Earlier this year, I attended a UW Libraries Digital Storytelling workshop and spent 4 weeks writing, filming, recording, and editing a little digital story that acts as an overview of what the Akamatsu Lab, where I currently work as a research scientist and lab manager, focuses on.
You can watch “What drives collective behavior in cells?” below.
In another world, during my blogging days, I’d write some thoughts, some lessons learned, some musings. But let me just tell you to watch the movie, and enjoy the ridiculousness of stop motion, goggly eyes, and silly faces. And maybe you’ll also learn a little bit about my current favorite protein: actin. Enjoy!
Throughout the past two years, I’ve colored my hair several times, leaning in extra hard on my manic pixie dream girl persona – I’m just quirky like that. At the moment, my hair is green. With this new color, I thought it’d be fun to dive a little deeper into the hairy world of… well, hair.
That means that over the course of a year, your hair might grow somewhere between 10-15 cm (or 5 to 6 inches, ish). Which, if you’re trying to grow out your hair, seems slow. On the other hand, if you’re trying to maintain bangs, it’s really fast.
Fun fact: that means it took Cousin Itt about 8 years to grow their hair, assuming their hair grew at the speed average for humans – so who knows – and taking into account that the actor that plaid Cousin Itt was just under 4 ft tall.
But don’t worry, at that same time about 99,900 other hairs are happily growing along. On average we have 100,000 hair follicles on our scalp, all there at birth (which is why usually children have denser hair – our scalp expands as we grow older).
Follicles don’t all grow hair at the same time: in fact, hair just grows for a few years, before the follicle decides to take a little break. That’s when the hair in the follicle falls out. Because all your follicles take turns, you typically won’t halve all 100,000 of your scalp hairs fall out at once, so you won’t notice losing hairs.
That said, some follicles stop growing hair as you grow older, which is why some people get thinner hair when they get older (or go bald).
Unless you’re stressed…
3. Hair loss and stress are related
On that note, high stress levels may cause hair loss. There are a few conditions associated with increased hair loss, including telogen effluvium (where stress causes large number of hair follicles into resting phase, see point 2), alopecia areata (a condition in which the body’s immune system attacks hair follicles, causes may include severe stress), and trichotillomania (the urge to pull out hair, which for some people is a way to deal with negative feelings).
4. Most of your hair is dead
Hair grows from your follicle out, with new cells rapidly dividing in the root, pushing previously formed cells in the hair strand out of the follicle. The cells forming hair are the second-to-fastest dividing cells in your body (after cells in your bone marrow), which is why people undergoing chemotherapy sometimes lose their hair: chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells.
By the time your hair is at the skin’s surface, the cells in the hair strand aren’t alive anymore. So all the hair you see on your body is already dead! The hair shaft is made out of a protein called keratin, which is the same protein that makes up your nails, feathers, horns, claws on hooves. Well, maybe not yours.
While on the topic of death (also, it’s Halloween), it’s a common misconception that hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person dies. This is untrue, though it may seem like hair and fingernails appear longer after death: after a person dies, their skin and soft tissues dehydrate causing shrinkage.
Cells stop deviding when they die, and that counts for hair cells as well. I guess that means Vampires should be really sure about cutting their hair!
I’ve made a grave mistake!
5. The record for longest hair is 5.62m (18 ft 5 in)
Scalp hair actively grows for two to six years (oh, there goes my Cousin Itt estimate), depending on the person. That’s why some people have a hard time growing their hair long, while others have a really long active phase of growth and can get those long locks.
The record for longest hair is held by Xie Qiuping, who started growing her hair in 1973 when she was 13 years old. Math tells us her hair grows a bit faster than usual (about 18 cm/year), and her active hair growth phases are just, non-existent?
In any case, over 5 meters is really impressive. It’s more than twice the height of André the Giant impressive. Or as long as a giraffe is tall impressive. And we all know that’s pretty impressive to me.
Hair on other places of your body, such as your arms, legs, brows, has a short active phase growth of one month to one month-and-a-half, before falling out. That’s why that hair is so much shorter. Though some impressively long eyebrow hairs have been known to exist.
There, we’ve learned some facts about hairs. In a convenient listicle format. Maybe someday I should make a listicle about the effectiveness of listicles?
Originally published on the satire science journal website DNAtured
Think your regular data isn’t scary enough for Halloween? Try these tips to put the “ahhhh!” in your analysis!
1. Ghostian Curves
Casper is no longer the cutest ghost in town! Draw eyes on a Gaussian distribution curve to make yourself a spooky lil’ ghost.
2. Haunted P-Values
You think a p-value of 0.08 is scarily insignificant? Turn your calculator upside down for another scare: BOO
3. Zombie Survival Curves
Night of the living dead? Night of the living rats! Turn those survival curves upside down – or back up – by summoning your test subjects black to life with some Michael Jackson in the background!
4. Witching Hour Gel Electrophoresis
Want some Wicked-ly good pictures? Add a splash of green fluorescent protein to make your image light up like slimy goo!
Photo by @heysciencesam
5. Bloody Western Blots
Messed up your assay and now you have a smeared Western blot? No problem! It looks just like smeared blood! The horror!
6. Coffin Plots
Don’t ever let anyone say your box plots are boring… Get your spook on and turn them into coffins!
7. Scary scatter plots
Need more spooky plots? Turn your scatter plots into any scary shape: a witch’s hat, a jack o’ lantern, a spider web, or a bat! All you need to do is get rid of those terrifying outliers!
8. Beastly n-Values
666 summons the devil, so if you have three experimental conditions, make sure your sample number is n=6 for each!
9. Black & Orange Graphs
As a last resort, colour code your excel sheet with some spooky colors, we recommend methyl orange. As if using excel for data handling isn’t scary enough, you monster!
10. Dangerous Data Storage Systems
And if nothing else works, live on the edge with the scariest lab data of all: stored on an old, barely functional computer that runs on Windows 94 and hasn’t been backed up in decades!
Some have theorized that the universe is made completely out of strings. Some creatures, however, really see the world in strings. You know, spiders. With their spider webs.
Many types of spiders produce a strong, sticky, proteinaceous fiber from their butt spinneret gland. They use it to build webs, sometimes quite pretty and sometimes spooky, to catch their prey in.
Fun fact: even spiders that don’t build webs produce silk, and it is important in, you know, seducing the other sex.
Spider webs are useful for many things, reproduction (as mentioned), but also to capture and immobilize prey, build nests, move around in the world (some spiders build tiny parachutes), communicate, and leave pheromonal trails. Spider silk is known to have exceptional mechanical properties, having a tensile strength comparable to that for high-grade steel, and a toughness that equals some synthetic polymers.
(Tensile strength relates to the maximum force to which a material can be pulled before breaking, while toughness relates to how much a material can deform and absorb energy before breaking. In any case, spider silk is a natural material that material scientists would just love to emulate. Biomimetics, you know.)
Spider silk is also very sticky. You know. To catch the foods.
Source: Wikipedia commons
Feelin’ those good vibrations
For those spiders who use their web to capture prey, vibrations are a key to success in their endeavor. When an unsuspecting fly, mosquito, or human, wanders into the web, it induces a vibration that the spider can easily distinguish from oscillations created by a breeze, thanks to tiny little hairs that cover their body and legs.
“The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you might see but not immediately recognize,” Markus Buehler of MIT explained. “By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really start to understand the environment the spider lives in.”
Here’s an example of one of their spider web sonifications:
Talking to spiders
Each web strand has a different length, which the scientists translated to a sound frequency to create a musical cacophony (if we’re honest) based on the vibrations created by a perturbation. The researchers were even able to develop an algorithm to differentiate between different types of vibrations that might occur, such as “trapped prey,” “web under construction,” or “hot spider just wandered into my web and wants to get busy.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider,” Buehler said. “If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do, and can we begin to communicate with them? Those are really exciting ideas.”
But for now, I would just like to imagine spiders as tiny little violinists, creating music with their webs, mocking the sorrowful life of the individual how just blindly wandered into their web.
Mr. Krabs knows what’s going on.
Bonus number 1: Scientists gave some spiders some drugs. And then those spiders spun some webs. And they looked weird.
Researchers recently found a treasure of 125-year-old, unopened, beer bottles in a shipwreck off the Scottish coast. In those bottles, preserved thanks to the cold ocean water, was even more of a treasure: live yeast.
Beer Archeology
It was only recently that I learned about the field of “beer archeology,” after hearing a talk by the beer archeologistTravis Rupp. I was delighted to learn that there is a whole field dedicated to recreating ancient beers, as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, only using materials, ingredients, and methods that would have been available at the time. Or as close as still available.
Inspired by old techniques, Travis Rupp has developed a series of beers named “Ales of Antiquity.” There’s an ancient-Egypt-inspired beer and a Viking-inspired beer. Of course, there is also a Belgian-style beer as well!
If I’d been interested in beer at the same time I was interested in archeology (the latter was when I was about 8 years old), who knows where I would have (could have) ended up?
Yeast explorers
The yeast found in the Scotting shipwreck is only one of the many endeavors of brewers resurrecting old strains, which cannot only be used to brew historical beers but may have applications in cleaning up pollutions and in the perfume industry (though the article states that the smell of the beer was quite atrocious).
That doesn’t mean noone tried brewing a beer, of course they did! Scientists at Brewlab, a spin-out from University of Sunderland, isolated two types of yeast from the Wallachia shipwreck beer: Brettanomycas and Debaryomyces. With that, they brewed a 7.5% stout that, apparently, had some coffee and chocolate notes. Certain byproducts of the fermentation products create a distinct flavor that is specific to the yeasts used.
And resurrecting ancient yeasts can yield more interesting flavors, compared to the limited stains that are used by most modern brewers today. Maybe something to try in our next batch of homebrew? Time to go diving, I guess!
A recent grad student, who has asked to remain anonymous as to not influence their perspective chances at finding a job, has come to the unfortunate realization that having a PhD does not make them automatically employable.
“I was told during an interview last week that I was overqualified,” complained the student. “But in the next sentence, they said I didn’t have enough experience. How can it be both?”
Tragically, like many other prospective PhDs, the student thought that having a plethora of knowledge in a niche scientific area would be applicable outside academia.
“In today’s day and age, we are looking for candidates who can thrive in interdisciplinary teams,” Ms. Laurie Durham, Senior Recruiter at Biotech Intl., “not people who can recite the base pairs that code for the angiotensin-converting enzyme within one minute.”
“I can do that, but at this point, it’s basically just a party trick” confirmed the grad student. “When I started listing them off in my interview, the recruiter just looked at me in confusion.”
For other recent graduates concerned about running into the same problem, resume experts suggest adding “soft skills” to your resume. Being able to distinguish blobby lines and gather meaningful blot information, being able to turn hours of “data analysis” into doom scrolling, and being able to convince your supervisor that you need three more weeks to finish a powerpoint presentation are, in fact, very transferable to work life.
Editor’s note: to protect the identity and avoid embarrassment for the people involved, we have retracted the name and field of the Laureate – though if you were assuming it was a man, you’d be right. Not that it narrows the possibilities by much.
Academics around the world are applauding a recent Nobel Laureate for remembering to thank his overworked post-doctoral students after their discovery helped him win the notorious award.
A leaked draft of the Nobel Laureate’s acceptance speech revealed some open secrets about his true feelings toward his underlings, which many have described as “out of touch.”. The full draft reads:
“I am truly thrilled and honored to receive this prestigious award all by myself, with no co-winners. I would like to thank the Nobel Prize committee for continuing the decade-long tradition of giving this prize to a man, the obviously bigger-brained of the sexes.”
“I suppose I should thank all the people who made this possible, including the many researchers before me who laid the groundwork for this science, but it’s not my fault that I simply did it better (neener neener)! “
“I’d like to thank my undergraduate minions who have worked endless hours in the lab for experience and no pay, my grad students who have given up their chance of any personal relationship to make this research a success, and finally, my post-docs who have generously allowed me to take credit for years of their work.”
“I hope all the members of my lab are equally as thankful for the prestige of working in the lab of a Nobel Prize Winner!
Since my graduate students will benefit tremendously from the increased status this award brings to the lab, I trust that they will understand when I cut their graduate stipends by 50%.”
“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
I’ve always imagined octarine to be that green-purple metallic color of bird feathers. You know, that color that seems to change depending on the incidence of light?
Peacock feathers always looked octarine to me. From StockSnap
Just humming outside our window
We have a plant outside our window. It has tiny yellow flowers that bloom in the winter and seem like they taste delicious. Or would taste delicious if I were a hummingbird.
The feeding ground, bird not included.
We have at least two regular hummy-visitors, that I’ve seen. Just buzzing around just outside our window, usually, when I’m on a phone call and I lose my train of thought and end up sounding (even more) incoherent on my call.
In my defense, I grew up in a place where hummingbirds aren’t that common, so they are pretty amazing for me to see.
But, I think the most fascinating part is how their color seems to change. From one angle, one of the two birds has a deep red colored throat. Change the angle slightly, and it looks completely different.
Considering we’re seeing these tiniest of birds in the winter, and there are only one species that don’t migrate south for the winter, we are probably seeing Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna), named after Anna Masséna the wife of a nineteenth-century bird collector.
Male Anna’s Hummingbirds have a brightly colored neck. There are about 1.5 million of these hummingbirds in existence. They are quite common, and seemed to have adapted well to urban environments – they surely don’t seem to mind buzzing outside our window and distracting me from phonecalls!
Nature photography is hard.
Why do hummingbird feathers (seem to) change color?
Hummingbird feathers aren’t “the color of magic,” they show the optical phenomenon called iridescence. Iridescent surfaces seemingly change color depending on the view or illumination angle. It’s the same effect that causes that rainbow sheen on a soap bubble, that lenticular-looking effect on some minerals, the changing colors of the tapetum lucidum, and that metallic shine on butterflies and bird wings.
The colors of the material are not due to a pigment (though that can determine the base color), but due to microstructures within the material that interfere with light in different ways (structural coloration).
Let’s take the example of a soap bubble. A soap bubble can be considered a thin film, it basically has two interfaces: the air-soap interface, and the soap-water interface. Light will interact with those interfaces in two ways: some light will be reflected (like on a mirror), and some will transmit and refract (change of angle due to material change).
So if we consider a single incoming ray of light, it will be reflected twice, once at each interface – and two rays will interact with each other by interference. Constructive interference happens when the light is in phase, destructive when it’s out of phase.
Depending on the angle of the incoming light, the angle of where we observe the light, the thickness of the film, etc. certain wavelengths (or colors) will be visible to the observer, because the rays constructively interfere, while others colors will be cancelled out.
This phenomenon is called thin-film interference, an effect that occurs when the material thickness is of the same order as the wavelength of visible light (380-750 nm).
Light reflects off the two surfaces and interferes constructively or destructively. Then *physics* happens. Image source.
Changing angles
When we change the angle of incoming light (by changing from which angle we observe), the thickness through which the light has to travel changes, changing its interference pattern. For example, looking straight on might make the film look red, while at an angle the same material will look orange or green or blue. This is how we see a rainbow effect on a soap bubble.
Different light incidence angles change the color observed. Created using a thin film simulator.
A lot of tiny little mirrors
The same thing happens when we have certain crystalline structures, which is why some minerals show iridescence, or materials that are basically just a bunch of tiny little mirrors (like CDs).
The same is true for bird feathers, they show a regular crystalline nanostructure: individual tiny mirrors are spaced out just right to cause constructive interference of certain colors at a certain wavelength. And that’s why the Anna’s Hummingbird that chills* out outside our window sometimes looks like he has a bright Fuschia neck, and sometimes he does not.
Different examples of iridescent structures as found in nature. From Parry, Ahu & Savin, Thierry. (2016). Recent advances in the biomimicry of structural colours. Chem. Soc. Rev.. 45. 10.1039/C6CS00129G.
Anyway, to me, octarine is real, and not only on Discworld.
*Actually, I’m not sure hummingbirds now how to “chill.”
Grad student Anna Esquivel’s duties, which already include carrying out her research project, managing the lab, and TAing twice a week, have now expanded to include creating all poster and presentation images for her group after she created a half-decent image of a protein for a lab meeting.
“It was so amazing to see,” said Dr. Lyndon Vang, a postdoc in the same lab as Anna who attended the lab meeting in question. “The Prof was incredibly impressed by Anna’s ability to turn the standard shapes available in Powerpoint to an adequate representation of a protein. You should have seen the Prof’s face when the animation started!”
Anna has now been tasked to create all the images that the lab will use for all future talks, posters, and publications – including a (virtual) poster presentation that Dr. Vang’s due to present tomorrow. “Good thing I have Anna to help me,” Dr. Vang says. “So far, all I have is a title and half an abstract.”
Jadine Sparks, another grad student in the same lab, is an aspiring science illustrator. “It’s kind of frustrating; I’ve spent hours creating scientifically accurate figures in Adobe illustrator, both for scientific posters I’ve presented and to expand my portfolio – I want to make a career out of this. But apparently, all my figures look “too professional” for a scientific conference.”
Anna allegedly also knows how to do conditional conditioning in Excel, implying that soon she will also be designated the lab’s biostatistician.
Bonus: here’s an actual image I made in PowerPoint for my PhD theses. It took me embarrassingly long:
