Bench Press

One of the best ways for scientists to reach out to the general public is through video. This past Friday, I got a chance to experience this firsthand at the IMAX theater at Boston’s New England Aquarium. A while back, I had caught the trailer for Hubble 3D at an IMAX movie and, given my love for all things Hubble, I had wanted to catch a showing. Seeing that the Hubble special was only ~40 minutes long, I decided to also buy a ticket for Under the Sea 3D as well.

And, as my Tweets that day pointed out, I was blown away:

There are some today who think high-def/3D is usually a gimmick by movie studios and digital display sellers, but that was definitely not true for either of these films. The 3D really enhanced the impact of the visuals. It let the audience, many of whom are unlikely to ever conduct spacewalks or scuba-dive where the Under the Sea 3D crew went to really feel what it was like to see undersea life. And, in the case of some of the deep space Hubble 3D shots, it gave the audience a very cool new look at objects so far away that its almost inconceivable that human beings will ever actually get to visit them.

Couple that with strong performances on interesting material by Leonardo DiCaprio in Hubble 3D and Jim Carrey in Under the Sea 3D and you get a strong combination which, if I’m any judge, not only gives the audience a juicy taste of why science is cool, but why its important to continue to study it.

I have definitely been sold on these, and I not only plan to check out more of these as they come out (I’ve got my eye on Sea Rex 3D), but would recommend this to anyone who has an hour to spend or would like to check out a visually stunning way to learn something new.

What would you do you if you were curious about the relative importance of selective pressures on a population of lizards on Caribbean islands? Since you’re reading Bench Press you might be inclined to turn to the power of computer modeling which can provide numerous advantages particularly when traditional experiments can’t be conducted. We’ve seen examples of computer models analyzing near earth asteroids, potential epidemics, and classic math and physics problems. However we’ve also seen that at times purely mathematical approaches can result in errors as well. Our inability to accurately describe problems with numbers 100% of the time makes it imperative that we continue to think creatively about ways to design experiments to test hypotheses.

That’s why I was particularly impressed by a paper in Nature by Ryan Calsbeek and Robert M. Cox, who wanted to explore the importance of selective pressures on anole lizards in the Caribbean. Field experiments to measure the effect of selective pressures are rare for a variety of reasons. A major one being the difficulty of finding animals and environments which can be manipulated in a controlled manner. Drs. Calsbeek and Cox didn’t let this stop them as they utilized a group of small islands in the Caribbean, each small enough to throw a ball end to end, as their test beds. There they removed the resident brown anole lizards and replaced them with experimental animals which had been carefully measured, tested for stamina, and tagged to identify at the end of the experiment.

Now that they had their experimental populations they needed to set up islands that tested the hypothesis that competition played a larger selective role than predation in island anole lizard populations. They established islands that had low and high density populations, and for each density type they setup islands inhabited by lizard-eating birds alone, lizard-eating birds and snakes, as well as islands free of predators (accomplished with a generous covering of netting as seen below). An unmodified control island was also monitored as a natural reference population.

They distributed the lizards in May and four months later at the end of the breeding season, September, they came back to capture the survivors and census the population. While this was difficult work they were able to collect a large amount of data which confirmed the hypothesis that competition is a more powerful selective force in these populations. They saw no real phenotypic differences in the lizards on islands experiencing differing predation, but saw that lizards surviving on crowded islands were significantly bigger and had greater stamina than those on less crowded islands (seen below). This indicated competition between lizards pushed the population while predation did not.  

While their clever experiment does a great job explaining the relative importance of selective pressures on this particular species of lizards on islands in the Caribbean it may not say anything about natural selection in other species. Despite that this paper remains awesome because as much as I like to see technology change the way we do science, I still appreciate a well constructed experiment to answer tough questions.

(Nature: Experimentally assessing the relative importance of predation and competition as agents of selection)

If you’ve never used Google Earth, I’d recommend trying it out, at least once. For those of you not in the know, its an amazing piece of software which lets you access Google’s wealth of geographical and geological information (although with its layers feature, it also gives you access to the oceans, the moon, the sky, historical sites of interest, and Mars).

The magic of new, cheap and powerful technologies and information sources like Google Earth is that they can also be used to push additional experiments and discoveries. Widely available mathematical analysis tools like Mathematica let a professor figure out what instruments made up the mysterious “twang” at the beginning of the Beatles classic “It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night.” Advances in gaming and graphics technology make it possible for gaming consoles and personal computers to do sophisticated number-crunching. And, Google Earth helped make it possible for a team of students to take pictures from near-space for only $150.

More recently, Google Earth helped a team of researchers led by the University of the Witwatersrand’s Professor Lee Berger to find and unearth new fossil remains, including those of the newly discovered Australopithecus sediba (pictured right) in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa.

Berger and his associates used Google Earth to learn how to identify cave sites from satellite imagery and to help supplement on-foot exploration to map out ~500 previously unknown caves and, subsequently, 25 new fossil sites!

This discovery has been especially exciting as some have argued it could potentially be “the point from which the genus Homo [the genus we humans are a part of] arises” and “a good candidate for being the transitional species between the southern African ape-man Australopithecus africanus (like the Taung Child and Mrs. Ples) and either Homo habilis or even a director ancestor of Homo erectus (like Turkana Boy, Java man, or Peking man).”

Check out the University’s web coverage of the discovery as well as the Google blog’s coverage of the event as well as the video celebrating Professor Berger’s find (below):

(Image credit – University of the Witwatersrand website)

Science papers by Berger’s group: (1) and (2)

We’ve posted before on the Federation of American Scientist’s Immune Attack computer game as a great example of the use of games in science education. But, science “edutainment” isn’t limited just to computer games. Fans of Wizard’s Magic the Gathering and Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games will immediately recognize The Healing Blade, a trading card game designed in the spirit of Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh but designed around the battle between antibiotics and bacteria (HT: AMEDNEWS)

The game was designed by two self-admitted “mega-geek” physicians, Dr. Arun Mathews and Dr. Francis Kong, who met in medical school and created the company Nerdcore Learning to promote The Healing Blade and other medicine-related “edutainment” paraphernalia. As to why they created the concept, Dr. Mathews notes:

I was struck upon the complexity and yet innate nature of gaming within the choice I would make for putting some of my sick patients on particular antibiotics … Essentially, in a similar way, when you are playing a complex multi-tiered video game, we are making similar choices by obtaining data from our cultures [and] making risk-management decisions.

Truer words were never spoken.

Amazingly, while Mathews and Kong had only intended to bring 30 copies of the game to launch at the American Medical Students Association annual meeting, a printing error turned that into over 100 copies, 90% of which sold! Mathews describes the sight:

We had this gaggle of students just sitting down, spreading out on a bunch of tables, all playing the game. That is one memory that will take a while to fade, because it was such a neat thing to see students getting super excited about infectious disease and therapies.

As an unabashed former-Magic-and-Yu-gi-oh player, I can definitely see the appeal. There is something very compelling about the mix of chance and strategy in trading card gameplay. Sadly, at the time of the writing of this blog post, The Healing Blade’s online purchase form shows that the game is sold out. So, in the meantime, I will have to leave you with some pictures of some very nice-looking game card art:

(Images and video from Healing Blade website)