Black Bromptons bearing bounty

pip-pip gives us this wonderful photo of a quintessentially English Brompton folding bicycle (be still my beating heart) with a lush harvest of leeks from the allotment. Two years ago last week I snapped this photo of our Brompton with a truly ginormous butternut squash from Wimbledon Farmers' Market:

Coincidence? Perhaps.

Stella by starlight

Welcome to the world, Stella! Your mother has put out a request for lullabies but after having racked my brain for two weeks, I couldn't come up with anything, and though I do plan to ask my own mum, she is on an RV trip right now. However, a little searching yielded this, something that I know both of your parents will dig:

Languages from the Cradle is a European Union funded project to collect the lullabies of Europe. Learn more in this mp3 from United Nations Radio (did you know there was such a thing? neither did I) including a lovely Sudanese lullaby, and don't miss the Languages from the Cradle wiki.

I also offer two lullabies from my favorite British songstress, Kate Rusby. The first is a real lullaby and the second and third are two versions (second one is live and I love how the audience embraces it ...I even see some young heads nodding off) of a traditional song that works well as one:

Scientist Pin-Ups: Kitty Joyner

Thanks to Darwin-dispersalist Michael Barton who suggested this pin-up, asking, "do engineers count?" I was pondering my response to the question as I clicked through to the link he sent me and as soon as I saw the oh-so-pinuppable-in-that-1950's-you-know-what-I'm-talkin'-'bout-way image I knew my answer had to be hell, yes.

Kitty Joyner, electrical engineer, at Langley in 1952 (NASA Images).

On top of being aesthetically beautiful, this pin-up is hot for the following reasons:

1. I have a soft spot for NASA
2. Kitty Joyner is not a household name and as such provides another much-needed example of a 'normal woman' in science
3. Even in 2008 a woman engineer is a relatively rare thing (in the US, only 12.4% of electrical engineering bachelor's degrees went to women last year); I can't imagine how rare it must have been in 1952 ...perhaps this is the tail-end of the of the Rosie the Riveter era?
   

Down syndrome research pop quiz: fruit flies 94, Sarah Palin zilch

This story has already been covered to death (or at least I hope so) on teh interwebs, but I must have my say. You see, when Palin dissed fruit flies...



...she didn't just diss fruit flies and the general and specific importance of model organism research (for which she is rightly and expertly skewered by Christopher Hitchens, Kevin Berger and others). She also dissed me.

As mentioned previously here and here, I did my PhD research on the fruit fly* Drosophila melanogaster. Specifically, I worked my butt off for six years to understand some of the myriad and complex functions of a fruit fly gene called Ras (the human counterpart of which plays a role in the onset and/or development of almost every kind of cancer) on the ovarian and embryonic development of the fruit fly, and how this has been modulated during fruit fly evolution.

That's right, friends, I am officially (and, it must be said, very proudly) on Sarah Palin's shit list: not only did I do research on fruit flies (booooo!) but I also did research on evolution (hissssss!).

But enough about me.

Almost unbelievably, Palin's sneer came directly on the heels of her own call to help families with special needs kids like her nephew with autism and her son with Down syndrome. See, in Palin's (surprisingly young) universe, it cannot possibly be fathomed that something as obscure as a fruit fly could help special needs kids. But a quick search on PubMed for 'Drosophila and "Down syndrome"' yields 94 peer-reviewed research articles including this one [my emphases]:

Dscam guides embryonic axons by Netrin-dependent and -independent functions.

Andrews GL, Tanglao S, Farmer WT, Morin S, Brotman S, Berberoglu MA, Price H, Fernandez GC, Mastick GS, Charron F, Kidd T.

Development. 2008 Oct 23. [Epub ahead of print]

Developing axons are attracted to the CNS midline by Netrin proteins and other as yet unidentified signals. Netrin signals are transduced in part by Frazzled (Fra)/DCC receptors. Genetic analysis in Drosophila indicates that additional unidentified receptors are needed to mediate the attractive response to Netrin. Analysis of Bolwig's nerve reveals that Netrin mutants have a similar phenotype to Down Syndrome Cell Adhesion Molecule (Dscam) mutants. Netrin and Dscam mutants display dose sensitive interactions, suggesting that Dscam could act as a Netrin receptor. We show using cell overlay assays that Netrin binds to fly and vertebrate Dscam, and that Dscam binds Netrin with the same affinity as DCC. At the CNS midline, we find that Dscam and its paralog Dscam3 act redundantly to promote midline crossing. Simultaneous genetic knockout of the two Dscam genes and the Netrin receptor fra produces a midline crossing defect that is stronger than the removal of Netrin proteins, suggesting that Dscam proteins also function in a pathway parallel to Netrins. Additionally, overexpression of Dscam in axons that do not normally cross the midline is able to induce ectopic midline crossing, consistent with an attractive receptor function. Our results support the model that Dscam proteins function as attractive receptors for Netrin and also act in parallel to Frazzled/DCC. Furthermore, the results suggest that Dscam proteins have the ability to respond to multiple ligands and act as receptors for an unidentified midline attractive cue. These functions in axon guidance have implications for the pathogenesis of Down Syndrome.

In other words, research on fruit flies is helping us to understand Down Syndrome better. The same can be said for almost all human biology, both pathogenic and 'normal' (whatever that means).

And here's where Palin's mocking is even more resonant: the reason fruit fly biology illuminates human biology is because our genomes are so similar and the reason our genomes are so similar is because we inherited them from the last common ancestor of humans and fruit flies [cue Sarah Palin's head popping off and steam shooting out].


*Though not technically correct, 'fruit fly' is the colloquial name for the monumentally important model organism Drosophila melanogaster. True fruit flies belong to the insect family Tephritidae and it was in fact a research project on these Tephritid flies that Palin was so gleefully skewering as wasteful earmark spending. Some have argued that this fact exonerates Palin-- i.e. that she was not mocking D. melanogaster research because she knows how important that is (right, as if Palin knows the difference between true fruit flies and model organism 'fruit flies') but rather she was mocking Tephritid fruit fly research. Problem is that the project she mocked is more applied to human benefit (in this case agricultural productivity) than most D. melanogaster research, not less, so there's that argument out the window.

Mood blogging

h/t Chris Coltraine via Matt Brown

Scientist Pin-Ups: Senta's sexy sextant

Senta Osoling learns how to determine latitude by using a sextant in September 1942 at Polytechnic High School, Los Angeles (which is, coincidentally, where my father went to high school). Senta later became a chemist, and is now the Director of National Center for Improving Science Education. Profiled here.

h/t Michael Barton

"I'm a scientist, and I'm voting for Barack Obama"

Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund and ScienceBlogs have launched A Vote for Science, a collection of YouTube videos made by scientists explaining who they are voting for and why. So in addition to casting my absentee ballot, I think contributing something to A Vote for Science should be my other pre-election duty this weekend. I'm not sure I need a whole video, though, when one picture pretty much says it all:

A good friend's uterus, this week. I'm going to hazard a guess that this future heir of our environmental legacy is not going to look back kindly on the folks who chanted "drill, baby, drill! and pretended for way, way, way too long that climate change wasn't caused by human activity.