New university one step closer

The bill proposal the creation of a new university in South Texas (including a medical school) passed unanimously in the House of Representatives a few moments ago. The only legislative step needed now is for Governor Rick Perry to sign the bill into law, which he said he would do.

This means my university will be changing and merging with other institutions and more stuff will expected from us.

Now what? In the words of Amy Pond... “Okay kid.... this is where it gets complicated.” 

There will soon be a zillion nitty gritty details to work out, which have so far been in short supply. 

Colour costs crickets

You probably don’t feel tired when you get a tan.

You probably think your friends feel more or less fatigued depending on whether they are dark skinned or fair skinned (like myself).

We know that differences in colour are important lots of other species besides humans. They can play a big part in an animal’s ability to blend into the surrounding environment, for instance. What might be less appreciated is that being a certain colour might take energy. After all, many colours in animals are caused by pigments: specific molecules that animals have to make in their bodies. Some of those molecules could well depend on molecules that the animal has to get somehow, or make through a physiological process.

Melanin is just such a chemical. Melanin is a dark chemical in lost of insects, but one of the main compounds insects need to make it only comes in food. If you don’t get enough food, you can’t make enough melanin. A new paper by Roff and Fairbairn take this a step further, and asks if melanin might actually be costly for animals to make, with an eye towards evolutionary situations. For instance, how big a benefit in dark colour would there have to be for you to spend the energy to make more dark stuff?

They test this in a clever way. Rather than looking at different colour types of one species, they look at changes in colour of a single species, a sand cricket (Gryllus firmus; above right). When these crickets shed their skeleton, they are very lightly coloured (right): there is no melanin in their new skeleton for a while until it hardens up.

They reasoned that if making all this melanin was costly to the cricket, then crickets with less melanin should have more of some other feature, like the gonads. And that’s what they found. The bigger the gonads in cricket, the less melanin they had. This degree of melanization was highly heritable, too (a score of 0.61, where 0 is not influenced by genes, and 1 is completely determined by genes).

This in no way suggests that this means you shouldn’t tan. Yet.

Reference

Roff DA. & Fairbairn DJ. 2013. The costs of being dark: the genetic basis of melanism and its association with fitness-related traits in the sand cricket. Journal of Evolutionary Biology: in press. DOI: 10.1111/jeb.12150

Moth picture from here; cricket picture from here; cricket molt from here.

Sudden realization

I genuinely had this thought walking home last night...

Comments for first half of May 2013

The Singular Scientist examines oft-given public speaking advice to calm nerves before a presentation.

Small Pond Science is looking for summer reading. If you’re an educator, I like Design for How People Learn.

I really liked Doctor Becca’s reflections on being mid-way through the tenure process, especially the bit about fame. Also excellent is Small Pond Science’s reaction to that.

Love Girls Are Geeks advice on how to talk with a scientist.

“Offshore” journals

Jeffrey Beall is doing much to draw attention to issues surrounding the validity of new journals. He is in the news today because a publisher is threatening to sue him for one billion (yes, billion with a b) dollars.

But I wanted to comment about a post from April about Hindawi Publishing. Beall ends:

Is this the future of scholarly publishing, dumbed down and offshore?

The “offshore” comment has a slightly snobbish overtone. It implies that, “Of course, some places simply can’t produce good scholarship.” I am sensitive to this, since I realized my own posts made similar jabs at the national origin of many journals. I realized that was a little unfair.

I agree that researchers some countries do face bigger challenges in producing top-quality scholarship. It could be due to lack of infrastructure, distorted publishing incentives, or an overly cliquish academic culture. But such challenges need to be examined and spelled out, not made in an offhand way.

External links

Hindawi’s Profit Margin is Higher than Elsevier’s
Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion

Related posts

As Nigeria is to banking, India is to science publishing
Science Online 2013 appetizer: Open access or vanity press?
The center of knowledge

Tuesday Crustie: Macro

The photographer identifies this as Orconectes, though not which species.

Photo by Bee Nouveau on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Continuing education

“I just want to continue my education.”

I’ve heard this from a few prospective grad students. I understand why they would say they want to continue their education when they’re asked why they want to go to grad school. I imagine for their entire lives, they have probably been encouraged to stay in school. For their entire lives, they have probably been told degrees are a pathway to greater professional success. For their entire lives, education has been an unalloyed good.

But “continuing education” is not a good reason to go to grad school. At the end of a bachelor’s degree, honestly, you should have a pretty darn good idea about how to continue educating yourself. That’s the point of a liberal arts degree. Grad school is a specific education with a specific purpose. Do it if you need the degree for a specific career, or if you love the subject.

I have yet to hear someone who says, “I just want to continue my education” give a good answer if they get asked, “Why?” They often have no plan, and little understanding of what grad school entails.

Scientific writing seminar

This is a talk I gave to undergraduate research students at the STEM Center earlier today. Come for the tips, stay for the bad jokes!


Additional, 11 May 2013: Now you can follow along with the slides on Slideshare!

Getaway

A CBS station in Dallas reports of a new invasive species in my state. Now, I work with potentially invasive species, so I don’t want to make light of the biological damage that could be done here, but... this is the invasive species:

The report calls it a giant African land snail, which could be any of several species.

The story concludes:

Unfortunately the snail discovered in the Houston homeowner’s backyard woman’s backyard got away before it could be caught.

Got away? A snail got away. A snail... got away? A snail?!

How does a snail get away? You had one job!

Are you sure this isn’t a publicity stunt for this summer movie?

“Can you hear me now?” The new record holder for hearing

This is our new winner, ladies and gentlemen.

This unassuming moth is a greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella). Don’t let its drab appearance fool you, friends. This is a record-setting animal, with one of the most extreme sensory systems yet found. Its speciality? Hearing.

When you listen to anything, there are two main properties inherent in the sound: loudness and tone. The volume is determined by the size of sound waves; the tone is set by the frequency of sound waves. Humans hear tones where the sound waves vibrate back and forth at several thousand times a second. Something that moves back and forth once a second has a frequency of one Hertz (Hz); a thousand times a second is one kiloHertz (kHz).

People differ in how well they hear sounds at the high end. In particular, you lose the high frequency sounds as you get older. You can test how high you can hear at this website. Note that it stops at 22 kHz, because very few people can hear that high.

Animals, of course, have different limitations than humans. Cartoons often reference a dog whistle, with a pitch that humans can’t hear, but dogs can.

(Note: “Dog whistle” is not to be confused with “wolf whistle.” Know the difference!)

Moir and colleagues did two experiments to show the wax moth’s superior high-end hearing. First, they used a technique to show whether the ear drum (tympanum) was vibrating. If you can’t vibrate something at at the same frequency as the sound, you can’t detect the tone of the sound. They found the ear drum was able to keep up with every frequency they tested.

The critical experiment, though, is the neurophysiology. It doesn’t matter what the ear drum does if the neurons don’t convert anything into a signal. The wax moth has an ear with a grand total of four neurons devoted to picking up sound. Thus, analyzing the signals is fairly straighforward.

They found the moth’s ear could pick up sounds all the way up to 300 kHz. That’s twice as high as the previous record holder:

Sorry, Lymantria dispar. You had a good run.

The wax moth doesn’t hear equally well across the range. It is particularly good at picking up sounds in the 60 kHz range. For the wax moths to hear the end frequency sounds, they have to be much louder. At 60 kHz, the wax moths can pick up sounds of a volume about 50 decibels of sound pressure level (dB SPL); at 300 kHz, the sound has to be more like 90 dB SPL. That’s a loud sound. And at the very high end (280-300 kHz), some of the moths don’t respond at all to even loud sounds, suggesting this is near the upper limit of their hearing.

Why does the wax moth need such amazing hearing? The general explanation for why insects can hear at these high frequencies is because of these:

Bats hunt insects using high frequency sounds, and many insects have evolved ears that can hear the sounds bats make. This does not seem to be coincidence. The bats are thought to be exerting extreme selection pressure on insects, so hearing predators approaching is an adaptive advantage.

In this case, there is just one little puzzle. No bat makes a sound that hits 300 kHz. Why does the greater wax moth ear reach way up that high in the frequency spectrum? The authors suggest that this highly responsive ear allows the moth to react faster to sounds. After all, if your ear can vibrate at 300,000 times a second, and it takes 300 vibrations for the ear to pick up the sound, you could pick up the sound in a thousandth of a second, compared to about a hundredth of a second for an ear vibrating at 20 kHz, like our crappy human ears.

Reference

Moir HM, Jackson JC, Windmill JFC. 2013. Extremely high frequency sensitivity in a 'simple' ear. Biology Letters 9(4): 20130241-20130241. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0241

Related posts

Good night, Dr. Griffin, where ever you are...
Crickets fly away from bats, but do they run away, too?
Do bright bugs banish bothersome bats?
Let your neurons relax, the predators are gone!

Photo by dhobern on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.