inkycircus

Winning the name game

We here at the circus are big fans of intriguingly named organisms and their genes. There's our favourite Drosophila genes, such as cheapdate and kenandbarbie. Or the perfect nomers for three news species of slime mold beetles, named after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (the entomologist meant it as a token of respect - no really).

But species naming is not just for geneticists and humour-challenged bug dudes. The Queensland Museum in Australia is offering up the opportunity to name a handful of newly described spider species. You could name them after yourself, your favourite furry friend, your mother-in-law, or that creepy lady who always gave scary home-made candy at Hallowe'en.  Thanks Sara!

(Totally random PS: The Latin name for a walrus is Odobenus rosmarus. In my 4th year mammalogy class, I became convinced that walruses were named after an important natural historian's wife, Rosemary. He meant it as a compliment, of course. But she, um, didn't quite get that part).

Sheekdom

Get it? She meets geek? Yeah, thanks go to Clive for that stroke of genius. And more thanks go to the people behind www.itgoddess.info. They've brought together IT babes (?), photoshop skills, and our favorite movie lasses to produce the Screen Goddess IT Calendar. It's pretty fun. And there are some legit babes in the mix. As well as some fun with fonts. The higher goal of the calendar is to encourage more women to enter IT, cause they aren't at the moment. Odds are it'll mislead more men into the trade, cause now there's more than java at the end of the rainbow. There are, like, major babes there too. Helloooo Halle Berry white bikini clad Sharon.

Much better way to get gals into IT: Come up with the equivalent of the Vancouver Fire Department's Flame calendar. C'mon people.

I don't want a grab bag

Word of warning - rant alert. I (like many many MANY people around the world, including, of late, Anna) am constantly attempting to slim. I've been a chronic diet bore since the beginning of the year and am in danger of becoming a weight watchers born-again. One of reasons why is that with ww you can eat what you want, so long as you dont eat too much of it. So, if I wanted to, I could eat 40 jaffa cakes a day and not break my diet. So long as I don't eat anything else apart from vegetables that day of course. However. This new annoying trend towards the 'grab bag' is threatening to derail me. If I have a salad at work with me for lunch, I like a bag of crisps so I'm not just muching boring tedious depressing lettuce. But the WH Smiths at work doesn't sell normal sized bags of crisps any more, they only sell these ghastly grab bags. Salt'n'vinegar Squares, my weapon of choice, used to come in nifty 25g bags. Perfect. Only 2 points. But now they only come in big fat ugly 50g bags. Why? WHY? It's dumb. I don't to grab a grab bag, I want my small but perfectly formed squares back to give me my salt n vinegar fix (mm). Walkers, I'm talking to you. Join the fight against obesity. Drop the grab bag.

(PHOTO: E.T)

Mysterious methane

One of the big justifications for space travel is to try and find evidence in the universe of who we are and where we came from. And if there is anyone else out there like us. Which means hunting for evidence of things like liquid, or signs of life. We may have found something on Saturn.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn last year started turning up interesting findings the moment it started scrutinising Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Titan seems relatively inhospitable at first - it's got a temperature of 180 below zero, and it's surface is obscured from space by a dense hydrocarbon cloud. But the space probe has taken pictures of what appear to be dried up canal and river beds. How could anything flow in such a cold, blasted environment? Well, water couldn't. But liquid methane could.

A team of scientists from Basque Country University in  Bilbao have suggested that Titan may have or have had a methane cycle much like our own water cycle. The hydrocarbon clouds could lead to storms and methane clouds, and lead in turn to liquid methane precipitation. So they may have identified the only other planet/star/moon etc apart from Earth that might have liquid-state deposits. They have yet to spot these deposits, but are pretty confident they're there. A methane cycle sounds a bit stinky to me. And if there are Titanic aliens up there lets hope they don't smoke...

Via Eurekalert. (PHOTO: MODCAM)

Making a beeline

Iif a creature is endangered, there wont be many left of them around. And they'll be hard to find. So tracking them down is a tricky task. So why not train a dog to do it? The creature in question here is the noble bumblebee, the dog in question is a former stray named Quinn. Quinn has been trained to smell a bumblebee nest, but to avoid getting too close and getting himself stung. It's hoped he'll be able to help scientists figure out how many bee nests there are, particularly nests of endangered bees. Like the Great Yellow Bumble (great name, eh?). Quinn's fellow kennel mates training to be sniffer dogs were learning how to sniff out explosives and drugs. His job is a little less hardcore, but a lot more alternative and cool.

Via BBC News here. (PHOTO: VIKUSH)

Pigeons save lives

Living in London, you get used to people hating pigeons. Our very own mayor Ken Livingstone is waging a war against the birds, even spending a fortune to hire hawks to patrol Trafalgar Square to stop people feeding the "winged vermin". And it's true that some of them are particularly manky and freaky.

However, the White Carneau and the Show Racer are two breeds of pigeon that are not manky or freaky - in fact they have the potential to save lives. The reason is their genetic makeup. The Carneau birds are abnormally susceptible to heart attacks and heart vessel disease, the Racer birds not so much. In the Carneaus, the smooth muscle cells from the heart vessels are prone to uncontrolled growth. In humans, this growth is thought to be the reason why the lifesaving results of angioplasty operations sometimes don't last - 25 - 30% of patients experience re-stenosis, ie "over exuberant" tissue healing, which eventually blocks up the newly cleared artery once more.

Why exactly this restenosis happens in some patients but not all has up til now been a bit of a mystery. But by studying transcription factors that switch genes on and off, scientists found something surprising. A factor called STAT4 was 10 times higher in the Carneaus with heart disease. In birds without the heart disease, stimulating the STAT4 caused a 3-fold increase in cell growth. So now medics can work on figuring out how to block or modify the STAT4 pathway without needing to know what genes it affects, and possibly rescue a lot of people (and pigeons) from serious heart problems.

Here's the press release via Eurekalert.

FYI - I was looking for info on the two breeds mentioned above and I found the National Pigeon Association homepage, and with it some very handy advice on what to do if you find a lost pigeon with a band on its leg...

Night Swimming

 Or toe dipping. I've met many people who don't really believe that the sea can shower sparks when you stir it up at night. But tis true. Very very true. A kayak paddle does the same. As does, with comic effect, someone peeing in the sea: you are sew busted! And it's very useful too. Let's say you have an irrational fear of swimming in a pitch black ocean at night. Rest assured that if a shark is approaching he'll stir up enough bioluminescent sentinels to give you fair warning.

I've been on a random housesit on Bowen Island (just outside of Vancouver) this past while and last night we all traipsed out to the local dock to check out the phosphorescence. Cause it's not always good. It's quite quirky. So far as we can tell, it gets better later in the summer but then booms in certain random pockets (?). So were thinking that there are two ways of bettering the pacific NW's phosphorescence monitoring. It's the first step to forecasting.

1. Google map phosphorescence. If it's good near you, slap a pin on a google map with the date and location. Real-time phosphorescence mapping. Aw yeah. first pin: Galbraith Bay on Bowen Island.

2. Nocturnal web came attached to stirrer. Go visit some cheesy named website (suggestions oh Pun Masters most welcome) and you can watch a webcam that watches a patch of ocean constantly being messed with. This requirers more money. Any sponsors?

Anyone you know have the time to put these together? Cause if so pass on the idea and tell them to run with it. We could even do a miniature phosphorescence tour of the 'hood. The grand highlight of which would be a visit to Biobay in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where over 750,000 tiny dinoflagellates per gallon of water light up.

Shock therapy

Wound healing is one of those things that just seems like magic to me. You tear a hole in your blood vessels and somehow (you hope) the tear just heals itself up and stops leaking. Miraculous. Ways of assisting the process seem to run along the lines of finding new substances to seal up the injury (like superglue) or putting coagulation stuff in the blood so it clots faster. But how about zapping the damaged bit with electricity to make it heal faster? Nifty or what. Cells and tissues in the body act as a sort of chemical battery, and create electric field patterns all over the body. Injury disrupts these patterns, and scientists have just found that applying an electric current to the injured skin speeds up the healing process. Here's an explanation via New Scientist...

"Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. Penninger and his colleagues realised that it is the resulting altered fields that attract and guide repair cells to the damaged area."

The whole article is at New Scientist here.

Laws againts homosexuality - a real crime

(PHOTO: DKG)

Every now and then I read something in the news that makes me wonder what decade/century/parallel universe we live in. Sort of like when South Dakota banned abortions, US money for AIDS prevention in Africa gave the kibosh to condoms, pharmacists refuse to dole out emergency contraception and old birth control pills or when the money for sex-ed in the US is going towards abstinence training, ONLY.

Today I learned that the practice of homosexuality in India is actually still illegal (a very with-it kind of law dating back to 1861). According to AIDS activists, it's forcing the gay community underground and leading to dramatic rises in infection rates; because they are hidden, they don't get the information, education and CONDOMS necessary to keep a burgeoning epidemic at bay. 8% of Indian gays have HIV, compared with 1% of the straight population. In total the country has 5.7 million infected, the largest national population in the world (South Africa is second with 5.5 million). The Indian health authority is moving to scrap the law. Bravo.

There is something similar between all of these examples, however. Telling someone they can't have sex, restricting their freedoms, access to education, birth control, abortions does NOT lower HIV infections, teen pregnancies, teen sexual activity rate etc. Countries with the best track record in all these categories, like Denmark, have loads of mandatory sex ed, free condoms and birth control and a national attitude towards sex that is the antithesis to all the Christian, right-wing, oppressive bull crap. It's time to take the hint.

POWs (Pets of War)

(PHOTO: BETHAN)

Israel and Lebanon might not be agreeing on much these days. As casualties increase, both sides seem to become more entrenched in their fight, their right, and slip further away from a compromise.  One thing they have in common are the hundreds and hundreds of dogs and cats (gerbils, guinea pigs and parakeets) that have been abandoned by civilians fleeing the war-torn areas. Evacuated US citizens were not allowed to bring pets with them. In their terror, most animals have just been left behind. Organisations on both sides of the border are working furiously to capture these animals and transport them to safety. Israelis are even (sort of dysfunctionally) attempting to work with a Beirut-based group to save all these helpless creatures. If only such like-minded, humanitarian behaviour could extend to, um, the guys with guns (..or they guys in suits who control those guns).