If you’re passing by Karangahape Road in Auckland over the next 3 weeks check out the Crossing Wires Lab, a science meets art installation. Plant and Food olfactory scientist Richard Newcomb and sensory artist Raewyn Turner have joined forces to produce this exhibition-come-science lab where the general public have the opportunity to participate in an active science experiment.
During the exhibition Newcomb and his team will be extracting odours from worn socks, supplied by a scientists, artists and joggers, and then offering the public the opportunity to categorise these odours (presumably in an artistic way, rather than an ew-foot-odour kind of way). The installation features a science laboratory set up in the shop-front window where the odour extraction will take place, as well as performance exhibition art with interactive video imaging and audio.
This exhibition/experiment runs from Nov 2nd to 20th and is funded by the Smash Palace funding initiative set up by Creative New Zealand and MoRST to encourage collaborations between scientists and artists. Check out their blog for regular updates, video and audio clips.
The past week has been Open Access Week, celebrating the unrestricted sharing of research results via the internet for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. From the Open Access week website:
Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.
Events celebrating Open Access Week have been held all over the world, including here in Wellington, New Zealand. As my own commemoration of the week I thought I’d round up some interesting articles that have been published in Open Access Journals over the last few weeks. All of these are peer-reviewed journal articles that are free for anyone to download and read – no subscriptions required!
Are you a molecular biologist or geneticist suffering from lab plastic waste-guilt? Then here’s the video for you, made by Toronto-based biochemist, science writer, and artist Eva Amsen:
We’ve all been told to reduce, reuse, and recycle when it comes to our households. But in the lab, unless there is an underlying money issue, this rarely comes into play. In cell biology or molecular biology labs the emphasis is on working sterile, quickly and reproducibly. So companies have been selling all these incredibly useful products to life science labs: sterile plastic tubes of all shapes and sizes, single wrap multi-well tissue culture plates, sterile plastic dishes, sterile pipettes. All these products make it a lot easier to do the required work. I can’t even imagine how you could work in a cell culture lab without them, but they do create a lot of waste.
I made this video as a creative outlet and to try and raise some awareness of all the disposables in the lab, and give some mild suggestions on how to reduce the pile of trash by a tiny amount. Every bit helps, right?
Lab Waste from Eva Amsen on Vimeo (sorry it appears I can’t embed the actual video, so head over to Vimeo to watch it!).
Most New Zealanders can name at least a dozen or so species of native bird, but how many can do the same for our native reptiles? If you starting counting and only got as far as 1. tuatara, you’re probably not alone. Although we are missing some of the major groups of reptiles (like snakes and alligators), we do have a diverse array of lizards. In fact New Zealand has around 80 different lizard species in two major groups – geckos and skinks (tuatara are not lizards, they are Sphenodontids).
Around half of our lizard species are skinks. These are the most commonly encountered native reptiles, being the species most likely to be spotted disappearing under rocks or into long grass on a hot day, and generally being favoured by the domestic moggy. Now new research is improving our understanding of the origins and evolution of our skink fauna, with some exciting fossil finds and the publication of a comprehensive genetic study. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who prefer to get your science in aural form, I thought I’d share a couple of excellent sites for podcasts. Both of these sites succeed in making science entertaining for the public, covering both breaking science stories and discussing the science of everyday phenomena.
The Naked Scientists are a group of researchers from Cambridge University who produce a regular science show for the BBC. Each episode is around 30 mins long and covers a handful of different science stories at a snappy pace, often with the help of an expert guest. You can download the podcasts of their show from their website, which also has some cool articles, ideas for experiments you can do in your kitchen, and a forum where you can ask your favourite random science question.
Radiolab is a US-based science show, broadcast on public service radio stations across the US. Each hour-long show covers a particular aspect of science and/or philosophy, and uses music, sound effects and a healthy dose of humour to get the point across. Podcasts of the shows are available from the website. For those of you with short attention spans, there are also short podcasts (15-20 mins long) on the website.
There’s not many people who get to see kakapo these days… and even fewer who can say they’ve been shagged by a kakapo.
This video (which is apparently a hit on Youtube) comes from the new BBC series Last Chance to See , part of which was filmed in New Zealand last summer. I hope the series will be shown in New Zealand sometime soon!
I read an interesting post by Olivia Judson at the New York Times blog a few weeks ago, which asked if you could sequence any genome, what would you choose? Olivia’s choice was the coelacanth- a worthy choice, given that the coelacanth may represent the ancestor of all tetrapods (the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). No prizes for guessing what my choice would be…
Anyway, this got me thinking. What good is a genome sequence? What is it going to tell us about our favourite organism that good old-fashioned biological enquiry and lab work hasn’t been able to tell us so far? Whenever the idea of sequencing the tuatara genome is discussed, one of the major questions that comes back (especially from non-geneticists) is “why? Even though genome sequencing is getting faster and cheaper by the day, it still requires huge resources of time and money and it’s not always obvious why its worth going to the effort. Read the rest of this entry »
This from a letter to Nature, in the latest edition:
Could Nature have been unknowingly publishing papers for the past 80 years about crocodilian gastroliths (stomach stones) instead of stones concluded to be 2.5-million-year-old hominid tools? This possibility could cast doubt, for example, on the nature of the Oldowan specimens described by Michael Haslam and colleagues in their Review of primate archaeology (Nature 460, 339–344; 2009).
…Identification of the Oldowan specimens as tools is based on the fact that the soft relict sands of Olduvai Gorge contain no natural stones of their own, so any stone found there must have been moved from distant river beds by some unknown animal transporter — concluded by high science to be Homo habilis. But crocodiles have the curious habit of swallowing rocks: these account for 1% of their body weight, so for a 1-tonne crocodile that’s 10 kg of stones in its stomach at all times. Surprisingly, science has never even considered the crocodile as transporter.
Posted by hilaryml 
Posted by hilaryml 
From the Open Access week website:
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