Uh-oh

Worrisome news from China:

A person who had close contact with a dead H7N9 bird flu patient in Shanghai has been under treatment in quarantine after developing symptoms of fever, running nose and throat itching, local authorities said late Thursday.

So far, China has confirmed 14 H7N9 cases — six in Shanghai, four in Jiangsu, three in Zhejiang and one in Anhui, in the first known human infections of the lesser-known strain. Of all, four died in Shanghai and one died in Zhejiang.

That first paragraph is the really scary one: it suggests that there may (emphasis on the possibility, it has not been demonstrated) have been human-to-human transmission, rather than just bird-to-human. The latter case is slightly more manageable — avoid ducks. The former case would require avoiding people — not so easy.

The H5N1 bird flu virus, different than this one, had about a 60% mortality rate, but 36% mortality for H7N9 so far is not good. Also, H5N1 was lethal to birds, too — this one seems to be relatively harmless to the bird carriers, while being relatively deadly to infected humans.

My morning so far

  • Cough myself awake. (Fifth cold in the last six months.)
  • Dodge call from collection agent.
  • Make coffee. Note I’m out of coffee, reassess budget for earlier trip to grocery store.
  • Read the below-quoted about myself in comments in this article about divisions in the environmental movement:

    What we don’t know, is how much oil and gas/ Koch money Steingraber and Clarke are getting.

  • Dodge call from different collection agent.

How’s your day going?

Reddit: working hard to bury their reputation ever deeper in the slime

A new tasteless meme is spreading across Reddit: good girl college liberal. As usual, I think you can guess what makes someone a “good” girl: it’s the willingness to do anything the guy with a copy of photoshop wants her to do. And what makes her a “college liberal”?

She’s topless.

I’ve never known that to be a common characteristic of women in college, liberal or otherwise, but as we all know, reality never interferes with a misogynist’s fantasies about how women should behave.

I’ve included an example below the fold. Breasts are blurred out, but you might still want to be careful about flashing the picture around the workspace.

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John Logsdon hits the big time

Last night at #nwc36 we were talking about evodevo, and one of the topics that came up was the importance of Drosophila reasearch in providing the foundation for comparative genetic analysis…which led to Sarah Palin. Remember Palin’s ignorant mockery of fruit fly research? This is what we get from the Republican party.

Now Michelle Malkin’s blog chimes in with a similar complaint. John Logsdon got an NSF award to study reproduction in snails. WASTE OF MONEY! CUT THE DEFICIT! HOW DARE THEY SPEND MONEY ON SOMETHING SO STUPID!

Malkin’s blogger, Doug Powers, and the majority of the commenters there are embarrassingly ignorant. They quote the award announcement with some annotations.

The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction [just paying for the drinks can end up running into the thousands of dollars over a lifetime – DP] [fucking moron – PZM], yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.

And then doubles down on the cluelessness.

“Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs”? Seriously?

Yes. Seriously. That’s an important question in biology. Selfish stupid libertarian/republican idiots ought to understand this clearly.

Look at it this way, Doug. When you go to reproduce, you — perfect, powerful, independent, self-serving you — need to go to a mere woman and in order to produce offspring, you only pass on half your genes, and they are mingled with half the genes from your partner. That’s what we mean by the cost of sexual reproduction. You don’t get to produce a literal self-made man: you need to cooperate with a partner, and your genome will be diluted with that of some other person. That other person is using YOU as well, parasitizing off the perfect efficiency of your genes to propagate her patently inferior genes.

Any good conservative Republican ought to be outraged at this state of affairs. Think about it: your God, President Ronald Reagan, instead of cloning himself, had to randomize his genes with some other person and produced a son, Ron Reagan, who is a politically liberal atheist. You ought to be throwing far more money at this problem!

Snails are an interesting choice to study this problem because, unlike humans, they have options to either reproduce in that familiar sexual way, or to do it asexually and essentially clone themselves. The question is why any individual would elect to throw away half their genes each time they reproduce.

If Doug Powers can explain that, he could get published in some big name science journal instead of the blog of an ignorant political hack.

Hey, we should study that choice, too, except we haven’t yet found any molluscs stupid enough to have to decide whether they want to be published on Michelle Malkin’s site or not.

What I taught today: O Cruel Taskmaster!

I’m out of town! Class is canceled today! But still, my cold grip extends across the Cascades, over the Palouse, the Rockies, the Dakota badlands, the old homeland of the American bison, the the great farms of the midwestern heartland, to a small town in western Minnesota, where I crack the whip over a tiny group of hardworking students. They’ve been mastering the basics of timelapse video microscopy in the lab this week, I hope, and will be showing me the fruits of their labors on Monday. I’m also inflicting yet another exam on them over the weekend. Here are the questions they are expected to address.

Developmental Biology Exam #2

This is a take-home exam. You are free and even encouraged to discuss these questions with your fellow students, but please write your answers independently — I want to hear your voice in your essays. Also note that you are UMM students, and so I have the highest expectations for the quality of your writing, and I will be grading you on grammar and spelling and clarity of expression as well as the content of your essays and your understanding of the concepts.

Answer two of the following three questions, 500-1000 words each. Do not retype the questions into your essay; if I can’t tell which one you’re answering from the story you’re telling, you’re doing it wrong. Include a word count in the top right corner of each of the two essays, and your name in the top left corner of each page. This assignment is due in class on Monday, and there will be a penalty for late submissions.

Question 1: One of the claims of evo devo is that mutations in the regulatory regions of genes are more important in the evolution of form in multicellular organisms than mutations in the coding regions of genes. We’ve discussed examples of both kinds of mutations, but that’s a quantitative claim that won’t be settled by dueling anecdotes. Pretend you’ve been given a huge budget by NSF to test the idea, and design an evodevo research program that would resolve the issue for some specific set of species.

Question 2: Every generation seems to describe the role of genes with a metaphor comparing it to some other technology: it’s a factory for making proteins, or it’s a blueprint, or it’s a recipe. Carroll’s book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, describes the toolbox genes in terms of “genetic circuitry”, “boolean logic”, “switches and logic gates” — he’s clearly using modern computer technology as his metaphor of choice. Summarize how the genome works using this metaphor, as he does. However, also be aware that it is a metaphor, and no metaphor is perfect: tell me how it might mislead us, too.

Question 3: We went over the experiment to test the role of enhancers of the Prx1 locus which showed their role in regulating limb length in bats and mice. Explain it again, going over the details of the experiment, the results, and the interpretation…but without using any scientific jargon. If you do use any jargon (like “locus”, “regulation”, “enhancer”), you must also define it in simple English. Make the story comprehensible to a non-biologist!

Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I’m evil.

Friday Cephalopod: Our cunning plan exposed

pinksquid

This pretty pink photo that accompanied the article has nothing at all to do with the contents; this can’t be the species involved. But that’s appropriate to the devious nature of the story.

A squid was caught in China that had swallowed a three pound bomb — a live explosive that was later detonated by the local bomb squad.

Just keep that in mind next time you order calamari. If you hear a loud boom from the kitchen, you’ll know the suicide squid have struck again.

Here I Stand; I Can Do No Other

I weigh in on Google Glass at KCET.

The gist:

Some of us come out to the desert to escape the Panopticon that life in the city already is, increasingly. In Los Angeles, Google Glass might be just one more increment of invasion in a landscape already thoroughly colonized by surveillance cameras, red light cameras, random private webcams, smart phone videographers and other such prying eyes. But there are places out here that don’t even have 4G yet. In fact — and you might want to sit down here and swallow that mouthful of coffee — there are some places out here where even the 3G coverage is spotty. We are in the back of beyond here in much of Eastern California.

And we like it that way, mostly.

So by all means, come on out and visit the desert. Bring your recording equipment, whether it’s a shoulder-mounted Steadicam or this latest bit of geek lust from Google sitting on your face. Document your hike. Record that coyote begging for sandwiches. Take video of that gorgeous desert bloom backlit by sunrise. The desert needs all the documentation it can get.

But if you’re talking to me, take that Google Glass off and put it away. If I’m speaking in public — which I do from time to time, offering lectures and poetry readings and such — and see you’re in my audience wearing Google Glass and you haven’t cleared it with me first, I will stop what I’m doing and ask you to put it away or leave. If you’re at an adjacent cafe table facing me and recording in my direction, I will write something derogatory in Sharpie on a sheet of paper and hold it up. I may escalate from there. And I’m not alone.

Read the whole thing.

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