Seen at the Loomof Carl Zimmer: using Play Doh, Sophia Tintori and Cassandra Extavour talk about multicellularity and the specialization of reproductive cells.
The video, made by the evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn, is from Creature Cast, a collaborative blog produced by members of the Dunn Lab at Brown University. The Dunn Lab investigates how evolution has produced a diversity of life. On this newly evoluted “Creature Cast” you can find short, original and good quality posts on zoology in the broad sense often with beautiful photos or videos. You can now subscribe to the CreatureCast video podcast through Brown University at iTunes U.
Work provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
Another example of a great post on Creature Cast is the Tale of two holes about why some animals have one hole and others two. Does the single hole in one-holed animals correspond to the mouth or anus of animals with two holes? Apparently the same sets of genes appear in many different contexts within and across species. In this case there are two distinct modules for mouth and blastopore (the first hole developed in animals during their development) and they can be decoupled. Again there is a terrific photo made by Dunn showing a sea anemone with a single hole for eating, excreting, and shedding eggs and sperm, and an annelid worm with two holes.
This is a Friday Foolery post, thus permit me to show me something completely different: a successful Play-Doh ad-campaign started in Singapore (what a coincidence, the city I left 26 h ago). These ads talk to parents directly, reminding them about the thousand of possible things you can make with the product, but even more so about how safe it is to play with it. (although someone commented: “what if kids eat those pills? Although Play-Doh is non-toxic…)
This year’s theme was FEAR. The program was as follows:
Welcome – Rinnooy Kan
Presentation of new work of art of Albert van Westing (1960), recently bought by the AMC – Wim Pybes, director of the “RijksMuseum”
“Mit Freud und Freud ich fahr dahin”- Johan Sebastian Bach. 1.”O Jesu Christ, mein’s Lebens Licht” 2. Gottes zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit – Baroque Ensemble “Follia d’ Amsterdam”together with the choir“Nuovo Musico” , conducted by Gustav Leonhardt (above is another version). The cantatas express both fear for death and faith in God.
Audiovisual presentation of the assay ” de vertrouwenscrisis” (what went wrong with the fundamental trust in the Dutch society?), written by 19 different publicists.
Audiovisual impression of pupils of Amsterdam High Schools attending lectures in psychiatry: funny and disarming.
And the climax: a 50 min lecture of Prof. Arieh Y. Shalev, M.D. (Head Department of Psychiatry at the Hadassah University Hospital of Jerusalem, Israel) about living with fear.
I will try to summarize the main points of Shalev’s lecture as I remember them (no notes).
There are several factors that may influence how people react to fear:
DNA (fixed), inherited differences – (written composition in musical notation)
Epigenetic Mechanisms (mostly but not exclusively determined postnatally). (tuning of the piano, quenching the middle register)
(Gene) Expression(Accordion register determining ranks and timbres, determined by the accordionist)
Exogenous factors (i.e. empathy and affection) (the people singing, the acoustics)
Fear is an emotional response to threats and danger, meant to protect against a threat (fright-fight-or-flight). It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of pain. Recognizing a person in agony is easy. The facial expression of fear includes the widening of the eyes (out of anticipation for what will happen next); the pupils dilate (to take in more light); the upper lip rises, the brows draw together, and the lips stretch horizontally. Muscles used for physical movement are tightened and primed with oxygen, in preparation for a physical fight-or-flight response. When the stimulus is shocking or abrupt, a common reaction is to protect vulnerable parts of the anatomy, particularly the face and head. When a fear stimulus occurs unexpectedly, the victim of the fear response could possibly jump or give a small start. The person’s heart-rate and heartbeat may quicken (from Wikipedia).
The amygdala, an almond shaped complex of related nuclei, located in the middle of the brain, is a critical processor area for fear. Connected to the hippocampus, it plays a role in emotionally laden memories. It is part of the limbic system.
Fear, begins with arousal. For instance:
You hear a sound. The amygdala is alerted.
You see a face, the amygdala is alerted to a greater extent. Your pupils enlarge, your breathing and hartbeat quicken.
You recognize the face; it is nobody to be afraid of: the fear response is dampened. The heartbeat drops to normal levels, because you are reassured that there was no danger.
But suppose (1) you’re walking in a dark alley and (2) you see a gun. (3) Next you see a man holding that gun. (4) He shouts something threatening. There are no breaks anymore (by prefrontal cortex/hippocampus on the amygdala) and the fear machine starts running at full speed. Thus, in case of a major threat, in a split second all alarm bells ring: the abovementioned reflexes occur immediately and with no point of return.
One’s memory of what happens consists of separate “pictures”: (1) the alley, (2) the gun, (3) the man, (4) a loud voice (and perhaps smell). Normally, moments of fear will takes it’s place along other memories, although this may take some time.
However, depending on the kind of fear, your personality and external factors, memories to the incident causing fear may stay at the foreground. It may become a memory that comes to the mind frequently and spontaneously or evoked by one of the remembered associations. For instance any alley may cause the full blown fear response again in the abovementioned example.
Shalev telling this, I suddenly understood my reactions to a car accident. While driving on the highway, the driver lost control of the vehicle, causing it to skid and finally ending against a huge concrete wall. I was sitting in the back and while the car was turning I saw “the wall hitting us”. My “last thought” was “that was it”. The car was total loss, but luckily all 5 (members of a dancing group) survived. Apparently because of the “fear of death”, the impression of that very moment staid long with me. For almost a year I felt frightened not only in a car, but also when I saw a car or motor turning fast around the corner or when moving sideways in an airplane during landing. It must have been a similar feeling as when the car turned and hit the wall. The resemblance of that moment brought the memory and the fear back in quite un uncontrollable way. But as time passed by, so did this emotional reaction. The memory itself was still there, but at the background and slowly all intense associations with that frightful moment faded.
This is what normally happens with frigtening experiences. Fear can be retriggered by a memory (smell, picture, situation) linked to what happened, but can extinguish over time. Thus responding to a conditioned stimulus (CS) spontaneously recovers with the passage of time indicated that extinction does not erase the conditioned memory, but is a form of (active) inhibition. The brain (prefrontal cortex/hippocampus) learns how to coop with it and suppress the emotional fear reflex (amygdala).
However, some fears don’t extinguish and have a lifelong impact. For instance in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to extreme physical or psychological trauma.
Shalev gave several examples of people with PTSD other than PTSD in war veterans . For instance, a mother who lost her daughter on the complications of a simple (and unnecesary) intervention. The daughter died of sepsis and from that moment on the mother continued to live in the past, persistently reexperiencing the traumatic event.
This was what the mother remembers as the most frightful moment:
I entered the door, my hand still holding the knob. There she lied staring with pupils so dilatated that her irisses were no longer visible. Death was inevitably approaching. I wanted to scream for help, but there were no doctors present and nurses were all running around. I could do nothing about it.
That was a recurrent theme in all examples: feeling desparate and helpless while facing the inevitable.
In PTSD patients the normal extinction mechanisms don’t work. PTSD patients remain in a state of arousal.
Shalev also emphasized that the mere reiteratation of the traumatic event doesn’t help the patient. If the patient is in fear it doesn’t help to bring him to an alley all over again, and to leave the alley again as soon as the patient gets frightened. This only reinforces fear. What should be done is to learn the patient to associate the alley with positive events through psychotherapy. Trust, empathy, friendship can all help as well.
Because extinction is a form of learning some medical treatments given soon after the trauma will not help to reduce the PTSD. In a Randomized Controlled Trial presented at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology 46th Annual Meeting (December 8-12, 2007), Shalev and coworkers showed that cognitive therapy or prolonged exposure therapy (a type of cognitive behavioral therapy) within 1 month had a reduced prevalence and severity of PTSD at 5 months to 20%, whereas early treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fared no better than individuals randomized to placebo or spontaneous recovery (wait-list) groups (60%). According to Shalev this is a phantastic effect. (Source: Medscape ).
Still, although cognitive therapy is effective, many PTSD patients remain symptomatic despite initial treatment.
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This post was (also) written for next Grand Round hosted by Mexican Medical Student. Enrico had a tentative theme in mind (with some flexibility to change it ) but these words should be applicable: renewal, metamorphosis, change, transformation. Well, this story was about how extreme fear can transform you in another person. Furthermore death, referred to in the Bach cantate, is our ultimate transformation.
Finally I hope that Enrico, being both a medical student and a classical pianist likes Bach.
Above are two word-clouds of my blog, created by entering the URL of my blog and removing common words. However, since my blog is bilingual, removing English stop words leaves Dutch stop words and vice versa. Thus the two versions shown above most prominently show the stopwords of the other language, but that gives a funny effect. Wordle only shows the words of recent posts, those posts which show up when you type in the URL.
The variation is endless. Even when you refresh, you get a different picture.
Next I created a category cloud from my (old) categories (I need to update them). First I didn’t weight the words, entering each word once (3). But in the next series I gave the categories weight by repeating them as many times as they were used in my blog (4,5). I just show fig. 4, because ‘Social Networking’ was completely out of the cloud, which is -I think- a contradictio in terminis. Really amusing.
Ik heb eerst woordenwolken van mijn blog gemaakt door de URL in te voeren en de opdracht te geven stopwoorden te verwijderen. Maar mijn blog is twee-talig. Verwijder ik de nederlandse stopwoorden, dan komen juist de engelse stopwoorden prominent in beeld, en vice versa. Maar ach, dat is eigenlijk wel grappig. Wordle toont trouwens alleen een wolk van de laatste berichten, d.w.z. díe berichten die je ziet als je de url intypt. Bij mij gingen de laatste berichten juist over Twitter en PubMed.
Je kunt eindeloos varieren. En zelfs als je ‘refresht’ wordt het plaatje weer helemaal anders qua kleur-compositie.
Vervolgens maakte ik een wolk van mijn (oude) categoriën (althans het is het plan ze drastisch te vernieuwen, er komen nog teveel woorden van de Spoetnikcursus in voor die ik niet meer zal gebruiken). Eerst voerde ik de termen in enkelvoud in (3). Maar daarna gaf ik er gewicht aan door ze zo vaak te kopiëren als ze op mijn blog voorkomen (4,5). Fig 4 laat ik zien omdat ‘Social Networking’ er helemaal buitenhangt, eigenlijk een contradictio in terminis, maar wel amusant.
Wederom werd mijn oog getrokken door prachtige foto’s op het grensgebied van wetenschap, kunst en design in het NRC van afgelopen vrijdag (Warna Oosterbaan, 14-03-2008). Wat vreemde, maar prikkelende foto’s werden getoond van DNA-smileys gemaakt met behulp van nano-technologie, een bord met vleescreaties uit stamcellen op een bedje van rode kool en runderleer dat in een erlenmeyer op het lab gemaakt wordt. Ik werd een beetje op het verkeerde been gezet door de titel: boetseren met DNA en sperma. Het gaat niet om enge cloneringsexperimenten, maar om een tentoonstelling “Design and the Elastic Mind’ in het Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Het thema is veel breder dan een futuristische kijk op de gen-technologie, het gaat erom dat een een elastieken geest (aanpassing!) en intelligent design nodig zijn om het moderne leven te kunnen volgen. Op de website is het volgende te lezen onder het kopje “People and Objects”: “Design has expanded into new fields, including the interactions between people and objects. Responsive design features objects that respond to our needs rather than awaiting our instructions. The tagging of information in our environment makes the world into a live information platform. New interfaces incorporate instinctive human traits, expanding our relationships with the objects they enable us to access.“ Wel weer ontzettend toevallig dat ik daar net nu tegen aanloop.
Onderwerpen liggen ook geheel buiten de biologie, zoals bijvoorbeeld cabspotting, het ritme van de wereldstad, grafisch verbeeld door een animatie van het taxiverkeer in San Francisco. Veel op het gebied van de biologie is futuristisch, maar het maken van DNA-smileys met behulp van nanotechnologie blijkt werkelijkheid (zie artikel in Nature over DNA origami (maart 2006)
Voor wie niet naar New York kan afreizen is hier de prachtige website. Goed zijn de tagging en links verbeeld met dwarsverbanden op de overzichtspagina. Elke afzonderlijke foto is getagt en via tags kun je naar andere foto’s met dezelfde tag.
Vorige week toen ik me net over Flickr boog en welke foto’s ik nou moest uploaden viel mijn oog op deze prachtige foto, als blikvanger op onze AMC-homepage. Het bleek te gaan om de winnende ‘Seeing science’ foto. ‘Seeing Science’ trok ook al mijn aandacht, het prikkelt mijn fantasie. Het blijkt te gaan om een internationale fotowedstrijd ter gelegenheid van het tweehonderdjarig bestaan van De Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschap (KNAW) met als motto ‘Magie van wetenschap’.
De foto ‘Fruitvlieglarve in een druppel water’ van de Hongaar Robert Markus combineert volgens juryvoorzitter Frits van Oostrom wetenschap, schoonheid, magie, originaliteit en kunst. Het is een krachtig beeld met een natuurlijke schoonheid en een prachtig voorbeeld van state-of-the-art wetenschap. Robert Markus is onderzoeker aan het Biological Research Center van de Hongaarse Academie van Wetenschappen.
Hier zitten ook enkele juweeltjes bij, zoals ‘Dansende kristallen in de nacht’ van Anna Kozhevnikova en de publieksprijs ‘Conflictmanagement / communicatie’ van Chris Timmers.
Al heb ik de Flickr-opdracht ten voltooiing gebracht (zie vorige bericht en de Flickr-widget rechts), het heeft me wel de nodige inspanning en irritatie gekost.
Net als bij de vorige opdrachten moet je toch wel veel via trial en error achterhalen.
Het laden van foto’s gaat snel, het organiseren al veel minder, maar na 1 uur gepruts kwam ik niet verder dan de woorden ‘widget’ en ‘more photo’s’ … tot ik erachter kwam dat je de plaatjes voor dit doeleinde ‘public’ moest maken. Toen lukte het wel.
Vervolgens bleek dat alleen de laatste getoonde plaatjes zichtbaar waren. Ik dacht slim te zijn door de foto’s waarvan ik niet wilde dat ze zouden verschijnen privat te maken, maar dat lukte niet, dus moest ik alles terugdraaien. Zou het toch veel leuker vinden als er net zoals bij librarything wat foto’s random zouden verschijnen.
‘Blog it’ ging supersnel, maar nu blijkt dat de foto die ik geladen heb meestentijds niet zichtbaar is. Wat is dan in hemelsnaam het voordeel hiervan, vraag ik me dan af? Sowieso, ben ik niet graag afhankelijk van een of andere server waar een plaatje e.d. op geplaatst is. Ook librarything is geregeld even uit de lucht.
Ik kan me voorstellen dat Flickr:
heel leuk is voor mensen met (digitaal) fotograferen als hobby, die er behoefte aan hebben de hobby (en de foto’s) met een groep te delen
goed is voor netwerken (bekendheid krijgen als fotograaf, kunstenaar e.d.)
effectief is om fotografisch materiaal (ook van een boeken, – kunstcollectie) ter beschikking van velen te stellen (zoals bij de library of Congress).
Maar ik fotografeer nog met een ouderwetse spiegelreflexcamera, ik wil op dit vlak niet netwerken en ik zie niet direct toepassingen voor onze bibliotheek. Foto’s wel als materiaal, maar niet direct via Flickr.
Het meest vervelende vind ik wel dat je alles public moet maken wil je het op je blog kunnen zetten en ook dat foto’s 90% van de tijd niet zichtbaar blijken in je blog.
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) but these words should be applicable: 
).
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