Wrap up

Thank you one and all for your presentations today. Excellent timekeeping by everyone and  such a diverse range of topics.

If you did not receive your Multiple Choice Quiz back that means that it was all present and correct - good work.

After ten weeks of daily posts (a habit is a powerful thing) I'm going to take a break from posting here every day but will return next quarter.

Good luck with your finals and have a fun Spring Break. Here's a final Spring Break related topic from a paper in Science this week that the media are naturally picking up on: 
eg in the Washington Post - Real barflies: Study explains why male fruit flies turn to alcohol when they can’t have sex
 The actual paper in Science is here: Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila
(my new favorite paper title)
and there's a commentary on the paper here: Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze

Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he's mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It's the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior. 

Evolving Economics

On the Origin of $pecie$

My parents religiously watch PBS NewsHour, sometimes even over dinner. Throughout high school I would watch it with them, and I have grown to miss hearing about the latest news that PBS covers daily. I recently heard about a popular new book by naturalist and economist Bob Frank, who in his book relates the evolution of species to the market economy. This greatly interested me, since I plan to relate biology to another field like sociology. When my Dad called me and told me about Tuesday night’s PBS coverage of Bob Frank’s The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good I went to the PBS website and watched the episode. In his interview, Bob Frank explains his comparison of Darwin’s evolutionary theory with the market economy. He even goes as far to say that the honor of being regarded as ‘The Father of Economics’ should be bestowed upon Charles Darwin. Frank uses Darwin’s theory of evolution to describe the negative effects of competition on a species. This is described by traits favored by the gene pool that help a species in one aspect of life but hinder them in another. Frank uses the example of male Elk – those with larger antlers than their competitors win battles between males, so that mutations in the species that coded for larger antlers are very strongly favored. Generation by generation, Elk antlers have grown in size so that now bull elk have massive four-foot long antlers. These antlers are great for winning interspecies battles, but horrible for retreating into cover when being chased into a dense forest by a pack of hungry wolves. The bull Elk’s antlers get tangled in low hanging branches, and the animal is slowed down and more easily killed by its predators. This phenomenon of evolution captures the conflict between individuals and the group. From an economic standpoint, the survival of the fittest comes at a cost to the 99%.

Frank uses a particular species of seals as another example. In this species of seal, 4% of the males father 88% of the offspring. This can be related to humans in the sense that the children of the rich often become rich themselves, due to connections fostered for them by their wealthy and powerful parents. In modern societies, incomes concentrated at the top, cause the rich to continue spending patterns, consequently raising the bar for the standard of living of that society. This reality relates to why money conditions in the middle class have become more difficult since the 1950’s. As the rich continue to build larger mansions, people’s standard of living goes up, causing middle class families to spend possibly 50% more on a house than is affordable.

Frank concludes by stating that there are two sides to market economics: the invisible hand of competition which makes companies and their products more ‘fit’, and the helping hand of the group and the government, which is supposed to impose regulations when the cost outweighs the benefits. Chief competitors such as Henry Ford and Steve Jobs can be compared to the individuals within a species that benefit from a small mutation. These mutations not only help individuals, but they also promote the prosperity of the species by leaving copies of that mutation to be passed down to generations to come; in economic terms: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Mmm pie

Welcome to Pi day - a favorite holiday among geeks, according to CNN, whose article is actually quite interesting explaining several interesting uses of pi, including finding planets, DNA folding and drug design.

On a vaguely related note (drug design) next week's MCDB seminar is a little different in that the speaker is from industry.

Thursday, March 22, 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Rathmann Auditorium (1001 LSB)

Timothy W. Behrens, MD, Senior Director, ITGR Human Genetics
Genentech, Inc.

Developing biomarkers for inflammatory diseases

In this presentation, Tim Behrens will discuss overall strategies for developing biomarkers that predict treatment effects in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, and provide examples of the application of this approach in rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.

Short Bio:
Dr. Timothy Behrens moved to Genentech in 2006 following 20+ years in academia, with a focus on three major themes: 1) development of B lymphocytes; 2) genetics of human autoimmune diseases, especially systemic lupus erythematosus; and 3) identification of biomarkers for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Recently, Dr. Behrens has been particularly intrigued by the problem of applying cutting-edge genetic and proteomic technologies into the clinic to answer important questions like 'How active is the disease in this patient?' and 'How likely is this patient to respond to a particular drug?'

Google Doodles

It wasn't that surprising to see Google doodles for Darwin (Feb 12 2009, on his 200th birthday) and for Mendel (July 20 2011 on his 189th birthday) but I was very surprised to see Nicolas Steno show up on his 374th birthday in January this year.
I must confess when I first saw this I wasn't sure whether it was for Steno or William 'Strata' Smith but I like the design. I also like to look at the design notes

Known as the father of stratigraphy and geology, Nicholas Steno worked to understand history by what he could find in the ground. Rather than simply write books about his findings, Steno opted to do his own hands-on research. As an innovative thinker, he disagreed with his contemporaries in thinking that shark-tooth-shaped objects found imbedded in rocks "fell from the sky." Instead, Steno argued that these formations were fossils. His dedication to analysis, critical thinking, and creative thinking make him a great subject for a Google doodle!

Considering Steno's contributions to stratigraphy and geology, I wanted to honor his birthday with a unique take on his work. I knew that the colorful and geeky aesthetic of stratigraphy was the right direction for the doodle, but the team and I weren't sure how to apply it. Should we set the doodle in the middle of the country? Should we relate it to Google culture? Should I just make things up? Below are the exploration sketches.



After consulting a few geology nerds within Google, I decided to set the land in our very own Mountain View! I learned an interesting fact about our home-- there are no dinosaur fossils in the Bay Area (except for Stan of course).

Also staying a little more faithful to stratigraphy graphs, I formed the Google logo as though it was cut from a chunk of three dimensional land. Below are early drafts of the final direction.

Ancestry inference

EEMB's departmental speaker today will be John Novembre. Dr. Novembre is a professor at UCLA. His research combines theoretical population genetics and statistical genetics to investigate questions in evolutionary genetics, focusing on human evolutionary history and using data from second generation sequencing.  The title of his talk is "Ancestry inference and population genomics: Insights to recombination, migration, and rare variant diversity." 


4pm in the MSI auditorium (ground floor) as usual.

Earth's history in cake

You should probably review this fantastic cake before our class on Tuesday. Mmmm cake....

Shiny birds

According to a new study, Microraptors—four-winged, feathered dinosaurs that lived 125 million years ago—sported Earth's earliest known iridescence, as pictured in this illustration.

Recent research suggests the pigeon-size Microraptor's feathers glimmered black and blue in sunlight, like feathers of modern crows or grackles.

The findings are the earliest evidence of iridescence in any creature-bird or dinosaur, said study leader Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin.



National Geographic has the cool pictures and this week's Science has the original article: Reconstruction of Microraptor and the Evolution of Iridescent Plumag.