more generalized inability to recognize objects). Usually individuals have lesioned fusiform gyruses, either by trauma or by some sort of genetic variation (some cases run in families). People with prosopagnosia usually develop tricks to get around it, recognizing other people based on gross features or context. It is believed that this is much more common than one might think, as people don't seek medical attention if they are born with it, because "that's just the way they are."

5) Kessler syndrome is the official name for the "space junk phenomenon," where it's getting increasingly dangerous in near-Earth space because of a bunch of aging equipment we've left there. The issue is that a single collision between two objects will create thousands of smaller objects that are equally dangerous, creating a catastrophic domino effect. Because of the velocities involved, one of these tiny fragments would be like a truck bomb. A 10-cm sphere of aluminum packs the punch of 7 kg of TNT.