Darwin meets Eminem

Maybe this is over-the-line geeky, but I'm sort of an over-the-line geeky kind of guy. So let me introduce you to Baba Brinkman, a Canadian hip-hop artist who gained a small amount of notoriety for rapping Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. His new subject is Darwin and evolution:

Science has a review of one of Baba's live performances on their website. It includes lyrics and several other videos of his work. If you're reading this from home, you can also checkout his MySpace page to hear the "Natural Selection" rap with music and a back beat.

Artificial Eyes?

From 60-second science:

When vision fails, it's often the result of damage to the eye caused by an injury or degenerative disease. In an attempt to restore such vision loss, researchers for more than a decade have been working to develop an optical prosthetic that can restore sight by delivering images directly to the brain. And it appears they succeeded. The BBC reports that a 73-year-old man identified only as Ron, who received an optical implant at Moorefields Eye Center in London last summer, can see again for the first time in 30 years.

Apparently the device works by using a tiny camera and video processor mounted on a pair of eyeglasses:

After the video processor converts the images to an electronic signal, a transmitter on the glasses sends that information wirelessly to a receiver attached to the surface of the eye. From there, the information is sent through a tiny cable to an electrode array implanted in the retina, stimulating it to emit electrical pulses. These pulses trigger signals in the retina that travel through the optic nerve to the brain, which perceives patterns of light and dark spots that correspond to the electrodes stimulated.

Other tests have shown promise for the prosthetic eye, with 11 of 17 reporting some degree of restored vision.

Daily Recap: Friday 3/6

Investigating Technologies:
Only four days left to finish up the third harbor rotation.

Anatomy and Physiology:
Work day in preparation for next Tuesday's exam covering the respiratory system.

Biology:
Friday catch-up day.

Thru-YOU

The concept is really pretty simple: create an entire musical album by sampling and remixing YouTube videos. The results, given to us by an artist called Kutiman, is unreal:

To give you an idea of how it's done, Podcasting News shows one of the videos along with a list of the source videos that were mixed and sampled. And if you really like what you hear/see, a full video list can be accessed here.

Facebook Sociology

Okay, so Facebook makes you more social, right?

Actually, according to a recent article published in The Economist, that might not actually be the case. You see, sociologist have, for quite awhile, thought that there is a limit to the number of people that can form a meaningful social group:

Several years ago...Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

You see, while many Facebook users make it a (very annoying) habit of responding yes to every friend request that they get, the average number of friends across all users is relatively small, and the number of "friends" that an average user will actually interact with is even smaller:

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

So, surpirisingly, while Facebook might allow you to connect with (and broadcast your life to) an excessively large number of people, the social "norms" that humanity has established seem to be holding steady. From the dawn of our species to the explosion of cyberspace, humans have remained...well...human.

25 things

I've got a couple of Facebook posts for today. The first is a video that I thought was pretty funny:

Daily Recap: Thursday, 3/5

Happy Birthday, Collin!
Welcome to EHS, Michael!

Investigating Technologies:
Groups are making progress towards the completion of their projects for the third rotation. Obviously, everything will need to be finished up a week from today.

Anatomy and Physiology:
Lab day! Each student measured their different respiratory volumes and compared them to "normal" values. Since we don't have access to a proper spirometer, we used balloons. Since balloons are roughly spherical, we were able to approximate the volume of air inside of them by using some simple geometry equations.

Biology:
1. We took and graded quiz 3.5 over evolution, primarily focusing on population genetics.
2. We completed a graphic organizer that summarized and compared different patterns of evolution.

Fossilized Footprints

While we're on the topic of fossils, check out this story:

Freshly discovered trails of ancient footprints, left on what was once the muddy shores of a river near Ileret, Kenya, indicate that some 1.5 million years ago human ancestors walked in a manner similar to that of people today. The international team of researchers who analyzed the prints say that those who left them had feet that looked a lot like ours.

The prints were probably left by Homo ergaster, an earlier, larger version of the widespread Homo erectus, says David Braun, a lecturer in archeology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and co-author of the study set to be published tomorrow in Science. This discovery "lets us know that they were probably just as efficient at walking upright as we are," he says.

The 300,000,000 Year Old Fish Brain

(A tip of my teacher's hat to Brock, who first pointed this story out to me.)

Paleontologist have recently discovered a 300-million year old fossilized fish brain. It represents the oldest fossilized brain ever found. As Carl Zimmer describes it:

In recent years, scientists have been able to get important clues about brains by scanning the brain cases. They can create virtual fossils in their computers that reveal a wealth of details. Alan Pradel of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and his colleagues recently scanned a 300-million-year old fossil of an ancient relative of sharks called Sibyrhynchus denisoni. They recognized many details of the skull. But when they looked closer, they saw something they could not quite believe. They saw something that looked like a fossilized brain.

[...]

Pradel and his colleagues were pleased enough to see the braincase of Sibyrhynchus, but they were stunned to see a chunk of rock deep inside that looked like a very small fish brain (and I do mean small–its length was 7 mm, or a quarter of an inch). Fossils sometimes form strange structures, but Pradel and his colleagues are pretty sure that they’re actually seeing a brain. It has the shape of a ratfish brain, including the various sections of a ratfish brain. And it even has nerves that extend to the right places to connect to the eyes and ears.

The video below shows a 3-D model of the skull, brain case, and brain:

Daily Recap: Wednesday, 3/4

Investigating Technologies:
Intervals 2 and 3 are now open, so groups should be meeting to go over their team briefs and task lists. We have 6 class periods after today to finish this rotation.

Anatomy and Physiology:
The lab that was scheduled today was moved to tomorrow, since I didn't have the supplies that I need. Instead, we took a few brief notes over gas transport and diffusion. (Basically we just flip-flopped the schedules for today and tomorrow.

Biology:
6th period: Discussion about teaching evolution in Kansas.
7th period: Notes over equilibrium and speciation.

National Athletic Training Month

I should mention at some point that March is National Athletic Training Month:

During March, athletic trainers across America are being recognized for their commitment to helping people prevent injuries and stay healthy and active. Athletic training is an allied health care profession. Highly educated and dedicated to the job at hand, athletic trainers can be found in high schools and colleges, corporations, professional sports, the military, performing arts, and clinics, hospitals, and physician offices.

iPod Shuffle

I was "introduced" to The Waifs a few years ago at the Smoky Hill River Festival in Salina. They've been one of my favorites since. Just awesome stuff.

And the girl blows a pretty mean harp too:

Product Labeling

Yesterday I went home right after school with a pretty good migraine headache, and by "pretty good" I mean absolutely debilitating. I think I read somewhere that 25 million Americans get these. Those of you who do will feel my pain, those of you who don't won't understand.

I don't get them very often, but when I do I like to use Excedrin Migraine. It does as good a job as anything else at relieving the symptoms that I experience. However, yesterday all I could find was some "extra strength" Excedrin. I got to looking at the product labeling, though, and realized that it's the same thing! So I'm thinking to myself, "Boy, that's really kind of a cheap trick for the company to sell the same product as two different things," and did a little research.

What I found was interesting. The original Excedrin ("extra strength") was approved by the FDA for treating migraines in 1998. This made it the only over-the-counter migraine medicine. In order to comply with the approval, though, Excedrin must be labeled different when it is marketed and sold for migraine headaches. So if I would have read past the active ingredients, I would have noticed that the indications, warnings, and dosages were different.

Basically it's the same medicine with different instructions. Interesting.

Daily Recap: Tuesday, 3/3

Happy square root day! (h/t Mrs. Daigh)

Investigating Technologies:
We're continuing to move forward with our third and final harbor rotation for the third quarter. We should be getting close to finished, and intervals 2 and 3 will be open tomorrow.

Anatomy and Physiology:
Notes over respiratory physiology and lung capacities. These notes aren't posted online yet...sorry.

Biology:
Lab day! We are using beans to simulate the effect of natural selection on the relative frequency of alleles in a gene pool. Good stuff.

Biology and anatomy both have current events articles due on Friday!

BioLab Website

If you get the chance, after you collect your data for the natural selection lab you can post it here.

iPod Shuffle

I was sick yesterday and didn't get to this...so here you go (one of my favorite bands, BTW.)

Daily Recap: Monday, 3/2

Welcome to March!

Investigating Technologies:
Each group should be coming close to finishing up the first interval of harbor rotation 3. I will open intervals 2 and 3 in the next few days. Keep in mind that we only have a week and a half left (8 class days) to finish up this rotation. We're going to have to hustle a little bit.

Anatomy and Physiology:
We finished up the respiratory anatomy notes from Friday, then worked on Lab Exercise 43: Organs of the Respiratory System.

Biology:
1. Both classes took quiz 3.4.
2. 6th period: Notes over equillibrium and speciation (population genetics)
3. Discussion over teaching evolution in Kansas

That Flushing Sound

That sound you're hearing is continuing flush of the economy down the drain. This morning, the DOW dropped below 7,000 for the first time since 1997. If this keeps up, we all might be using sticks and rocks for lunch money by this time next year.

Asteroids and Such

Early this morning, a piece of rock 35 meters wide passed within 72,000 km of Earth. In the sense of space, that's a pretty close miss (about 1/5 the distance to the moon). Sky and Telescope has a short post about this even, as does Spaceweather. Bad Astronomy also has a post about it, but you won't be able to access it from a school computer (it's one of those dreaded blog-things...) It's important to note that this asteroid never posed a threat to Earth, even though it was only discovered a couple of days ago.

If you're tired of sleeping at night and want to give yourself something to worry about, scroll down on the Spaceweather site. You'll see that astronomers are currently tracking 1033 PHA's (potentially hazardous asteroids). These are large asteroids that have the potential of intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

As celebrated by Google: