Squid suckers

This photo won an honorable mention in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. They were robbed! Grand prize or they’ll rip the judges’ faces off!

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Squidsuckers: The Little Monsters That Feed the Beast
Credit: Jessica D. Schiffman and Caroline L. Schauer, Drexel University
Crunch. The satisfying sound of a crushed cockroach comes from the destruction of its chitin-based exoskeleton. The white, fanglike circles in this electron micrograph of squid suckers are also chitin, but they are not so easily crushed. Their scant 400-micrometer diameter belies the true power of the suckers. A squid uses them to latch onto prey and force the unfortunate creature to its beak, where it is readily slurped down. “They’re just tiny things, but they really keep the beast alive,” says Jessica Schiffman, a doctoral student in material science engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She compiled the image while researching chitin properties in the lab of Caroline Schauer. The iconic film Little Shop of Horrors inspired the color scheme, she says.

This is my body….take….

MAJeff here, playing “host” this Sunday.

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The image above is a bit dated. It was a poster produced for last year’s Folsom Street Fair in San Francsicso. (For those out of the know, the Folsom Street Fair is a queer leather/BDSM festival.) Of course, the tighty-righties got terribly fussy over it.

Now, if you like your christ-cock a bit more hippie-ish, or if you’re a show-tune queen, this might be more up your alley:

That’s from the upcoming film, Hamlet 2.

Of course, you could just get your jesus-jizz the old fashioned way:

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That’s El Greco’s Carducho’s Stigmatization of St. Francis, which is part of a traveling exhibit of Spanish art from the reign of Phillip III. I saw the show in Boston a few weeks ago. Very nice exhibition, overall.

The erotic had been central to many forms of religious expression, not the least of which are the various “saintly ecstasies.” However, move it into popular cultural forms, or turn “the savior” into a black leather queer, and you’ve crossed a whole lotta lines.

Well, pull out a video recorder. Give him a dildo and you can watch Jesus fucking Christ on your DVD player or via streaming video.

And I depart in a cloud of poetry

Once again, we open the floor to the lyrical expression of a few readers who have been inspired by the recent effusion of musical and poetical outbursts here. Fortunately for all, there is no gong hanging on the wall behind you, the judges…although some of these have been pretty good.

First up is a little poem written during the Dover trial by a very famous evolutionary biologist who has asked me to keep it anonymous. No confidence in the meter, huh? Or perhaps fear that declaring such talent will lead to the literary set distracting from the real work of biology?

I think that I shall never see
A theory dumber than ID:
It says that God can make a tree,
A beaver or a honeybee-
That God can simply get a whim
To make the small E. coli swim.
He waves His hand through Heaven’s air
And lo! Flagella everywhere!
But sometimes even God falls down
And makes a poor, pathetic clown:
Yes, poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make Behe.

The second submission is by a well-known atheist who does out herself.

Super Geek
by Greta Christina
(to the tune of “Super Freak” by Rick James)

She’s a very geeky girl
The kind you cheat off of in math class
And she will never let her teachers down
Once she takes her SAT’s

She likes the boys in the chess club
She says that Spassky is her favorite
When she makes a move, it’s rook takes bishop, check-mate
She’s very hard to beat

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
I’d really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright with me, yeah
She’s a Super Geek, Super Geek, she’s super-geeky

She’s a very special girl
From her glasses to her Oxfords
And she will help me study AP math and physics
And AP bio, too

“Live long and prosper”‘s what she says
“Back in the chem lab I’ll be waiting”
When I get there, she’s got Number Two pencils
It’s such a geeky scene

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
I’d really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright with me, yeah
She’s a Super Geek, Super Geek, she’s super-geeky

Judges?

As for me, it’s time for me to flee the country. Ta-ta, until I next find a wireless connection somewhere in South America!

Molecular biology teachers need a rock anthem

For those of you who liked yesterday’s little poem, here’s a somewhat rowdier piece that I was sent.

DNA (to the tune of TNT by ACDC)

Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi!

See me divide up in your nucleus on your micro-screen
I’m all of you that you can get
If you know what I mean
Proteins to the left of me, lipids to the right
Aint got no oxy, but I got moxy
Don’t you start a fight

“Cus I’m DNA
I’m Dynamite
(DNA) I’m wound up tight
(DNA) I have secrets to tell
(DNA) I’m in your cells!!!!

I’m Adenine! Guanine! Cytosine!
And Thymine man!
Nitrogen bases, a phosphate group
Understand?
G binds to C
A binds to T
A double helix plan
I run your life!
I control your cells!
So don’t you mess me around!

Cus I’m DNA!
I’m dynamite
(DNA) And I’m wound up tight!
(DNA) I have secrets to tell
(DNA)I’m in your cells!

It’s too bad we can’t get Bon Scott to sing it for us, but a Brian Johnson version would be great. Somebody send the new lyrics to the band.

Geek cred at the edge of science and culture

I was sent this lovely bit of poetic biology, by someone who said it was written by a colleague at the Salk…maybe she’ll give full credit in the comments. Consider yourself a knowledgeable cell biologist if you get all the allusions.

The p53rd Psalm

p53 is my shepherd, I shall not cycle
It maketh me to lie down in G1
It leadeth me beside still nucleotide pools
It restoreth my genome
It leadeth me past the restriction point for replication’s sake
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the cobalt irradiator
I shall fear no gamma rays, for thou art Guardian of the Genome
Thy amino and thy carboxy termini, they comfort me
Thou maintainest my genomic stability in the presence of mine enemies
Thou annointest my nucleus with p21/WAF1/Cip1/Sdi1/Pic1
my cyclin dependent kinases overflow
Surely pRb phosphorylation and E2F activation shall follow me
all the cycles of my life
and I shall dwell in a non-tumorigenic state until senescence

And if you want some more literary bioscience, here’s some short fiction I was sent.

I also want the future and the past at the same time

I think I have a new favorite t-shirt supplier: Retropolis Transit Authority. Not only are the designs well done and stylish, but any designer who has both “mad geniuses” and “space pirates” as categories (not to mention “demented futuristic housewives,” which I somehow find highly titillating) is a winner in my book.

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Remember: Father’s Day is coming up, and what dad wouldn’t want an “I still want my flying car” t-shirt?

(via Schlock Mercenary)

Portrait of a president

I never thought I could actually like a portrait of George W. Bush, but this one isn’t bad. Go ahead and click on the link — the overall portrait is fine, and you may not notice anything at all disturbing (well, except for the fact that it is George W. Bush) on seeing it. You might not want to click on the links to details in the image, though; this picture is a collage made from pictures of anuses snipped out of porn magazines.

It ain’t pretty, but it’s art that speaks the truth.

Fear the philistine

I am reminded of the whole host of intellectual failings of creationists: it’s not just that they reject modern science, but many of them tend to be brain-damaged peckerwoods who are also incapable of viewing literature and art without squawking in horror, unless maybe it’s a tasteless photorealistic airbrushed Aryan Jesus, or perhaps some cookie-cutter landscape from a hack like Kincade. For a truly sickening example, just look at Ray Comfort’s latest blog entry. He’s reacting to a documentary of Gustav Klimt, which describes his work as “sensuous” and “obsessed with women”, which are all marks of Satan in Comfort’s book. He ends his recitation of the description of the eroticism in Klimt’s paintings with this:

If you too enjoy gazing at the naked female form, you don’t have to go to New York to see similar works. You can find them scrawled on the walls of most public rest rooms.

I know there are lots of good artists around, but they generally don’t scribble on restroom walls. Does this look like something you’d find on a bathroom stall?

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Does this make you think of pornography?

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Here’s a gallery of art by Gustav Klimt. There’s a good reason he’s a famous painter — this is wonderful stuff. Ray Comfort, two-bit rednecked ignoramus that he is, sees none of it, and is so freaking dishonest that he doesn’t dare show his readers any of Klimt’s actual work … so instead he does his own crude rendition of “The Kiss” to illustrate his screed, and just so you don’t miss his point, he crudely slathers wicked words all over it.

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I think you might find Comfort’s work in a seedy, filthy restroom somewhere, but not Klimt’s.

Just so you don’t think this battle is all about nothing but esoteric arguments over details of the interpretation of rarefied biological data, I can’t imagine a clearer example of the broader field of the struggle. This is a war over all of Western culture. What do you want? Klimt or Comfort? Science or lies?