I read a book!

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Scheikundeles / Chemistry class Chemistry lab. Photo by Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands.

It’s called Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching (buy it over on Indiebound). It’s about teaching science to undergraduates, which is a thing I’ve been trying to do, lately. And I wrote a review for ProfHacker.

In their new book Making Scientists: Six Principles for Effective College Teaching, (Harvard University Press, $24.95) Light and Micari argue that undergraduate education in the sciences should go beyond imparting a basic set of knowledge, and make learning science more like the experience of doing scientific research.

If teaching science to undergraduates is also a thing you do, may I suggest you go read the whole thing?◼

A Thing I Can Do

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2009.10.11 - Portland marathon, mile 17 About mile 17 of the 2009 Portland Marathon. After five marathons, this is still the best “running” shot I have. Photo via jby.

I first heard that something was up in Boston yesterday when I got off the treadmill at the campus gym and logged onto the exercise-tracking app Fitocracy to record the workout. Like any self-respecting tech startup in 2013, Fitocracy has a “social” component, and people were using its message board to ask each other what had happened.

When I got back to the office, I found out pretty quickly. Someone planted bombs at the finish line to the premier marathon in North America. As of right now, three people have died of injuries sustained in the blasts; more than 170 are injured. Many people have lost limbs—legs—to shrapnel. I’ve run five marathons myself, and pushed myself pretty damn hard to do it, and I can only dream of someday qualifying to run the 26.2-mile course that ends at that finish line.

And that’s really all I can say about it. Other people were actually there. I’m just another guy who runs, listening to special reports on the radio.

I’ve spent the time since I saw those first social network posts helping a friend celebrate the completion of her doctorate (with cake!), hacking away at two or three different projects I’m currently juggling, listening to the news without saying much, planning for a scientific conference, speculating angrily about the kind of person who’d bomb a marathon, receiving some good (but not yet blog-able) news, and trying to decide whether to write about any of this in a public way at all.

And I found out—via Twitter, of course—that runners all over the place are logging their runs, and dedicating them to Boston. There’s a hashtag: #RunForBoston. So I did that for my nine-mile Tuesday run, down one bank of the Mississippi River and back up the other in the still-too-rare sunlight of an April evening in Minnesota. Because it’s A Thing I Can Do.◼

Science online, advice that doesn’t add up edition

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math outside Math, in the field. Photo by Wanda Dechant.

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Battlestar Galactica, the late-90s sitcom

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This doesn’t quite achieve the same degree of cognitive dissonance as the trailer for that romantic comedy Shining, but it’s not far off.

Blame the Mary Sue for dragging me back into this frakkin’ fandom.◼

Science online, plight of the honeybees edition

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Honeybees Bees. Photo by wondermac.

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Carnival of Evolution, April 2013

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Tomorrowland at Dusk What kind of sequencing capacity do they have in Tomorrowland? Photo by Big DumpTruck.

The April 2013 edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online over at Synthetic Daisies. This issue of the monthly collection of online writing about all things evolution-y is organized around the theme of the future of evolution—which looks to be full of exciting possibilities. There’s experimental phylogenetics and speculation about radio-sensing animals and species coming back from the dead, so maybe you should go peruse the whole thing.◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of pollinators’ role in creating new plant species

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Joshua tree flower closeup A Joshua tree flower. Photo by jby.

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I’ve got a new post discussing freshly published results from my dissertation research on Joshua trees and their pollinators. I don’t have to tell you why Joshua trees are interesting, do I?

Joshua trees are pollinated by yucca moths, which are unusually focused, as pollinators go. Your average honeybee will blunder around in a flower, scooping up pollen and drinking nectar, and maybe accidentally pollinate the flower in the process. A yucca moth, on the other hand, gathers up a nice, tidy bundle of pollen in specialized mouthparts, carries it to another Joshua tree flower, and deliberately packs it into place. She does that because the fertilized flower provides more than a little nectar for her—she’s laid her eggs inside the fertilized flower, and when they hatch her offspring will eat some of the seeds developing inside it.

That’s pretty cool in its own right. But what’s especially interesting about Joshua trees, from an evolutionary perspective, is that they’re pollinated by two different moth species. And it turns out that the flowers of Joshua trees associated with the different moth species also look pretty different. The most dramatically different feature is in the length of the stylar canal in the pistil, the part of the flower that determines how the moths lay their eggs.

In the latest development, my collaborators and I tested for genetic evidence that Joshua trees pollinated by different moth species are isolated from each other. To learn what we found, go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, lupins for dinner edition

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Lupins Yum? Photo by Stephen Downes.

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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of the relationship between gut microbes and obesity

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Obese mouse, non-obese mouse. Photo via Nothing in Biology Makes Sense.

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Sarah Hird discusses an attempt to suss out whether your gut microbes change when you’re overweight, or your gut microbes can make you overweight.

Historically, medical research has focused on pathogenic bacteria when trying to understand the relationship between human health and microorganisms. This makes intuitive sense – since pathogens make us sick – but our bodies host way more nonpathogenic bacteria than pathogens and they function in keeping us healthy. Our gastrointestinal tract has trillions of bacteria in it and much recent work has been trying to understand these complex communities. Mice are a common model for understanding human gut microbes and health. Enter Obie, the obese mouse (Figure 1, left) and Lenny, the lean mouse (right).

The new study demonstrates that bacteria cultured from the gut of an obese mouse cause normal-weight mice to gain weight when they’re fed a high-fat diet—and that the genetically similar mice without the bacteria can eat the same diet without becoming obese. You should definitely go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, selected swallows edition

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Cliff Swallow in flight Cliff swallow in flight. Photo by donjd2.
  • This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Doing natural history like a Victorian—but with gigabytes of genetic data.
  • And, at the Molecular Ecologist: A tale of two Dryad submissions.
  • Speedy evolution in more ways than one. Cliff swallows living under highway bridges have evolved shorter wings—maybe because they help dodge oncoming cars.
  • Breaking! It’s possible to make science accessible without reinforcing sexist stereotypes.
  • Which, I would argue, is most of the time. When evolution and ecology happen at the same time.
  • Not the only way in which it’s fantastical. The paleofantasy of “alternative” medicine.
  • Step one: read good science writing. How to write good science.
  • Handy! Convert technical units of measurement into more comprehensible terms using Wolfram Alpha!
  • And why that makes the whole business suspect. Why proposals to resurrect extinct species are really all about Homo sapiens.
  • First, they came for the political scientists … The U.S. Senate decides it can ban the National Science Foundation from funding an entire field of research.
  • Related: who still does this? Why do we call it the “wild type,” anyway?

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