Moss cam

Sadly it looks like the moss cam may be defunct. After seven years of daily service it looks like live updates have ceased. However the moss cam web site is still there and will answer all your questions from, 'what does it look like at night?' (dark) to 'how much did it cost' ($1832.72) and 'what happens if a chipmunk comes by?' (cool pictures). Check out the hydrated and dehydrated pictures of the moss.

Orchid bee trade-off

Orchid bees use their extraordinarily long tongues to drink nectar from the deep, tropical flowers only they can access. Researchers have long suspected that this kind of exclusive access came with a mechanical cost. According to common sense and a classic law of fluid mechanics, it's just plain hard to suck thick, viscous nectars up through a long straw.

A paper in The American Naturalist confirmed this prediction for the first time in 2007: orchid bees with long tongues suck up their nectar more slowly than bees with shorter tongues.

Scaling of Nectar Foraging in Orchid Bees

It's all one song

"It's all one song." -- Neil Young replying to a man in the audience, who said "It all sounds the same!"
I just discovered WikiQuote and it's there so it must be true.

Anywhow I'm probably the only person who thinks this is a good metaphor for evolution, particularly macroevolution, but this story made me think of it again.

In a finding that overturns conventional wisdom, scientists are reporting the first discovery of the female sex hormone progesterone in a plant. Until now, scientists thought that only animals could make progesterone.

"While the biological role of progesterone has been extensively studied in mammals, the reason for its presence in plants is less apparent." They speculate that the hormone, like other steroid hormones, might be an ancient bioregulator that evolved billions of years ago, before the appearance of modern plants and animals.

It seems to me we shouldn't be too surprised by the discovery of progesterone in plants because it is, after all, all one song.

Occurrence of Progesterone and Related Animal Steroids in Two Higher Plants

J. Nat. Prod., January 28, 2010

Walking with Tetrapods

This week's Nature Video is also cool, and relevant to class.

The fossilized remains of 395-million-year-old footprints in Poland have turned back the clock on the evolution of four-legged creatures, or tetrapods. The finds, reported this week in Nature, are 18 million years older than the earliest confirmed tetrapod fossils.

Scientists are getting better at getting their stories out (or at least some journals are better at presenting stores to the media in digestible form)

Read the original Article, the accompanying News and Views, related news story and listen to the Nature Podcast.

Weekend video

For most of human evolutionary history, before the advent modern running shoes, humans ran either barefoot or in minimal shoes. A comparison of the biomechanics of habitually shod versus habitually barefoot runners suggests that running barefoot is not only comfortable but may also help avoid some impact-related stress injuries. On the cover, the feet of Kenyan adolescents who have never worn shoes and run up to 20 km a day. Their feet are healthy and strong - and until recently, everyone’s feet looked like this.

I was going to leave this until next quarter but since being on the cover of Nature last week barefoot running is attracting even more attention from the media. Nature is actually a little slow to this bandwagon - just this week I've caught two CCS students indulging in barefoot escapades.

Nature have a nice series of short videos that illustrate some of their papers.



This actually reminds me of a story I read recently, in Wired magazine I think. Some researchers were interested in using force platforms to help rehabilitate stroke victims by giving them feedback on balance and forces. The type of force platform that would typically be used, like the one used to calculate the forces on the foot in the study above, can cost well over $10,000. Looking for a cheaper alternative they dismantled the balance board available for skateboarding and balance games on the Nintendo Wii system. They found the accelerometers and strain gauges more than adequate. Thanks to the Internets I can confirm that this half remembered second hand story is actually true.

Wonder

Just about everyone will agree that trees are made from sunlight, water, and soil the trees sucks up from their roots. But the surprising truth is that trees are made from air! Trees are solar-powered machines that convert air into wood. Why is it that, despite the fact that photosynthesis is one of the most widely taught subjects in science, so few people really understand the central idea underlying this system?

Watch the video here.

I've posted this to the blog before but I think it is worth a repost. I've thought about this video a lot and I think the point it makes is spot on. Somewhere in all the teaching, especially in big intro classes, we forget to include the wonder. Sometimes you really do need to stop and see the wood in the trees.

West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference

The 35th Annual West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference will be held at Santa Clara University on April 24, 2010. Register and/or submit an abstrac at the website http://www.scu.edu/cas/biology/wcbsurc/index.cfm

1. Registration: It is time to register for the 2010 Conference. Our website includes the registration form and the website allows you to pay via credit card. http://www.scu.edu/cas/biology/wcbsurc/index.cfm

2. Abstract Deadline: March 1, 2010. Please read the guidelines for preparing your abstract on our website. E-mail abstracts to me: weisinger@scu.edu

3. Background: On Saturday April 24, 2010 the 35th Annual West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference will be held at Santa Clara University. Two other Santa Clara faculty and I founded the Conference in 1975 and Santa Clara exclusively hosted the Conference for the first decade. Over the years the Conference has grown in size and prestige and now rotates between Northern and Southern California. Each year about 100 undergraduate students along with their faculty sponsors attend the Conference and students give oral presentations or posters of their original research. Typically we have a broad spectrum of undergraduate students from large universities like Stanford and UCLA to smaller colleges like Occidental and Westmont.

4. Keynote: This year's keynote speaker will be Dr. Christopher Field, Director of the Carnegie Department of Global Ecology. Dr. Field, as chair of an international research team on global warming, shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007.


5. We will send e-mails to remind you of abstract deadlines, etc.