Like always, click for larger.
Disclaimer: This is not supposed to mean evolutionary biologists are hostile to any contrary evidence. It’s a joke. I hate to have to include this, but I know if I don’t this comic will get picked up by some creationist site as proof that we’re all dogmatic Darwinists. Actually, that’s probably going to happen anyway, so oh well.
So a month ago I mentioned that our club would be having a freethinking photo scavenger hunt, where they had to take photos of various atheism and science themed things. I finally have most of the photos from people (still missing some good ones, but I give up) so I’m going to post some of my favorites. Feel free to do this event at with your group too!
Lipid! Randomly ran into an old high school friend who helped us.
6. …the oldest scientific apparatus you can find.
11. …evolution.
Josh is about to be removed from the gene pool.
15. …someone in a lab coat.
This is the artwork you see when you walk into Lilly, the biology building (where I basically live nowadays). Yes, those are the hands of God creating all life on earth. In the biology building. All of the biology professors hate it, and it’s been vandalized and removed multiple times since its been put up.
School starts Monday here at Purdue, so I’ve been trying to get organized. I’m still mildly terrified that this is my senior year. The last three years have gone by so ridiculously fast, and the idea that by December I will be done applying to grad schools is scary…especially since I’m still not sold on any particular places (If anyone knows great scientists studying the genetics and evolution of humans, let me know). Anyway, let’s focus on the present. Here’s what I have in store this semester:
BIOL 500 – Protein Expression (2 credit)
This class has two four hour labs that meet twice a week for six weeks (first third of the semester) and a one hour lab prep on Mondays. I believe all biology majors who needs lab modules have to take this specific one first. Proteins aren’t really my thing, but maybe doing something other than genetics will be novel.
BIOL 542 – Animal Cell Culture (1 credit)
This is another lab with the same format that meets that last six weeks of the semester. Unlike the previous one, you get to choose your other lab modules, and this has a lot to do with gene transfer and making mutant lines, so it sounded pretty neat. Oh, and since I got the lab for DNA Sequencing waived (since I’ve kind of been doing that for the last two years in the lab I work in), I don’t have a lab module the middle six weeks! Hooray!
BIOL 597 – Sex & Evolution (3 credit)
I have been waiting to take this class since I arrived at Purdue four years ago. It’s offered every other year to upper-class men, so that’s why I’ve had to wait so long. Evolution of sexual reproduction? Sexual selection? Mating systems? Human sexual behavior? This is going to be the best class ever. Not to mention it’s with a professor I absolutely love. I also accidentally signed up for the Grad student Recitation, but he told me to stay in there because I would like it better. Yay!
BIOL 441 – Biology Senior Seminar in Genetics (1 credit)
So, I honestly have no idea what’s going on with this class. It has a conflict with Sex & Evolution, and the prof (who I also like) said we could work something out to make up for missing the seminars. What I’ll be doing, I have no idea. I’m talking to him on Tuesday.
PHYS 221 – General Physics, Electricity & Magnetism (4 credit)
I apologize to all the Physics people out there, but – ewwww, physics. Sorry, but I’m really not a fan. Physics was okay in high school – I got A’s, but I found all the math parts insanely boring – but god is it bad at Purdue. It’s one of those huge classes with thousands of students where they don’t really care if you understand anything because they’re just going to curve it 30% at the end so the required amount of people pass. It’s ridiculous. It’s horribly boring and tedious the way they present it. I want to make it clear that I think theoretical stuff ala Elegant Universe is absolutely fascinating, but doing busy-work math problems is not interesting at all. Sigh.
BIOL 498 – Biology Teaching (3 credit)
Like I’ve mentioned way too many times (excited!!) I’ll be teaching a lab class this fall, Cell Structure & Function. Like all intro biology courses at Purdue, the name really doesn’t correlate to what you actually do in lab. It’s a hodge podge of proteins, genetics, evolution, anatomy, and random science skills. Oh, and lots and lots of gel electrophoresis. Lots. My first class is Tuesday, andI have to look over all the information I received about teaching the first lab. Oh, and ironically, my Grad student TAing partner (the two of us teach it together) is also a member of Non-Theists and works in our club advisor’s lab. Small world! Well, maybe not so much in the Biology department.
That’s only 14 credits, which is amazing. I’m usually at 16 to 18, and some of the credits this semester aren’t even taking place all at once, so I hopefully won’t go totally insane like usual. Of course, I’ll have other stuff to keep me busy:
1. Society of Non-Theists, woo! We’re having a ton of events this year, but those are always fun to organize.
2. Research. Trying to finish up two projects and have them submitted to journals before I apply to grad school. Will start working on my Senior Thesis and basically whatever else I can cram in before I graduate.
3. A fun development that I think is awesome – I was suggested by both of the Biology counselors (yay) to a Professor who’s creating a new class. It’s going to be a lab class for honors biology freshmen that gives them real hands on experience with research and teaches them how to think like scientists, rather just go through cookbook experiments to learn the required skills. This semester I’m getting paid to help develop the curriculum, and next semester I’ll be TAing the class! I am super excited about this. I want to be a professor someday, so this is perfect for me. The freshmen labs also need a lot of improvement, so hopefully I can help to make them a better experience.
Still, the fact that this is an easy semester for me should really illustrate what an overachiever (aka, how crazy) I am. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging away. I consider it a break from the insanity. Oh, and I’ll be hanging out with friends and stuff…right. Have to remember to actually have a social life. I bought season football tickets mainly so I go out and do something every couple of weeks – I could care less if Purdue wins or loses. Yeah. …I think this post pretty much illustrates why I’m probably not going to have a boyfriend for a while.
School starts Monday here at Purdue, so I’ve been trying to get organized. I’m still mildly terrified that this is my senior year. The last three years have gone by so ridiculously fast, and the idea that by December I will be done applying to grad schools is scary…especially since I’m still not sold on any particular places (If anyone knows great scientists studying the genetics and evolution of humans, let me know). Anyway, let’s focus on the present. Here’s what I have in store this semester:
BIOL 500 – Protein Expression (2 credit)
This class has two four hour labs that meet twice a week for six weeks (first third of the semester) and a one hour lab prep on Mondays. I believe all biology majors who needs lab modules have to take this specific one first. Proteins aren’t really my thing, but maybe doing something other than genetics will be novel.
BIOL 542 – Animal Cell Culture (1 credit)
This is another lab with the same format that meets that last six weeks of the semester. Unlike the previous one, you get to choose your other lab modules, and this has a lot to do with gene transfer and making mutant lines, so it sounded pretty neat. Oh, and since I got the lab for DNA Sequencing waived (since I’ve kind of been doing that for the last two years in the lab I work in), I don’t have a lab module the middle six weeks! Hooray!
BIOL 597 – Sex & Evolution (3 credit)
I have been waiting to take this class since I arrived at Purdue four years ago. It’s offered every other year to upper-class men, so that’s why I’ve had to wait so long. Evolution of sexual reproduction? Sexual selection? Mating systems? Human sexual behavior? This is going to be the best class ever. Not to mention it’s with a professor I absolutely love. I also accidentally signed up for the Grad student Recitation, but he told me to stay in there because I would like it better. Yay!
BIOL 441 – Biology Senior Seminar in Genetics (1 credit)
So, I honestly have no idea what’s going on with this class. It has a conflict with Sex & Evolution, and the prof (who I also like) said we could work something out to make up for missing the seminars. What I’ll be doing, I have no idea. I’m talking to him on Tuesday.
PHYS 221 – General Physics, Electricity & Magnetism (4 credit)
I apologize to all the Physics people out there, but – ewwww, physics. Sorry, but I’m really not a fan. Physics was okay in high school – I got A’s, but I found all the math parts insanely boring – but god is it bad at Purdue. It’s one of those huge classes with thousands of students where they don’t really care if you understand anything because they’re just going to curve it 30% at the end so the required amount of people pass. It’s ridiculous. It’s horribly boring and tedious the way they present it. I want to make it clear that I think theoretical stuff ala Elegant Universe is absolutely fascinating, but doing busy-work math problems is not interesting at all. Sigh.
BIOL 498 – Biology Teaching (3 credit)
Like I’ve mentioned way too many times (excited!!) I’ll be teaching a lab class this fall, Cell Structure & Function. Like all intro biology courses at Purdue, the name really doesn’t correlate to what you actually do in lab. It’s a hodge podge of proteins, genetics, evolution, anatomy, and random science skills. Oh, and lots and lots of gel electrophoresis. Lots. My first class is Tuesday, andI have to look over all the information I received about teaching the first lab. Oh, and ironically, my Grad student TAing partner (the two of us teach it together) is also a member of Non-Theists and works in our club advisor’s lab. Small world! Well, maybe not so much in the Biology department.
That’s only 14 credits, which is amazing. I’m usually at 16 to 18, and some of the credits this semester aren’t even taking place all at once, so I hopefully won’t go totally insane like usual. Of course, I’ll have other stuff to keep me busy:
1. Society of Non-Theists, woo! We’re having a ton of events this year, but those are always fun to organize.
2. Research. Trying to finish up two projects and have them submitted to journals before I apply to grad school. Will start working on my Senior Thesis and basically whatever else I can cram in before I graduate.
3. A fun development that I think is awesome – I was suggested by both of the Biology counselors (yay) to a Professor who’s creating a new class. It’s going to be a lab class for honors biology freshmen that gives them real hands on experience with research and teaches them how to think like scientists, rather just go through cookbook experiments to learn the required skills. This semester I’m getting paid to help develop the curriculum, and next semester I’ll be TAing the class! I am super excited about this. I want to be a professor someday, so this is perfect for me. The freshmen labs also need a lot of improvement, so hopefully I can help to make them a better experience.
Still, the fact that this is an easy semester for me should really illustrate what an overachiever (aka, how crazy) I am. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging away. I consider it a break from the insanity. Oh, and I’ll be hanging out with friends and stuff…right. Have to remember to actually have a social life. I bought season football tickets mainly so I go out and do something every couple of weeks – I could care less if Purdue wins or loses. Yeah. …I think this post pretty much illustrates why I’m probably not going to have a boyfriend for a while.
A recent study by the University of Rochester Medical Center has found that the same chemical used to color blue M&Ms and blue Gatorade can also be used to heal spine injuries. The chemical, Brilliant Blue G (BGG) blocks P2X7, known as the “Death Receptor.” This stops the signal that tells motor neurons to undergo apoptosis (cell death). When rats with spinal cord injuries were injected with BGG, they were able to walk again with a limp.
How awesome is that?
And BGG has the added benefit of making rats extra adorable. They go from this:
To this:
Want. Now.
I’m feeling much better now after resting. Took a five hour “nap” after making that last post at 9am. I could have slept longer, but I didn’t want to completely destroy my sleep schedule. A friend I hadn’t seen in five months ended up randomly calling me to tell me he was passing through town, which forced me to actually get dressed and stop being a cranky zombie. Was great to see him though, and human interaction + delicious middle eastern food woke me up. I then proceeded to sleep eleven hours last night, which put me at about the total necessary sleep for the last two days. Had insane Harry Potter dreams involving Snape running around crying with smeared eyeliner/mascara running down his face, me as Hermione being annoyed at people asking for my help in finding books in the library (Do I look like their wizarding Dewey decimal system?!?!), and me “off set” as Hermione joking with Daniel Radcliffe how I really should have been allotted a love scene with Snape…and then Alan Rickman walks by chuckling and I die of mortification. Hooray messed up dreams!
My left eye also seems completely unwilling to focus today, despite my being up for two hours already. I’d like to chalk it up to the messed up sleep schedule, but the whole inability to focus in the morning thing has been happening more and more lately. So have the headaches, the squinting, the… yeah, I really need to go see an eye doctor. Last time I went was four years ago, and he said I would need glasses sometime in college. Well, I’m about to be a senior in college, so I’m pretty sure I’m doomed. I really don’t have anything against glasses* other than it will complete my transformation from Uber Nerd to Nerdica, Queen of the Nerds.
Hmmm…glasses may not be that bad after all.
*Contacts are right out since my eyes are super sensitive and just the sight of someone adjusting their contact freaks me the hell out.
People assume that parents or schools are going to be where you first learn about sex…but that hardly ever seems to be the case. When I was 11 I had many slightly older online friends thanks to a Pokemon forum (ha) who thoroughly corrupted me. By age 13 I was giggling at goatse, by age 14 I was the resident sex guru – before taking any official sex ed class. And I don’t mean the kid who spreads misinformation about sex – I really knew what I was talking about. It was this fascinating area to me, and I couldn’t stop reading every sex information and sex advice thing I could find online. I wanted to understand as much about it as possible in a scientific way – it didn’t even cross my mind to start trying things out on a practical level for a few more years. It was just another topic to learn, just like history or biology. I didn’t even quite understand how taboo it was in America.
I take great pride in that my Sexpert status has stayed with me – I still have people coming to me with their random questions.
Where did you first learn about sex? And how the hell is it that I somehow thoroughly educated myself using the internet, but your average American teen uses the internet just to learn stupid rumors (can’t get pregnant on your period, etc)? Kids these days. Get off my lawn, etc.
This is post 36 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.
So the previous project I described is what I worked on most of my junior year and is in the process of being transformed into a paper (which I’ll likely get to be first author on – huzzah!). What other lab work have I been doing recently?
This wasn’t even meant to be a full project, but really started out of curiosity (like all good science does). One of my professors, Prof W, was doing some collection in the krat’s breeding season (Novemberish) instead of our usual July. During his trapping he was lucky enough to discover some copulatory plugs.
What the hell are copulatory plugs, you ask? Basically it’s a secretion the male deposits during mating that hardens into…well, a plug that takes time to remove. This makes it harder for the female to mate with another male later for obvious reasons. Or to steal a good analogy from Wikipedia, it’s a biological chastity belt.
Most rodents and some insects use copulatory plugs but they’re still a bit of a mystery. There’s not much literature on them in rodents, and virtually none on kangaroo rats. So we thought, what the heck can we do these things? Hmmm, let’s chop them up and genotype them!
We cut the plug into four segments, so one segment 1 would be the most internal in the female, and segment 4 would be the most external. We digested the plug and extracted DNA, then genotyped the DNA using various genetic markers. We then compared the results for these markers to the genotypes of the females we retrieved the plugs from. The tricky thing here is that you have a mixed sample, something they have to deal with a lot in forensic cases. Think of a rape case – you may have a semen sample, but it’ll have DNA from the female in it too. How do you know which belongs to which when you’re looking at something on a screen?
This is an example of what you would see (each number represents an allele):
Female: 130, 142
Mixed sample: 130, 136, 138, 142
You know that 130 and 142 most likely came from the female, and the new 136 and 138 came from the male. So the male is 136, 138 right? Well…it’s a bit more complicated. Maybe there are two males, and one is 130, 136 and the other is 138, 142. Or maybe one is 136, 138, and the other is 138, 142. What if there are three males?
Thankfully, there are ways around this. One is by comparing the relative strengths of each allele (not going to explain that, sorry). Another is using multiple markers. Another is assessing the probability of the combination using statistics. And finally, you can use the exclusion principle – see what males absolutely cannot possibly have contributed those alleles, and see who’s left and how the puzzle fits together.
I think you can imagine that this project is the ultimate puzzle. It can be a pain in the butt deciphering everything, but it’s really rewarding once you crack the code. And what have we figured out so far? Well, we have a pretty good guess of what male contributed to the plug, and in some cases more than one male appears to have contributed to the same plug, with their contributions separated by location in plug. Aka, the male that got their first formed the most internal part of the plug, and the second male formed the most external.
And before I start talking too much about rodent sex, I’m going to leave the implications of that up to your imagination.
This is post 29 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.
So the previous project I described is what I worked on most of my junior year and is in the process of being transformed into a paper (which I’ll likely get to be first author on – huzzah!). What other lab work have I been doing recently?
This wasn’t even meant to be a full project, but really started out of curiosity (like all good science does). One of my professors, Prof W, was doing some collection in the krat’s breeding season (Novemberish) instead of our usual July. During his trapping he was lucky enough to discover some copulatory plugs.
What the hell are copulatory plugs, you ask? Basically it’s a secretion the male deposits during mating that hardens into…well, a plug that takes time to remove. This makes it harder for the female to mate with another male later for obvious reasons. Or to steal a good analogy from Wikipedia, it’s a biological chastity belt.
Most rodents and some insects use copulatory plugs but they’re still a bit of a mystery. There’s not much literature on them in rodents, and virtually none on kangaroo rats. So we thought, what the heck can we do these things? Hmmm, let’s chop them up and genotype them!
We cut the plug into four segments, so one segment 1 would be the most internal in the female, and segment 4 would be the most external. We digested the plug and extracted DNA, then genotyped the DNA using various genetic markers. We then compared the results for these markers to the genotypes of the females we retrieved the plugs from. The tricky thing here is that you have a mixed sample, something they have to deal with a lot in forensic cases. Think of a rape case – you may have a semen sample, but it’ll have DNA from the female in it too. How do you know which belongs to which when you’re looking at something on a screen?
This is an example of what you would see (each number represents an allele):
Female: 130, 142
Mixed sample: 130, 136, 138, 142
You know that 130 and 142 most likely came from the female, and the new 136 and 138 came from the male. So the male is 136, 138 right? Well…it’s a bit more complicated. Maybe there are two males, and one is 130, 136 and the other is 138, 142. Or maybe one is 136, 138, and the other is 138, 142. What if there are three males?
Thankfully, there are ways around this. One is by comparing the relative strengths of each allele (not going to explain that, sorry). Another is using multiple markers. Another is assessing the probability of the combination using statistics. And finally, you can use the exclusion principle – see what males absolutely cannot possibly have contributed those alleles, and see who’s left and how the puzzle fits together.
I think you can imagine that this project is the ultimate puzzle. It can be a pain in the butt deciphering everything, but it’s really rewarding once you crack the code. And what have we figured out so far? Well, we have a pretty good guess of what male contributed to the plug, and in some cases more than one male appears to have contributed to the same plug, with their contributions separated by location in plug. Aka, the male that got their first formed the most internal part of the plug, and the second male formed the most external.
And before I start talking too much about rodent sex, I’m going to leave the implications of that up to your imagination.
This is post 29 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.
*Minor Harry Potter 6th movie spoilers bellow*
Thanks Mark and Vanessa for standing in for me with a couple nice posts. I don’t thank you, however, for playing Rock Band in the other room while I must continue typing away. Sadness. I had to run to work for a bit to see if my DNA extractions were finished (they weren’t, sigh). No PCR dance was done, but the night is young and I haven’t yet reached my maximum caffeination level.
And if you want to know what working in the lab is like… For those of you who have seen the sixth movie, you know the first potion classroom scene? Where Hermione’s hair comically gets frizzier and frizzier from the fumes and stress (until it’s the level of frizziness it’s supposed to be according to the books)? Yeah, that pretty much happens to me all the time.
…Real post next update, sorry.
This is post 18 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.
