That. Was. Epic.

I loved Bill Nye the Science Guy when I was a kid. He's engaging, funny and just plain fun. Turns out, he can be funny to adult audiences too, and this skit was just perfect.

Bill Nye the Science Guy, always a boss. 

On How Awesome Gecko Feet Are

When my colleagues are not totally sick of hearing me talk, we have an occasional segment in the office known as "this week in Zoology". I work with people who have a background predominantly in Neuroscience, Molecular Biology and Genetics, whereas I got my degree in Zoology. Given this, I know quite a few random and awesome facts about animals, permanently stored in my brain, so I figured why not repeat a few of them here? The very first thing we talked about was the fractal feet of geckos.

Lets start with talking about what a fractal actually is. A fractal is a mathematical concept which is often observed in nature, in which a pattern is maintained at every scale of resolution. This can be seen in branching of biological structures, in which one branch has many branches, each of which has many branches, each of those having other branches etc. This is how gecko feet are structured, which is the secret to their success with climbing virtually any kind of surface.

A snarky way to learn about fractals

Researchers noticed that, among creatures who could crawl on vertical surfaces, geckos are pretty much the best at it. Trying to pull a gecko off the wall can result in ripping its legs from its body, rather than removing the whole animal. So, how do they manage to stick to a surface so well, and at the same time crawl over it so rapidly? Is it suction cups? Electricity? Attempting to coat the surface with oils, changing the materials or passing electrical currents through them led to no changes in the gecko's ability to climb. Finally, they looked at the gecko's toes, and therein was the answer.

source

It turns out, a gecko's toes are structured like a fractal, they are branched into smaller and smaller structures, until ultimately they can squeeze between the molecules of the surface, taking advantage of the molecule-to-molecule interactions of the surface in order to stick to them.

How amazingly cool is that??!! They are actually penetrating the molecular structure of your wall!

Any random animals you don't think can be cool? Name them in the comments and lets see if I can scare up any ancient memories of weird facts about them!

Dammit! I'm A Day Late

Despite the fact that this was yesterday, it was such an overload of dorky science love I just can't get over it and I just had to post it, despite my tardiness.

 

 

 



I've Always Said It.... And Now This Study Proves It!

Let's keep with the science theme shall we? Because I just love this study. Turns out, as I've been telling people that I am particularly self-aware, science backs me up! New evidence out: Lucid dreamers are more self-aware. Woop!

Now everyone calm down, I know this doesn't prove that every single lucid dreamer is an awesome self-awareness machine and everyone else sucks, take a breath, and allow me to take the tiniest victory lap for every time I've heard "Yeah, well, everyone thinks they're self-aware, but nobody actually knows they are, if you weren't you'd still think you were!"

OK, I'm done now, and a little back story for those who are interested (If you're not, skip ahead to the end).

It is very common for people to find it hard to escape their own context. For me, this was lucid dreaming and self-awareness. For a long time I thought that people who were not self-aware were simply being intellectually lazy, they were just not thinking about their own behaviors the way I would endlessly ponder my own, but if they just tried (perhaps with a little outside guidance) they could do it. I also didn't know until I went to college that most people could not, at the very least, notice they were dreaming and wake themselves up, if not change the landscape of the dream entirely.

The more I looked into it though, the more I discovered that I am actually particularly awesome at lucid dreaming.

One of my first memories of controlling my dreams was when I was no older than five, since I had not yet changed primary school at the time. I was often plagued by recurring nightmares, many of which I still remember in vivid detail. As they were recurring however I recognized them as dreams, though that didn't make them any less scary at the time. I then realized that I could wake myself up from them quite easily. It took me a couple of tries at first, squeezing my eyes shut and opening them again, until I managed to pop my real eyes open. 

This, however, did not solve the problem of falling back asleep into the same nightmare, so as I got older my skills developed. I started confronting the monsters in my nightmare and telling them to piss off when I finally understood that they were not real, just in my head (though I also found out the hard way that lucid dreamers can feel pain in their dreams). When I was having one of those "oh no I'm late I have to get to this place now and I can't manage it" dreams and I recognized it I would stop trying to get to wherever it was and start opening up random doors along the street, knowing my brain had just put them there as backdrop, just for the amusement of seeing what my brain would put behind them when given such short notice to come up with something. I then realized that I could put whatever I wanted behind those doors and just step into a whole new dream if the one that I was in got boring. I also perfected my ability to fly, which I have been able to do for as long as I could remember and was astonished when I discovered I was in the minority. I can now flit through different dreams at will, fly like superman and even erase entire characters from my dreams by simply snapping my fingers at them.

OK, after that little window into the depths of my psyche, how about the actual science?

Recently, the Max Plank Institute published a study which correlated Metacognition, or "thinking about thinking", with lucid dreaming abilities. 

Well, this makes sense, to an extent. Usually people are not aware they are dreaming when they are doing so, but if you are capable of lucid dreaming perhaps the part of the brain responsible for self-awareness is more developed, as it has had "more practice". This study simply gives evidence to that effect.

If you find the original article a little difficult to digest, IFLS sums it up very nicely. 

Ahh science, always interesting and, once in a while, hits particularly close to home. I do love it :)

I Love A Little Vindication....

Since I have not been active on this blog in quite some time, I have been scrolling through some of my old posts and comments. While the overall reaction to my posts has been relatively positive, the post which caused the most dissension was, strangely enough, the one in which I bemoaned the fact that I was sick, probably in part due to my having slept in a very cold room that night. 

WHAT?! OMG what bullshit cold temperatures don't contribute to your cold development NO WAY.

Now granted, the explanation that I put forth as to why cold temperatures could contribute to the development of your infection was a hypothesis, unproven, and one of the many that was floating around. But why are there so many hypotheses around to begin with?

Because the correlation between cold temperatures and cold/flu infection has progressed further than confirmation bias. There are studies which show this correlation, and although this does not demonstrate the cause, it is still something that warrants further investigation. If the numerous studies showed no correlation between the two we could dismiss this as a case of confirmation bias, end of story.

So, thanks to this correlation science has gone one step further, and looked for that causation factor. While the "stress reduces immune system efficacy" hypothesis which I spoke about in the previous post was touched on in the 1990s, new studies float a very different yet still excellent explanation of why this correlation exists.

There is now new evidence which suggests that the rhinovirus replicates better in your nasal passages when they are at lower temperatures - which happens when you are breathing in cold air for an extended period of time.

Yes, this study was conducted in mice, and more research is needed on this topic, but the evidence now is mounting that there is at least something that cold temperatures contribute to the progression of the illness. To dismiss the entire idea as bullshit is to ignore evidence.

I love me a little bit of vindication!

Journal Club: No Smoking Allowed

We haven’t done a journal club in a while, so I figured I couldn’t resist delving into the science behind another one of those scientific newspaper articles that love tohype it up. It all started with one of those articles that people share on Facebook, the title of which translates to:

“Peptidediscovered to stop smoking definitively and without relapse!” Wow, that’s some discovery! This article linked me to a statement released from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, which of course actually had a far more toned down title: “CAMH discovery may lead to new treatment to prevent smoking relapse”. O.K., we’re digging down past the layers of hype.

Of course both of these articles committed my worst pet peeve ever: they didn’t cite the actual article, and it took me forever to find it. It’s not on Science Direct or Google Scholar yet, PubMed only has the abstract, I finally managed to find it on the webiste of the Journal of Experimental Biology, also because the actual title they landed on was:

“The α7nACh–NMDA receptor complex isinvolved in cue-induced reinstatement of nicotine seeking”

Yeesh, good thing they accompanied this article with a press release, cause that’s a pretty specific and boring title that would not have led me to open that article and read on, nor does it make it easy to find in a search engine. Anyway, this is the part where I read the actual article and digest it into easier morsels for you, like a mother bird barfing up her dinner. So let’s see, what did they actually conclusively find?

Let’s start with what we know: we know that there are receptors in our brains called nicotine acetylcholine receptors, or nAChRs. These receptors are activated by nicotine, which in turn cause the yummy feelings in our brains, which is what makes smoking additive and hard to give up, especially over long periods of time (don’t I know it). What remains fuzzy is exactly what these receptors do on a molecular level after they receive the nicotine fix, therefore the molecular source of what exactly makes smoking so hard to give up.

Here, they found that one particular receptor of the nAChR family, called α7nAChR, forms a complex with another kind of receptor called NMDAR, under chronic exposure to nicotine. This means that the formation of this complex could be a key component to understanding what makes it hard to quit. Therefore, theoretically, if you stop this complex from forming, you could prevent the downstream warm-and-fuzzy effects on the brain that this complex induces, and thus making it easier to give up the cigs. With me so far?

In order to test this hypothesis, the researchers got rats addicted to nicotine, teaching them that if they pressed down on a lever, they got a shot of nicotine. Once they were well addicted and their self-administration of nicotine became relatively stable, they were given a shot of a peptide that the researchers showed interferes with the formation of this complex. After this shot, the rats no longer looked to self-administer nicotine. They also made sure that this was not because the peptide simply made the rats loopy, therefore making them less likely to press down on the nicotine bar for different reasons, but they demonstrated that the rats injected with the peptide moved around just as much as normal rats.

This sounds quite promising, so what are the ups and the downs?

One big problem I have with this paper is the lack of focus on the aspect that they focused on in their press release. I understand that the molecular part of the paper is extremely labor-intensive and important, the fact that they conclusively demonstrated the protein complex formation (which is not easy) and found a peptide that inhibits it is a paper all on its own. However, rightly so, they knew that the part of this experiment that would get the most attention is the part about actually testing this peptide to see if it works. However, despite being the only focus of the press release, they completely gloss over it in the paper. There is not a single graph, not a single statistical analysis of the behaviour of the rats.

ICV injection of 12 or 40 nmol TAT- α 7pep2[L336-M345] blocked reinstatement of nicotine seeking, they say. OK, completely? Significantly? That’s it, that’s all the information I get?

TAT- α 7pep2[L336-M345] peptide did not affect locomotor activity (not depicted) why is it not depicted? Did you not run a statistical analysis to demonstrate that the locomotor activity was not affected? If you did, let’s see it! If you’re not going to pay any attention to the behavioural aspect of the experiment then just don’t do it, and you definitely don’t get to make it the sole focus of your press release.

Putting aside my wariness about the nicotine-seeking results of the rats, it is a promising experiment and certainly the first of its kind. Of course there is a very long way to go in applying it to humans: seeing if this complex also forms in humans (tough to do, since in this case they demonstrated it by taking neurons from the rats), and definitely doing a very in-depth analysis of this peptide to make sure that it doesn’t interfere with anything else in the body which is important.

It is a good start, but I still give them a tut tut for their handling of some of the data.

I May Have Gotten A Little Overexcited...

Pharyngula has done it again, and led me to a truly fantastic discovery. Despite the weird decision on Minnesota's part to ban this site, I think they may have just Streisand-ed Coursera, at least I for one would never have found out about it if it weren't for this story.

It is, in my opinion, one of the coolest initiatives that I have come across so far. It is based on the principle that everyone should have access to education, regardless of background. Thus, Professors from top Universities all over the world are offering free online courses for a variety of different subjects, complete with exams and a certificate of completion. That just might be the best idea ever.

So I may have gotten a little overexcited. I signed up for 5, at least two of which overlap significantly, while being a PhD student with deadlines, an English tutor, a regular gym-goer, a by myself-liver, a twice a month Rome-traveller and a would-be writer. Yeesh, like I'm not busy enough!

My first course hasn't started yet, but I will let you know if they are as awesome as I think they're going to be. In the meantime, do check out the Biology section, I actually had to be very very conservative with myself or I would have signed up for three times as many courses by now!

Agh if only my boyfriend spoke better English, the Science of Gastronomy course has his name written all over it...

Journal Club: No Lorena Bobbit Jokes Allowed

We've had enough of the Lorena Bobbit jokes in the 90s amirite?! There's no need to bring that back up, even when faced with such temptation as this. 

Turns out that scientists in Switzerland, while creating a mouse line with a deletion in a region important for development, got an unexpected result in their female mice.

We analyzed full-night video recordings and witnessed females chasing males assiduously. In the course of such inverse pursuits, they often bit the genitals, very specifically, while the hind paws of the male were off the floor. Inverse pursuits involving such bites were directed at males exclusively, never at bystander females.


What the Hell are you doing ladies?! Bad mouse. Don't do that. 

The strange part is, they're not otherwise aggressive except during the time they're supposed to be mating. They don't do it to other females and the males don't seem to react aggressively back, even after getting his dick chewed. What's going on?!

Don't make an MRA-style mangina joke. It's just not worth it. you can do it, stay focused.

Hox genes are believed to have no function in neuroectoderm derived cells in forebrain. They encode transcription factors and are selectively repressed throughout the midbrain and forebrain of all vertebrates. Remarkably, we found ectopic expression of the Hoxd10 gene in diverse regions of the developing forebrain in Del1–9 (HoxD^Afc) newborns. Later, in adult, expression was maintained only in a few cells in the basomedial amygdala, and a new domain of ectopic expression appeared in the hippocampus. 

Basically, a gene that is not supposed to be expressed in the developing or adult brains of these mice is expressed, which is the most likely cause for this very, very strange behaviour. Is it that the abnormal expression of the gene causes a malformation in the developing brain of some kind, or is the expression of the gene in adult females the direct cause of the behaviour? 

Speculation at this point, but gawd, science can be some crazy shit.

Source: Zakany, J. and Duboule, D. (2012). A Genetic Basis for Altered Sexual Behaviour in Mutant Female Mice. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.067

The Torn Biologist

Sorry about that absence guys, yesterday was the last day of the week-long conference I was at and I am BEAT! But now it's back to work as normal and hopefully the inspiration I felt at the conference will carry me along until I can catch up with my sleep. 

So on the last day of the conference I go to get on my bike to go home, and I was faced with an extra passenger trying to hitch a ride on the back. This is where my human side and my biologist side come head to head in a battle most people do not think should exist within me given my line of work.

So my first reaction was ah cool NO WAY! I didn't know we had praying mantises in Italy! TAKE A PICTURE! 

But then my second reaction was... eeeewwwww. It's a bug. It's longer than my palm, that makes it a big bug. I don't want to ride home with a big bug behind my ass. How do I get rid of it?

Biologist pipes up: Don't kill it!

Human side retaliates: no no, squishing big bugs is just as eeewww-y as having them around, it solves nothing. But I don't know how mantises react when you swat them. Do they fly? Do they fly at you? Do they start freaking out? I don't like bugs that stay perfectly still and then freak when you try to get rid of them. Eeeeew, what do I do?

Fortunately for me a male colleague of mine chooses that minute to walk over as he had parked his bike right next to mine, at which point I find out that this interior battle is not as uncommon as I would have thought.

His first reaction: Crap do I have one on my bike?!
second reaction: hey, would you look at that, I've never seen one that wasn't behind glass!
third reaction: eeewww, I don't like bugs, sorry, don't know if I can help you.

But finally he couldn't say no to me, so what ended up happening was him taking out the cord attached to his keys, standing as far away as possible, swatting at it and punctuating each blow with "Go away! Go away!"

In conclusion? Turns out Italian mantises don't fly, nor do they jump, nor do they freak out. After the fifth swat it just kind of plopped to the ground and assumed what my colleague referred to as the thriller pose

Some kind of reaction to a perceived threat perhaps? We asked ourselves as we watched it being perfectly immobile again. There's our biologist showing again.

Dude's Got A Dick On His Chin

 

How do some of these scientists present their findings without giggling like schoolchildren?

Ladies and gents, meet Phallostethus cuulong, a little Vietnamese fish that for some bizarre unexplained reason has its genitals underneath its head instead of, well, the usual places. 

 I got nothing but respect for these people that have to present these data, and more for all the people in the audience stifling the giggle. Perhaps they realize that they can't possibly expect such maturity from a group of scientists, and present the entire thing with a humorous spin to begin with. 





Either way, the article is extremely mature in its detailed techincality, but for a much simpler and straightforward article you can read what National Geographic has to say about it.

The more interesting question that comes out of all this is, how and why would these fish evolve in this way? One theory put forth:

head-to-head mating is apparently "a very efficient way to do it," Parenti added. While examining preserved female priapiumfish, she has found oviducts filled with sperm, meaning almost all the eggs had been fertilized.

So, did you chuckle? I did. If you didn't, well, must be boring being that mature.


Source: Shibukawa, K. et. al. (2012). Phallostethus cuulong, a new species of priapiumfish (Actinopterygii: Atheriniformes: Phallostethidae) from the Vietnamese Mekong. Zootaxa 3363: 45-51

Non C'è Due Senza Tre...

I'd like to close this boss trifecta with a common Italian saying, literally translated as there is no two without three, and a big thanks to Why Evolution Is True for posting this video of Bill Nye the Science Guy. I adored Bill Nye as a kid, along with Kratts Creatures he was my main source of science growing up, ironically educating me even more in many areas than my science teachers in elementary and middle school. 

Sometimes, you find out that the people on TV that you loved as a kid turn out to be not so great in real life (I almost cried when I heard about the racial slurs thrown out there by Kramer, or how Frasier is actually a right-wing nut) but not this time! Bill Nye turns out to be just as cool in real life as he was on TV, as illustrated by his willingness and sincerity in coming out publicly against creationism.

Coincidence that three days later a rumor on twitter spread that he was dead? Probably not, but who cares. Bill Nye, you rock.

Journal Club: Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia

So I touched on something in yesterday's post that reminded me of a fascinating story I heard while still in college in Dublin during my parasitology course. It's time for another one of those sciency posts! Today I'm going to give a brief introduction to Toxoplasma gondii, some various misconceptions regarding it, and it's possible link to schizophrenia - a relatively new hypothesis that many people I have encountered even in the research community have not heard of yet. Let's start with the basics shall we? What is Toxoplasma gondii?

There it is, the little bastard

Toxoplasma gondii is one of, if not the most common parasite known to man, infecting anywhere from 50 to up to 80% of the world's population. Until recently it was believed that this little critter was largely asymptomatic in humans unless a woman is infected during her first trimester, which can lead to devastating consequences to the child once it is born. Ever heard of pregnant women having to stay away from cats? Well this little bugger is why, although it is actually far more common for people to become infected with T. gondii due to infected meat rather than cats, thanks to its ability to infect just about every mammal. Why do cats get the bad rep though? Because cats are the ones that T. gondii really need in order to stick around.

Like many parasites, T. gondii's life is a two-step process, in that it needs two different species to complete it's life cycle. Mice (or other rodents) eat the oocysts, which are basically the "fertilized eggs" that mom and pop T. gondii have made. Once inside the mouse, it busts and out come the babies, ready to grow and multiply inside the mouse. When a cat eats the infected mouse, T. gondii can sexually mature and produce oocysts, which are pooped out by the cat and ready to infect other unsuspecting mice. The problem at this point is that, in order to increase its chances of infecting it's final host, T. gondii has gotten really good at infecting and surviving in a variety of animals, including sheep, pigs, birds and humans. This means that unless a pregnant woman starts getting a mad craving for kitty litter (or is not in the mood to wash her hands after handling cat turds) she's most likely not going to get infected from a cat, but if she eats lamb or pork chops from animals that are infected with T. gondii, she's in trouble.

This is where it gets interesting

I ees controlling your miiiind

Also like many parasties, T. gondii dabbles in a little mind control when it comes to its intermediate host, in order to further increase its chances of infecting its final host (perhaps a review on mind-controlling parasites in the future, if you're interested!). T. gondii can alter mouse behaviour, making it less afraid of open spaces and more likely to come out during the day, greatly increasing its chances of being caught and eaten by a cat.

 

Here's the thing, if T. gondii can affect behaviour in mice, does it stand to reason that it can also affect certain aspects of human behaviour, even if it is otherwise asymptomatic?

In 1996 a study conducted in Prague showed that humans that are infected with Toxoplasma gondii had significantly different personality profiles than controls when questioned with Cattell's questionnaire. Since then, there have been numerous studies indicating a link between Toxoplasma gondii infection and behavioural changes in humans.

But how does this link to schizophrenia?

Here's the evidence so far:

1. Anti-psychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia have anti-Toxoplasma gondii properties in vitro (meaning in a petri dish, not inside an organism).

2. Drugs used in the treatment of schizophrenia are actually better at reducing the T. gondii-induced behavioural changes in rats than drugs used to treat T. gondii infection.

3. People infected with T. gondii seem to have a higher incidence of schizophrenia

Of course Toxoplasma gondii is not solely responsible for the development of schizophrenia (if it was, we'd be in trouble). However, being a very complex and multi-factorial disease, it seems possible that T. gondii infection can exacerbate the situation, tipping the scale in favor of the development of the disease. 

So, what do you think? Am I the only one who finds this shit fascinating?

Or is it a no-go on the review of mind-controlling parasites?

I'm Back To Eviscerate

Well I’m back, my computer is fixed (for the time being) and I’m ready to dig right back in with another wrong, wrong I’m-not-sure-if-you’re-trolling-but-let’s-address-this-anyway person clogging up the comments section of my video of Penn and Teller on the Boy Scouts who identifies himself as LordSignur.

Now I don’t usually comment much on my own videos, even though I do read the vast majority of the comments that are left on them. Usually I only get involved if someone is asking me a direct question, but once in a while a comment is so glaringly wrong and I have just enough time to butt in, I will say something. This was one such case, in talking about the Boy Scout’s officially unofficial policy of excluding gay men from working there or gay scouts from participating.

they aren't born with anything.

sexuality is decided by your environment and the decision you make. There is actually a gene that make you more likely to have sex with anybody but it doesn't make you gay.

Would you look at that! The old being gay is a choice argument! Oh how annoying you be, and how very very wrong. I responded in kind.

you dont choose who you are sexually attracted to. you may choose to actually sleep with them, but the basis of the sexual attraction remains innate and perfectly natural. Can you suddenly decide to be sexually aroused by the sight of a naked man? Dont know about you, but I cant decide to be aroused by anything that doesnt arouse me, because its not a choice

He gets insistent, and intelligible English becomes harder and harder to come by

It isn't completely conscious. but you do choose who you sleep with.

About the attraction, again, if you had experience where you come up with the idea that men a beautiful then you might be gay.

You even have gay that pretend to be straight now and get aroused by women. Are they lying?

the simple idea that there is a good way is stupid.

And you do choose everything, consciously or not. You don't realize it, that's all

What?! I gave it one last shot

If they are sexually aroused by women they are probably “bi”. Sexuality and gender are not as binary as you think they are. And the idea that you "choose" everything is ridiculous. Do you "choose" to be depressed or anxious? Do you "choose" to be schizophrenic? Do you "choose" what you dream and who you dream of? Christians love to say that people "choose" to be attracted to the same sex because it lets them off the hook for hating people for being born that way, but it doesnt make it true

 And now, for the very last comment, that prompted to make me turn this exchange into a post, since there is no way that 500 characters could ever be enough to address this sheer amount of wrong

first : I AM NOT CHRISTIAN, I AM AN ATHEIST.

You choose everything even if you don't know about it. It come from unconscious part of you but still it's you. Sexuality isn't binary. Because you do whatever you want. the fact that you don't know yourself enough to see it doesn't change that it is.

schizophrenia is caused by genetic issue. this have nothing to compare to love.

Depression is a choice you made Saying that "it's someone else fault" is the best way to never overcome it.

Wooow, OK, where do I start?

So I’m not going to shit on the guy for obviously not being a native English speaker, but that does not give him the right to make up definitions of words. Let’s start with this very fuzzy idea of what choosing something actually entails. To the dictionary!

Oxford English dictionary:

Choose: To take by preference out of all that are available; to select; to take as that which one prefers, or in accordance with one's free will and preference.

Merriam-Webster:

Choose: to select freely and after consideration <choose a career> b : to decide on especially by vote : elect <chose her as captain>

2a : to have a preference for <choose one car over another> b : decide <chose to go by train>

By definition, you can’t unconsciously choose something. There can be things that unconsciously influence your choice, like the color of two people’s shirt can influence which one you choose to think is more trustworthy without you realizing it, but you are still making a conscious choice, a selection, between two people which is influenced by a variety of variables.

If you define a choice as anything your body does whether you have conscious control over it or not then you choose to be blond, because you know your body is the one making the pigment, even if you don’t realize it, so hair color is a choice.

The second word this guy seems to want to redefine is sexuality, Sexuality is not defined as “the people that I choose to sleep with”. There are many definitions, but let’s stick to the ones that are relevant to humans. Back to the dicitionary!

Oxford English Dictionary:

Sexuality: Sexual nature, instinct, or feelings; the possession or expression of these

                   A person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which he or she is typically attracted; the fact of being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual; sexual orientation.

A person who someone is attracted to, who they are aroused by, is not a conscious decision. Ask any teenage boy how many erections they consciously decided to have in the middle of class, and how much anyone not having sex would love to be able to say “tonight I’m going to have a wet dream! Woop!” Arousal is not something that we can choose, it is a physiological response that we can sometimes try to influence (oh crap it’s happening… think of dead kittens…. Think of grandma in her underwear; or, alternatively; oh crap this isn’t working… think of that awesome porn I watched last night… Jessica Alba taking her bra off… Licking honey off of that blond dude from Sex and the City’s abs… mmm…) but effectively have very little control over.

Then we get into where LordSingur actually does draw the line between a choice and not a choice, and this is where it gets unbelievably ridiculous. Let me refresh your memory

schizophrenia is caused by genetic issue. this have nothing to compare to love.

Depression is a choice you made Saying that "it's someone else fault" is the best way to never overcome it.

Let’s forget what the hell love has to do with anything at this point in time, but WHOA the stench of condescension with that last part. Depression is caused by shifting blame? And that is your expert medical opinion yes?

So the only thing here that is not a choice in his mind is schizophrenia, because it is “caused by a genetic issue”. Well, I have news for you, it’s not as simple as that. There is certainly a genetic component to schizophrenia, a friend of mine wrote an entire thesis on it, but it is definitely not as simple as whether or not you have “the schizophrenia gene”, and there are a variety of other factors that influence it. One fascinating hypothesis circulating at the moment is about the possible contribution of Toxoplasmagondii infection to the incidence of schizophrenia, but that’s a story for a later date.

Interestingly enough, depression also has a studied genetic component as well, would you look at that! Looks like depression is actually very similar to schizophrenia in that regard, unless our friend would like to redefine the word “depression” too while we’re at it.

In summary, the only thing that LordSingur seems to acknowledge is not a choice is something that is caused by genetics, or at least has a genetic component to it. Therefore, even by his own, wrong definition of the word choice, homosexuality is a choice because it is not genetic, correct?

Oh dear

Oh please

Make it stop

So much research

So many papers

What am I going to do??!!

Of course the genetics behind sexuality is still complex and needs to be explored, and there is no one “gay gene” that will “make you gay” if you have it. However, the fact that sexuality does have a significant genetic component to it is a virtual certainty.

One final note, I don’t give a shit what religion you ascribe to, or lack thereof. If you’re wrong you’re wrong, and not believing in an omniscient deity does not automatically make you right about anything else, nor does it eliminate the possibility that you have your own motives for wanting to believe in nonsense.

That's Just Not How It Works

I have noticed throughout my biology studies that the general public is grossly unaware of the rigorous ethical standards that biological and medical research has to adhere to. While with medical research I started to understand why after reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the misinformation that circulates regarding animal research is astounding, more so that very few people actually step up to correct it. While with other forms of misinformation that circulate in the public there are plenty of people who are not necessarily experts in that field that step up to the plate to refute it, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge when it comes to the ethical process when conducting research on animals. Television also tends to perpetuate the stereotype of the at-worst-sadistic-at-best-indifferent scientist (while also perpetuating old stereotypes in medical research as well – both the placebo and treatment groups get the treatment at the end of the clinical trial guys, I get it makes for good dramatic television to pretend otherwise but enough already), and it doesn’t help that the media go right along with it instead of taking the time to educate the public on a little known fact. I’ve been thinking about writing a post detailing the process for a while now, and a few days ago this post came up on Pharyngula. I’ll let PZ Myers explain:

Now in those old observations, we weren’t really manipulating either the brain or the environment: you don’t get to do that with human babies! All we were doing was documenting the natural progression of synaptic connection density — which, by the way, declines rapidly as the brain learns and refines. What we could see anatomically is that as young children adapt to their environment, the brain is busily pruning and shifting connections — but what we couldn’t see is what was causing those changes, or what effect those anatomical changes had on visual processing.

For that, you have to tinker. And since you can’t do that with human babies, you have to go to animal models.

And the most common animal models for studying the visual system in humans are mammals: cats (also ferrets, for technical reasons involving some of the pathways). And since we’re interested in the plasticity of the brain in young, developing animals, you can see where this is going.

Neuroscientists do experiments on kittens.

(…)

I’ve done experiments like these in the past, and even more substantial surgical manipulations. The investigators know how to do these experiments humanely: we know about anesthesia, for instance, and anything involving surgery on animals is tightly policed by Institutional Review Boards (actually, they tend to be discouraged by IRBs, but that’s a different complaint), which usually have veterinarians serving on them. If Buyukmihci has evidence that these surgeries were done in a way that did not minimize suffering, he should speak up, and the neuroscience community would join him in deploring them.

But these protocols went through Cardiff University’s ethical review process and the Home Office Animals in Science Regulation Unit. There’s no reason to think they were anything less than impeccable.

Ralph Cook, some politician or bureaucrat: “It’s an academic producing a paper which is meaningless and can’t be transferred to humans. Vivisection is completely wrong.”

No, actually, most of this research isn’t just an abstract pursuit of knowledge (although there’s nothing wrong with that, either). This is research that is directly applicable to alleviating human suffering. Treatment of visual system disorders in children is informed directly by these kinds of experiments: they tell us about the sensitivity of the visual system to abnormalities in inputs and long term effects of sustained aberrations. I had a child with ‘lazy eye’ at birth: the doctors (as well as the parents in this case) knew how important it was to correct this problem as quickly as possible, and gave us protocols (tested in cats!) that we could implement until she was old enough to get surgery.

(…)

Scientists don’t do these experiments to get their jollies torturing kittens. These are experiments that advance our understanding of the wiring of the brain.

I agree that there is an amount of suffering involved, and having done similar work, I also know that good investigators do their best to minimize it. My second job as an undergraduate was as an animal care assistant in a surgery, and one of the things I was paid to do was to spend a few hours a day just playing with post-op cats and kittens, and making sure that their housing was clean and comfortable. These were conscientious scientists. They needed to do these experiments, but they also cared about the animals. I was really impressed with their concern and respect for the animals they had to do experiments on.

So after the Mirror published yet another ridiculously misinformed and biased article, they sent it to a poll, expecting of course for the public to outrageously vote No! Kitty experimentation not OK!

I went over and voted yes, not because I think it’s awesome to randomly experiment with cats, but because I understand how these experiments work and how, at the moment, they’re the best and only option we have. Trust me, scientists are looking for ways to avoid using animals in research: it’s complicated, it’s expensive and getting the experiment approved by the ethical review boards is grueling and time-consuming. Unfortunately at the moment we have no other option, and the decision at the end is that the knowledge gained from these experiments is worth it. I understand that not everyone will agree with me, it’s not as cut-and-dry as some of the other online polls I’ve voted in, but I voted the way I felt was right.

Well, the Mirror was not happy that it’s grossly biased poll did not pan out the way they wanted it to, so what did they do? They reposted the exact same article with the exact same poll, changed the title, and added the subtitle 

Animal lovers across Britain were left out outraged by our story yesterday, however, in our poll, just 54% of people said it was wrong

Golly gee! How did our hatchet job get such mixed reviews?! No assholes, that’s not how it works.

You don’t just get a do-over because you don’t like the results. How about doing a follow-up article about why people didn’t fall for your stupidly biased approach, actually going into what bioethics is and how it works? How many times are you going to lazily repost the exact same article under a different title before you accept that the numbers are not on your side?

This time, just to spite them, I want to vote from a few different computers.

You all should go vote too, if for no other reason than sending the message that you can’t ask people a question then ignore the answer just because you don’t like it.