Trumpeting The Coming Of Spring


A cool, grey morning, but with the promise of spring close, almost close enough to reach out and touch. The winter colors of dark red and green are changing to bright yellow and pink as daffodils and prunus species start to flower and raise the mood.

 While admiring an extensive daffodil collection in full bloom, the information that their trumpet controversy has been settled last week (1) came to mind. In the nick of time for St. David’s Day, when some of the Welsh wear their daffodils with pride, Prof. Scotland settled the issue that the trumpets are a new organ and not related to the petals or the stamens. Most lowly flowers have only four organs, but the daffodils have five, which makes then special. Perhaps this new distinction will have encouraged the rest of the Welsh to eschew wearing their rather odiferous leeks in favor of their more aristocratic flower. It is now four days past the big day and I can find no reports on any of the news outlets on this important issue.

Heronry Startup
The geese are spreading out and it won’t be long before they start to get broody. No sign of the ospreys yet. Last years nest is still the same pile of twigs as ever sitting ready for some new clutter. The herons though, are getting on with it and have the start of their heronry well under way with four birds and two nests in the uppermost branches of a stand of very tall trees. Penthouses are still popular amongst the beautiful people.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-12598054

Tread Carefully


The Brazilian rain forest would seem to be an ideal place to reside if one were a carpenter ant. Not only is there lots of dead and rotting wood to fashion city galleries from, but the range of exotic and rare hardwoods available, would make wood artists and makers of musical instruments green with envy.

Living quietly in the jungle, however, has its dangers. Whilst trotting about the forest floor on their daily business they can pick up fungal spores. It is much more serious than our human athlete’s foot. Hughes and Evans (1) have identified four new species of the fungus that infects specific variants of our ant buddies.

It is called the “Zombie-Ant Fungus” for good reason Infecting the ants, the fungus releases chemicals, which kill the ant and then it has the temerity to sprout a stalk with a fruiting body from back its host’s head. This would be bad enough, but the chemicals that are killing the ant, are slow acting, mind altering drugs which cause the ant to wander around and finally clamp its mandibles onto the vein on the underside of a leaf in a death grip. A devilish plan that enables the fruiting body to sprinkle its spores widely over the forest floor and so catch the maximum number of unsuspecting ants. Whole colonies can end up decorating the underside of bushes. A sight terrible enough to put any self-respecting ant off her dinner.

Carpenter ants are widespread globally and an Asian family, Camponotus saundersi, can get very excitable and insist on having the last word. They have large mandibular glands that run along their body and when sufficiently irritated, their head explodes, spraying the contents of the glands over all and sundry. Their tormentors are covered in a sticky concoction of toxic chemicals leaving no options for negotiation or apology.


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017024

Beneath The Surface


The shrimpophiles amongst us have spent the past year worrying if the Gulf shrimp population is going to recover from the last year’s oil spill disaster. These gourmets of decapods are well aware that not all shrimps are equal and those from the Gulf are particularly plump and delicious. However, life in the shrimp world has other matters of moment than whether or not they are ready to be turned into Southern Fried Shrimp, Cajun Shrimp or for the special occasion, Coconut Shrimp. Today’s BBC News headlines just two of these (1).

Firstly, the good news is that Dr. Jamieson of the U of Aberdeen has given his name to a shrimp, Princaxelia Jamiesoni, in honor of their first meeting. The shrimp is two and half inches long, white and lodges on the bottom of the northwest Pacific, and was generally minding its own business before being thrust into the limelight.

Next we turn to an invasion of shrimp from the dark side – the Black Sea is their base and they go by the name, Dikerogrammarus villosus, which is enough to strike terror into us humble hunt and peckers, let alone any entrant in a Spelling Bee. Brigades of these warriors have marched along the bottom of the Danube, down the Rhine and then sneaked rides across the Channel. The have spread across the UK from Cambridgshire in the east to Cardiff in the west. At an inch long, they are formidable opponents that slaughter the peace loving native freshwater shrimps and insect larvae, gorging on some and leaving the bodies others to rot where they fall. The surface of the reservoir or river may look peaceful, even idyllic in the early spring sunshine, but the sun’s reflection merely serves to hide the mayhem from our view. Isn’t it always so when we view things at a distance?


1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/

Small World


Nanotechnology has been a big buzzword for a few years now, and is viewed by some as an evil genie, which should be stuffed back in the bottle, and by others as a good genie which ensures research funding at a level they could only dream of previously. In reality nature has been dabbling with it long before we had a catchy name that we liked. One of its minor attractions is its ‘emperor’s new clothes’ character of being able to observe an effect without actually seeing what’s causing it. Of course there are expensive units like electron microscopes, with which we can peer at desiccated samples, but nothing as simple and cheap as an optical microscope that we can look down and see things wriggling and dancing about.

Well, we have moved one large step forward this week with the publication by Dr. Wang from U of Manchester and an international team (1) who have given their specimens a liberal sprinkling of little glass beads, which act as super lenses giving them an extra eightfold magnification. So ‘Hey Presto’ and a sprinkling of this magic dust, your humble lab microscope is turned into a state of the art nanoscope, opening up a new world of excitement of watching small things misbehave in real time rather than studying their dried out remains. We shall become nano-behavioral anthropologists rather than nano-archeologists – a very exciting prospect.

Geek notes:
The magic dust is silica microspheres about 5 microns in diameter.
A micron is a millionth of a meter, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
The transparent microspheres focus the evanescent light waves that occur at their interface, and the normal lens system can pick up the image with a resolution of about fifty nanometers.
Evanescent wave is a wave component that rapidly looses brightness as it travels.

1. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n3/full/ncomms1211.html

Getting Down To Business


For most of us, our interest in woodlice or pill bugs decreases after the age of five. They are just there. Under stones or scurrying along the bottom of a wall, we see them as an untidy blemish on our orderly arrangement of nature.  Their vital role in the decomposition of organic material and their important contribution to soil health, is not a topic for discussion at the dinner tables of the chattering classes. I, for one, had given little thought to the social aspirations of the little bugs. But they have been much studied, and a paper by Devigne et al (1), which was published last Friday, looked at their gregarious nature.

Their social networking skills work at long range, and they quickly get the word out that there is a meeting to attend. Dark corners are preferred for large meetings, and like most large meetings, they tend to take a long time to get through the business. Brighter lights result in the quorate rules being relaxed, smaller meetings are held and the business dispensed with more rapidly. There is an important life lesson in there for all of us I think.


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017389

Cat's Cradle


The current issue of Discovery News introduces us to a pre-print of a paper by Kotrschal et al of U Vienna describing the social interaction between people and their cats. Note that I report it was done with their cats, and not their neighbor’s cats who bury little messages in your newly planted seedbed or regard your new bird table as their personal fast food take away outlet. There were 41 cats taking part that consented to their owners being involved and the depth and nature of their bonding being discussed.

Because food is more than just mere material for sustenance, but also has a role in showing affection the, cat-owner interactions took on a similar character to those of a preverbal baby-parent response. The study then showed that the cats tended to choose the female human over the male because they were more readily manipulated and more responsive. Of course this is not a one-way street, the cats show their gratitude by allotting more petting time to the women. Its not that men were excluded, but just that the cats have sussed out who is more likely to go to the refrigerator and pull out cat food rather than a beer. We men clearly have to get more in touch with our feminine side if we’re going to be considered for promotion in the petting order.

The alignment of goals and objectives is strongest between young active cats who are lucky enough to manage extroverted women. Here a simple flick of an upright tail can illicit the correct response whether it is opening the door to the garden, opening the door to the 'fridge or providing a lap for a nap. Tomorrow morning, when I go to the gym, I will make sure that when my personal trainer tells me to do twenty press-ups to warm up, I will be able to explain to her that I’ve been excused such hard effort and give her a note from my cat to confirm.

A Little Winner


A very exciting result came in from the Osaka Marathon this morning.  After only 2.27 days of fierce walking, the winning margin was a mere one-second. The robot race was decided during the final few laps as the winner, Robovie-PC, took a firm grip on her capacitors and powered on whilst the erstwhile leader, Robovie-PC Lite was dithering around and titivating her transducers, with the result that a comfortable lead evaporated like snow in summer.

Sustenance, in the form of freshly prepared batteries, was available during the race, but chivalry in the form of a hand up to a fallen robo-lady was not allowed and would have resulted in instant disqualification. The racecourse was indoors, otherwise rain showers would have made the carrying of umbrellas essential and this would have slowed the pace.

The winner’s stats are her weight is 2.4 kg and her height is 40 cm. Her other key measurements are a secret between her and her engineer. We would, of course be too polite to pry further. An excellent video of the event can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12589607
where you can see these vertically challenged robo-ladies hurrying along with little 7 cm steps reminiscent of old-time geishas hurrying from one entertainment gig to the next.

Ragged Nerves


The clear chilly night last night has frozen the peripheral regions of the large pond and the whole of the shallower ones. The ice is thick enough to hold the weight of a tentative goose. As a result, the geese have retired once more to the grass, leaving a just few holdouts honking in derision at their wimpy ex-neighbors. 

By the time I reach the car lots, the nerves in my extremities have ceased sending desperate messages for relief in the form of pain signals and have gone into hibernation mode as the numbness indicates. I have to admire the humor of the car vendors though, as they have moved a red ragtop, with it's roof down, to the front of the display and have a prominent sign shouting "Sporty". Indeed, It should be "Extreme Sporty". If my outer limits are numb when traveling at a speed of 3.5 mph, I can't imagine what bits would be numb dashing about at 20 times that velocity.

The numbness reminds me that the nerve axons carrying signals can be very long and are pretty delicate. My attention was drawn to a paper by Radtke et al, which was published yesterday (1) which described the successful repair of a 6 cm length of axons using a bundle of spider silk as a guide template. A section of nerve in the femur of a sheep was chosen. This is a very interesting development leading to a functional length of remyelinated nerve fiber, which builds on the earlier work of Alimeling et al (2). Spider web has an old use as a clotting aid in wound management.  The structure of spider silk is the result of a couple of simple amino acids (glycine and alanine) joining together and forming sheets, which then form a crystalline structure that is extremely strong. It is kept moist by a small amount of pyrrolidine and acidic by some potassium salts. The latter act as a bactericide and a fungicide.

So don’t stomp or spray those beasties hiding in your drapes and guarding your premises against numerous flying pests. They are more valuable than you think.


1.                 1.   http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016990

2. Alimeling et al, J. Cell. Mol. Med. (2006), 10(3):770–77

At Loggerheads With Nature


Wandering around in the brisk morning sunshine and watching the visiting ducks and geese, started me wondering about migration and sense of direction. Having got used to my car’s GPS system telling me to turn around as soon as it is convenient after my strong sense of direction overrode its instructions, I know more is involved than just the position of the sun and what street signs say. Clearly with the sun, a wristwatch and a compass, we should be all set to go anywhere, and like all guys, no need to ask for directions.

Even our goose friends’ travels seem to pale against those of swallows and Monarch butterflies. So what do they use? An internal compass as a directional aid has long been suggested but they are all short of a wristwatch and sextant. It took us a very long time to tame the problem of longitude.

Now, baby loggerheads emerge from their sand nest and rush down to the sea, eager for the wild Atlantic, and knowing exactly where the action is regardless of which side of the Atlantic they start from. Lohmann et al (1) have demonstrated that they work using the Earth’s magnetic field as their direction finder. The mechanism is that they detect both the local intensity as well as the inclination, so they have a 3-D map of magnetic hills and valleys in their mind and, continuing the visual simile, their magnetic sensor, like a magnetic eye, ‘sees’ where they are on the map.

Wonderful as this is, even more remarkable is the fact that they hatch with the map already in place. Learned direction finding seems logical, so salmon tasting their way back to their original river seems plausible but a magnetic map of the North Atlantic carefully packed away by your Mom in a pocket of your genes is something else indeed.

It leads one to wonder what potential latent ability to detect and know our surroundings are being ignored as we turn on our GPS. Clearly the artifice, beloved of authors and screen writers, of people wondering around in circles in the desert or snowy waste, as shown by finding their own footprints, is a fiction. We all have a better idea of where we’re heading than that. But we can still go badly awry, as shown by Mao with his Long March, or Moses with his even longer one. Could we learn to be turtles if we get in closer touch with our inner selves?


1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(11)00113-8#ResultsandDiscussion

Random Flurries


With winter having a new flurry here in the Pacific North West and meaning that some hours of hunkering down are required, it is interesting to scan the news feeds for cheerful excitement occurring elsewhere in the world. 

The tale of “Vstone and the Five Robodwarves” was the first to catch my eye.  These little chappies are running a marathon in Osaka as I hunt and peck. It will be a very boring race for them, as they have to trot around the 100-meter track a total of four hundred and twenty two times in all. The rules of the Rob Mara Full are harsh though. If one green robot should accidently fall, he has to get up and continue without help from sympathetic supporters. But they’ll tough it out, and the winner is expected to cross the finish line sometime on Sunday, if the race officials haven’t gone to sleep and lost count. It'll be 5 full days of sport that the robodwarves won't forget.

As a fan of Test Match Cricket with its matches lasting 5 action-packed days, I felt a new sporting enthusiasm stirring and within a few seconds of surfing I discovered the RoboCup. Last year 500 teams from 40 countries played robodwarf football in Singapore. This years Robot Soccer World Cup will be in Istanbul. At this time, I am uncertain if the marathoneers can be re-programmed to play soccer or if the swearing and foul play require a different build.

Back to my window on the real world and the steely-grey sky and driving snow force me back to longingly view the warmth of the Sun Drop diamond that is vacationing in the warm depths of the National History Museum in London. Pear-shaped (aren’t we all) perfection in a one-inch, yellow, refracting, one hundred and ten carat crystal, it is sitting there smugly making our Valentine Day’s gifts look puny. Ah well, I am comforted by the fact that the yellow is due to a small percentage of nitrogen atoms inveigling their way into the perfect tetrahedral diamond lattice and making it imperfect as nitrogen is a cheapskate and is only prepared to make three bonds to carbons four, thus short changing the gem.

Dragging myself away from pear-shape perfection, I see that Taylor, Wedell and Ciffelli (1) had done some rummaging in a box of very old bones and spotted a new sauropod with big hips, well big all over really standing about four meters high, who they’ve called ‘Thunderthighs’ or ‘Brontomerus to those lovers of the Greek amongst us. The kicker was that it would kick the hell out of the competition. Maybe the engineers working on this year’s teams for the RoboCup could get some design tips from the Early Cretaceous.



1. http://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app56/app20100073.pdf

Monkey Business


Another interesting paper from the AAAs meeting was given by Dr. Smith, SUNY at Buffalo. In this case the subjects were monkeys, both Old World and New World, namely Macaques and Capuchins respectively. They were playing a computer game for goodies. The task was simple enough for me to carry out. It consisted of assessing the density of a screen image as either sparse and clicking ‘S’ or dense and clicking ‘D’. Easy!

 The kicker was if they got it wrong, the computer hung and they were wasting gaming time. Now in this day and age, instant gratification taking to long, a fact that we are made maddeningly aware every time we reboot our computers. Well, in true game show fashion, Dr. Smith gave our primate friends a pass option button, ‘?’. Hitting this moved the game rapidly forward with no loss in goodie-getting time.

The Macaques made good use of this option indicating that they were sometimes victims of self doubt and unable to make a choice, reminiscent of most of us as we stare at our tax forms and wondering where to start. Wouldn’t we all welcome a pass option on those questions? Capuchins, however, never doubted their choice. In their case, there were only known knowns, that they knew they knew even when they didn’t, unlike the Macaques who also had known unknowns when they knew they didn’t know. I guess worrying about unknown unknowns is something reserved for other primate species.

It isn’t only monkeys that rival us in decision-making. Prof. Morton of U of Cambridge has been watching sheep which were visiting from the Welsh mountains, make executive decisions. Food was used as the training tool, just as it is used for monkeys, mice and us men. Colored buckets and colored shapes were used in the sheep’s mid-term tests.

Other exciting sheep information noted was that sheep can find their way home as they know where they’ve been and that they can recognize other sheep just by looking at mug shots. Not only do sheep not all look the same to each other, but neither do humans all look the same. They know who they’re looking at and if your expression is nice or nasty. We would be in trouble if they were enfranchised.

A Day-Off Day


A beautiful, spring-like sunny day for the Big Man’s birthday. Dandelions and periwinkle are recklessly displaying themselves in an attempt to snag an insect visitor or two. An azalea with tiny flowers is much more discrete but is still trying to flaunt with dignity. A small fungus with aspirations to grow up to be a mushroom was staring at me like a second grader before a softball game, waving and saying ‘Pick me, pick me’.

With an urgent quest for a humanizing latte, I can’t stop to smell the flowers. Anyway, getting my nose two inches off the ground would result in an unacceptable energy penalty. However, the weather is gorgeous, so much so that I go as far as unbuttoning my jacket. I won’t go as far as one guy I spot going in the opposite direction, and stripped down to shoes, shorts and a dog.

The flush cycle for the Ponds is now at low, leaving clear water, and more shoreline property has come back onto the market. The geese are returning from the grassland and sailing sedately around and occasionally upending to moon at their potential neighbors or simply squatting in an initial attempt to stake their claim.

Goose Island
Even the car lots are quiet, except for the guy wheeling around a resurrection cart to shock the hearts of the trucks back into working. Nobody seems to be in a buying mood though.

Singing Mice


With the speculation and rumors around the Oscars at their peak and, indeed, becoming a tad monotonous, we lessor mortals should have foreseen that the American Association for the Advancement of Science would have dedicated a symposium at its Annual Meeting to the subject of stuttering, with three lectures this morning.  The subtitle of the symposium was ‘Untangling the Mystery of Stuttering’ (1)and it is an interesting change from the past in that these newer multidisciplinary approaches are breaking new ground. The Guardian UK gives a detailed account of Dr. Drayna’s presentation (2).

Apparently, there are three genes with particular mutations involved. Mutations in these can result in a deficit of the correct products from the cell metabolism. To test this theory, a set of GM mice have been produced with these three genes inactive. Mr. Mouse bursts into song at the drop of the right pheromone. They sing for minutes and prefer to write their own music. The music is too high pitched for us being just into the ultrasonic but just fine for cats and dogs. If the theory is on target, they will have some very frustrated mice as I don’t expect that the females will come rushing if the singers of the love songs are having difficulty in getting the words out. Drayna’s objective is to design an anti-stutter pill.

The work of du Nil was on a different tack. Using imaging techniques, he has shown that several areas of the brain are involved through differences in activation. This would seem to suggest a fairly complex interaction is at the root cause of a stutter and a pill may be a long way off.

Going up in brain size from mice to rats, a recent neuronal protein study by Dr. Bossert (3) indicated that specific regions of the front part of the brain are involved in drug addiction. Some rat subjects were taught to self medicate with heroin until they were nicely addicted and then they were sent to a rehab unit to clean up. Apart from being a drug-free zone, the quarters became nice and bright and the rats cleaned up their act. However, when back with the sleazy environment, they fell off the wagon. They could get drug help them though by injections of drugs that inhibited the part of the brain wound up by their heroin addiction. I guess you can take the rat out of the street but not the street out of the rat.


1.      http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2011/webprogram/Session2789.html

2.      http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/20/scientists-create-gm-mice-stuttering

3.      http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2758.html

Back to Winter



Another few feet of snow in the Cascades meant another snowshoe hike was a must. This time the trip was along the Lava Flats trail. The Lava Lake area lies deep in the Willamette National Forest. The most common tree species here are tall Douglas Firs. The new snow was soft and powdery with the snowshoes leaving a trail about a foot deep. The several small creeks running under the snow added excitement and we needed some care to avoid breaking through and soaking our feet. Jack London’s tale ‘To Build A Fire’ came to mind. At this point we realized that we had the dog but no matches.

The snowfall had produced lots of odd and picturesque forms like the two trees converted into snow children in the picture below. Winter or summer the Mackenzie River area is always worth a visit. Although it is home to lots of wildlife, we only spotted one lone deer today, but it is difficult not to make lots of noise huffing and puffing if the powder is fresh and deep.

Once More Into The Breach


Winter has moved back in with a little ephemeral snow on the valley floor but with it inches deep in the hills and Cascades at elevations above a few hundred feet.

 I start my hike in search of a latte with some excitement at our Fire Station. A guy in a fully enclosed, orange hazmat suit, showing a huge hump on his back from his life support system, is slowly plodding towards the sidewalk, leaning forward at an angle of forty-five degrees and hauling 25 yards of heavy fire hose. Clearly struggling and with his visor totally misted over, I see that he could do with a hand. Before my offer is complete, two guys with lots of fancy insignia and clipboards invite me to leave, like instantly.

The river has become a high, dirty brown torrent and the Ponds are in the middle of a flush like a slow motion tide cycle that takes place over days instead of hours. The rising water has reduced the composure of the goose population who have mostly decamped to the local grassland, leaving their waterfront properties to the vagaries of the rising water and the marauding ducks. Even the cormorants have moved off to clearer water where they can see to find breakfast. Some of the newly planted forest are not just getting their feet wet but are striving to keep their growing tips above water.

The car lots continue to pile in new stock in preparation for an epidemic of Spring spending fever. The serried ranks are reminiscent of a nineteenth century battlefield. The bright colors of the Mustangs and Cobras lined up front and center, like the Light Horse, poised to rush the opposing line to break it and capture the guns, while on the right flank, the more somber Crewcabs are in a row, like the heavy horse, ready to lumber down the slope and crush the opposition, leaving the multicolored infantry, in the guise of Focuses, to come in behind to mop up.  The Wallet War is about to commence.

After yesterday’s news of Borders Books seeking Chapter 11, I thought my local store was getting nervous. A sign above a line if shelves announced in large red letters that there was “20% off Dummies”. I took my purchase up to the register and it was slowly and carefully explained that the reduction didn’t apply to people like me but to a line of help manuals. Ah well!