learning

So I don't just complain about how shitty our classes are. I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes them bad, what this means for our education and science education in general, and how I can improve things. I think about this a lot, especially during section when I have to discuss tedious papers in tedious detail. I have had this stuff on my mind since the "town hall meeting" with the new head of BBS to talk about how to make the program better. Today three things have got me thinking about this stuff enough to blog about it:

1. This article form Nature's chemistry blog about students in the UK who start university in the sciences without enough preparation in math. This one's kind of self-explanatory. Maybe you can remember how people freaked out over the twist and writhe equations back from the beginning of the year.

2. This article from the new york times (if you don't have times select you should-it's free for university students now!) comparing science and science education in China and the United States. Now I'm not a huge fan of the neo-liberal crap about how we have to do better if we want to stay a global leader bla bla bla that this article is kind of about, but I really like the discussion about Einstein being a rebel. Maybe comparing Nazis and Harvard is a little too extreme, but I feel like I need to resist what I'm getting from the professors here in order to do anything interesting.

3. This paper about metabolic modelling (for our non-harvard readers it's Edwards et. al. Environmental Microbiology, 2002 if you are interested (which you should be-metabolic modelling is awesome!)). It starts with a quote from T.S. Eliot "Where is the Life we have lost in living?... / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (when was the last time you saw a scientific paper with a literary epigraph?) and discusses how we have a lot of biological information, but not necessarily a lot of ways to use it yet. Yes.

Ok, here's what I'm getting at: I feel like our professors our doing us a disservice by even bothering to teach our classes the way they are. We aren't being encouraged to learn and think outside the box. We're learning to spit back stuff they tell us about cellular factors. They never give us equations (or apologize profusely when they do) as if we can't handle math at all even though there is almost no biology that does not depend on math and statistics anymore. if we're lucky we can get this stuff in our labs, but most professors were trained in a time before the genome. Instead of teaching us to be leaders in science, we're learning archaic methods and how to suck up to professors.

I'm not just crazy, right?

no fat chicks

So some research across the pond has led to the claim that adding leptin (a hormone associated with appetite regulation) to baby formula has the potential to prevent children from becoming obese later in life. The hormone - naturally present in breast milk - was added to the diet of neonatal mice, and they remained slim throughout their life span even when fed fat-laden diets.

The claim is that the presence of the hormone in the early stages of development can hard-wire the brain in such a way that calorie intake is more highly regulated. Some scientists, however, are calling the eventual addition of leptin to all baby formulas and subsequent elimination of obesity "wildly optimistic science fiction."

The biggest problem right now? Finding parents willing to allow their newborns to participate in a clinical trial with the supplemented formula.

The Guardian article noted that "other specialists in the field condemned the search for a medical answer to obesity, saying it is a modern social ill and that people need to address their lifestyles, not look for an artificial quick fix." Does anyone have thoughts on this? While too many people do make poor eating choices (which have more potential health implications than just obesity and diabetes), is it really a bad thing to 'artificially' hard-wire the brain so that you can't really get fat? I mean, I think that sounds like a GREAT idea. And it's a natural hormone found in normal human breast milk; really, they're just adding back something to formula that was already there in the stuff they modeled it after. In general, I'd agree that most 'social ills' do need to be addressed by a re-assessment of lifestyle choices, but I just don't think that applies here.

Bacteria: friend or foe?

Bacteria are pretty awesome. In researching probiotics for some school projects I have come to realize that we should all be bathing in yogurt all the time if we want to be healthy. Who needs rational drug design when you have bacteria to make drugs for you and replicate themselves! There is a bunch of clinical evidence that bacteria found in regular old grocery store yogurt can improve regularity (for your butthole), metabolism, detoxification, boost your immune system and help you fight off cancer and viruses, kill pathogenic bacteria and yeast (hello drug resistant evil bacteria!), improve allergies and inflammatory disorders of the skin and intestine, help treat stomach uclers, eat up cholesterol, treat upper respiratory infections, and maybe even help people with autism!

I don't really know a lot about the immune system but as someone with allergies and a regular person who gets colds and could get cancer I am prettye excited about the immunomodulatory possibilities of probiotics. This paper outlines some of the cool immune system stuff that lactic acid bacteria can do. Totally sweet! I'm pretty sure people still don't really know how this works or why bacteria do this at all. Any thoughts?

So, do you want to eat more fermented food right now or is the idea of 10^8 bacteria/ml still not something you want to put in your mouth? I obviously vote for bacteria over chemicals. LB is way yummier than ethyl acetate. This is of course not the case for Americans at large, who would much rather take a million pills than think about ingesting live organisms that are meant to colonize your intestines and secrete wonderful goodies. I think that's a big part of the problem (hi again drug resistant evil bacteria).

A New Direction

I was struck by some words by a well-known writer: "Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished." When I turned these words inward, toward our blog, I realized that while we are great, we are rarely original, leaving us with a familiar and oft-experienced taste, one that struggles to be relished.

I offer a new direction for our blog, one where we are the creators, the thinkers, the debaters. Let our voices be heard, for they are far more delicious and ripe. Let us propose our own ideas about science, our own thoughts, whether whimsical or weighty, simplistic or complex. Let The Butthole be a forum for a group of young scientists to explore the beginning of their scientific minds and careers. Let this blog be Us.

As was once said: "By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote." And so shall we. But let the quoted be previously unquoted. Let us call out those articles and studies that do not regularly receive media attention. Let this be a place for the unheard of and creative, not the trite and mundane.

If we are one day charged as owing debts to other authors, may someone reply: "Yet [The Biology Butthole] was more original than [its] originals. [It] breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

NEWS FLASH: antioxidants still good for you

A BBC news article just out reports on the benefits of drinking tea and how it can reduce your risk of skin cancer. But really, it's just the fact that tea (specifically black and green teas) has antioxidants, and that antioxidants are good for you. Still. Whoopee! More blueberries, pomegranates, and green tea for everyone!

The sound of feminism being pushed down the stairs

It's a jumpin' time for ladies, ladies: Pam Silver threw down the gauntlet to women who don't speak at conferences in this week's Nature. And this Friday, Priscilla Yang gives the HGWISE coffee talk. I know it's at 9AM, but it's free breakfast, and me & Mary'll be there to keep it nice and belligerent. It's in the DMS student lounge (TMEC 442 - you know, where I go to nap and watch Dr. Phil).

And guess what?! May 4th it's my PI's turn to HOLLA at Gloria Steinem. Same time & place as above. You KNOW you want to go to that. She's a hottie, Scott "9x5" Jones....

omg

Too much free time?

seals with accents!

Apparently, bearded seals have different accents depending on where they're from (different enough that Canadian and Alaskan seals might not understand each other's mating calls). Cool!

Too Much Free Time

I hope they left themselves some wiggle room.

My Humps

Just watch it. OMG.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGQ_ehWm2Y

more on the genetic basis of sexuality

Got to love the Science Times. Here's an article talking about sexuality programming in the brain. And here's a video about some theories regarding the basis of desire. Who doesn't love a good article about sex?

as good as it gets

Source: boingboing

a sixth sense (and seventh and eighth and...)

A cool article on Wired.com talks about the possibility of plug-ins for the human brain, such that we could sense direction or 'see' using another sense's hard-wiring. Pretty cool possibility. How long do you think it will be before we get x-ray vision and the ability to fly?

Slashdot synopsis here.

evolution and baseball

In celebration of the opening day of the Red Sox regular season, here's a clip from an article in the NYT about what's really 'ruining' baseball:

"The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an avid baseball fan, hypothesized that in competitive environments, as the variance of the quality of participants shrinks, opportunities for great performances diminish. For most of its history, the major leagues were progressively populated by better and better baseball players — through natural population growth, racial integration and immigration — which meant that opportunities for achievements like hitting .400 were decreasing. As superior players replaced the weakest ones, even the very best had fewer chances at turning in remarkable performances.

Expansion abruptly reversed the trend; today, the variance in quality of major league pitchers, based on E.R.A., is at an all-time high. By letting in the riffraff for baseball’s elite to exploit, expansion increased the likelihood of great achievements. Without even bringing steroids into the discussion, it is no surprise that some already fine hitters performed even better after the early 1990s."


It's science!