Eva has been trotting the North-Western Hemisphere visiting science museums, parks, and other science-themed tourist traps. You can follow her travels on our custom Have Science Will Travel Google Map:
Eva cannot visit everywhere. If you are interested in writing a guest post, especially focusing on a science tourism destination in the Eastern or Southern Hemispheres (ie, the continents other than North America and Europe), contact The Finch & Pea here.
cdza have a hypothesis: key changes increase the epicness of a song.
They have evidence*.
*I will grant you that this is more of a demonstration to illustrate a point. At best, it is, in isolation, anecdotal. But, it is fun, and unlike unproven, quack cures for cancer, this has almost no side effects.
François Jacob, a pioneer in our understanding of the regulation of gene expression, passed away on Friday. His work with Jacques Monod was foundational to much of the work in my PhD thesis lab and inspired our approach to understanding splicing regulation in my post-doctoral lab. Like many true insights, his realization about a basic mechanism of biology was so basic and fundamental that seemed like the kind of thing we must have known all along. Maybe we did, but until François Jacob we didn’t know we knew it.
Carl Zimmer tells the story of Jacob’s moment of insight:
In the darkness of the Paris movie theater, Jacob hit on an answer. The repressor is a protein that clamps on to E. coli’s DNA, blocking the production of proteins from the genes for beta-galactosidase and the other genes involved in feeding on lactose. A signal, like a switch on a circuit, causes the repressor to stop shutting down the genes…Perhaps these circuits are common in all living things…But when François tried to sketch out his ideas for his wife, he was disappointed.
“You’ve already told me that,” Lise said. “It’s been known for a long time, hasn’t it?” – Carl Zimmer
*Hat tip to Heidi Smith via PZ Myers.
To me, the take home message from David Brooks’ article “What You’ll Do Next” and Tyler Cowen’s follow-on comment is that “Big Data” is a potentially useful tool, but alone it is not a coherent or inspiring approach to life.
Physicist Sara Callori uses Punnett squares to try to figure out who Sophie’s father really is in Abba’s Mamma Mia?.
One of the interesting implications of her approach is that our expectations would changes with each new casting of the musical.
The Finch and Pea 