Although biological systems generate beautiful patterns that unfold in space and time, most students are taught biology as static lists of names. Names of species, anatomical structures, cellular structures, and molecules dominate, and sometimes overwhelm, the curriculum and the student. Cookbook labs may demonstrate advanced techniques but have a foregone conclusion. Not surprisingly, students often conclude that biology is boring.

I always liked physics much better than biology, until, after suffering through two semesters of O chem, I took biochemistry. To see how the behavior of biological molecules arose from chemical principles was an epiphany. Unfortunately, that moment in my education was an exception, because much of my subsequent coursework, and the way most biologists I knew practiced science, was focused on identifying the details of structures and the identities of molecules.

So I’m all for this:

Can biology be taught by focusing on unfolding patterns in space and time? Can one also reach students who are repelled by details; are more comfortable with abstractions and clear principles; and who often become mathematicians, physicists, or engineers? The divide between the cultures of biology and the more quantitative sciences is unfortunate because interdisciplinary opportunities are expanding. Engineers are fascinated by self-assembling, self-repairing, and self-replicating nanomachines (2), exemplified by proteins. How can these nanomachines be combined into cell-like modular reorganizing components? What is the basis for multifunctional designs that allow biological organisms to use the same neural control and periphery to flexibly switch among multiple behaviors?

Reference: Learning Biology by Recreating and Extending Mathematical Models, Hillel J. Chiel, Jeffrey P. Gill, Jeffrey M. McManus, Kendrick M. Shaw Science 25 May 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6084 pp. 993-994

Also check out their course page: https://biol300.case.edu

It’s pretty obvious to me that the engineers in the Dune universe would not discuss the design of the ubiquitous ornithopters using metrics designed for fixed wing aircraft like we, apparently, do now. Phillip Burgers and David Alexander have taken a stab at creating a new measure of lift¹ that is readily applicable to fixed wing aircraft, lift generating rotating cylinders, and things with flapping wings (i.e., ornithopters and bats):

For a century, researchers have used the standard lift coefficient C_Lto evaluate the lift, L, generated by fixed wings over an area S against dynamic pressure, ½ρv², where v is the effective velocity of the wing. Because the lift coefficient was developed initially for fixed wings in steady flow, its application to other lifting systems requires either simplifying assumptions or complex adjustments as is the case for flapping wings and rotating cylinders.

This paper interprets the standard lift coefficient of a fixed wing slightly differently, as the work exerted by the wing on the surrounding flow field (L/ρ·S), compared against the total kinetic energy required for generating said lift, ½v². This reinterpreted coefficient, the normalized lift, is. . .the same as the standard lift coefficient for fixed wings, but differs for wings with more complex motions. . .We suggest that the normalized lift can be used to evaluate propellers, rotors, flapping wings of animals and micro air vehicles, and underwater thrust-generating fins in the same way the lift coefficient is currently used to evaluate fixed wings.

Not that the authors actually mention ornithopters in the text, but I think it is pretty obvious where this is all headed.

It should be noted that ornithopter research is actually as old as manned flight research.

NOTES

1. Burgers P, Alexander DE (2012) Normalized Lift: An Energy Interpretation of the Lift Coefficient Simplifies Comparisons of the Lifting Ability of Rotating and Flapping Surfaces. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36732. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036732

We love books. A lot. And we love sci-fi books, new and old. But mostly old.

We’re going to take some of the greatest works of imagination of the 20th Century, and bring them into the 21st, and you can help, by subscribing today!

Common science fiction wisdom has it that the genre became more focused on psychology, sex, and literary sophistication in the 1950’s with the rise of magazines like Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which departed from the stern genre requirements of John Campbell, the impresario of science fiction’s Golden Age who reigned from his perch as editor of Astounding Science Fiction. This common wisdom fails to account for Catherine Moore, whose beautifully written, sensuous stories are centered on characters’ conflicted mental states as they experience desire and seduction. And incidentally, Moore got many of her best stories published in Astounding. In her work of the 1930’s and 40’s, Moore functioned as a bridge between the moody, cosmic horror of Weird Tales writers like H.P. Lovecraft, and the increasingly popular, action-driven genre of Campbellian science fiction.

The characteristic traits of Moore’s fiction are present in her very first published story, “Shambleau”, which appeared in Weird Tales in 1933. “Shambleau” is a fusion of Burroughsian, swashbuckling planetary romance and Lovecraftian horror, with an erotic core that is pure Moore. The hero of the story is Northwest Smith, a typical sci-fi action character, and a roguish opportunist of the type whose best known example is Han Solo. Smith is looking for opportunity on the Martian frontier, when he comes to the rescue what appears to be a girl, “sweetly made and in danger” from a lynch mob. She turns out not to be a girl, but a Shambleau, a hairless alien creature with feline eyes, retractable claws and a “sweet brown body,” who mysteriously always wears a turban. “Shambleau” is a riff on the Medusa story that plays with the conflicted feelings towards women and sex that were undoubtedly experienced by many of the adolescent readers of Weird Tales. Northwest Smith is decked out in the trappings of a manly hero, and yet after his chivalrous rescue of the damsel in distress Smith is drawn into an erotic trap that offers mind-blowing ecstasy at the price of degradation and destruction. Shambleau embodies what a woman is to a nerdy, awkward, pulp-reading fourteen-year-old boy: desirable and dangerous, offering sex that is both enticing and disgusting, as Northwest Smith discovers when he surrenders to the monstrous embrace of the Shambleau:

“In nightmares until he died he remembered that moment when the living tresses of Shambleau first enfolded him in their embrace. A nauseous, smothering odor as the wetness shut around him – thick, pulsing worms clasping every inch of his body, sliding, writhing, their wetness and warmth striking through his garments as if he stood naked to their embrace.”

In the end, our less-than-heroic hero Smith is rescued by one of his Venusian pals, and despite the close call, Smith knows that, should he ever face another Shambleau, he will likely succumb again.

Most of the stories in The Best of C.L. Moore feature a woman who is both seductive and mysteriously alien, often dangerous, usually appearing to be in distress, but in fact never helpless. Moore presents these women to us through the eyes and mental states of the principal male characters, who are usually typical science fiction heroes on the surface, but whose dark, sexual cores are awakened by women who are simultaneously desirable and thoroughly alien. By portraying women as alien beings, Moore manages to co-opt the trademark elements of science fiction to explore erotic desire and even love in a venue that at the time was notoriously hostile to anything that smacked of romance. In “Black Thirst”, we again follow Northwest Smith as he explores a harem of alien women bred for millennia to achieve the madness-inducing ultimate in female beauty. Jirel of Joiry, in “Black God’s Kiss,” is a female warrior who traverses a nightmare landscape worthy of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle visions, in order to achieve revenge on an enemy warrior who physically violated her. Love defeats all barriers in “The Bright Illusion”, in which an adventurer falls fatally in love on a distant planet with a being whose female image is only an illusion generated to enable the hero encounter the alien world without losing his mind. In “Tryst in Time”, a time traveler discovers his blue-eyed true love, and pursues various endangered instantiations of her across the eons. In “Fruit of Knowledge,” the demon Lilith seduces Adam in the Garden of Eden, but she is later displaced by the more submissive and helpless Eve. In these stories, desire is a motive force that often undoes the characters’ heroic pretensions, and it is a force so powerful that it can lead men ecstatically to self-destruction.

Perhaps one reason that Moore was so influential, particularly among those writers who changed the nature of science fiction in the 1950’s, was that she had a rare talent for sustained character development. Her contemporaries in the 30’s and 40’s, particularly Asimov, van Vogt, and Heinlein, sustained their stories with action and rational puzzles, whereas Moore, clearly influenced by Lovecraft, could compellingly focus on the gradual transformation of her characters’ mental states as plots moved towards their climax. This is evident in “No Woman Born” (1944), a story which is clearly one of the finest ever published in Astounding Science Fiction during its peak years in the 30’s and 40’s. This story again features a woman as something alien. Deirdre was a beloved and famous dancer nearly killed in a theatre fire, but her brain was salvaged and transplanted into a robot body. This body is not a synthetic recreation of a human body; it is merely suggestive of one. Deirdre now has no face (and thus no facial expressions), no hair, and no skin, but the robot is nevertheless skillfully shaped to evoke Deirdre’s former grace and beauty. The story turns on the question, who is Deirdre now?

To the scientist who built the body, Deirdre is his creation, “an abstraction”, like Frankenstein’s monster, the realization of his idea. Deirdre’s former manager, through whom the story is told, tries to see in this cyborg the beautiful woman he knew before. But Deirdre is neither abstraction nor human; she is something completely new, an isolated human brain coupled to the super-human potential of her new body. Deirdre eventually refuses to limit herself to the images that others project on her. As in her earlier stories, Moore presents the alien woman through the eyes of others; we don’t know what happens in her mind, locked in horrible isolation within its metal vault. The reader is left wondering until the end what Deirdre is feeling, when she is finally revealed to be fully human and willing to confront the unexplored possibilities of her new life.

The Best of C.L. Moore is one of the very best collections of Golden Age science fiction stories in my collection. It demonstrates that science fiction’s enormous potential for expression was well-realized even during its mawkish age, and that the later, more psychological developments in the genre had very solid roots in earlier work. And like all great science fiction, these stories are a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Find more Finch & Pea science fiction here.

“Each of them thought of very big ideas,” she told me. “And each of them was very good at translating those ideas into testable hypotheses. And then each of them was very good at developing the technology that’s necessary to test the hypotheses. And to have all three of those capacities is really remarkable.” Also, although “they were both very data-driven, neither was afraid to say outrageous things about their data, and neither was afraid to be wrong.”

If you’re never wrong in science, you’re not generating enough ideas.

Neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides which act on the central nervous system of insects with lower toxicity to mammals,  are among the most widely used insecticides worldwide, but recently the uses of some members of this class have been restricted in some countries due to a possible connection to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD),  which is the result of the European honey-bee populations collapsing.  Lobbyists and spokespeople for the German chemical company Bayer, the producer of the pesticide Imdacloprid, are disputing such claims, while other scientists and activists blame these exact companies for destroying important links in our food chain.”

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

* via access2research

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate duck is me
I’ve got a patch
I’ve got a bill
I’ve got a curvy sword
I’ve got oily feathers
So no water gets on board
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate duck is me

via Tumblr

The press release:

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have made a discovery that once again forces us to rewrite our textbooks. This time, however, the findings pertain to RNA, which like DNA carries information about our genes and how they are expressed. The researchers have identified a novel base modification in RNA which they say will revolutionize our understanding of gene expression…Although mRNA was thought to contain only four nucleobases, their discovery shows that a fifth base, N6-methyladenosine (m6A), pervades the transcriptome.

Larry, as a textbook writer, is understandably skeptical of claims that we have to rewrite our textbooks. He digs back into the classic literature:

The most prevalent internal methylated nucleoside in eukaryotic mRNA is N6-methyladenosine (m6A). This modified nucleoside is found in RNAs of higher eukaryotic organisms (1-6), plants (7-9), and viruses (3, 10-12), and occurs at two specific sequences: Gpm6ApC and Apm6ApC (13-17).

In addition to being poorly written and blatantly wrong about context, the breathless reporting in press releases like this one damage trust science by contributing to the mistaken impression that it’s common in science to show that everything we ever thought we knew about X just wrong, wrong, wrong!

MC Shanahan is on tour today. So, y’all get stuck with me. In what may be a repressed hope that you will follow the back links to my stand-up comedy set at Bright Club Cambridge. Kind of sad, eh?

Bright Club featured the comedy musical stylings of Rosalind Peters, and we were featuring what was undoubtedly the nerdiest song of the night, “The Philosophy Song”. I’m pretty sure the lyrics were composed after Ros asked, “What rhymes with Spinoza?”