And now for something completely different.
Hm, let’s see when I last checked into this section of the website. 2015? Boy, that was only forever ago, huh? And yet, at the same time, it seems like just yesterday when I was bitching about how terrible 2014 was, and darn it, doesn’t that just seem hopelessly quaint right now. Science and reason […]
Hm, let’s see when I last checked into this section of the website. 2015? Boy, that was only forever ago, huh? And yet, at the same time, it seems like just yesterday when I was bitching about how terrible 2014 was, and darn it, doesn’t that just seem hopelessly quaint right now. Science and reason still largely prevailed over nihilism, I had virtually no reason to spend any time on Twitter, and I was still blissfully going to movies and crowded bars. I mean, Prince was still alive, so how bad could the world have been? I’ve tried not to let myself get too bogged down in the mire of the COVID-19 era, although obviously that’s a little tricky when my work increasingly revolves around pandemic research. And of course, as what passes for US civil society continues to erode, it can be increasingly hard to find things to be cheery about. But I managed to find one. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="1109" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2020/05/29/and-now-for-something-completely-different/20200424_153923/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-scaled.jpg" data-orig-size="1244,2560" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"1.7","credit":"","camera":"SM-N950U","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1587742763","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.3","iso":"160","shutter_speed":"0.033333333333333","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="20200424_153923" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-146x300.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-1109" width="424" height="871" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-498x1024.jpg 498w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-146x300.jpg 146w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-768x1580.jpg 768w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-747x1536.jpg 747w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200424_153923-996x2048.jpg 996w" sizes="(max-width: 424px) 100vw, 424px" /> In April, we welcomed this strange but beautiful little creature into our home. It’s been a major adjustment — for a long time, I had assumed that I would most likely never have kids. But then at some point, and it’s hard to say when exactly, it suddenly became a real priority. And after a lot of effort (mainly on my wife’s part, obviously) it has now become a reality, and we are thrilled to have little Baby Z in our lives. <img decoding="async" data-attachment-id="1110" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2020/05/29/and-now-for-something-completely-different/20200526_101531/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-scaled.jpg" data-orig-size="1244,2560" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"1.7","credit":"","camera":"SM-N950U","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1590488131","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.3","iso":"200","shutter_speed":"0.016666666666667","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="20200526_101531" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-146x300.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-498x1024.jpg" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-498x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-1110" width="348" height="716" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-498x1024.jpg 498w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-146x300.jpg 146w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-768x1580.jpg 768w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-747x1536.jpg 747w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-996x2048.jpg 996w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200526_101531-scaled.jpg 1244w" sizes="(max-width: 348px) 100vw, 348px" /> More than a month in, we’re still getting used to her and getting to know her. Honestly, in the first months of 2020, it seemed more than a little crazy to think about bringing a baby into such a chaotic and sometimes scary new reality. I started wondering how early I might have to train her to use a crossbow or make armor out of the bones of her enemies to protect her in the Barren Wastes. And who knows, it’s still only May. But it’s reinvigorating to be able to disconnect after a day of mainlining despair from the news, and see this tiny bit of love and life and potential. She’s a sweet-natured charmer, and we can’t wait to see who she becomes. I know that I’m hoping that she’ll grow up in a far better world than where we are now — but even if not, I’m looking forward to arming her with the knowledge and power to help make the future a little less fucked up.
On the whole, 2014 was at best unremarkable and at worst unpleasant (speaking personally – on the global scale, it was rather a shit year all around). But there was one most excellent thing that came out of it. This was improbable for a number of reasons. The highest mountains I ever actually climbed before […]
On the whole, 2014 was at best unremarkable and at worst unpleasant (speaking personally – on the global scale, it was rather a shit year all around). But there was one most excellent thing that came out of it. <img decoding="async" data-attachment-id="871" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/15447603791_91cec363dc_z/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" data-orig-size="640,428" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="15447603791_91cec363dc_z" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z-300x201.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-871" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg" alt="15447603791_91cec363dc_z" width="640" height="428" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z.jpg 640w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/15447603791_91cec363dc_z-300x201.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /> This was improbable for a number of reasons. The highest mountains I ever actually climbed before this were in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and therefore essentially qualify as speed bumps from a geological standpoint. I’m asthmatic. My primary form of exercise consists of dog walking and playing Ingress. And of course, there’s this – the primary reason my year sucked: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="879" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/20131004_085615-360x640/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640.jpg" data-orig-size="360,640" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.2","credit":"","camera":"SPH-L720","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1380876974","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.2","iso":"250","shutter_speed":"0.066666666666667","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="20131004_085615 (360×640)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640-169x300.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-879" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640.jpg" alt="20131004_085615 (360x640)" width="360" height="640" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640.jpg 360w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131004_085615-360x640-169x300.jpg 169w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px" /> Yup – in fall 2013, I broke my kneecap like a china dinner plate. At the time, I thought it would be endless fun to chase my year-old Lab/Pit puppy around the courtyard of our home in order to tire her out. After catching my foot on a crooked cobble and abruptly taking a knee on solid concrete, I recognized the error in my thinking. The pain was pretty brutal, and over the next three months of being strapped into this Victorian interrogation device, I learned that a) opiates do not work for me, except to the extent that they make me extremely nauseous and b) there are few things more tedious and miserable than being forced to sit around for three months straight. At one point, I tried to crutch my way six blocks over to the post office to deal with some tax drama, and by the end I felt like I’d gone six rounds against Rocky (or maybe Ivan Drago). After that, I decided to focus my energy on watching Netflix, reading trashy thrillers, and testing the limits of my girfriend’s patience and compassion. Of course, my dog – who was in many ways responsible for this whole mess – loved my new, chair-bound lifestyle. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="880" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/20131016_145757-640x360/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360.jpg" data-orig-size="640,360" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.2","credit":"","camera":"SPH-L720","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1381935476","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.2","iso":"1000","shutter_speed":"0.066666666666667","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="20131016_145757 (640×360)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360-300x169.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-880" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360.jpg" alt="20131016_145757 (640x360)" width="640" height="360" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360.jpg 640w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20131016_145757-640x360-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /> What I didn’t realize was this was the easy part. When the brace came off in late January, I found myself with a left leg that was literally useless. When I was 14, I had broken both the bones in my lower leg and spent three months in a cast. After that, my leg was scrawny and floppy, but quickly recovered as the muscle came back. This time, my leg was locked straight as an iron rod – I’d gone from being a fully-poseable GI Joe action figure to an awkwardly stumbling Star Wars action figure. It took another few weeks before I could put weight on it, but even then, all I could do was swing it around like a shillelagh. That’s when physical therapy came in. Six months. That’s how long it takes a middle-aged knee to learn how to bend, apparently. For the first month or so, I’d sit pathetically on an exercise bike, rocking the pedals back and forth, yearning for the day when I would finally complete a full revolution. And when I did, it felt like completing SEAL training. Then I had to learn to walk, jump and run in a non-marionette fashion. I performed improbably silly-looking exercises with rubber bands and trampolines. I learned about the glorious invention that is the ‘Game Ready‘: an adjustable sleeve that wraps around an afflicted body part and fills with icy water. You might think this sounds like a terrible thing. You, my friend, are wrong. After an hour of PT torment, ten minutes in the Game Ready is like Aphrodite herself descending to offer you a flagon of sweet, sweet nectar. Late that spring, my friend Bhavan invited me to join with a group of friends to climb Kilimanjaro later that August. By now my left leg was mostly functional, but weak. Oh so weak. I thought long and hard about it, and decided it was worth a shot. I had three months to get ready, and so I did something that I would only consider in the most desperate of circumstances. I joined a gym. After two months of elliptical, treadmill and weight training – assisted by audiobooks of the complete works of Raymond Chandler – I was as ready as I was ever going to get. It was three and a half days up, a day and a half down. The first two days were relatively easy, hiking at a steady grade through rainforest, and then high-altitude scrub as we passed the first cloud-line. After that, it got trickier. The final camp, Kibo, was in a rocky desert nearly three miles above sea level. By far the highest altitude I’d ever experienced. Yet. At this point, the altitude was hitting our group hard. We were supposed to hit the summit at dawn, which meant leaving Kibo at midnight and hiking in the dark on the steepest and most treacherous trails yet, ascending nearly a kilometer and a half in sub-zero cold with steadily thinning air. One of my friends couldn’t even leave Kibo, and we lost another six to altitude sickness on the way up. I made it in a hypnotic haze, wrapped in layer upon layer of garments and looking for all the world like some delirious wooly ninja. Our porters and guides cheered us on through the dark, but the real secret of my success was drinking lots of water, eating lots of sucking candies and – in the end – constantly repeating in my mind “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot…” But we beat the sun to the top. We had 20-30 minutes at the true summit, Uhuru Peak (>3.6 mi above sea level) before it was time to head back. The descent was a death march that left me sore, sick and exhausted for days. I smelled like a Deadhead’s underpants. When I got back and told my girlfriend, she thought that anybody who would want to do this must be crazy. Was it “fun”? It was the greatest test of my physical endurance by far, culminating in an entirely sleepless 36 hours – but it also brought me here: We had a great group of people, and we bonded surprisingly strongly over the course of that week – supporting each other closely through our suffering, even if we occasionally drove each other slightly nuts. And I think those of us who made it have the rare satisfaction of knowing we truly DID something. I love my work and I think I’m good at it, but there’s also something uniquely satisfying about a physical accomplishment. Especially considering that just eight months before, going upstairs to use the bathroom was a feat worth of Gilgamesh (and never mind the challenge of actually USING said bathroom). So yeah, I guess 2014 didn’t suck that bad after all. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="891" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2015/01/16/on-bended-knee/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480.jpg" data-orig-size="640,480" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1421426222","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o (640×480)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480-300x225.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-891" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480.jpg" alt="1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o (640x480)" width="640" height="480" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480.jpg 640w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1941516_10203932165359269_8012607713672906349_o-640x480-300x225.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
When The Guardian and Hitler agree, you’ve hit consensus
I’m very selective (on the verge of Luddite) in my embrace of online tools and technology – somewhat unfortunate, given my line of work, as the road to freelancer success can be somewhat more smoothly paved for those of us who hurl ourselves vigorously into the blogosphere or Twitterverse whatever hackneyed ‘social media’ + ‘topographic […]
I’m very selective (on the verge of Luddite) in my embrace of online tools and technology – somewhat unfortunate, given my line of work, as the road to freelancer success can be somewhat more smoothly paved for those of us who hurl ourselves vigorously into the blogosphere or Twitterverse whatever hackneyed ‘social media’ + ‘topographic delineation’ construct you may prefer. There are many reasons I fundamentally dislike Facebook and Twitter, but it’s often hard for me to express them lucidly without descending into visceral “you’re a big doody-head” level arguments. I am, in fact, on Facebook. Furthermore, I go on every single morning, primarily because I’ve learned the hard way that it’s the only way to find out whether people I know are getting hired, fired, married, divorced, pregnant, exiled, executed or canonized. And it has that little birthday box on the right. But I would say that only a vanishingly small percentage of my friends know how to use Facebook the way I would want to use it – posting interesting, thoughtful articles and provoking stimulating discussion with people I wish I knew. Otherwise, it’s like a cross between the world’s longest no-cover open-mic night and the comments section of YouTube. Likewise with Twitter – I am not personally on Twitter, but I do use it to, for example, get ‘behind the scenes’ information from scientific meetings or product launch events. But then I have to roam through endless repetitive retweets and sad, sad attempts at “wit”. And god save us all from #hashtaghumor. This is why the idea of ‘social search’ scares me – even though tech pundits seem to love the concept so. So few people are looking for exactly what I want, and almost none of my friends does exactly what I do, and everybody’s idea of what’s ‘important’ and ‘interesting’ is miles apart from everbody else’s, with the convergence of this messy Venn diagram unfortunately landing squarely on lolcats and the Harlem Shake. If this kind of ‘digital democracy’ determines what comes up on top of my list, it’s going to take me ten times as long to find anything I need – if I ever find it at all. And this, in turn, is why I love, love, love Google Reader. Love it. I’m a Google partisan anyway – Android phone, Chrome browser, Google as homepage – but there is no single page I spend more time on. In the last five years, I have put together a magnificently manicured collection of feeds for both business and pleasure. For my work as a journalist, it’s critical – I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve started my day stumbling across a story or two that is directly relevant to an assignment I’m working on. My other option is to go to each journal homepage, science blog and science news website every day and try to figure out what’s been updated. Open about three or six dozen browser tabs, because otherwise I can’t keep track of what I haven’t read yet, and hope I remember to ever look at them again. Then, when it’s time to take a break and goof off, let’s just slap a few dozen more tabs up there, because I can’t be spending all day goofing off, but there’s so much new stuff on Cracked and AV Club… Google Reader is my salvation; an hour or two every morning, and maybe a half hour in the afternoon, and I can economically blast through information that would take me eight hours or more to find otherwise. And of course, I have it on my Android phone, so I can never be far from my precious, precious feeds. But now that’s done. As the nerds among you – and who else is visiting my website, anyway? – know, Google has decided that I should instead find my information by stumbling across whatever articles the five people I know on Google + are reading. Oh, or I suppose I could let Facebook and Twitter show me what to read. Probably something about cats. Cats are funny. I think this headline from The Guardian puts it better than anybody else I’ve seen so far: “Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees.” This is a tool for primary productivity. It’s like when you hear all the wonderful shiny news about how the new media will kill off the dinosaur tree-killing old media. Yes, there’s lots and lots of room for complaint about newspapers and magazines, and there’s a lot to be said for the fast upload, fast update means of information dissemination… except that probably 75% of all of the news being dissected and re-analyzed online was first broken by reporters and editors working at ‘old media’ institutions. You know – the bees. Maybe it’s a touch melodramatic – the RSS format isn’t dead, after all. But without the momentum of a unified Google Reader community behind it, who knows how long that will last. This will almost certainly be the last time I ever write these words, but perhaps Hitler put it best: UPDATED: Oh, and if you’d also like to join in the quixotic battle against a massive global corporation dizzy with its own power, please sign this petition at Change.org: “Keep Google Reader Running.” It’s almost up to 150,000 signatures…
Dystrophin: The Reader’s Digest abridged edition
In spite of a solid grounding in experimental practice and animal models, gene therapy has had a difficult road in the clinic. According to the Journal for Gene Therapy, over 1800 gene therapy-oriented clinical trials have been conducted worldwide since 1989, including 67 Phase III trials – typically the last stage in a drug’s journey […]
In spite of a solid grounding in experimental practice and animal models, gene therapy has had a difficult road in the clinic. According to the Journal for Gene Therapy, over 1800 gene therapy-oriented clinical trials have been conducted worldwide since 1989, including 67 Phase III trials – typically the last stage in a drug’s journey to the market. However, only one gene therapy product has been approved for use in patients: Glybera, from Dutch company UniQure, which uses a virus to deliver a replacement for a damaged gene normally responsible for fatty acid metabolism. Importantly, Glybera is only available in the EU, although the company seems confident that they’ll win approval from the FDA in short order. In other words, pharma and biotech companies are still feeling their way in this new land – but that’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of really cool and promising studies out there. A lot of neat stuff has been bubbling up around muscular dystrophy (MD), which encompasses a family of disorders arising from mutations of the gene encoding the dystrophin protein. Dystrophin is critical to the proper arrangement and stabilization of muscle fibers and, without it, muscle tissue wastes away until patients ultimately perish from failure of the muscles of the heart and/or respiratory system. Now, something you should know about dystrophin. It’s big – I mean epically big. Burj Khalifa big. Blue whale big. Let me put this in perspective: the median length of a human protein is 375 amino acids, but dystrophin contains a whopping 3,677. The DNA encompassed by the gene spans 0.07% of the total human genome, and the process of transcribing the gene into a protein-coding messenger RNA molecule takes SIXTEEN HOURS. This is a damn long gene – the kind that would make Marcel Proust or David Foster Wallace proud. It’s just slightly smaller than this picture, in other words. But here’s the cool part – you don’t need the whole thing. The dystrophin RNA needs to undergo a process known as ‘splicing’ before it gets translated into protein, which entails the clipping and stitching together of 79 protein-coding segments known as ‘exons’. In some MD cases, a whole exon or multiple exons might go missing, but even a tiny insertion or deletion of nucleotides in one of these exons can have catastrophic consequences for how the rest of the protein gets made or even halt protein production entirely. But scientists have learned that you can make short strings of chemically-modified ‘antisense’ nucleic acids that will actually bind directly to those damaged or misplaced exons, causing the splicing machinery to ignore them and just move along to the next exon. This turns out to not be as problematic as one might think – leaving out a tiny chunk of a behemoth like dystrophin is, of course, a hell of a lot less damaging than gumming up the whole protein in mid-sequence – and the early trials have given some cause for optimism. For example, Sarepta Therapeutics now has a Phase II clinical trial underway in the US to test the efficacy of their drug eteplirsen, which knocks out defects in exon 51 – one of the more common causative mutations for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), the most common form of MD. GlaxoSmithKline is gunning for the same target with an antisense molecule of their own, GSK2402968, which is currently making its way through both Phase II and Phase III clinical trials. Both drugs have been initially associated with small but statistically significant performance improvements with regard to muscle function in DMD patients, and it seems like other companies are keen to queue up in developing gene therapies that operate along similar lines. And given that there are a broad range of DMD mutations, and that each exon will most likely require its own targeted exon-skipping antisense molecule, there should be plenty of room to operate. Unless, of course, you say “The hell with this noise – I’m just gonna make myself a tiny, pocket-sized dystrophin that I can cram into a virus and force patients to express that instead!” That sounds nice, because then you don’t really have to worry about targeting each individual exon in each individual patient. It also sounds like total crazy talk. Especially given that the standard gene therapy viruses can only hold enough genetic material to encode a protein on the order of 1500 or so amino acids. But many biologists just happen to be that kind of crazy, and not without cause – one patient has been identified who was naturally missing nearly half of her dystrophin gene, and yet she exhibited only relatively mild symptoms and these at a late age. Since then, scientists have been banging away at the idea of creating a viral delivery-friendly, stumpy ‘microdystrophin’ gene that remains sufficiently functional to combat muscle-wasting in DMD patients. Unfortunately for us dog lovers, dogs happen to be the best available ‘large mammal’ model for characterizing the performance of these types of gene therapies. And sadly, many of the sacrifices of these pioneers were made in vain – early microdystrophin constructs were successfully delivered, and even gave rise to truncated protein in treated animals, but with no particular improvements in muscle function… in some cases, muscle performance even suffered as a result of treatment. A new study in Molecular Therapy gives a bit more cause for hope, however. Dongsheng Duan’s team at the University of Missouri School of Medicine synthesized viruses containing a profoundly abridged version of dystrophin – a mere 30% of the original sequence – and used it to treat six dogs with muscular dystrophy. In each animal, they only dosed one muscle so that they could compare directly against the untreated counterpart in the same dog. Within two months, they could specifically detect microdystrophin being produced in every single treated muscle. More importantly, microdystrophin proved capable of interacting with the appropriate protein partners in muscle tissue, and seemed to repair many of the abnormalities normally observed in dystrophic tissues. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="755" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2013/01/16/dystrophin-the-readers-digest-abridged-edition/gtfig/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig.jpg" data-orig-size="448,294" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="GTFig" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig-300x196.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-755" alt="GTFig" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig.jpg" width="448" height="294" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig.jpg 448w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/GTFig-300x196.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 448px) 100vw, 448px" /> As you can see, a lot of the disorganization and other mishegas (e.g. calcification and immune cell infiltration) that’s going on in the dystrophic tissue (left panels) has been addressed in the microdystrophin-treated muscle (right panels). On the other hand, the physical benefits were less readily apparent. There were no clear improvements in the force of muscle contraction, and although the treated muscle performed significantly better than the untreated in tests of repeated contraction, it was still far from acceptable levels for normal performance. Nevertheless, this seems like a big step towards demonstrating the principle that a virus-friendly microdystrophin might become a viable option for the broader treatment of DMD patients. It’s abundantly clear that the current minigene is unready for clinical development and that scientists can now look forward to a protracted process of optimization (a.k.a. trial and error), but the authors also want to emphasize the primary positive takeaway point: “Our results have cleared uncertainty on microdystrophin therapy [that have] arisen from other dog studies.” Ladies and gentlemen – start your editing!
Short answer: because they can be. An interesting new article in PLoS ONE, by an interesting guy whose work I’ve just now become acquainted with… Aaron Clauset, formerly of the Santa Fe Institute and now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who uses computer modeling and data analysis to investigate the principles underlying complex […]
Short answer: because they can be. An interesting new article in PLoS ONE, by an interesting guy whose work I’ve just now become acquainted with… Aaron Clauset, formerly of the Santa Fe Institute and now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who uses computer modeling and data analysis to investigate the principles underlying complex systems ranging from the dynamics of social networks and terrorist cells (probably not as dissimilar as one might expect) to evolutionary biology. Clauset goes solo on this article, a theoretical piece simply titled ‘How Large Should Whales Be?‘ It’s essentially a follow-up to a study he published in Science in 2008, looking at the distribution of body sizes among terrestrial animals. In that earlier work, he and co-author Douglas Erwin plotted more than 4,000 land-dwelling bird and mammal species (both living and extinct) from the past 2 million years based on their body mass, and arrived at a curve that was heavily skewed toward the left (low body mass) with a long tail tapering off toward larger and larger body masses: (image from Science) This reveals a clear peak that appears to represent an optimal minimum size (approximately 40 grams) from an evolutionary perspective, below which remarkably few species seem to tip the scales. The great majority of species analyzed are considerably larger than this ‘peak minimum’, although true heavyweights are relatively rare. Clauset and Erwin arrive at a model that describes this long tail of bigger body sizes as the result of two competing forces. On the one hand, bigger animals are less likely to be eaten by predators and may be better capable of dealing with short-term changes in resource availability than their small-bodied colleagues. This tendency is described by an evolutionary principle known as Cope’s rule, which states that organisms in a given generation of a particular lineage will generally tend to be larger than their ancestors. On the other hand, excessively large animals become less energetically efficient, reproduce more slowly and are generally more prone to extinction events. So, to bust out the cliches, size DOES matter… but bigger isn’t always better. And yet – as Captain Ahab learned the hard way – the rules change at sea. A 7,000 kg elephant may be king of the hill on terra firma, but that’s only twice as massive as the smallest whale species – such as the adorably puny pygmy right whale, which typically weighs in at a mere 3-3,500 kg. Try not to step on it. And as Clauset shows, many of the mammals that spend their entire lives at sea are notably larger than even the mightiest mammoths of yesteryear. So what gives? The reason turns out to be a single factor – body temperature regulation. For land mammals and birds, Clauset describes a relatively firm 2 g minimum, below which animals lose body heat into the air too rapidly to maintain their proper internal temperature. However, body heat is generally transferred into water much more rapidly than in air, pushing the minimum mammalian body size up to a whopping 7 kilograms. Using this as a starting point, he applied computational modeling to predict the likely size distributions for cetacean species based on the same parameters he previously applied with land-based species, and the results were astonishingly close to the real distributions for the world’s 77 living cetacean species. Accordingly, this single factor seems to be sufficient to entirely explain the striking difference in range of sizes between land and sea mammals. These thermoregulatory limits would also have shaped the timing with which marine mammal species began to appear on the evolutionary timeline, with the earliest mammals far too small to survive a full-time seafaring life. This is in keeping with current estimates that suggest that the earliest whale ancestors took their first big dip around 50 million years ago, well over 150 million years after the first mammals came on the scene. This study provides strong additional support for a surprisingly simple and elegant general model for how the distribution of animal body sizes has shifted over time. Or, as the author modestly notes, “Rarely in biological systems are the predictions of mathematical models so unambiguous and rarely are they upheld so clearly when compared to empirical data.” What remains now, he concludes, is to determine whether our cold-blooded contemporaries the fish, reptiles and amphibians, have played by the same evolutionary rules.
One of my two articles in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology looks at some of the cool stuff that’s going on right now with wearable wireless medical sensors that can track and transmit data about cardiac health, blood sugar and even brain activity to a smart phone for the benefit of patients, their family […]
One of my two articles in the November issue of Nature Biotechnology looks at some of the cool stuff that’s going on right now with wearable wireless medical sensors that can track and transmit data about cardiac health, blood sugar and even brain activity to a smart phone for the benefit of patients, their family members and their caregivers. Among the most commonly cited challenges in bringing these tools forward is providing adequate power to drive both the device and to enable routine data transmission to ensure that the wearer is getting a real-time ‘story’ of physiological changes. We all know that even while technology just gets more powerful and versatile, batteries have more or less continued to suck, and the folks who have been trying to create fully functional medical devices that are essentially small enough to be taped onto your body with a Band-Aid have really been grappling with this. Julian Penders at Belgium’s IMEC research institute is deeply immersed in the world of so-called ‘body area networks’, the design of wireless electronics for physiological monitoring, and a lot of his team’s efforts are particularly focused on this problem and in particular on the idea of moving away from conventional batteries altogether. He told me: “There has been quite a lot of work in terms of energy harvesting… the dream is to have wearable devices that can be used for an entire lifetime without having to charge them. We’ve been looking into thermal harvesting, radiofrequency harvesting and harvesting of energy from vibrations. We’re not at the point where we can have a fully autonomous system, but I would say that the gap between consumption and generation and harvesting of power is really shrinking. We are on the order of 1 milliwatt for a wearable electrocardiograph, and what we can generate in terms of harvesting is typically on the order of around 100 microwatts – we still have a factor of ten to bridge, but this gap has become much easier to cross.” Obviously, this is really cool stuff – the equivalent of a body-powered ‘perpetual motion machine’ (or at least as perpetual as things get for we mere mortals). Plus, it’s just one less thing to worry about when your doctor is worried about making sure your heart is working properly 24/7. An early iteration of IMEC’s wearable ECG patch. If only I’d been able to wait another month! Just in the past week, a pair of research teams have presented two completely different mechanisms for continuously harvesting power to drive an on-body medical device. The first of these appeared in the exact same issue of Nature Biotech as my article. MIT’s Anantha Chandrakasan and Konstantina Stankovic of the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary took advantage of a source of natural electrical power within the inner ear. The cochlea is a snail shell-shaped structure where vibrations received at the eardrum get translated into neural impulses to the auditory cortex of the brain. It contains two types of fluid with different ionic concentrations, separated by a membrane, resulting in a voltage potential of 70-100 millivolts. This endocochlear potential (EP) is a critical component for the generation of electrical signals in response to sounds and therefore must be stably maintained, making it a promising biological battery for ear implants. Of course, this requires accessing the cochlea and connecting electrodes to the biological ‘anode’ and ‘cathode’ without interfering with normal ear function – no mean feat. But in a series of experiments with guinea pigs (as in actual research guinea pigs, not unwary humans), Stankovic and Chandrakasan pulled it off. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-696" data-attachment-id="696" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/11/09/people-power/nbt-2394-f1-3/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12.jpg" data-orig-size="550,247" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="nbt.2394-F1" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12-300x134.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12.jpg" class="size-full wp-image-696" title="nbt.2394-F1" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12.jpg" alt="" width="550" height="247" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12.jpg 550w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nbt.2394-F12-300x134.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" /> (from Nature Biotechnology) As Penders remarked, making electronics that can get by with what the body provides is a singular challenge, and the researchers here devised a custom semiconductor chip that can work with the approximately 1.1-6.3 nanowatts generated by the guinea pig EP – including a remarkable wireless radio transmitter that requires only 46 picowatts of standby power, and is estimated to be in ‘active mode’ only 0.0001% of the time. The initial test was only a proof of concept, showing that the chip could run and transmit a wireless signal for at least five hours continuously. Importantly, the authors observed some impairment of hearing, and note that: “Our data imply that major improvements in low-impedance, small-diameter electrode design would be required to allow long-term energy extraction from the EP without causing long-term cellular trauma during electrode insertion.” Nevertheless, it’s a very exciting demonstration both of sensor miniaturization and a promising potential mechanism for the long-term operation of cochlear implants and other inner-ear-based sensors in the future. Especially since most of the immediate challenges appear to relate to electrode miniaturization, an area where device manufacturers are making remarkably steady progress. The second study, although more preliminary, is exciting because it’s targeted for use in cardiac pacemakers, which are the most widely-used medical implants currently on the market: according to a recent article in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, there are roughly three million people with implanted pacemakers worldwide. However, with a battery life of five to ten years, many patients can anticipate having to undergo replacement surgery at least once in their lifetime. As an alternative, M. Amin Karami of the University of Michigan is looking into piezoelectric harvesting – drawing power generated from vibrations. Last winter, Karami and his UMich colleague Daniel Inman published an article in Applied Physics Letters, describing how energy obtained from heartbeats might be transformed into a stable reservoir of long-term power for implanted pacemakers. More recently, they presented findings at the American Heart Association showing that their piezoelectric harvester, which is half the size of existing pacemaker batteries, could obtain ten times the power required to operate a pacemaker from the range of vibrations generated by a typical heart. Although these devices have not yet been put to the test in animal studies, this demonstration suggests a promising road forward for pacemakers as well as implanted defibrillators. It’s definitely nice to think that there may be at least one aspect of our lives where bitching about lousy battery life might soon become a thing of the past – especially if it’s for technology designed to help keep us alive.
Just over a week ago, I lost my very dear friend Kern to a truly evil case of liver cancer. Given the (astonishingly low) frequency with which I update my website, and the (astonishingly high) proportion of dog-oriented content that those updates comprise, I want to take a moment to eulogize this sweet, odd creature […]
Just over a week ago, I lost my very dear friend Kern to a truly evil case of liver cancer. Given the (astonishingly low) frequency with which I update my website, and the (astonishingly high) proportion of dog-oriented content that those updates comprise, I want to take a moment to eulogize this sweet, odd creature who had been my buddy, my henchman and, in some ways, my alter ego for almost 12 years. For those of you who don’t feel like reading on as I wax sentimental, the rest is below the jump – as an alternative, perhaps you’d prefer Matt Inman’s very sweet ruminations on dog ownership over at The Oatmeal? The rest of you – follow me. I adopted Kern back in 2000, while traveling through the barren wastes of central California. My ex and I had stopped in a town called Kernville (near the Kern River, in Kern County), where there was supposed to be kickass whitewater rafting. Since we were dumbasses and went at the end of a long drought season, the mighty Kern River was nought but a feeble, muddy trickle. So we went to a pet store run by bikers, where we were charmed by this tiny reddish-brown lump of fur who was on display in the shop window, being terrorized by a nasty parrot perched overhead. I HATE parrots. So of course, we had to rescue him. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="666" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/10/01/requiem-for-a-brown-dog/kern1/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg" data-orig-size="500,335" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="Kern1" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1-300x201.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-666" title="Kern1" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="335" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1.jpg 500w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kern1-300x201.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /> In honor of Edward Kern, who apparently never missed the opportunity to slap his name on something, we named the pup Kern. And since these happened to be incredibly sweet bikers, they gave us this whole puppy ‘starter kit’ for a song, including a carrying case so I could stow the little bugger under the seat for the flight back to New York. He slept like a baby. But that was the end of that. He quickly established a reputation as a hellion, earning the moniker ‘Kern-an the Destroyer’. He ate shoes, blankets, pillows, chairs, table legs, rugs – pretty much anything not made of metal or vulcanized rubber. As he grew older, he was less indiscriminate in his destruction, but still maintained an unhealthy fascination with the consumption of shoes and socks and underwear, which would persist until his final days. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-attachment-id="668" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/10/01/requiem-for-a-brown-dog/kern2/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2.jpg" data-orig-size="500,338" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="kern2" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2-300x202.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2.jpg" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-668" title="kern2" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="338" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2.jpg 500w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kern2-300x202.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /> Long after my ex and I parted ways, Kern and I remained inseparable, and he has been the one constant in my life as I’ve changed apartments, changed careers, changed cities, changed relationships. Kern became a litmus test by which I would judge people, especially prospective partners. He once peed on a girl I was dating the very first time I brought her home – and then she discovered that he’d also destroyed both her purse and shoes as a prelude to his ‘master stroke’ attack. I should have listened to his advice; she was completely insane, but it took me a year longer than him to figure that out. Kern was moody and prone to outbursts of crankiness, much like me. But he was also very cuddly and sweet, and loved nothing more than to be used as a pillow or footrest. He had a bizarre and troubling foot fetish, and would lick any available toes or soles for endless minutes until the inevitable gross-out reaction. He loved paper as well, and could find and ferret out the smallest scrap of napkin hidden in a pocket or purse without disturbing any other contents. He was an avid hiker and swimmer in early life, earning him the additional moniker ‘Action Dog’, but in later years his athletic career was limited to extended bouts of sniffing and chasing his tail (you’re never too old for that one), and he put on a bit of pudge that won him yet another nickname: ‘The Velvet Eggplant’. He was also the cleanest dog in history, and licked himself like a cat whenever there was a spare moment – especially if no feet were available. He never lost the puppy smell from the top of his head, and his ears were always impossibly velvety. And even though he never quite ‘got’ dogs, he always loved people and would strategically position himself in the optimal spot to be equidistant to the largest number of humans. He would occasionally howl like a banshee when he was left alone, making spectacularly mournful sounds that wouldn’t seem the least bit out of place on the English moors. He also tended to win over strangers very quickly, all of whom seem convinced that he must be some particular breed rather than all of them mixed together. I used to make up fake breeds, like the ‘Venezuelan Marmot-Hound’ or the ‘Lord Durnsberry Ruddy Terrier’, but really he was one of a kind. He was diagnosed with a bump in his belly on the 4th of September that made our vet concerned. Within a week, the ultrasound confirmed it and he went in for a biopsy. He was still his usual waggy self, stunning all the vets and techs with his vigor, but by the time the biopsy results came back he was already starting to slow down and lose weight. The tumor appeared to be a hepatocellular carcinoma, and a great big motherf***er at that – when you looked at the abdominal incision, it completely eclipsed the liver, which is normally pretty hard to miss. You know, that huge reddish-brown thing. Things crashed quickly after that. I scrambled to prepare something, anything he might want to eat – steamed chicken, rice and broth, grilled hamburger, mashed carrots… things that made my stomach grumble, and which he normally would have climbed onto a burning stove to steal. He barely wanted to look at them. Steroids, antibiotics, pepcid… nothing helped, and neither of us enjoyed the twice-daily wrestling match involved in getting medication down. He stopped eating for four, five, six days and finally couldn’t even reach the end of our very short block. By the time I realized we had reached the end of the line, after a week of fasting, the decision was both very easy and terribly hard. He was ready to go, and just sat peacefully in my arms from the moment we left the house and he stayed there long after the barbiturates had already kicked in. It was 22 September, slightly less than three weeks after his diagnosis, and just two weeks short of his 12th anniversary in my home, which even now still seems impossibly empty. Things have gotten much better since those first few days, when it felt like I’d lost a limb. But I can’t say when the absence will really go away. But he was a great dog that I loved a lot, and I like to think we did pretty well together during the time we had—Godspeed, Kernel.
Like most other Americans, I always plan to kick off each new year with a vigorous storm of self-improvement – grabbing every day by the lapels, smacking it in the face a few times and then striding down the street to celebrate with a cold beer. But more realistically, my year tends to begin like […]
Like most other Americans, I always plan to kick off each new year with a vigorous storm of self-improvement – grabbing every day by the lapels, smacking it in the face a few times and then striding down the street to celebrate with a cold beer. But more realistically, my year tends to begin like this: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-626" data-attachment-id="626" data-permalink="https://www.eisensteinium.com/2012/01/02/building-steam-in-2012/sleepykern/" data-orig-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" data-orig-size="600,359" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"PC36100","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1325253856","copyright":"","focal_length":"4.92","iso":"110","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="sleepykern" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" “2012, huh? Wake me when it’s 2013.” " data-medium-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern-300x179.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" src="http://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg" alt="" title="sleepykern" width="600" height="359" class="size-full wp-image-626" srcset="https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern.jpg 600w, https://www.eisensteinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sleepykern-300x179.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> "2012, huh? Wake me when it's 2013." So I’ll spare you my roster of ‘resolutions’, which will in all likelihood be as far from binding as anything posted on the internet can be. But I will say that even though things look exactly the same in January 2012 as they did in December 2011, I’m hopeful that this is just the launching point for some fun and exciting projects and adventures. I’ve got a mountain of pictures to post, story ideas to develop and – most importantly – trips to take. So happy new year to all, and let’s see if this can’t all be the start of something good!
Apparently, I’ve been a bad dog-parent. My pup, now 11, still loves to chase his tail, and after 11 years, I still find this endlessly amusing and giggle-inducing. Yes, I like the simple things. But apparently I’ve been reinforcing his clueless behavior even while I mocked it, at least according to a new article from […]
Apparently, I’ve been a bad dog-parent. My pup, now 11, still loves to chase his tail, and after 11 years, I still find this endlessly amusing and giggle-inducing. Yes, I like the simple things. But apparently I’ve been reinforcing his clueless behavior even while I mocked it, at least according to a new article from PLoS ONE: “I gathered data on the first large (n = 400), non-clinical tail-chasing population, made possible through a vast, free, online video repository, YouTube . The demographics of this online population are described and discussed. Approximately one third of tail-chasing dogs showed clinical signs, including habitual (daily or ‘all the time’) or perseverative (difficult to distract) performance of the behaviour. These signs were observed across diverse breeds. Clinical signs appeared virtually unrecognised by the video owners and commenting viewers; laughter was recorded in 55% of videos, encouragement in 43%, and the commonest viewer descriptors were that the behaviour was ‘funny’ (46%) or ‘cute’ (42%). Habitual tail-chasers had 6.5+/−2.3 times the odds of being described as ‘Stupid’ than other dogs, and perseverative dogs were 6.8+/−2.1 times more frequently described as ‘Funny’ than distractible ones were… These findings highlight that tail-chasing is sometimes pathological, but can remain untreated, or even be encouraged, because of an assumption that it is ‘normal’ dog behaviour. The enormous viewing figures that YouTube attracts (mean+/−s.e. = 863+/−197 viewings per tail-chasing video) suggest that this perception will be further reinforced, without effective intervention.” I’m nothing but an enabler! Plus, you can apparently now do science while watching silly animal videos on YouTube. What an age we live in!
You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that this is probably not the best abbreviation for ‘copper nanotubes’ or giggle like a 12-year-old at images like this, and that’s the beauty of the TOC ROFL Tumblog, a collection of silly, embarassing, unintentionally bawdy and just-plain-WTF graphical abstracts for chemistry research papers. It’s truly […]
Somebody set us up the bomb! You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that this is probably not the best abbreviation for ‘copper nanotubes’ or giggle like a 12-year-old at images like this, and that’s the beauty of the TOC ROFL Tumblog, a collection of silly, embarassing, unintentionally bawdy and just-plain-WTF graphical abstracts for chemistry research papers. It’s truly got something for everybody (with a perverse sense of humor). And if you ARE a scientist or science writer, and you’ve actually seen figures and graphical abstracts like these before, well there’s just so much more to love. I remember the receptor complex slide I used to use in grad school that everybody but me thought looked like an angry robot, and my friend’s slide from his TB talk that showed a snapshot of a man sneezing where the dispersing vapor looked just like a giant breast… but these really take the cake. Just what were these editors thinking? In a world where young’uns hurl around the phrase ROFL with excess and reckless abandon, I must say I came pretty close to literally ROFL for some of these. Hat tip to ‘In The Pipeline‘ for bringing this to my attention. As Derek Lowe rightly points out: “I’ve no idea who this is, but they’re helping, in their way, to make the world a better place.”