I’m with Sean , Facebook is an excellent application when you have an accumulation of friends in far flung corners of the earth and it’s too much to keep up with them via email. I’ve been hooked for a month now.
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“Biology’s Big Bang”
The Economist’s feature on RNA and what it means to genomics includes a broader observation about the our place at the cusp of a profound revolution in biology:
There is in biology at the moment a sense of barely contained
expectations reminiscent of the physical sciences at the beginning of
the 20th century. It is a feeling of advancing into the unknown, and
that where this advance will lead is both exciting and mysterious.
I certainly share this view. Sitting atop a bioinformatics project for a couple of years it became obvious to me that the convergence of software development, computational power, and wet lab experimentation is moving us to a transformational moment, a reaching of escape velocity, in life sciences. Whether the analogy is physics in the 30’s or IT in the 80’s, something exciting is about to happen.
In addition to the suggestion that:
If RNA is controlling the complexity of
the whole organism, that suggests the operating system of each cell is
not only running the cell in question, but is linking up with those of
the other cells when a creature is developing. To push the analogy,
organs such as the brain are the result of a biological internet. If
that is right, the search for the essence of humanity has been looking
in the wrong genetic direction.
My prediction is that we will find that RNA is networking beyond the bounds of individual organisms, and we humans will understand how the human genome is only one of our many genetic masters.
POTty-mouthed teen busted for not being a dope
A kid in Saskatchewan gets in trouble for talking about marijuana in a school hallway. From the description I am almost certain he was discussing this study on drugs and alcohol toxicity.
Link: School suspends teen after drug-linked protest.
Kieran shared the information he found with classmates around the
lunch table, mentioning studies that suggest marijuana kills fewer
people than tobacco or alcohol. He also opined that marijuana use
should be legal in Canada. "I wasn’t selling any drugs, I was just
giving out statistics," Kieran said.One of his fellow students
complained to Susan Wilson, the principal at Wawota Parkland School,
who in turn called Keiran’s mother on May 29. During the phone
conversation, Kieran said he was accused of "soliciting the sale of
drugs to minors and others within the school."…
And get this quote from the Director of Education for the school division:
…"Public schools are not public places like shopping malls where
students can gather and talk about any issue that they wish," he said.
"We have teachers and principals who have expectations for student
conduct in a safe and orderly climate."
What makes this newsworthy of course is not that a teen might be talking about pot (oh my stars and garters, what a shocker!!) or an interesting bit of research, but the school’s overreaction. We are in the unfortunate season of graduation-linked teen deaths, usually from drunk driving or other alcohol related misadventure. In that context, I wonder if the officials at this school think marijuana is the drug they need to worry about?
19th-century weapon found in whale
This story hits me at a number of levels. I had no idea whales lived so long. General unhappiness at the professed need to kill these complex and intelligent animals. Hounded for a century – we finally got ‘im.
Link: 19th-century weapon found in whale – Yahoo! News.
A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a
weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar
hunt — more than a century ago.Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped
projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age,
estimated between 115 and 130 years old."No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by
amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived
more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years
old.The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale’s neck and
shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the
southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time,
Bockstoce said.It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around
1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a
time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the
whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and
prevent it from escaping.The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.
"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a
non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn’t have been that bothered if he
lived for another 100 years."
Air Traffic Patterns
Buried under work so not much blogging lately, so I’ll take the easy way out with a YouTube link.
Stranger Fruit has a link to a very cool visualization of air traffic patterns over the USA.
World Oceans Day
genomics for 1st graders
A week from tomorrow I face my daughter’s grade 1 class to talk about my job so if anyone has any nifty ideas for communicating DNA to 6 year olds I am all ears. I have used the IKEA parts-list analogy for other lay audiences, and one of my coworkers who works in public education has forwarded some kick-ass ideas, but if anyone else happens along this post with some ideas I would be grateful. My wife thinks I’m going to bomb.
Canada’s next top cephalopod
A reality shows finally gets interesting. From Canada’s next top model
:
It’s a tough call, but I’d vote for the octopus.
Today’s Invertebrate
The Extended Phenotype and the Mountain Pine Beetle
For kicks last week I was reading an anti-evolution blog post (cause that’s how I roll) that included the notion, and I paraphrase, "why does all this matter, it’s all in the past, let’s move on". 
Now, the person making that statement was a non-scientist, and there is no shortage of similar nonsense out in the internets by people undisciplined by facts, so why do I note this now? Because coincidently I attended a workshop on forestry genomics where one of the presenters put up the cover of the Extended Phenotype, citing the concept of the gene as the unit of selection, in contrast to the organism, as a way to inform analysis of genomics approaches to the Mountain Pine Beetle disaster here in BC. Having just completed it, mention of the book caught my attention. He went on to say that, from a gene’s perspective,the Pine Beetle is an insect-fungal hybrid, and the complexity of interactions among these genomes and the genome of the host tree as they adapt to each other is key to combating the blight. In other words, a conceptual model based on standard Darwinian theory informs scientific inquiry into a current problem.
This is why good theories (in this case Darwin’s natural selection and Dawkin’s Selfish Gene) persist – they are useful. They generate testable hypotheses and inform research every single day. Unlike intelligent design theory, which is utterly useless in shedding light on any given set of observations.
iBiome 