All the Science Ladies

I have a follow-up post coming about that enigmatic Lebbeus shrimp, but today here’s a quick shout out for Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, the first Australian woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. (While the article’s title paraphrases one of Dr Blackburn’s anecdotes, I can’t help but cringe at “What’s a nice girl like you doing with a Nobel prize?” – a sentiment echoed by the excellent Clem Bastow over at The Dawn Chorus. The ABC did rather better. Hopefully you’ll forgive my terrible pun title…)

Dr Blackburn, along with her US associates Jack Szostak and Carol Greider, are awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine for research into telomeres, repetetive protein strings on the end of DNA which protect them. As cells divide and reproduce, the telomerase string at the end of the DNA gets shorter, until there is eventually not enough left to protect the chromosome and it suffers damage. Their research has had big implications for aging, cancer, cloning, forensic science and indeed genetic medicine in general.

Dr Blackburn is a model scientist in many ways – the longest part of her Wikipedia entry is her list of awards and prizes – and she’s well known as a strong, rational voice for ethical concerns in genetics. Somewhat unsurprisingly, but no less disappointingly, she was booted from a Bush administrations advisory panel on stem cells for questioning it’s bias back in 2004.

Congratulations, Dr Blackburn. You’re a rock star, and now you’re in the hall of fame.

What’s in a name?

Australian readers will probably have heard about the travesty that is iSnack 2.0, the name chosen by voters as the name for the new variety of Vegemite (it’s the traditional yeast extract mixed with cream cheese). But names fascinate me all the more when applied to living creatures, and it seems we’re in need of some.

Australia has a dearth of taxonomists – scientists whose job is to classify, catalogue and – in conjunction with the biologists and botanists who discover them – name new species. The problem of not having enough taxonomists for the job is never more present than when we see evidence of the back-log of un-named Australian species, and in the news at the moment are hundreds of underground species from central Australia, about half going unnamed.

News.com.au invited readers to come up with names, and predictably “iBug 2.0” was an early comment. Work colleague Robert came up with the better “iBlindFish”, though it sounds rather violent.

It’s unlikely the public will really be asked to name these creatures, and in any case, those are only common names – important, but less so than the binomial names required by science. But just such a name was offered up to the public by the Australian Marine Conservation Society, when they put the rights to choose the scientific name of a newly discovered species Lebbeus shrimp on eBay back in March. (All proceeds to the conservationists, of course, though how we’re supposed to know what we’re conserving without decent funding for taxonomy I’ve no idea.)

Discovered just off the southern coast of Western Australia by Anna McCallum, a graduate student at my old stomping grounds the University of Melbourne, the shrimp – of the genus Lebbeus – looks pretty impressive with it’s yellow and green carapace dotted with red spots. In addition to the naming rights, the winner of the auction got to take home a framed portrait of the little bugger by “freelance botanical, scientific and natural history artist” Mali Moir. The story was picked up by a stack of marine blogs – everything from conservationists to aquarium enthusiasts – and the comments on Stony Reef’s article indicate the bidding got up to $3,550 before the end.

I say before the end, because even though this happened back in March, I can’t find any indication of who won, or what the shrimp was eventually named. I’ve found quite a few Lebbeus species online, including L. grandimanus, L. groenlandicus, L. balssi, L. elegans and L. polyacanthus (these last two seem to have been discovered in late 2008 in the Sea of Japan), but none of them are our red-spotted yellow and green eBay item. There’s a Lebbeus entry on Wikispecies, but almost none of the species have any details, so it’s not much help.

So what happened? I hope it’s not significant that the auction ended on April 1st… Surely someone out there knows something, but it’s a sad sign of our taxonomic paucity that no central database of Australian species exists. But fear not, lab coat readers! I shall endeavour to follow this up. Emails are even now winging their way toward people who might be in the know, and I’ll post a follow up in the coming weeks.

I never get tired of dinosaurs

…and just to prove it, here are a couple of cool dinosaur finds reported in the last week or so.

Tiny Tyrannosaurus – not actually a Tyrannosaurus, of course, since they’re pretty big, but the smallest Tyrannosauroid found so far. At around the height of a human and up to three metres long from head to tail, it’s not really all that tiny, but Raptorex kriegsteini is, as the name suggests, an excellent suggestion of how Tyrannosaurids – with their defining features of tiny arms and massive head – evolved from smaller theropods. As pointed out in the linked article, it’s unlikely to be a direct ancestor of T. rex, but still, it shows us what their ancestor probably looked like, and how they diverged from smaller predators before getting bigger. No transitional fossils my arse, Creationists.

Oh, and Raptorex isn’t just a portmanteau – it means “King of Thieves”. Yes: this is the Autolycus, and thus the Bruce Campbell, of dinosaurs. Kriegstein is the name of the person who donated the fossil, though it’s actually in honour of his father, a Holocaust survivor.

As a side note, check out Raptorex paper author Paul Sereno’s web site. It’s pretty awesome; among other things, he rents out and sells replicas of his fossil finds, and on his postings page you can be disabused of the notion that the scientific community is one big, happy family. This is why is pays to delve into the links given on any science story!)

Earliest feathered dinosaur – Raptorex might have had feathers, but Anchiornis huxleyi is particularly significant because it pre-dates even Archeopteryx, usually acknowledged as the earliest bird. The genus name means “near bird”, but the type species honours Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley. It even had two different kinds of feathers. Dinosaurs are awesome.

Science fiction double feature

I missed Moon at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and I was bummed, because it looks like the first “proper” science fiction film since Gattaca. My friends have heard my sci-fi film rant before, and I’ve mellowed a lot, but it boils down to this: science fiction isn’t just a backdrop.

Isaac Asimov called science fiction a “flavour” that can be added to any genre – best-loved Robot books are detective stories – but that flavour isn’t just the superficial set of tropes: space exploration, time travel, aliens, a future setting and so on. A film (or a story in any media, for that matter) can have some or all of those and not be science fiction.

Science fiction is about exploring possibilities, about asking “what if…?” and answering “then maybe…” Every great science fiction work explores the human answers to the technological and social questions they raise. “What if we invented robots that could truly do the work of any human?” “What if we colonised Mars?” “What if our population continues to grow at its current rate?”

Moon promises to do something like this, and using reasonable science (rather than technobabble) to boot. I don’t want to give much away – the trailer spoils the key premise of the film, but if you haven’t seen it it’d probably be more fun to go in blind – but Sam is a solitary worker on the moon, running a largely automated mining operation. His situation could be the setting for any type of film, but it’s “proper” science fiction because of its exploration of the effect his situation has on him, and its wider social and ethical implications.

I didn’t miss District 9, and I was cautiously optimistic. A spaceship comes to Earth and hovers above Johannesburg – no message, no destruction, not even any motion. Eventually the authorities land on it and cut their way in, revealing squalid conditions and a population of bipedal, crustacean-like aliens who don’t resist being moved into a camp on the ground, called “District 9”. It’s a pretty clear allegory for the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, especially here in Australia where we do keep those a large number of asylum seekers in detention centres for an unspecified time. (And, until recently, billed them for this – though thankfully this practice has just been abolished by the current government.) It devolves into a bit of a shoot-’em-up towards the end, but the emotional journey of the protagonist – forced by an accident to appreciate how the alien “prawns” feel – isn’t compromised. It’s pretty good science fiction, if not terribly deep and far too wobbly. (My beloved felt quite ill through most of it, thanks to the incessant shaky-cam.)

This isn’t to say I disapprove of pure entertainment, even when it uses science fiction tropes. I enjoy Star Wars (by which I mean Episodes IV-VI) as much as any card-carrying geek, it clearly isn’t science fiction, falling more into the science fantasy/space opera camp. Its story is mostly drawn from classical mythology and American history (in case you’re wondering about the latter, I don’t think it’s an accident that nearly all the Imperial officers have British accents, while all the rebels are Americans – though quite how Alec Guinness fits in I’ve never been able to work out).

I bring this up because of a little thing called Suburban Knights. Star Wars is full of cool ideas developed badly (especially in the case of Episodes I-III), and while there are a lot of fan-films out there, most of them don’t do anything new or interesting with those cool ideas. Most of them ape the original films, and not just the lightsabers and costumes – they even re-use or mash-up the dialogue, often to awful clunky effect. Suburban Knights is different: it takes a cool idea – Jedi Knights battling evil Sith – and takes it entirely out of the Star Wars context. Obi-Wanker and Darth Death are not Star Wars characters, even if they do throw lightsabers and Force lightning at each other. They’re more like the archetypal wanker and bogan, in Australian terms, but with Force powers.

What does this have to do with me, I hear you ask? Well, Suburban Knights Episode Two: Death Crush is about to get a premiere in Melbourne – and yours truly is in it. I won’t give anything away, but you should definitely check out the Suburban Knights web site, where you can watch the first episode and find details about the premiere. Note that it’s invite-only, but if you’re keen to come along and see both episodes of Suburban Knights, then please drop me a line at ben@labocatman.com.au and I’ll see what I can do.

The Mystery of Dinosaur Island!

“Dinosaur Island” sounds like a cheap Jurassic Park rip-off, but it was a very accurate title for the presentation given last night by Professor Scott Sampson, one of the international guests for this year’s Science Week tour. Being in the upstairs function room at the Redback Brewery brought back fond memories of science activity; it’s been used as a venue by Science in the Pub, Science in Public and the Australian Science Communicators.

Scott covered a several angles of dinosaurology (you’ll be hearing more of this word from me soon), first offering a brief overview of dinosaur knowledge and how our picture of these animals has drastically changed. As you probably know dinosaurs were originally depicted as slow and dull – in both the mental and physical senses. In his words, though, dinosaurs became supercharged in a cultural nanosecond, and it’s all the raptor’s fault. That’s raptor in the “raptor-like dinosaur” sense, since he doesn’t blame Jurassic Park; rather it was the discovery of Deinonychus which originally led some palaeontologists to speculate a link between birds and dinosaurs, and when that become the majority opinion in the 1990s with the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, everything was turned on its head, graphically illustrated by the contrast between the old-school, dog-like dinosaurs in images by artists like Charles R. Knight and Heinrich Harder and those by recent dino illustrators like Greg Paul. Colour, movement, feathers…it’s all there.

From this beginning Scott made his way to his own research, mostly on dinosaurs of western North America. Around 75 million years ago what we know as North America was split into three or four pieces, and the westernmost part was a long, thin strip of coastal plains, separated from the eastern Americas by a narrow seaway – Dinosaur Island indeed! When plate tectonics allowed continental drift to be accepted by mainstream geology in the 1960s, it was no longer a mystery how dinosaurs had managed to spread across the whole, but in estern America the fossils presented a new mystery. The species found in Utah and New Mexico (in the south) were different to those in Alberta and Montana (in the north). Not only were there lots of different species, but there were lots of dinosaurs – in his sites in Utah, Scott revealed that you couldn’t walk for 15 minutes without spotting the telltale signs of dinosaur bones; he also regularly finds “bone beds” containing tens or even hundreds of specimens that died together, evidence of massive herding behaviour in herbivorous dinosaurs.

This is weird; as Scott says, there’s only one species of elephant in Africa, a much bigger area than Dinosaur Island. So how could this sliver of North America support so many individuals of so many species? Several ideas were put forth by the resident audience expert, who was of course a ten year old boy (and ginger too, which gave me a twinge of pride). Was there a huge abundance of food to support them? Did they have slower metabolisms, and require less food than modern animals? Was it easy when there weren’t human beings around to stuff things up? Or did they not really live all at the same time?

That’s what Scott set out to determine with his digs in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and he shared lots of details about how the dig is run. His “rag-tag fugitive fleet” of volunteers and students were centre-stage; as in astronomy, Scott stressed that palaeontology would get nowhere fast without these mostly unpaid workers. Not only do they spend hours in the field looking for fossils and uncovering them,  they get used as pack animals transporting them out of the inhospitable terrain – thought the biggest are airlifted by helicopter – but also spend up to two years preparing them for serious study. (He later revealed that his favourite scene in Jurassic Park is the scene at the start where they uncover a whole Velociraptor skeleton in a couple of minutes, which makes him laugh. Scott loves Jurassic Park, since it’s entertainment, but has a beef with Walking With Dinosaurs and its ilk, who present their conjecture about dinosaurs as fact.)

At Grand Staircase Scott’s team has found a huge variety of ceratopsian, duck billed, armoured and carnivorous dinosaurs. It seems these species really did co-exist, and that there was both more vegetation to support them, and perhaps they had slower metabolisms. Crocodiles, after all, can go without food for up to two months, but top mammalian predators can’t hope to do that. (Mammals, he joked, are the SUVs of the animal world, burning up as much energy as they can get their hands on, while reptiles are more like a Prius.) His own theory, which he admits is still contoversial, is that dinosaurs occupied a “Goldilocks” state – their bodies were not too cold-blooded nor too warm-bloodied, but just at the right metabolic rate in the middle, making them quite unlike anything alive today.

Scott wound up the prepared bit of his talk with his opinions of why dinosaurs are important to science. His basic point was that they’re a great hook to start conversations about immediately relevant topics like global warming. An understanding of climate changes brought about the asteroid which probably wiped them out (correctly identified as falling in the Gulf of Mexico by our audience expert) was also used as evidence for the destructive power of a nuclear winter, leading to the (relative) end of the cold war, so as Scott says, dinosaurs have saved the earth!

Scott left time for a question and answer session, and as you might expect, he knows his stuff. None of the questions phased him, and he answered them all directly. No doubt his upcoming book, Dinosaur Odyssey, will really live up to his claim: “it’s the first time a palaeontologist of my generation has really tried to set down the current state of knowledge about dinosaurs.”