BEES AND POLLINATIONS

When I got back from ScienceOnline, my boss asked me how it went.  (I was sort of AWOL from the first week of class, and she was not real thrilled about that.)   “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life” was my response.  That’s what I feel–but I’ve been trying to figure out WHY.

You can see the full list of attendees here–it’s a really fascinating bunch.  To name check just a few:  Wired. BoingBoing. Nature. Science. Ed Yong. Carl Zimmer. Museums. And, uh, independent blogger/social media types like me.  And so here I am, feeling like a little bug scuttling among giant writers. And I discover…that people actually read my shit. And know who the hell I am. Whoa.

Everyone was geeked about science and about communicating science.  IT WAS AWESOME.  But Why was it so awesome? I think Ed Yong nails it in his summary–we “knew” everyone before we arrived. Even though I hadn’t ever met 447 of the 450 folks attending in meatspace, I had chatted with them online, commented on their blogs, and read their books. From further discussion in the comments from David Dobbs:

“The steady message, via the unconference idea, that it’s a relatively level playing field — or, as someone put it on Twitter, that it’s not experts and non-experts, but different people all bringing different experiences in areas we’re all interested in. It’s a steady insistence that it’s not a producer-consumer model, with the audience full of consumers, but rather a conversation.

The other key, it seems to me, is that it’s a fairly balanced mix of mainly-scientists and mainly-journalists/communicators, so it’s not a single peer group, as it were — not a single discipline. There’s always this chemistry of excitement, of mixing with another tribe. To me that’s an important part of what distinguishes ScienceOnline. And I think it helps create the sense of humility and egalitarianism: Prominence in one area doesn’t make anyone top dog at this conference, because even the most distinguished people in one area are among not just their own discipline’s peers but amid those of another discipline in which they have little expertise or distinction.”

Just before I went to ScienceOnline, I read a book called Cognitive Surplus.  And it kind of blew my mind.  Shirky’s central thesis is that the web and the relatively large amount of leisure time in the first world (i.e, time not spent working for the man, or raising our food) has created an amazing opportunity.

We kill a lot of that free time in very unimaginative ways.  Americans spend 200 BILLION hours each year watching television. What if all that brain power was directed toward something?  Shirky posits a surplus of creative energy exists, and is only beginning to be tapped.  For example, take the humble LOLcat:

“Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average LOLcat has the social value of a whoopie cushion and the lifespan of a mayfly.  Yet anyone seeing a LOLcat gets a second unrelated message: You can play this game too.”

The internet bridges the gap between doing nothing and doing something.  Creating a LOLcat is more than passive consumption of pre-packaged TV shows…and opens the door to doing other original things.

Time and space are not a constraint to community formation–ideas or passions now bring people together, rather than physical locations.  Scientists that blog online–even when it’s looked down upon by fellow scientists? We are modeling positive deviance.  It’s not so much what we write that is important, but THAT WE WRITE AT ALL.

We are creating a model for a new way of science communication.  And we are having a bitchin’ time doing it, which invites new people over to have fun with us.  You can play this game too.   We are showing lots of different ways to share science online to our friends, our friends’ friends, and to the random strange people who keep searching my blog for “sex with insects.”

It’s a kind of nerdibacter called social contagion.  The internet creates social change among total strangers. Think it’s too sparkly-kumbaya to really work?  Just look at an example from earlier this month: A shark researcher calls out a company for sponsoring a shark hunt.  He manages to mobilize an amazing network via Twitter, and the company not only pulls the promotion, but blacklists the person from ever posting with them again.  And that all played out within the space of one day.

Small individual creative acts (tweets or blog posts) can become a thing of lasting value.  Shared and unmanaged effort can produce useful and meaningful results.  No one is in charge, and that’s OK. The beauty of the web is that we don’t all have to have the same motivations, or skills, or professional level of skill. We don’t all have to be working toward the same goal.  We can still make change happen simply by putting our ideas out there.  And the value of that work isn’t from professional production values; it’s from the sharing.

A lot of the attendees at SciOnline were people like me–folks who don’t get paid to write about science. We do our thing (write, podcast, tweet, whatever) simply for the love of it.  And we are wearers of many hats–as Bora reports in his ScienceOnline2012 wrap-up post:

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers, 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Even though the US is clearly falling apart politically, in a lot of ways SciOnline left me more optimistic and hopeful about the future than I’ve been for a long time.  All these people doing something because of a passion for science–it was wonderful.

Kevin is right:

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet….Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”

I will totally be up at 1AM next year trying to get a seat for ScienceOnline2013.  But you know what? If I don’t get a seat?  Or if I don’t have the time or energy to keep blogging/tweeting/whatevering at the same rate I do now?

It’s ok. The kids have it covered.

Filed under: Books, Science Tagged: blogging, scienceonline, scio12, social media
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It’s time once again for the NCSU Insect Museum’s Hexapod Haiku Contest!

hexapod haiku -
short poems that celebrate
most Arthropoda

The goal of this contest is to encourage people to think about the myriad ways in which insects and other terrestrial arthropods interact with their environments and other organisms (including humans!) and to express these thoughts through short poems. Despite the name of this contest we actually encourage any short poems you’re inspired to write, including (but not limited to!):

• Haiku (of course): An elegant medium, traditionally focusing on seasonal changes and nature and with a relatively standard format and objective.
• Senryū: Similar in structure to haiku but focused on the foibles of of humans and, in our case, insects, rather than seasons and nature.
• Haiga: A haiku that is accompanied by an illustration. Include a photo or draw a picture!
• Any other short poem you want to write!

We offer four awards with (small) prizes: 1) best in show, 2) runner-up, 3) best entry from poet under the age of 13, 4) runner-up from poet under the age of 13. Poems from any of the categories listed above are eligible to win any of the awards and therefore are judged together.

We also have honorable mention categories that change every year depending on the submissions we get (most traditional, funniest, best IPM-themed poem, etc.)

Visit the NCSU Insect Museum website for details on how to enter.

You can also browse through the past 5 years of winners with the tag “haiku” for inspiration and enjoyment.  A favorite of mine from 2011:

flowers’ bouquet
rousts them from their slumber
— bacon for bees

Filed under: Entomology, Insects Tagged: art, haiku, poetry
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Some time ago, I got an email from a student in the UK working on an Entomophagy project:

“I’m a postgraduate design student studying at the Royal College of Art in London, who is currently knee deep in a project on Entomophagy. Myself and 3 other students have spent the last four months developing a roadmap to western acceptance of bug eating.”

I referred them to Dave Gracer as the local Entomophagy Maven, and then sort of forgot about it. And then….Lo and Behold! They produced this project, with input from Dave and entomologists.

I’m not entirely sure what a Masters Degree in Innovation Design Engineering is, but if it produces results like this, I think we need more of them.  Well done!

More about the project:

“Ento is a project by Aran Dasan, Jacky Chung, Jonathan Fraser and Julene Aguirre-Bielchowsky, who are a team working together on the Innovation Design Engineering joint Masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. We also collaborated with Kim Insu in producing the food, who is a chef in training at Le Cordon Bleu.

This project is the outcome of the team’s motivation to tackle the growing issue of food security in an increasingly hungry world. Discovering the environmental and nutritional benefits of insects as a sustainable alternative to the high energy required to produce other meats, we wanted to see how it could be introduced into Western cultures through design.

It’s not just about introducing a new food, it’s about understanding human perceptions and psychology, then using the design of innovative experiences and strategic thinking to drive cultural change.”

In other words, addressing the mental hangups we have about eating insects, as well as making the food look amazing. Their video addresses some of the ecological benefits to insect eating in a very amusing way.

Filed under: Entomology, Food, Insects Tagged: art, creativity, design, entomophagy
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I want to highlight this research report for a couple of reasons.   First, it’s a summary of a lot of research on birds and bats–and it is alarming.  Major findings include:

• Current environmental mercury loads have the ability to significantly reduce reproductive success in several songbird species of conservation concern in the northeastern U.S. including the saltmarsh sparrow and rusty blackbird.
• Bats also build up significant body burdens of mercury;  individuals from multiple species from all 10 areas sampled exceeded the subclinical threshold for changes to neurochemistry.
• Mercury loading in songbirds is not only restricted during the breeding season; some species, such as the northern waterthrush, build up high levels of mercury during migration and in tropical wintering areas

Basically, this expands what we know about the dangers of biomagnification out into song birds and bats.  I’ve written about some of the research this report is based on before.

From an interview with an author:

“It is a game-changing paradigm shift,’’ Evers said. “For years, we’ve understood the notion that birds like an eagle can obtain toxins by eating a bass, which has eaten a perch, and the perch has eaten a fly. Now we understand the same kind of analogy can be applied to a water thrush, which eats a spider, which has eaten a smaller spider, which has eaten a fly.’’

The other reason I want to point you at this is because it’s a great example of how to produce a report on complex research and make it really accessible.  They don’t just have data; they have information on how to interpret the graphs.

The PDF report itself is beautiful to look at, and focuses on specific actions/conclusions that can be drawn from the data.  It’s a report that I could hand to any of my non-scientist coworkers and be confident they could read it and understand it.  The PDF is presented within the context of a page with lots of supplemental info, including jpgs of some of the figures.  This makes it easy for journalists to build a story.

A thermometer is used to indicate risk to certain species–which cleverly uses something commonly associated with Mercury, but also something a lay-person knows how to interpret without a lot of special background knowledge.

Lastly, they cited their research through the report in ways that let you look up the original research, but that doesn’t detract from your reading.  It makes a powerful case that we need to really start paying attention to the mercury in our environment–because it’s not just the birds that are exposed.

Additional Reading:

• Aquatic mercury in food webs
• USGS: Mercury in the Environment
• Game Changers: a report on how global warming and toxins might change hunting and fishing.
• EPA advisories on which states have fish too contaminated to eat

Filed under: Gardening, Science Tagged: bats, bioaccumulation, biomagnification, birds, mercury, nature, pollution, science communication
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The 2012 GBBC will take place Friday, February 17, through Monday, February 20. Please join us for the 15th annual count!
The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird…

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What do you do if you are textile artists in Madagascar and want to promote traditional Malagasy weaving techniques?  You make a scarf and a golden cape spun from spider silk.  Using half a million dollars of your own money.

The story has been making the rounds lately, but these videos about its creation were so captivating I had to post them!  A team of people labored for years to capture spiders, and then persuade them to produce enough silk to weave a garment.  It’s a rather mind-boggling process:

“The spiders are harnessed … held down in a delicate way,” Godley says, “so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there’s a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o’clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o’clock. They’re in boxes, they’re numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature.”   (NPR interview)

The Madagascar Golden Orb Weaver Spider is the spider-goose that laid the golden…er, thread.  It’s estimated that  1,063,000 spiders contributed silk.  The color of the silk is amazing–I had no idea!  The embroidery is also beautiful, with a spider motif.

This second video has more info about the history of trying to make textiles out of spider silk, footage of the apparatus they used to collect the spider silk, and some natural history information about the orb weavers.

Enjoy!

I also scored a copy of the book Spider Silk:Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, so I’ll be posting a review soon.

Filed under: Entomology Tagged: arachnida, art, clothing, design, Nephila, spiders, weaving
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One of the many cool things that came out of ScienceOnline2012 was a meme-thingy called “IamScience”.  From Mindy, who created the video below:

“On January 27, 2012, science writer and marine biologist Kevin Zelnio started the Twitter hashtag #IamScience, encouraging scientists to share their individual stories about their traditional or unconventional paths that brought them to where they were today. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of tweets pouring in over just a few days. 

I’ve collected and excerpted just a handful of them, and set them to Reckless Kelly’s “Wicked Twisted Road”, a song that Kevin mentioned in his original post as holding particular significance for his own path toward science.

You can see a storify of most of the tweets for #IamScience; or you can watch this video. Get Kleenex.

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet. One of these magical things is learning how personal experience shapes people’s lives. Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”  –Kevin Zelnio

Want to make the project bigger? Kevin has offered to put things together in an e-book:

I would like to curate a free e-book of submissions from people about their experiences – good and bad, whatever you are willing to share. Put your name on it or keep it anonymous, doesn’t matter, but people need to hear how your experiences in the past shaped who you are today and what you do.

If you are interested in participating in this project, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Submissions are whatever is necessary for you to tell your story, up to 5000 words. Include drawing, sketchpads, poetry, whatever you need to tell your story.

You ROCK, Kevin.

Filed under: Science Tagged: #iamscience, personal stories, pipeline, scio12
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You may have heard that I told a slightly rude story at the ScienceOnline2012 conference.  If you missed it, here you go!

Listen to the (Slightly NSFW) Story  via The Monti

Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.)

There are still pubic lice out there, even in a world of Brazilian waxing.  Here’s a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you spot the crabs?

Ben Lillie’s story is right after mine, and is very different, and incredibly powerful. I got a little verklempt.  Ben now runs The StoryCollider, which is an amazing project to collect science stories.

I had been mentally drafting something about storytelling and science, but then Emily at This View of Life wrote something so spot on in summary of ScienceOnline I defer to her:

“I think that this tendency to focus on the sexy or the gross, the morbid or the taboo, is not just a symptom of our four days of very little sleep, more than a little alcohol in some cases and a deep sense of intellectual and cultural overstimulation.

No, this is an integral part of who we are as a group. We focus on duck penises because we almost have to.

We are all story tellers, whether scientists, journalists or educators.  We take data and create hypotheses. We take facts and construct narratives. We take a curriculum and transform it into inspiration.

What she said.  Go read the rest.

I’ll try to put together a more meaningful summary of the Science Online conference later this week, but for the moment I’m enjoying the accomplishment of briefly trending on Twitter.  Even if it is for telling a story about Seamonkeys in your Pants.

Filed under: Insects, WTF Tagged: crabs, lice, monti, podcast
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It is passing strange to think that growing your own food in your own garden can be considered a subversive act! How did we come to this state, especially in the developed world, but also many cities…

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You might have noticed a lot of news lately about robot designs based on insects.  Insects are great models for robots because bugs have an extremely stable and efficient model of locomotion: the tripod gait.  At any time, roaches have 3 feet on the ground–even when they’re running.   This tripod structure makes insects extra-resistant to tripping or tipping over.

Biomimetics is the fancy name for engineering systems that copy principles found in nature. Basing robots that need to scamper over rough terrain on an insect model that’s successfully lasted millions of years makes a lot of sense. But just how, exactly, do insects keep all those legs going in the right direction?  How can they respond so quickly to an approaching rolled-up newspaper?  How do insects manage this advanced scuttling with such a tiny brain?  And how can insects keep running even after their head is removed?

(Yes, insects can live for quite a while without a head. They eventually die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t drink or eat anymore, but remain able to run away and respond to environmental stimuli. It’s really quite disturbing.)

In order to build a biomimetic robot, one has to first understand the mechanics at work in insects.  The engineering explanation for insect locomotion is hidden in equations about viscoelastic spring mass oscillation and tiny insect-mounted cannons.

Yes.

ROACHES WITH JETPACKS.

This is not a photoshopped picture; it’s from a 2002 research paper in which researchers attempted to mathematically work out the principles of roach locomotion. You can see the jet-pack at work in this movie:

So. Um, WHY did they put jetpacks on roaches? Aside from it just being a totally freakin’ COOL thing to do?

Remember I mentioned how stable the tripod gait is?   The researchers suspected that the roach wasn’t using just its brain to keep itself balanced and running.  They created a mathematical model of a roach with legs that were springs.

Just the mechanical properties of springy legs were able to explain how a roach kept on track and at full speed, despite obstacles.  They called these “preflexive” mechanisms, to indicate that the exoskeleton and muscles stabilize roaches without involvement of the nervous system.

They had an explanation on paper, with a lot of big words and calculations of lateral velocity.  The next step was to test their lovely model by poking a roach while it was running.   That…was about as difficult to do as you might imagine, based on your experience chasing roaches around your kitchen.

The researchers needed to have a precisely measured force disturbing the roaches, so that they could plug it into their model and see if it was accurate.  Hence, a tiny exploding cannon mounted on a roach. Or, to give it the gizmo it’s proper name, the rapid impulsive perturbation (RIP) device.  (That name is doubly clever, since they were experimenting with the death’s head cockroach, Blaberus discoidalis.)

They calculated the lateral force generated by the RIP explosion was equal to 85% of the insect’s forward motion.  If you were jogging along, and I ran into you with a force that was 85% of your forward momentum, I don’t think either of us would be standing up.  (Ok, yes, there’s mass involved in this too, but just work with me here.)  The roaches hardly even break stride.   In fact, it took just 13 miliseconds for a roach to begin to respond to the explosion and get back on track.  The roaches completely recovered from that RIP explosion within 31 miliseconds. 

Insects are indeed pretty damn amazing animals, and a great model for robotics.  The authors have continued their work on the hexapod gait, and have proposed several models of ways in which legs might be built–in both roaches and robots–to respond quickly to problems.

Science is awesome.

Citation: Jindrich DL, & Full RJ (2002). Dynamic stabilization of rapid hexapedal locomotion. The Journal of experimental biology, 205 (Pt 18), 2803-23 PMID: 12177146

Revzen S, Koditschek DE, & Full RJ (2009). Towards testable neuromechanical control architectures for running. Advances in experimental medicine and biology, 629, 25-55 PMID: 19227494

Also: Just look at how easily the Star Wars AT-AT or AT-STs were destroyed by the rebels! Tripod-gait woud have saved the empire!

Filed under: Entomology, Insects, Science Tagged: locomotion, research, robotics, tripod gait
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