[random attribute] + [subjective, complex phenomenon] → BAD STUDY

You’d think reviewers and journals would figure this formula out. It’s practically a guaranteed recipe for a bad paper. Pick some random feature, like, say, carrying a guitar case. Then correlate it with some messy, subjective and almost impossible to measure property, like sexual attractiveness. Bingo! You are guaranteed to generate statistics, whether positive or negative, and can find an undiscriminating journal somewhere that will publish it. Then, even better, some tabloid will pick up the story and give you publicity with headlines like, “CARRY A GUITAR TO ATTRACT THE LADIES!”

I didn’t pick my examples at random. There actually was a paper titled “Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context”, now retracted, that tried to make that claim with crappy (and probably faked) statistics.

The same author, Nicholas Guéguen, also had a paper retracted previously that claimed that high heels make women sexier. Oh, I should have mentioned — another important element of the recipe is to make sure one of the elements has something to do with sexual stereotypes.

Apparently, Nicholas Guéguen has published about 340 papers using the magic formula. Publishers still haven’t caught on. Or they have, and they don’t care, they just want more garbage to churn.

It’s depressing.

Baby spiders are voracious

As long as I was up early, I darted into the lab and fed my horde of baby spiders. I think I may need to increase their feeding frequency because whoa, they were eager. The tubes they are living in are a dense maze of silk, so you drop a fly in and they are instantly trapped and flailing about, and the babies just home in right away. They’re currently still a little smaller than a fruit fly (but they’re fattening up nicely), making for a nice little battle with a juicy reward at the end.

The adults, on the other hand, are experiencing a bit of seasonal malaise, I think, and are a bit sluggish. I’m going to have to do a major cleanup of their cages and maybe that’ll brighten them up a bit…but that’ll have to wait until after Thanksgiving. I just have too much to dooooooooo…

Sometimes, the Nobel Committee does the right thing

There has been an ongoing and ugly legal battle over rights to the CRISPR/Cas technology for gene editing, which has swiftly become an important tool in the molecular biology toolbox. I think most of us agree that the people most responsible for the discovery are Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, but then the Broad Institute under Eric Lander saw a hot topic, threw bodies at the problem, and rushed to get their fingers in the pie, including, as a sneaky tactic, publishing a review article that downplayed the role of Doudna/Charpentier. It was a nasty, greedy game they were playing, and I’d hoped people would see through it.

Apparently they did, because now Doudna and Charpentier have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Justice served!

It’s clear now that history has stamped Doudna and Charpentier with the credit for this scientific discovery, which is nice. I doubt that that will matter much to the legal system which determines who gets stamped with all the money from the patents, but it is a step forward.

Gladiatorial games, now open to the public

I’ve got a research student, Ade Atolani, and we’ve been in the lab recently, learning the basics…which mainly involves learning how to configure and aim a camera at a spider, throwing in a few flies, and talking about what’s going on during the bloodthirsty gladiatorial games. Then we do a few things to figure out how to transfer files and upload them to YouTube. Here are a couple of examples, nothing too exciting, but just the ordinary routine of getting a student comfortable with observing spider behavior.

This one is an adult:

This is a month-old juvenile:

Maybe we should start selling tickets to the spectacle? We can’t do betting, though, because the spider always wins.

First lab a success!

Hey, I survived my first lab of the year! It’s a bit strange to me that it’s taken until early October to get around to having an in-person lab, but it’s what we had to do, and I would have started two weeks ago if I hadn’t been quarantined. But we did it! It worked!

The students filed in quietly (eerily quietly) and impressed me by doing their work professionally and efficiently. Did I mention that they were quiet? That’s one thing I missed today — usually there’s a lot more back-and-forth and conversation, but we’re not doing group work this year and everyone is wearing masks and staying two meters away from each other, which does seem to squelch the typical lively interactivity. We can keep going, at least.

At least until we all catch COVID-19 and die! No, that won’t happen. It’s just my ongoing existential dread speaking.

Ugh. Lab.

I have to go in to prep a student lab 2 hours before it starts, which means my day starts at 7am today. Gotta get the yeast started, which means at least I’ve got something in common with a baker.

I’ve also got to don my armor, lab coat, goggles, face shield, and mask. Having to wear PPE is the insult added to the injury of an early start.

Oh no! It’s another Argiope video!

For once, the YouTube algorithm is working in my favor. It’s currently saying “Oh, so you like big spiders, do you?” every time I check in, which is factually true, so I keep seeing spectacular Argiope behaviors.

This one tickled me because I have vivid memories of seeing my first Cicada Killer, the Most Terrifying Wasp in the World, as a child. It was perched on a tree branch in my back yard, and it was swiftly and brutally dismembering a cicada, the Most Obnoxiously Noisy Insect in the World, and it was mesmerizing. It would just tear into it sloppily with its mandibles, slurping down slimy crunchy bits, and scraps of chiting and fragments of body parts were raining down out of the tree. I swore I’d never go near one of those monsters.

Yet here’s Argiope, my hero, neatly turning a Cicada Killer into lunch.

The camera work isn’t great, but you can see how effective Argiope‘s web spinning is — she isn’t tying up her prey with single threads, but with these broad ribbons of silk. I’ve seen them immobilize a large grasshopper in seconds.

Mmmm, tapioca…

Here’s another video of Argiope making an egg sac. The difference is that this is a time-lapse, so you can see the whole process in 10 minutes rather than 10 hours.

I particularly like how she squeezes out a big ball of eggs, looking like a mass of tapioca.

The clever spider and its masterful artifice

It’s OK if you skip around. This video of Argiope aurantia making an egg sac is over 8 hours long.

It’s very cool, though. It’s an impressive feat of spider engineering, and the mama spider invests a lot of effort into building that sac and filling it with many hundreds of eggs. My spiders build quicker, simpler sacs, and though I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to catch them in the act — it also doesn’t help that they seem to construct them in the middle of the night.

It also makes me anxious. I’m quarantined — hopefully for only a few days — so I can’t go into the lab to feed the colony, and they’re probably getting hungry. It’s nothing to panic over yet, since spiders are adapted for sporadic prey capture, but if I get bad news on my COVID test, I’m going to have to do something. My idea is to make one visit to the lab at some late hour and bring all the spiders to my house for prolonged care. It’s a lovely home decor idea as well, don’t you think?

I’d much prefer to get positive news in the next day or two so I can get back in the lab without cluttering up my house with more spiders, though.