#SciO13 - Photo Journal

The conference ended late Saturday night. Though I folded myself into crispy hotel sheets my mind would not allow me fall asleep. Every five minutes throughout the night I got up, flipped open my computer and wrote down another idea. It was the first night since high-school I saw the sun rise without sleeping a wink. All thanks to the most epic conference I've ever attended.

Science Online is an annual meeting of people interested in science on the internet. As you can imagine this constitutes a lot of people. To distill the attendees the conference organizers (first photo below) allow a limited number of participants to sign up each year. Sign-up inevitably turns into a race on Twitter. This year I was one of the lucky 450. Like Charlie and his golden ticket I bounded off to Science Online 2013 in Raleigh, North Carolina to take part in a three-day extravaganza of beautiful ideas and new connections.  I met more interesting people in those few days than most people meet in a lifetime. One aspect of the conference I think worth noting was the incredible tolerance that flowed through the entire thing. I was amazed at how rapidly we all connected and immediately formed a large protective family. This was the first time I had been around a large group of people who were all twitter super-users. Indeed part of sign-up required disclosure of our twitter handles. These handles and our names were the only identifiers on our neck-credentials. The speed of connectivity in such an environment is breathtaking. If you have the opportunity to take part in an event like this I highly recommend it.

What follows are pictures and brief descriptions of just a few of those interactions. Over the next few weeks, as my mind mends itself from the internal combustion, I hope to bring you more descriptions and flesh out more ideas born at Science Online.
 

Karyn Traphagen                                                            Bora Zivkovic                                      Anton Zuiker

The organizers of Science Online welcome participants to Raleigh at the North Carolina Natural Science Museum - free to the public and a marvel to behold.

Carl Zimmer - Writes The Loom at National Geographic. Some T.Rex feathers were ruffled among scientists during the #explain session when Carl told the scientists in the room not to unload a textbook on anyone if asked to explain scientific concepts... unless they happen to be writing a textbook. I later unloaded his textbook on him. Carl's comment was taken poorly by scientists as it sounded like he was saying - "you do the science we'll do the journalism." He was later paraphrased by Karen James as saying "Wait, allow me to #journosplain."  I respect Carl and Karen both.  I hope we come to a time in the future when good scientific explanations come about organically from scientists in situ and are not the product of incentives in the publishing biz but then again I am just a naive scientist.

Karen James, who I mentioned above,  is a research scientist and educator. She and I had never met before but bonded while tweeting the Mars Curiosity landing in parallel last fall. I will never forget that night; my enthusiasm for science was set aflame once again. So, I was happy to make her acquaintance in person at Science Online 2013, I even got the chance to have dinner with her and Jonathan Eisen. Listening to them exchange stories about their first trip to the Galapagos Islands and their shared affection for Darwin made me want to buy a plane ticket.

Ed Yong is a renegade science journalist gone legit. He writes a brilliant blog I've followed for years called Not Exactly Rocket Science. NERS recently migrated from Discover Blogs to Nat. Geo.  I wonder how he feels about all the shuffling about that happens as the result of procuring "branded content" as it were. (I always begin writing with a British tone when I think of Edmond)

Kate Clancy is a force to be reckoned with. Thanks to Kate I am now more sensitive to the way I might phrase my explanations of science. #Mansplaining is a pitfall to avoid at all costs. Maintaining self-awareness of how one comes off as a writer and educator is extremely important.  Kate Blogs at Context and Variation. Put her and the rest of this lot up there in your bookmark toolbar!

Mark Henderson is the head of communication at the Wellcome Trust in the UK. He Blogs at the Geek Manifesto. What Can I say, Mark is a hero of mine, up there with Jonathan Eisen and Stephen Curry as crusaders for open access to all knowledge great and small. Bully to the bunch!

Michelle M. Francl was new face for me in world of online science-writing. I am certainly privileged to be connected to her and her brand of writing. She is professor of chemistry on the Clowes Fund for Science and Public Policy at Bryn Mawr College and Blogs at the Culture of Chemistry. Michelle had a phenomenal piece in Slate recently. The piece outlines the perils of irrational fear of "chemicals" it undoubtedly resulted from a session we both attended on #Chemophobia.  I was going to write a piece on this topic and I may still conjure up something of my own but I really do recommend her piece in the interim.

Seth Mnookin is a best-selling author and journalist and is currently co-director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. He is a contributor to Vanity Fair and blogs with PLoS. I like Seth. We first met in New York City at the 2010 World Science Festival at a panel discussion on Blogs and science-journalism. I sense he is becoming comfortable with his status inside the establishment of science-writing.  Wish time would stop washing revolution from our minds.

I know Jennifer Ouellette because of her presence on the Google+ social network though she is famous in her own right as an author and science blogger. She blogs at Cocktail Party Physics, part of the Scientific American blog network. It is funny how people you've never met before and are not paying any attention to you become like family on the internet. It was through Jennifer's Google+ channel that I first saw the Gangnam Style video.  Ha! She is pictured above inspiring us to use science fiction to explain real science. She encouraged us not to get hung-up on the short-comings of science fiction but to go with it and take liberties to get the audience into a mode of thinking where they can think about big scientific concepts like black-holes or alternate dimensions. I asked her if I could use the tree of Yggdrasil from Norse Mythology as an analogy for the phylogenetic tree of life without running the risk of getting in a creation vs. evolution debate. She gave me the go-ahead with Gusto.  I appreciate her style and hope to stay connected.

And Finally I come to Annalee Newitz. Annalee is editor-in-chief at the best blog in the universe - iO9.  I had only become aware of iO9 over the last year by using a personalized magazine app called Zite. Let me just say, my goodness is iO9 fucking awesome.  I had just read this article on the Evolutionary Biology of Star Trek a few weeks ago and had no idea Annalee wrote it and would be at this conference. How cool is it when you read someone's work before you know you will know them? Really really really cool I say. We got to talk while waiting of for the bus about our favorite TNG episodes. (Mine - Measure of a Man, Annalee's - Darmok, maybe... others were discussed). On top of all this I think the most thought-tastic moment of the whole conference came for me during the #SciFiSci session when Annlee described one utopian/dystopian vision of the future. A vision in which the earth is engulfed by an ever-expanding sphere of technology melded with human consciousness. A physical description of the singularity that sent my frontal lobes swirling into oblivion for several days thereafter. And thus you see why I have had such a hard time writing this first post to summarize my experience at Science Online 2013. It will take me awhile to get it all out there but I hope you stick with me while I try. Thanks for reading and happy Bookmarking!

GMO Cancer Study in Rats - Sketchy Science

Listen to the following interview with science-writer and Yale University professor Carl Zimmer to see how the release of the recent study from France that claims genetically-modified corn causes increased rates of tumors in a special breed of rats is misleading.

Fate or Feedback: is the microbiome driving our behavior?

Once upon a time there was an unsuspecting ant on the rainforest floor somewhere in Thailand. Marching along single-file between his brothers he was minding his own business, when he suddenly cocked his head and sniffed a moldy kind of smell. Thinking nothing of it, he kept on walking but soon found himself compelled to get out of line and began wandering off into the forest alone. He felt disoriented, confused, not knowing what was happening to him. 

Our tiny friend then found himself at the base of a towering leafy plant. Looking up at the massive translucent leaves he began to climb. Higher and higher he climbed up the central trunk, passing branch after branch, all the while loosing any idea of where he was or what he was doing. Once he reached a height where the air was thick with humidity he stopped climbing and began to walk out onto a leaf. Over the edge of the leaf he could see the long homeward-bound procession of his brothers far below. But before he could make another move he felt an overwhelming urge to bite down on the central vein of the leaf where he found himself perched. As he bit down he felt all the energy in his tiny body flow to the muscles in his head and mandibles and he bit harder than he had ever bit before. His life flashed before his eyes and in an instant he was dead, frozen. 

What has happened to our little ant friend?

Just a few days after the ant's demise a long grey tube began to grow from inside his head, eventually puncturing the top of his ant-skull it continued to grow into a large mushroom. As soon as the fruiting body had fully unfurled tiny spores were released from the cap and sprinkled like snow, slowly down over a fresh line of brother ants where the entire sordid tale began anew.

This is a true story. As you can see, this fungus has hijacked the ant's body turning it into a zombie of sorts, bending the ant's behavior to work exclusively for the benefit of the fungus.This is not the only example of this kind of fucked up relationship in nature. There is nematode worm that lives part of it's life cycle inside the guts of birds. When the birds poop in the jungle, ants eat the poo and with it the nematode larva. Inside the ant's stomach the nematode enters the next phase of its life cycle causing the ant's abdomen to swell and turn bright red. The round red ants look like ripe local berries to hungry birds and the cycle starts again.  Crazy!

Humans are still plagued by extreme parasites as well. The killer gut bacteria Clostridium difficile (widely known as C. diff) causes 14,000 deaths in the US annually according to the Centers for Disease Control. The extreme diarrhea symptomatic of C.diff.  can cause patients to loose a third of their body weight or more. As C.diff usually proliferates in the wake of long antibiotic regimes it is often resistant to antibiotics.  At the same time C. diff. ferociously out-competes the diversity of benign bacteria (part of the microbiome) that regularly inhabit the ecosystem inside the human gut. 

Fear not! A radically simple and effective treatment has emerged for this problem. Fecal transplants! That's right, people get so desperate when they have lost 80+ lbs and are too weak to walk they will try anything. But this shit actually works! Doctors get a "donor" to poop into a container, then they mix it up into a slurry with some water, and deliver the slurry to the colon with a colonoscopy-style tube, or... the doctors can also deposit the donor's poop slurry through a nose-tube into the stomach. I almost just barfed typing that out.  Usually the fecal "donor" is a spouse or a parent, and four out of five patients who receive this poop infusion are cured on the first go!

It is hard to think of near-fatal diarrhea as a behavior but, strictly speaking, it is. The point I want to make by bringing up C.diff infection is that a human behavior - extreme diarrehea - can be changed by a fecal transplant. A transfer of the microbial garden from one field to another can literally change the culture.

So far I have examined extreme examples of behavior modification by parasites. They are extreme in the sense that the victims pay with their lives, but what if there were a whole lot more of these relationships than we ever thought? Relationships in which the host's behavior only had to be manipulated slightly to help the parasite. What if much of human behavior is largely dictated by the the non-human denizens of our bodies? One out of ten cells making up  a person's body are actually of the species Homo sapiens. The rest? Fungus, bacteria, mites, protozoa and a whole ecosystem of diverse fauna. The question is, how democratic is the human body in decision making? Do the peptides secreted by your gut bacteria help decide what to eat, who to mate with, when to fight and when to run?

Enter Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoa that has just such subtle effects on human behavior. In an article published in the European Journal of Personality researchers report that human beings inoculated with these tiny creatures are more outgoing socially, have a higher rate of car crashes, and become less and less conscientious the longer they carry the parasite (especially men).  The shocking part of this study was the number of people who host this little bug - 22.4% of the US population over the age of 12! T. gondii is generally thought to be benign unless present in pregnant women or infants where it can cause damage to developing tissue.  The protozoa is so small during the stage of its life cycle when it lives inside humans it actually penetrates the cells, living in heart and brain tissues. As it replicates it can form benign cysts in the heart and brain... yuck!  The prevalence of T. gondii is underscored by it's signature behavioral modification - extroversion.  By rendering its host more outgoing it increases the likelihood it will spread to additional hosts. Diabolical! Are there any benefits to knowing this? could someone with chronic shyness inoculate themselves with this bug and make themselves more sociable? Might we extract the biochemical mechanism this bug uses and just make an extroversion drug instead? Who knows! Time will tell.  

To me, it is interesting to ponder how deep this connection between medical ecology and human behavior will play out. Are we, like the ant at the beginning of this story, bouncing like a pin-ball between the needs and desires of tiny creatures that call our bodies home?

By writing out these thoughts I want to get my readers thinking about behavior and the unseen factors that influence it. You know that person at work who really gets on your nerves with the constant close-talking? Maybe it's not their fault. May they're acting on a whim of one of their microbial free-riders. Maybe this is true for a lot of human traits. Will we identify more human behaviors that operate under direct feedback by bacteria? fungus? protozoa? cats? dogs? Can we "fix" people by modifying their microbial clouds? Should we? How will super-cheap gene sequencing affect social dynamics?

I do not have the answers to these questions. Maybe you do. Is this a worthy line of scientific inquiry? Share your thoughts below or find me on twitter @thorsonofodin.

Written by Kristopher Hite

1.) Andersen SB, Gerritsma S, Yusah KM, Mayntz D, Hywel-Jones NL, Billen J, Boomsma JJ, & Hughes DP (2009). The life of a dead ant: the expression of an adaptive extended phenotype. The American naturalist, 174 (3), 424-33 PMID: 19627240  

2.) Khoruts A, Dicksved J, Jansson JK, & Sadowsky MJ (2010). Changes in the composition of the human fecal microbiome after bacteriotherapy for recurrent Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea. Journal of clinical gastroenterology, 44 (5), 354-60 PMID: 20048681  

3.) Jitka Lindová1,, Lenka Příplatová,, & Jaroslav Flegr (2012). Higher Extraversion and Lower Conscientiousness in Humans Infected with Toxoplasma European Journal of Personality, 26 (3), 285-291 DOI: 10.1002/per.838

Miscreant Mimicry Among Creationists

For four long days my colleague Carl Zimmer has been wielding the battle axe for sound science education, fighting the good fight for evidence and evolution. In the aftermath of this battle I have noticed a disturbing trend among the current generation of evolution denialists - they are shape-shifting!

First, a brief history of the debate.

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 a sub-group of stubborn Christians have been in a perpetual war with reality. Over the years the deniers of evolution have changed their name in order to re-frame their rhetorical attack on the mounting evidence supporting evolution. For the better part of the twentieth century they went by the title "creationists." They sincerely believe an imaginary sky-father "created" all living things six thousand years ago and just plopped them all down on earth in their present form before taking the next day off for a nap.

All was good from their perspective and they were allowed to tacitly poison science education in the United States for more than a century.

But alas, that pesky establishment clause in the US constitution caught up with them. In a 1987 Supreme Court decision six of the nine justices came down squarely on the side of science. Edwards v. Aguillard established that teaching creationism along with evolution in science classrooms is unconstitutional.

The stubborn creationists were undaunted. They knew what any good snake-oil salesmen knows. When your name gets smeared, just change your name. So began the rise of the "intelligent design" proponents. The idea being that the overtly Christian feel of the word "creation" would be remedied with a switch to the more scientific sounding "intelligent-design."  With this new name came new propaganda. Well, not really, as writing is tough work! So they just took an old creationist text-book and changed some words around a little bit so they could slip it into science classrooms without calling it creationism. The book was called "Of Pandas and People." 

The problem with this book was that the editors were lazy and left bits of the old "creationist" language behind in textual fossils. Where the text once read "creationist" it then read "cdesign proponentists."

In 2005 a group of nosy lawyers and science educators took issue with the use of this book in a science classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. As a result the book and the faith-based science education it promoted was banned from science classrooms. It was deemed by a federal appeals court to violate the precedent set by the 1987 Supreme Court decision mentioned earlier.  

What's a creationists to do?

Here we are seven years later in a scary place where the intelligent design movement has dispensed with identifying themselves altogether and are now just publishing propoganda with scientific-sounding names.  

Enter the copy-cats.

In evolutionary biology some species copy the shape, color, smell, or sound of unrelated species. They do this to protect themselves in order to survive. This is called mimicry. Remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the scarecrow, tin man, and lion dress as the wicked witch's guards to enter her fortress unharmed? That is what I'm talking about.

Guess what? Evolution deniers are doing this like crazy! They are cloaking themselves in scientific sounding names so they can slip through the cracks and deliver their propaganda to students of biology caught unaware.

 Listen to these names.  Biologic Institute, Evolution News & Views, and Science and Human Origins.

These are a facebook page, a website, and a printed book respectively.

Coming to these titles cold one would assume they are legitimate organizations for teaching biology and evolution.  Not so. All three are propaganda outlets for the notorious "Discovery Institute."  (*)

You may know about this Seattle based outfit by their incessant call to "teach the controversy." Their goal being to have intelligent design taught along side Darwinian natural selection in biology classrooms around the country. This is total bullocks as there is no controversy. The physical evidence of evolution is overwhelming and grows with each new discovery in biology. This idea of being fair and balanced regarding every single topic discussed often confuses speculation and facts. Lawrence Krauss describes this dilemma well.

Too often in the media, speculative ideas are treated on the same footing as well-tested ones. As a result, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between them. This is particularly unfortunate when firmly grounded ideas that are known to accurately describe the physical world (such as evolution and the big bang) are passed off as mere theoretical whims of a group of partisan scientists.

As a scientist, writer, and educator it is highly disturbing to see this kind of re-branding by the intelligent design community. By conflating scientific ideas with assumptions of faith and slapping a sciency-sounding name on their front page these groups further damage an already crippled science education program in the United States. Shame on them!

Back to Carl Zimmer.

Intelligent design proponents have been goading Carl with snarky ad hominem attacks on a combination of online forums including Facebook, his Discover Magazine blog - the Loom, and their own comment-free web space - "Evolution News & Views." He has been gracious with the amount of attention he has paid this group of pseudo-academics. Carl has responded at length to a series of games they have been playing with him over the past four days. Read all about it here. 

My advice to Carl is the same advice being given all over the web lately - Don't Feed the Trolls! That being said, I think he has done a great job of staving them off so far and keeping his talents where they belong, on HIS blog. As I walk away from these ceaseless trolls I keep in mind the perennial duty to play the role of a catcher in the rye. For as long as my words last I will attempt to catch those who have fallen into fuzzy-logic and irrational faith-based thought and bring them back to reason. I want to thank Carl for reaffirming my dedication to this goal and for exposing the harmful mimicry going on in the intelligent design community.  

(*) ~ in a previous version of this post I had incorrectly stated that the Discovery Institute and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY were of the same ilk. I was informed via a facebook friend that those organizations had cuts ties when the Dover descision came down in 2005. So as not to offend I have deleted mention of the creation museum. That batch of crazy is brought to you by Ken Ham. Apologies for the error and I hope this paragraph is sufficiently transparent.