Have an Ice Day!!!

Pseudomonas syringae is an extremely interesting bacterium, which I discovered reading Olivia Judson’s latest post on cloud-dwelling bacteria.

Usually, plants growing in cold regions use special chemicals as anti-freeze. This bacterium, though, secretes Ice Nucleation-active proteins to make ice crystals grow at temperatures as high as -2C. The crystals cause damage to cell walls of plants, and the bacterium vacuums up the nutrients released.

So, they use ice crystals as straw, although the name “syringae” doesn’t come from there. Rather, it comes from the plants they were isolated from at first:

It is named after the lilac tree (Syringa vulgaris), from which it was first isolated^[2]

(from the wikipedia)

and always on the theme of vampires from the cold, the new Penny Arcade strip is out!

Double blind scientific review

John Denney over at Evilutionary Biologist makes an interesting point: How often and how much knowing the reputation of the author of a paper influences the opinion we get from reading it?

The discussion was sparked by a piece on the journal Nature.

Would it not be better if the review process was double blinded, as it happens in the case of clinical trials of new drugs?

I do happen to think it is a good idea too.

It is certainly possible to guess who the author of the paper is from the subject, his writing style and (possibly) the amount of self-citations(!).

But one more hurdle to accepting a paper as a gold nugget just because it’s been crapped up (down) by Dr Eminent can’t hurt, can he?

I am personally in the middle of the final touches to my paper before submission – and I think that another good point of it is that reviewers who will happen to read it (if it gets accepted for review, that is) will not know my name so they will not black list me for future collaborations.

Oh, come on, a bit of self-confidence, Dr Fenu…

Boredom…

I am bored. I should correct my paper and get it finally submitted, but it’s stronger than me and can’t just decide whether to accept the corrections suggested by a co-author or not…

Scientific publications are so troublesome (at least for me) that I am almost tempted to give up on this career and pursuit a job in finance (lol, not really) or any other field where you are not required to write up your stuff. It’s not that I don’t want to share, I am more than happy of that and well willing to talk about my work. It’s just that I am very very bad at writing up, possibly because none of the endless literature courses during my school in Italy ever concentrated on the basic of good and understandable writing.

IYou can see it from how long the previous phrase was. In Italy long phrases, branching in two or three nested level get you a premium by the professor. Ow, all this sucks. I wish I was like many of my colleagues, with a much wider cultural span but much more ‘able’ to do the job… They’re like very sharp knives, good to cut steaks, whereas I am the jack of all knives (d`uh!) – with multiple skills but none up to an acceptable level.

Enough complaining. I’m leaving work early to discover the joys of having a Makro card – Then I will try to correct the paper in the evening at home, with the advantage of Word XP which lets you see the correction and the original at once…

see you soon…

Infrared photography

I recently heard on the naked science podcast that pointing a remote control to my camera phone I could see it flashing, because the sensitivity of the CCD inside extends to the near-IR.

It wrks! And it gave me a terrible case of cognitive dissonance to look at the remote through the screen, then with the naked eye, then with the screen again and so on. I just could not believe it, PhD in physical chemistry notwithstanding my mind was not prepared to accept it.

Anyway, the cool factor of the thing pushed me to show it to all my friends (real, as virtual) and to look on the i.net for more info about it, and possibly for how-to on how to build a proper IR-camera.

I discovered that few of them IR-capable cameras are sold, mostly for forensic use, possibly because you can see through clothes. In general, CCD are screened against IR not for this reason, but because the color yield is altered by the IR noise.

Anyway, there are plenty of descriptions on line and may be this evening I’ll buy a 9.99 EUR webcam to open it and remove the IR filter. I already have a ten diode IR lamp at home, so may be it’ll be enough to get nice pictures of my house in human-eye darkness.

More to follow!

How much the (OECD) world invests in R&D

It’s in this nice graph, from the latest edition of Nature. Sad to see Italy lagging behind, I did not expect the 4% that Sweden pulls but at least 2%, come on!!!

The latest analysis from the US National Science Board confirms that Israel leads the world in its economic devotion to research and development (R&D).
Its civilian R&D spending in 2005 accounted for 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Although US R&D investment was the world’s largest ( $340 billion ) and in 2004, it was more than that of the rest of the G7 nations combined, the report offers some evidence of a slight decline in its standing.
Its 2.57% share of GDP is comfortably above the OECD average of 2.25%, but both South Korea and Switzerland have leapfrogged ahead of the United States by this measure since the board’s previous report in 2006.
Germany could now be poised to do the same.
Most countries are investing more in R&D than they were, says Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, which published the report.
For example, although China ranks 23rd in GDP share ( just 1.34% ) it has pulled ahead to third in total R&D investment with an estimated $115 billion in 2005.

I am most surprised at the incredible figure for Israel expenditure: almost 5% of the GDP in R&D. and I thought they had to spend all of their GDP in weapons to keep their many enemies at bay…

Octopus loves Mr Potato

Here’s a new one. I have always been trying to convince people that octopuses are very advanced creatures in terms of ‘braininess’. That it really isn’t a good thing to fish them out of the water and kill them bashing them on a rock, or even worse biting their heads while still alive, as my gilrfriend saw with horror in a beach in Sardinia (no picture of the event, unfortunately).

And now, I discover they can get emotionally attached to puppets, just like a six-year old boy. In the picture, an octopus who was given a Mr Potato toy some months ago, and has been defending it since then. Differently from me, the octopus must have liked the new Transformers movie, since the puppet is in fact OptiMash Prime, Mr Potato version of the Autobot’s chief in command. Who would have thought that an 18-wheeler would need protection from a Kraken?

Another one bites the dust…

Another friend leaves “old” Europe to fly away, to the West Coast nonetheless!

She’s one of the smartest and prettiest girls around. And she makes good coffee too! (the link is broken. one day may be they will put it)

Francesca, good luck with your big American adventure!

Look out, there’s a Lion behind that bus!!!

copy-paste from Null-Hypothesis , which dubs itself as The Journal of Unlikely Science. It came to me through the facebook group We’re scientists AND we’re sexy! Ok, I admit, I am a member of it. Yeah, right. Me. Sexy. Ouch! It Hurts.

I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat

Scientists in California have been busy flashing images at people again. This is a favourite game of psychophysicists the world over, being a nice way of measuring reaction times to… well, Visual Things. This time they’ve been looking to see if people pay more attention to evolutionarily salient objects like lions and impala rather than novelties like cars, tables and lamps.

The result will come as no surprise to the evolutionary psychologists in the crowd. When presented with pairs of images, each flashed rapidly and identical except for a tiny change, participants were much faster and more accurate at identifying changes involving animals (including humans) than those involving your aforementioned inanimate things, even if the animal was hardly visible at all. This also held true when a failure to notice the inanimate object in the scenes would normally be associated with sudden and messy death, such as is the case with cars.

The explanation? Well, back in the day, humans would have benefited from attention to things that they could hunt and eat (like impala) as well as to things that could eat them (like lions) and things that may have filled both categories (like… each other). Humans who ignored these objects moving about would presumably have died from either a) starvation or b) being killed and/or eaten, so a tendency to attend to animate objects became hardwired in to the human visual system. Things like cars, although life threatening, are just far too modern to have been incorporated.

So, the good news is that you are very likely to spot a big cat as it sneaks up on you with every intention of making you its lunch. Sadly, in moving to avoid it, you may just end up being crushed beneath the wheels of a bus you have entirely failed to notice. Ah well, swings and roundabouts, eh?

Has Evolution Stopped, for Homo?

Not at all. If anything, it seems to have accelerated over the course of the past 80.000 Years.

It’s what The Economist reports in this article. The original piece of research can be found in PNAS.

Since I don’t have time to comment today, just go and read it, it’s free.

An interesting personal side-note on the article: it points out how two version of lactose tolerance arose independently in the Indo-European and the African Tutsi populations. So, may be my child(ren) will inherit both versions. I wonder if there are any studies around investigating the effect of the two mutations present at the same time in people’s cells. Will they reinforce each other? Or will they have a completely different effect? I guess it depends on the detailed mechanism of action of the two… I’ll have a look on the world wide wikipedia…

The Decline and Fall of the Animal Kingdom

Carl Zimmer has a new story up on WiReD.

Incredibly interesting piece detailing how the glorious animal kingdom decreased in size and importance in the last decades.

Courtesy of facebook which let me know about it.