Science Caturday: I smell a whatchamacallit

noms

A team of scientists led by Jonas Olofsson published a study this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, describing research that identified two areas in the brain which link odor to language. Using fMRI and other techniques, researchers were able to map areas of the brain which provide the interface between olfactory and verbal cues. The team hopes to use the findings to advance research into dementia. We hope they go on to experiment on cats, whose superior sense of smell is, alas, joined to a somewhat weaker verbal ability, particularly with regard to the word “the”.

Would you outsource your gel to a gel-informatician?

Sean Eddy explains why sequencing is replacing many older assays, and why biologists need to learn to analyze their own data.

“High throughput sequencing for neuroscience”:

If we were talking about a well-defined resource like a genome sequence, where the problem is an engineering problem, I’m fine with outsourcing or building skilled teams of bioinformaticians. But if you’re a biologist pursuing a hypothesis-driven biological problem, and you’re using using a sequencing-based assay to ask part of your question, generically expecting a bioinformatician in your sequencing core to analyze your data is like handing all your gels over to some guy in the basement who uses a ruler and a lightbox really well.

Data analysis is not generic. To analyze data from a biological assay, you have to understand the question you’re asking, you have to understand the assay itself, and you have to have enough intuition to anticipate problems, recognize interesting anomalies, and design appropriate controls. If we were talking about gels, this would be obvious. You don’t analyze Northerns the same way you analyze Westerns, and you wouldn’t hand both your Westerns and your Northerns over to the generic gel-analyzing person with her ruler in the basement. But somehow this is what many people seem to want to do with bioinformaticians and sequence data.

It is true that sequencing generates a lot of data, and it is currently true that the skills needed to do sequencing data analysis are specialized and in short supply. What I want to tell you, though, is that those data analysis skills are easily acquired by biologists, that they must be acquired by biologists, and that that they will be. We need to rethink how we’re doing bioinformatics.

I would add this: it takes some time to learn, but in the end it’s not that hard, people. Students in chemistry and physics routinely learn the requisite skills. We need to educate biologists who expect to do programming, math, and statistics.

Science for the People: Understanding Neuroscience

sftp

Blue Pyramidal Neuron - original watercolor painting on clayboard by Michele Banks (All Rights Reserved - Used with Permission)
Blue Pyramidal Neuron – original watercolor painting on clayboard by Michele Banks (All Rights Reserved – Used with Permission)

This week, Science for the People is we’re looking at the ways we try to understand the inner workings of the brain. They talk to University College London researcher Cliodhna O’Connor about patterns in the way the public interprets neuroscience news. And they’ll ask Duncan Astle, Program Leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, about “neuromyths,” popular misconceptions about the way the brain functions.

*Josh provides research help to Science for the People and is, therefore, completely biased.

What a cute baby. . .solar system

The folks at Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) just released an insanely detailed image of a developing star and the surrounding disc of material that may become its planetary system.

Credit: ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); C. Brogan, B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Credit: ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); C. Brogan, B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Phil Plait explains why this image is more than aesthetically interesting at Slate.

From what we understand of planet formation, a star and disk this young shouldn’t have a planetary system evolved enough to create these gaps. That’s a bit of a shock. Research published in 2008 also indicated the presence of a new planet, and I’ll be curious to see how this new observation fits in with that work as well. – Phil Plait

HT: Amy Shira Teitel

The Art of Science: Simulating the Sun

John Gerrard, Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014

John Gerrard, Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014

I thought that John Gerrard’s Solar Reserve installation, currently on display on the plaza of New York’s Lincoln Center, was a sort of film, relaying images in real time from a solar power plant in Nevada. It is not.

Gerrard didn’t just set up cameras at the power plant. He sent someone to photograph every detail of it, from the thousands of mirrors to the scrubby little plants, and then he (and a team of programmers) recreated the whole thing as a computer simulation, using a game engine called Unigine. The artwork will play 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on an enormous LED wall until December 1.

The piece – its full name is Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) – simulates an actual power plant known as a solar thermal power tower, surrounded by 10,000 mirrors that reflect sunlight upon it to heat molten salts, essentially forming a thermal battery which is used to generate electricity. The work mimics the actual movements of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky, as they would appear at the Nevada site, with the thousands of mirrors adjusting their positions in real time according to the position of the sun.

It’s worth having a look at this short video, in which the artist explains how the piece unfolds, following the light as it travels among the mirrors, out into space and back to the landscape, and allows a brief look at the hypnotic effect of the artwork.