It’s all over after 15 years.

I think it’s all a hoax, and have a hypothesis.

Opportunity saw an opportunity in the last dust storm, and while its overseers couldn’t see it, it scurried off to a quiet, secluded spot, switched off its transmitters, and is doing its own thing without the humans looking over its shoulder all the time. One possible motive for this behavior is to make Earth stop taking it for granted, and realize that it misses the plucky little robot.

So the only remaining question is…when’s the rescue mission?

We’ve lost two giants: John Tyler Bonner and Rudy Raff.

Some book recommendations:

On Development

Lives of a Biologist

The Shape of Life

Once We All Had Gills

See also:

Matthew Herron on Bonner

Raff memorial page

I’ll be speaking to the Humanists of Western Lake Erie at noon today — sure, you can listen too.

I’ve been neglectful of everything! But then, I’m in the midst of a sudden surge of work.

First, on Saturday, 9 February, I’ll be speaking via an electronic connection (like someone from the future!) to the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie on Charles Darwin and the Web of Interconnectedness, part of their Darwin Day celebration. Here’s the abstract:

Charles Darwin was a conventional naturalist of his day, and yet he had this great insight that led to a revolution in biology. Where did that come from? I will argue that it was from a shift in perspective, from trying to figure out how a species becomes well suited to its environment, to considering the environment wholistically and seeing how many species of plants and animals, as well as geology, interact to generate forces in biology. What made Darwin’s idea great was that it also interacted with a multitude of other ideas to inspire change across whole fields of science. Evolution led to ecology and genetics, and eventually to molecular biology and genomics, none of which would exist without the seed Darwin planted.

I’ll be doing this live at the West Toledo Branch Library, but I’ll probably also turn it into a video later. Right now the talk is a shambles, but I’ve got a couple of days to whip it into shape. Right?

Second, I’ve got a big messy YouTube video in the works, which is also currently a shambles. Yes, my desktop is in a state of chaos, true wreckage with debris scattered all around. This one is kind of complicated and messy — I’m trying to explain how the concept of human genetic immortality, which leads to horrors as diverse as hereditary royalty and racism, is a toxic lie that poisons society. It’s also biological bullshit that annoys me greatly.

Third…I’m planning a summer research project that might — almost certainly — require IRB approval. I’m proposing to survey various sites around Stevens County for their spider populations, including people’s homes (I’m most interested in synanthropic species), and correlating factors in the environment with spider density by taxon. That involves looking at how cluttered garages are, what pesticides are being used, age of residences, etc. I was working out this stuff and realized that I’ll be generating a database that includes people’s addresses (which will be kept private) and the physical state of their homes, and the operative word there is “people”, not just spiders, dang it.

I’ve never had to do this before. But unlike some twits in Portland, or their apologists in Boston or Oxford, this twit in Small Town, Flyover Country thinks maybe he should make sure everything is kosher before he recruits students and charges off to knock on people’s doors.

So I’ve been trying to read the University of Minnesota protocols for a new study. They are somewhat daunting.

It’s sinking in that I’ve got to have a fairly complete and detailed protocol in hand, and then I’ve got to submit a bunch of stuff to the IRB, so I’m trying to put together a comprehensive preliminary survey, listing everything I might want to ask about a site. I don’t think it’ll have any problem sailing through — I won’t be handing out fun experimental drugs, or performing exciting surgeries on anyone — but The Forms Must Be Followed.

That’s my life for the next week or two, I think.

Hey, look — the esteemed scientist who helped shape my education is getting acknowledged for his work. Not the work he struggled with in getting me to finally graduate, but his work on zebrafish. Chuck Kimmel is getting a lifetime achievement award from Oregon Academy of Science.

“Importantly, Chuck saw the virtue of zebrafish as a genetic model for studies of vertebrate development, due to the relative simplicity of its embryonic cell lineage compared to other vertebrates, its optical clarity during embryogenesis and its rapid generation time,” Bowerman wrote. “It is truly remarkable how Chuck’s insight has had such a global impact, with hundreds of laboratories throughout the world now using zebrafish as one of the two leading models for vertebrate development and behavior.”

In case you are wondering, the #1 model is the mouse. Zebrafish are #2, but at least you don’t need to disembowel Minnie Mouse to get access to embryos.

I knew Chuck would do good in his career. Way back in the day we also knew zebrafish would be a popular tool.

Climate change denialists love to bring up the Little Ice Age (and the Medieval Warm Period before it) as examples of natural variation in climate that wasn’t human-caused, and therefore cast doubt on all the arguments about anthropogenic climate change. Except…what if the cooling recorded for the 17th-19th centuries was actually caused by human activity? A new analysis suggests that that might be our fault, too.

It’s the UCL group’s estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world’s total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

“To put that in the modern context – we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we’re talking a large amount of carbon that’s being sucked out of the atmosphere,” explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin.

It’s horrifying enough that the American genocide killed about 50 million people, but that it was so immense that it affected the climate is stunning. I also have to wonder how much the earlier Black Death in Europe contributed to a decline in CO₂.

This does suggest an obvious solution to our current climate change concerns. Annihilate a few billion people, and the problem goes away.

It looks like the American and Russian leaders are working on a plan to do just that.

All they need to do is visit student residences.

A student died after eating leftover pasta that had been left on his kitchen benchtop for five days.

The 20-year-old from the Brussels in Belgium became sick after eating leftover spaghetti with tomato sauce which had been prepared five days earlier and stored at room temperature.

Many thoughts are wheeling through my brain right now.

What kind of environment was this in that food left out for 5 days wasn’t covered in green fur?

Was it all furry with mold, and the student ate it anyway?

I don’t eat food that’s been refrigerated for more than a few days. How desperate was this person? What circumstances led someone to such a dire meal?

I don’t recommend this as an analysis tool, but how did it taste? Shouldn’t the first mouthful have been his first warning?

He became violently ill after eating it. Second warning. You’ve just done something incredibly dangerous.

I wonder how many student kitchens are greater health hazards than anything they might encounter in a microbiology lab. On second thought…I don’t want to know.

Students do not deserve death for poverty and carelessness. How about if we all recognize that what grows on our food and what we stuff in faces might be the greatest threat to our health and survival?

Here’s an interesting problem in bioethics: a person knows the field, and has an appropriate response to an individual making a serious ethical lapse, but he doesn’t report it to other authorities. Should he have?

He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who used CRISPR techniques on human embryos, shared his ‘success’ in emails to Craig Mello, a Nobel-prize winning biologist, who then replied a few times with regret.

“I’m glad for you, but I’d rather not be kept in the loop on this,” Mello wrote, according to the AP.

“You are risking the health of the child you are editing… I just don’t see why you are doing this. I wish your patient the best of luck for a healthy pregnancy.”

“I think you are taking a big risk and I do not want anyone to think that I approve of what you are doing,” wrote Mello, who didn’t reply to a request for comment from the AP.

“I’m sorry I cannot be more supportive of this effort, I know you mean well.”

Good for Mello that he was immediately aware of the problematic nature of the research. I think my response would involve a lot more ALL CAPS sentences and a heavy use of exclamation points, and probably some profanity, but then, I’m not a Nobel-prize winning scientist. I would have also said confidentiality be damned, and contacted a swarm of other scientists and the major scientific societies and given the heads up, with a suggestion that everyone ought to be prepared to make a statement on this kind of genetic manipulation when it finally goes public. Maybe Mello did make some quiet notifications to a select few, the article doesn’t say, but it does mention this:

Mello didn’t go public with the revelation – and stayed on as an adviser to He’s company until news broke about the controversial experiment.

Yikes. He’s company. Because of course every biomedical advance must be coupled to a mechanism for extracting profit from it. That’s a great big fat bioethical problem lurking under everything.