Victoria McGowan writes,

Please find attached a photo of my Australopithecus tattoo. I’m a medical anthropologist researching the historical relationship between school meals and obesity in children as part of my PhD at Durham University. Obviously this has very little to do with Australopithecus but my interest in “Lucy” began when I started my UG degree in Anthropology here at Durham. One of my first lectures was on our Biological and Social Origins and we learnt about our evolutionary heritage. Lucy caught my eye because she was one of the most complete finds of this species at that time. Also as it was thought that she was more closely related to Homo genus than any other Australopithecus at that time.

I found it fascinating that from her remains we could postulate that she was bipedal and from her pelvis we could deduce that she would have gave birth to a larger brained infant than previous species. We can further postulate that her infant care practices would be more similar to our own, larger brained infant would have to complete their growth outside the womb and would require parental investment as opposed to leaving the infants for long periods in a nest or them being fully mature to feed themselves. I have long been fascinated with our origins and have always loved tattoos so felt the need to combine the two.

I approached Anthony Wilkinson a tattoo artist at Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Middlesbrough, UK. And his style of work was perfect for Lucy. We scoured the internet looking for an appropriate image and we found the one that I’m currently sporting on my arm today.

I like to refer to it as Lucy but it’s entirely possible the image we found is not actually Lucy. My supervisor, Professor Gillian Bentley identified it as Australopithecus but thought it was too robust for Lucy. So others might debate that it’s not actually Lucy, but I’m certain it’s Australopithecus, which is close enough for me.

I love the idea that around 3 million years ago little Lucy was living her life with no idea–no concept–of tattooing, never mind how famous she would be in the anthropological world millions of years later.

Click here to order a copy of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

Click here to view the Science Tattoo Emporium.

Ed Yong and I may live on either side of the Atlantic, but our minds are in the same place: that strange realm where fungi take over the minds of ants, where dinosaurs sprout feathers, and where ducks shatter glass with their genitals. In other words, Earth.

We don’t get to see each other in person more than once a year, if that, but we always have a good time when we do. Which is why I’m looking forward to having an online conversation with Ed on May 14. And you’re invited.

This event is brought to you by Shindig, a new company that’s set up a web site for video chat events. The design of the site is quite elegant: the speakers appear on the top of the event page, where everyone can watch them talk. Audience members appear in their own screens on the page as well, and when speakers ask for questions, they can hit a “raise hand” button. The audience member asking a question then zooms up to the top of the screen, where he or she can have a conversation with the speaker. (You’ll obviously need a video camera and mic on your computer to take advantage of this feature.)

There are lots of things for us to talk about, such as the controversy over manmade strains of bird flu. But we’ll be happy to talk about other things biological that are on your minds, too. So bring your questions (or offer some suggestions in the comment thread below.)

We will be talking on Monday May 14 from 5 to 6 pm ET. To join us, please RSVP at this eventbrite page. The talk is free, of course, but after you RSVP you’ll then get instructions for logging into the Shindig page on May 14.

This is 100% experimental, but I expect it to be fun. It reminds of Bloggingheads, but without the creationism.

[Photo: LouFDC]

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a very important part of a very special flu virus. It may look like an ordinary protein, but in fact it’s been at the center of a blazing debate about whether our increasing power to experiment on life could lead to a disaster. Not that long ago, in fact, a national security advisory board didn’t even want you to see this. So feast your eyes.

For those who are new to this story let me start back at the beginning, in 1997.

In that year, a child in Hong Kong died of the flu. Doctors shipped a sample of his blood to virus experts in Europe, but they didn’t bother taking a look at it for months. When they did, they were startled to discover that it was unlike any flu they’d seen in a human being before.

Each year, several different flu strains circulate from person to person around the world. They’re known by the initials of the proteins that cover their surface–H3N2, for example, is one common strain. The H stands for haemagglutinin, a protein that latches to a host cell so that the virus can invade. The N stands for neuraminidase, which newly produced viruses then use to hack their way out of the cell.

Birds are the source of all our flu strains. Our feathered friends are hosts to a huge variety of H and N type viruses, which typically infect their guts and cause a mild infection. From time to time, bird flu viruses have crossed the species barrier and adapted to human hosts, infecting our airways and then spreading in air droplets. Since flu spreads so fast around the world, a fair amount of the planet’s population has had some exposure–and thus some immunity–to the flu strains in circulation today. But if a new bird flu should manage to make the leap, we could face a very grim situation–a situation that some scientists worry could rival the 1918 pandemic, which killed some 50 million people.

That’s why the scientists in 1997 were so flustered. The Hong Kong boy had died of a strain of bird flu that hadn’t been found in people before. It came to be known as H5N1.

It turned out that around Hong Kong, chickens were rife with H5N1, including the chickens for sale in live open-air markets. Public health workers slaughtered huge numbers of chickens to stop the outbreak, and, for a time, it seemed like they had beaten the virus. In fact, H5N1 had simply gone into hiding. A few years later it was back–and spreading. Birds carried it across Asia, into Africa and Europe. The New World and Australia have been spared so far, but there’s no reason to think that the virus can’t colonize those continents as well. It will just take the right bird.

Doctors found that the majority of patients hospitalized with H5N1 died. The only comforting thing about H5N1 was that it remained a bird flu. Once inside a human being, the virus couldn’t churn out lots of new viruses capable of spreading to another human. But many bird flu experts consider that a cold comfort. Like all flu viruses, H5N1 has been continually evolving. When the viruses replicate they pick up new mutations–some of which help them replicate faster. Sometimes, two H5N1 viruses co-infect a single cell at once and swap some of their genes, producing hybrids. If this high-speed evolution leads to human-adapted H5N1, we could be dealing with a global cataclysm.

Yet some flu experts doubted this grim prospect. It’s been some 15 years since H5N1 was first discovered, and despite all those years of evolution, the virus has yet to nose its way into our species. Perhaps, some scientists suggested, there was something about the biology of the strain that prevents natural selection from transforming it into a human virus. Skeptics have more recently raised another question about the risk of H5N1: is its mortality rate really all that high? In many studies, scientists have estimated the mortality rate of H5N1 based only on sick people who come to hospitals. It’s possible that a lot of people recover from bird flu infections on their own, and go missing from the statistics. (It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that the 1918 flu only had a mortality rate of 2%. If a virus can infect billions of people, even a low rate like that can lead to terrifying numbers of deaths.)

A few years ago, some bird flu experts decided to test the proposition that H5N1 was a potential human scourge. They would tinker with it to see if it could be transmitted from mammal to mammal, instead of bird to mammal. They might be able to see some warning signs for how this transition could happen in nature. The scientists applied for money from the National Institutes of Health, which considered their idea important enough to sink millions of dollars into it.

Two teams of scientists–one in the Netherlands and the other at the University of Wisconsin–got good results. They could infect ferrets with modified H5N1, and the ferrets could cough up droplets that could infect healthy ferrets. They submitted their findings to the world’s biggest scientific journals, Science and Nature, to let the world know of their discovery. One of the Dutch researchers, Ron Fouchier, referred cryptically to the research at a flu meeting in Malta in September.

It occurred to persons unknown that publishing these results might not be such a great idea. What if individuals bent on destruction got the idea of unleashing a pandemic. Maybe they could use the scientific papers–in particular the description of the experimental methods–to replicate the results. Just knowing the mutations might be enough information for a talented virologist to tweak a bird flu virus into a biological weapon.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the May issue of National Geographic, I contemplate the hand. Human hands are unique and versatile–and yet we are far from the only animals with them. By looking at the variety of hands in nature, we can see some of the most striking evidence of how evolution tinkers in all sorts of unexpected way. Check it out.

The print version is accompanied by lovely sketches of a wide range of hands. If you read the story online, you can see an animation of the human hand. And if you have the National Geographic iPad app, you can see videos of other hands, from frogs to aye-ayes.

[Image: White -handed gibbon by Ingo Arndt, on Arkive.]

I’m heading south to give a series of talks about everything from evolution to science tattoos, the future of journalism, and the mutant bird flu saga. Most of these talks are open to the public. Here’s the rundown, with the public talks noted:

Thursday 11 am: Bethesda, MD: “Telling the Stories of Science in Words and Images.”
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Fellows Scientific Retreat.

Thursday 3 pm: Arlington VA: “The Darwin Beat.”
National Science Foundation

Friday 9:30 am: US Science Engineering Festival, Washington DC Convention Center:
I’m part of the festival’s “Nifty Fifty”–speakers who talk to high school students about science. In room 146A, I’ll be giving a sneak peek of my Science Ink talk to a group of students, in advance of the festival, which officially starts on Saturday.

Saturday: US Science and Engineering Festival, Washington DC Convention Center: open to the public

I’ll be speaking twice about Science Ink –both talks are open to the public

10:55 AM-11:40 AM Stage Meeting Room Number: 147AB

Noon to 1: Book signing Expo Hall B

2-2:30 PM National Academy of Sciences Booth 603

Sunday 2pm: Philadelphia : open to the public
Philadelphia Science Festival. I’ll be talking about Science Ink with a University of Pennsylvania scientist. Location: Frankford Hall

Monday noon: Radio Times, WHYY in Philadelphia
I’ll be talking with Marty Moss-Coane. You can listen live via the show web page.

Tuesday: Washington DC and Internetlandia: 8:30 to 5 pm: National Academy of Sciences meeting on the mutant bird flu controversy. Open to the public
The official name of this meeting is, “Issues Raised, Lessons Learned, and Potential Strategies for Dual-Use Research in the Life Sciences: The H5N1 Controversy.” Leading scientists and ethicists will be talking about the surreal saga of the bird flu viruses that have been transformed into mammal-infecting pathogens. (For those foggy on the history, I’ve written about it in Slate, the New York Times, and here on the Loom.) I’ll be talking on a panel at 1:15 about the relationship between scientists and the public when it comes to this sort of research, offering some perspective from the media.

The whole meeting is open to the public, but you have to register. I’m also told it’s going to be livestreamed. The link should appear on the meeting page, and I’ll try to post it here on Tuesday.

Whew! That’s it. Fortunately, I’ll have enough time in Philadelphia to take in a visit to the Mutter Museum. If you don’t know what it is, and don’t mind getting deeply unsettled by the sight of soap cadavers and Einstein’s brain, you really owe it to yourself to go. It is an experience like no other. I hope to blog about my visit upon my return.

If there’s ever excuse to publish an optical illusion as cool as the “Rotating Snakes,” I’ll take it. This illusion was invented in 2003 by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, and ever since, Kitaoka and other scientists have been trying to figure out why it works. A new paper by Stephen Macknik at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix may have the answer.

As you’ll notice, the circles seem to rotate in response to where you look at the illusion. So Macknik and his colleagues tracked the movement of people’s eyes as they gazed at two of these wheels on a computer screen. Their subjects kept a finger pressed on a button, lifting it whenever they seemed to see the wheels move.

Macnick and his colleagues found a tight correlation between the onset of the illusion and a kind of involuntary movement our eyes make, known as microsaccades. Even when we’re staring at a still object, our eyes keep darting around. These movements, called microsaccades, help us compensate for a peculiar property of the eye: if we stare at an object for too long, the signals each photoreceptor sends to the brain become weaker. Microsaccades refresh the photoreceptors with a different input and breath new life into our perception.

Unfortunately, the jumps of our eyes get in the way of our perception of motion. If we see a snake slithering along in a desert, we don’t have to register an entire image of the snake at one instant, then another image at the next instant, and then compare the location of the two images, in order to figure out that the snake is on the move and we might want to jump out of the way. Instead, we only have to sense rapidly changing light patterns in neighboring parts of the eyes. If certain neurons in the vision-processing regions of the brain gets a sudden, strong signal from the eye, they register motion.

Normally, our eyes can register motion despite the fact that they are also performing microsaccades. Our brains can tell the difference between a shift brought on by the movement of an object and one brought on by the movement of our own eyes. But thanks to the strong contrasts and shapes in the Rotating Snakes Illusion, we get mixed up. Our motion sensors switch on, and the snakes start to slither.

Reference: “Microsaccades and Blinks Trigger Illusory Rotation in the ‘Rotating Snakes” Illusion.’ Otero-Millan et al, The Journal of Neuroscience, April 25, 2012 • 32(17):6043– 6051

[Image: From Akitaoka's snake web site. Many more big screen versions there!]

[Update: I revised this post to correct the explanation of microsaccades and their function. Thanks to John Kubie for his comments and follow-up emails.]

I got back home last night to a pleasant surprise: a copy of the new French translation of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. One of the most interesting parts of writing a book is seeing what emerges from the mind of your translator. I’ve usually had good luck with translators. We’ll exchange emails to find a way to capture the spirit of sentences in my books that would make no sense in another language, thanks to the odd figures of speech we use in English. When the book actually arrives, I usually can do little more than hope that it makes sense in Korean or Japanese or Dutch.

Once in a while, however, things don’t go well, though. I once got a disturbing email from a German reader, who had read the original edition of Parasite Rex and then picked up the German translation. “Believe me, I have never seen something like this before. It is a sin. If you could read it, you would get tears in your eyes.” (Fortunately, my American publisher was able to use his email as a cudgel, and got that edition pulped and a new translation published in its place.)

This time around, my translator changed some of the wording–of the title no less. But this time, I was very happy with it. It traded one metaphor of evolution for one that’s just as profound.

For the English title of my book, I adapted a phrase from one of the famous passages in all scientific writing: the end of The Origin of Species.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. [Emphasis mine]

I made that passage the epigraph of my book. And when I looked in the French edition, I saw “the entangled bank” translated as “un rivage luxuriant tappisé.” That wouldn’t really sing as a title. Instead, the French edition is called “Ce Merveilleux Bricolage.”

The simplest translation of that is “This Marvelous Bricolage.” Which, in a way, just kicks the ultimate meaning down the road. What’s a bricolage?

The word appears in Webster’s, defined as “a construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand.” Bricolage derives from the French verb bricoler, to putter about. But Webster’s doesn’t give you a clue of how important the word is to biologists.

In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used bricolage to describe how people will recycle old cultural components and create something new. In the 1970s, the French Nobel-prize-winning biologist Francois Jacob recycled Levi-Strauss’s idea in a lecture called “Evolution et Bricolage.” You can read the English translation, which appeared in Science, here (free pdf). In that lecture, Jacob mused about how natural selection gave rise to complex adaptations.

Natural selection has no analogy with any apsect of human behavior,” he wrote. “However, if one wanted to play with a compoarison, one would have to say that natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer–a tinkerer who does not know exctly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him, whether it be pieces of string, fragments of wood, or old cardboards; in short, it works like a tinkerer who uses everything at his disposal to produce some kind of workable object.

The whole thing is worth reading. Hell, all of Jacob’s essays and books for non-scientists are worth reading. And I’m delighted to be able to swap one great image for another in France.

[Here's the French publisher's page for the book, and a page on a French book-selling site.]

I’ve got a new column in Discover on a scientist tracing the links from our genes to our personality. Here’s how it starts:

Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain.

Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Hariri’s graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. “Okay, we’re done,” she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs off on his paperwork.

As he’s about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Ross’s brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. “So, am I sane?”

Hariri laughs noncommitally. “Well, that I can’t tell you.”

True enough: On its own, Ross’s brain can’t tell Hariri much. But a thousand brains? That’s another matter. Hariri is in the midst of assembling a large cohort of Duke undergraduates and gathering key information—brain scans, psychological tests, and genetic markers—for the Duke Neurogenetics Study. From this mountain of data, Hariri believes he’ll be able to learn a lot about Ross, about himself, about all of us. As a result, someday he may be able to read your DNA and determine your innate level of anxiety, your propensity for drinking, and a range of other psychological traits.

You can read the rest here.

[PS--You can get more neurological goodness in my two ebooks, Brain Cuttings and More Brain Cuttings.]

Yesterday my Fresh Air interview was broadcast. You can listen to it here. I’ve been lots of emails with follow-up questions, and it occurred to me that I really ought to gather up some links to more information about the topics I discussed.

If I haven’t addressed a question you had listening to the show, leave a comment to this post and I’ll add a link.

Antivirals:
My feature in Wired on the search for antiviral drugs

The “virome”–the viruses that live in our body:
A Loom post about the swarms of viruses in the mouth, where they kill off bacteria
An article in Nature about a study of the viruses in identical twins

The microbiome
My article in the New York Times
My essay on the Loom about medical ecology
My Wired atlas of the human ecosystem
An example of microbiome research: extreme navel gazing
Maryn McKenna’s story in Scientific American on the struggle to mainstream fecal transplants to treat deadly infections
Ed Yong’s oeuvre on the microbiome at Not Exactly Rocket Science
Mayrn McKenna on her blog at Wired writing on the link between beneficial bacteria and protection from asthma, obesity, and other ills.

My books related to the interview
A Planet of Viruses
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life

As I blogged yesterday, I have a story in the New York Times today about some scientists who are calling for a reformation of science, pointing to troubling indicators such as the rise in retractions of scientific papers.

As any sane journalist would do, I consulted the fantastic Retraction Watch, written by Adam Marcus (left) and Ivan Oransky, while working on my own piece. I also called Oransky for his thoughts on the argument I was describing, championed by, among others, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington and Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Oransky was a huge help. But by the time my editor and I had shaped the story to fit in the paper, only a brief mention and a link to Retraction remained. Oransky’s own opinions were left behind on the cutting room floor. Fortunately, he knows that floor very well, having swung the journalism scimitar plenty of times himself as the executive editor at Reuters Health.

Even more fortunately, the Boston Globe has published some extended reflections from Oransky and Marcus on what retractions mean for the state of science. Check it out.

[Image: Retraction Watch]

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I’ve got a long story about a growing sense among scientists that science itself is getting dysfunctional. For them, the clearest sign of this dysfunction is the growing rate of retractions of scientific papers, either due to errors or due to misconduct. But retractions represent just the most obvious symptom of deep institutional problems with how science is done these days–how projects get funded, how scientists find jobs, and how they keep labs up and running.

Along with the main story, I also wrote a sidebar about how hard it is to hear from the scientists who write retracted papers. I also spoke on the latest Timescast video, which I’ve embedded below. I show up with Arturo Casadevall at about 4:30. There are also lots of links in my story to the original papers. And if you don’t already read it, be sure to check out the blog Retraction Watch, which has been digging deep into the retraction story for years now.

Recently I talked with Dave Davies, guest host on Fresh Air, about viruses and other things invisible. Our conversation airs tomorrow (Tuesday 4/17) on National Public Radio. More details can be found on the program’s web site.