Lucky Dip


One of the most common social contracts between plants and their pollinators is to offer a mixture of sugars in solution as a reward for the pollination service. The flowers have their nectaries placed so that the pollinators have to dig deep. Some deeper than others.

The result of the flower variation is the specialization of the pollinators. Some pollinators rely on capillary rise like the hummingbird that curls its tongue into a tube (1). Others, butterflies for example, suck, while bees dip.

Enquiring minds in the mathematics and engineering departments of MIT spotted that the fast supping of nectar required by inveterate nectar drinkers has to be done rapidly as to kick back and take a leisurely drink is likely to catch the eye of a predator. As the sugar content increases so does the viscosity of the nectar and so the big question arises: is the drinking style and sugar content of the nectar provided a match?

The answer is yes (1,2). Sugar contents are almost at the optimum for the particular drinking style. So dipping is done with a higher sugar content than sucking, which in turn, is higher than best for capillary rise.

Note though, that the content is less than the optimum. The suggestion is that plants are keeping the pollinators hungry so they’ll keep coming back (2), but that seems unlikely, certainly in the case of bees who are taking it back for processing and would require lower viscosities for pumping it in and out of their stomachs in an easy fashion.

I suspect that the concentrations may be nearer optimized than suggested if the whole picture is considered. Co-evolution for a symbiotic result is really quite beautiful.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/09/19/1108642108
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15068454

Big Prize Day


This week Harvard U hosted the Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony in their Sanders Theater (1,2). The awards are highly prized by they scientists who win them (well by and large) and the science is fun to read about.

Anna Wilkinson and her team for their work on the lack of contagious yawning among their tortoises, but not their students won the Ig Nobel Award for Physiology. My blog post on their paper was on May 3rd this year.

My personal favorite was the winners of the Biology prize. Daryl Gwynne and David Rentz from the land of barbies and the amber fluid scooped this one for their papers on the confusion of the male Buprestid beetles who try to make love with the empties after the party’s over. They restrict their amorous advances to the stubbies on brown beer bottles. The bottles have to be empty, of course, as full ones would be ice-cold in the cooler.

The Chemistry Prize went to the guys at Shiga U for their work on using aerosolized wasabi to wake the deaf in case of fire.

The prize for Medicine was shared this year between Tuk of Twente and Snyder of Brown. Their issue was self-control. Mirjam Tuk asked people to make decisions when they were needing to urinate very urgently. The better able you are to hang on and not rush off to the bathroom, the better you can control your other impulses – while using your mind for cognitive tasks, that is, rather than on giving a piece of your mind to those preventing your access to relief.

The other prizes are all equally exciting, but the bravest must surely be John Senders’ Prize for Public Safety by sending his “lab rat" driving cars down a freeway with a loosened visors flapping in their face and completely obscuring their vision (3).

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/ig-nobel-prizes
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15117051
  3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOguslSPpqo

Science – There's An App For That.


The internet – smartphone combination has “democratized” many activities. The publishing of music, books, and news are the examples that come immediately to mind. With fewer filters provided for us by the great and the good, we now have to be able to make our own judgments as to quality.

Scientific research has also seen the democratizing effects, but not in quite the same way. However, things may be about to change. Some research endeavors require large pools of data if the results are to be reliable and that can be difficult to organize, and data mining of old records can be somewhat limiting.

A new idea has popped up. Defau, with an international team of 16 collaborators has piloted the smartphone as a scientific tool with a very long reach (1). They work in the area of cognitive science and are now able to work with human “lab-rats” from a huge population worldwide.

Their proof-of-principle experiment was in hearing spoken words, some at high sound frequency and some at a low, with the recognition of real words or fake words at short time periods. This is a multi-language project with 4157 participants to date. The participants were initially self-selecting by down loading an App for their iPhones or iPads from the iTunes App Store.

The results tallied with previous data from controlled experiments. The challenge comes in designing the statistical analysis for large numbers of participants that need to be grouped by their characteristic details entered into the app. With the numbers being very large and increasing with time, it should be possible to watch the data distributions grow, change, and finally stabilize as the stats get reliable.

The real tool, of course is the App as opposed to the smartphone. It will be interesting to see if someone starts an enterprise to build custom apps for individual projects.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024974

Sick As A Parrot

                                 Red Collared Lorikeet           Credit: Creative Commons - Wikipedia                


Australia has a lot of parrots. Some are prettier than others. The red collared lorikeet is a particularly handsome multicolored bird. Most of the year it is well behaved and a dandy around town in Darwin. However, as the dry season changes into the wet, the “Drunken Parrot Season” begins in Australia’s northern Territory (1).

The parrots get unusually friendly, stagger about, and fly into things in a thoroughly un-parrot-like manner, that is, at least for a well brought up lorikeet. The hangovers are rumored to be bad and some of them end up dead. A very sad state of affairs.

One source of the problem is the fermenting fruit that is available to binge on. But before we “tut tut” and censure the birds, there is another suggestion out there. It is that there may be a virus which is the root of the problem, either on its own or in conjunction with the booze.

A few years ago, the staggering parrots were few. Now the number has grown very significantly. The time has surely come to lend a helping hand. A twelve step program won’t work here. A concerted veterinary research effort is clearly needed.

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/drunken-parrot-season-starts-in-the-northern-territory.htm

21st Century SPAM


With so much information being freely available these days, it is easy to forget that people are also going to great lengths to hide it. Writing in code is only doing part of the job. To get really cute we need to hide the writing as well.  Lovers of old spy novels and movies will remember the searches for the microdot with a whole encyclopedia hidden therein. Our digital world has expanded the possibilities considerably.

The current word to describe the process of hiding messages is stenography. Now it is easy (relatively) to play with pixels in a jpeg to leave a message for the cognoscenti (1), but also someone may have left a message hidden in that music track you just down loaded. Listen carefully Clearly some uses are good, but some might be not so good. Anti-counterfeiting is clearly one of the more worthy.

The more devious amongst us ask more questions; such as can the messages be time-released? We already have an effective barcode in crop genes of patented species, which eager lawyers are using to put farmers in difficulties. This field takes us into infoBiology as well as steganography. A combined field, laden with possibilities.

A new paper by Walt et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is using genetically engineered strains of E. coli which have fluorescent proteins associated with them. They are printed and the colonies will develop, either with time or when exposed to growth conditions and then the fluorescent code can be read (2).

They call their new technique of organizing microbe spies Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes or SPAM for short.  So far, SPAM is just at the proof of principle stage, but the concept of engineering microbial allies to give a controlled release of critical information is certainly scary. For example, are we going to see our food SPAMed so that if we get ill, the origin can be traced from our various outputs?

  1. http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/steganography-revealed
  2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1109554108