Talk about "Visualizing Bio Phenomena" - Frogs!

Scientists in Japan this week announced the have bred 'translucent frogs' making it possible to see their internal organs.

We'll explore the question of 'seeing the inside' in weeks to come, but these scientists apparently have engineered these frogs for the purpose of studying their development without the necessity of dissection.

Video of these ghost rib-bits is interesting, as is this short news blurb about them.

The lastest mass extinction

As we discussed in class, the recognition that mass extinctions ocassionally wipe out much of complex creation is a strike against the view of evolution as some grand "March of Progress" with some inevitable trajectory.

Although many believe the latest mass extinction is occurring at this very moment, due largely human activity, there was another large one just 13,o00 years ago. This happened at the end of the last ice age, and the questions was: where did the mastodons and giant ground sloths that used to prowl around here all go??

One theory has long held that humans hunted many of these animals to extinction, and while this may have contributed, the questions still remains was to why the climate shifted so suddenly - no doubt the ned of the ice age has a major facotr in driving many cold-adapted speices to extinction.

Just this week, new evidence is out on this! The possible cuplrit? - meteor impact! Thought to be responsible for other extinctions, evidence points to a recent meteor impact inducing major and rapid climate change. Read the article here, but reflect on what the world lost with those giant ground sloths....

Harry Harlow & Maternal Deprivation

Above is the psychologist Harry Harlow conducting his groundbreaking experiments on maternal deprivation with baby rhesus monkeys and various "Robo-moms."

Monkeys as models for human psychology? As we discussed in class , evolutionary biology gives this practice theoretical foundation, but the practice of drawing comparisons across species goes much further back than that - as we saw with Edward Tyson and his chimpanzee a la the Great Chain of Being, and as we will see again soon in the coming weeks as well with other examples.

Here is the This American Life Episode that discusses Harlow's work well, as a prelude to an amazing piece about a boy with "attachment disorder":

Unconditional Love, episode 317


-andy

Meta-analysis and the usefullness of Vitamin E

The readings reminded me of this NPR story on Meta-analysis in the case of Vitamin E. Meta-analysis is the consideration of various studies that share similar tests that can then be combined to fit on a broader scale to counter the specifics of data. Dr. Marcello Pagano of Harvard School of Public Health was on discussing the findings in a Meta-analysis of Vitamin E supplements, and in this case, so called Megadoses of vitamin E. Previous studies have shown that the intake of Vitamin E can be beneficial for your health. But this new study shows it can actually impact your health. It seems that when data is reviewed on a small scale it points to the benefits, but when viewed on a macro scale, negative aspects can be seen.

link
Meta-analysis Wiki

Two Viz sites of interest.....

A couple sites that might be of interest to you all -

EcoViz - a web-log about visualizing ecological and environmental information, run by Tiffany Holmes here in Art and Tech Dept. at SAIC

Visualizing Science - A web-lob by a Ryan Wyatt, a astronomy educator and planetarium show designer/director that covers all of the sciences.


andy

"3-D Fruit Fly Images To Benefit Brain Research"

Optical Projection Tomography?
Hot off the presses:

New forms of visualizations are developing faster than one can keep up - this technology is very new - in fact, I've never even heard of it before today.

The image to the right is one of a fly using Optical Projection Tomography, or OPT, and it has some novel powers to visually resolve details in the body.

Some of the images it produces are STUNNING

The articel raises another important issue - how do we "visualize" diseases like Parkinson's in Alzheimer's in humans? How does the headline even make sense? Other organisms themselves my be conceptual and biological models for things human - a principle we'll return to in a couple weeks, and that this article demonstrates well.

Luis Van Ahn + the visual cortex

This is a great article on a Carnegie Mellon researcher, Luis Van Ahn, and his work farming our idle hours to power various processes via games and other visualizations. My favorite of his inventions is the 'captchas' - those little validations at the bottom of forms to confirm you're human - he has designed a new type of captcha that feeds illegible words from the scans of digital archives, so that while you confirm your not a bot, you help fill in the fuzzy words of the database.

Link