Note (12/2015): Hi there! I'm taking some time off here to focus on other projects for a bit. As of October 2016, those other projects include a science book series for kids titled Things That Make You Go Yuck! -- available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and (hopefully) a bookstore near you!

Co-author Jenn Dlugos and I are also doing some extremely ridiculous things over at Drinkstorm Studios, including our award-winning webseries, Magicland.

There are also a full 100 posts right here in the archives, and feel free to drop me a line at secondhandscience@gmail.com with comments, suggestions or wacky cold fusion ideas. Cheers!

Kleptoplasty


· Categories: Biology
What I’ve Learned:

Kleptoplasty: the five-fingered photosynthetic discount.
“Kleptoplasty: the five-fingered photosynthetic discount.”

They say humans are what we eat. It seems to be at least figuratively true, as there are an awful lot of people who resemble walking stacks of lunch meat.

In the past, some cultures have decided to take the phrase more literally. Warrior tribesmen might eat the heart or brain of fallen foes to gain their power, strength and knowledge.

(Which frankly doesn’t seem particularly efficient. I mean, if those enemies had been smarter, stronger or more powerful, maybe they wouldn’t be the ones being served as appetizers.

I’m just saying, cannibals — maybe eat a dictionary instead. Or a rhinoceros. Think it through.)

These strategies never worked out so well for humans. But a handful of organisms actually can pick up desired traits — as opposed to love handles — from their food. These little critters basically cheat off someone else’s evolutionary paper, in a process called kleptoplasty.

Imagine for a moment you’re a lowly algal cell. Like most algae, you’re not much to look at, just a single-celled blob of schmutz bobbing in a scummy pond. Walking bologna? You wish you were walking bologna.

But you do have a couple things going for you. You’ve got a nucleus, for one. You might be able to swim around, or grow in filaments. Maybe you play a mean accordion; hey, I don’t know what sorts of hobbies algae have. But best of all, you have chloroplasts.

For those who slept through freshman plant biology — i.e., everyone — chloroplasts are little sacks of cellular goop that contain chlorophyll, which lets plants (and most algae) perform photosynthesis, or turning sunshine into energy. You and I don’t have chloroplasts, and we can’t photosynthesize, no matter how many bits of vanquished lettuce or seaweed or single-celled schmutzy algae we eat.

But a select few algae-eaters can.

Most of these chlorophyll filchers are single-celled creatures themselves, like certain dinoflagellates and ciliates. They manage to overwhelm an alga cell and break it down for energy, but they leave the chloroplasts intact. Sort of how we eat corn, and at the end of the digestive process, there’s still… corn.

But unlike corn poops, which are really only good for gross-out third grade homeroom jokes, saving those chloroplasts actually has a purpose. These swiped organelles are still functional inside the new cell, which means — for days, weeks or more — the conquering cell can now perform photosynthesis on its own. And that’s the magic of kleptoplasty.

The most complex known kleptoplastic organisms are Saccoglossan sea slugs, which are not exactly apex predators, but when you’re a smudge of algae, pretty much anything will eat you. The slugs go the extra mile and suck the algae’s chloroplasts out, storing them in digestive tract cells like a chipmunk stuffing its’ cheeks full of nuts.

So if you’re considering “practical cannibalism”, let this be a lesson: kleptoplasty is the way to go. Forget eating your enemies’ hearts or brains or gall bladders. And ditto for corn. All that stuff will get you nowhere.

What you want is to start a war with photosynthesizing pond scum, and eat all the algae you can get your hands on. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll pick up kleptoplasty and take advantage of photosynthesis yourself. But probably, you’ll just get really, really sick.

Hey, it’s still better than eating bologna.

Actual Science:
LiveScience – Surprising sea slug is half-plant, half-animal
Scientific American – Leafy green ‘solar-powered’ sea slugs begin to reveal their true colors
As Many Exceptions as Rules – Biological hybrids – the diet to end all diets?
io9 – Confirmation that photosynthesizing sea slugs steal genes from algae

Image sources: Solar Sea Slug Blog (kleptoplasty), Google Image Search (walking bologna), Someecards / kantinore (“Manana, maize!”), Daily Mail UK (nutty chipmunk)

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Statistical Significance


· Categories: Mathematics
What I’ve Learned:

Statistical significance: 'Do you feel 95% confident, punk?'
“Statistical significance: ‘Do you feel 95% confident, punk?'”

People are scared of numbers. Sometimes, the fear is justified. A 330 on your credit score report, for instance, is genuinely horrifying. So is a 410 on your SAT. Or anything greater than “two”, when asked how many cats your mother owns.

But most numbers are harmless. People only fear them because they might wind up in a statistic, and everyone is afraid of statistics. The saying is not “lies, damned lies and sharks with frickin’ laser beams”. It’s statistics. Even scarier than laser-sharks.

The problem is understanding. I can help — though only to a degree, because mathematics are involved, and I swore after memorizing the Pythagorean theorem that I was “full”, and couldn’t learn any more math.

(Which is probably why I’m familiar with the horror of subpar credit scores. And low SATs.

Someday, this will probably drive my mother to adopt a dozen cats. But not yet. Whiskers crossed.)

Happily, you don’t need math to demystify statistics; you only need to know about statistical significance.

(Although you might need a calculator or a fancy-ciphering web page to do some maths for you. Stand on the shoulders of Poindexters, my friend.)

Statistics can be manipulated to say just about anything — like a willing stool pigeon, or a guy trying to get a date with a lingerie model. The question is how confidently those stats say something, and that’s where statistical significance comes in.

Most scientists will run with a conclusion if they believe it’s at least 95% likely to be true. Some tests require 99%, and a few really crucial questions — like, can we clone Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s mustache in time for Halloween — need a 99.99% (or greater) probability before they’re accepted.

So how do researchers achieve those levels of confidence? Flip a thousand coins and see what comes up? Ask a Magic 8-Ball which answer is better? Co-author their papers with a pigskin-prognosticating porcupine?

(Based on recent scientific scandals, yes. A few of them apparently do.

But we try to weed these idiots out, based on their SAT scores. Or how many cats their mothers own.)

Real scientists determine statistical significance by performing calculations that take important factors into account, like the number of observations and the likelihood of the results.

For example, the “p-value” calculation, which involves math with Greek letters and squiggly brackets and other head-exploding details. But just remember it like this: the “p” in p-value stands for “pssshaw“, as in: “Pssshaw, you’re wrong; I bet your mom owns so many cats.”

Once calculated, the p-value is the probability (subtracted from 1) that your scientific conclusion is full of smoking cat turds. A 1.0 means you’re one hundred percent talking out your ass, and a value of 0.05 means you can be 95% sure you’re not vocalizing through your rectum.

The keys to getting low — meaning good — p-values are making a lot of observations, and having most of those come out one way, and not the other. A million dice rolls where every number comes up just as often doesn’t tell you anything about what’s coming up next. And — to the chagrin of sportscasters everywhere — a winning (or losing) streak of one, two or eight games isn’t sufficient to make their pre-game blather “significant”. Or coherent, if there’s a liquor cabinet in the press box.

Another example: over the years, I’ve worked with a number of Belgians. From my observations, 100% of Belgians are named Paul, 100% wear fashionable sweaters, and 50% say really inappropriate things in the workplace.

Those are statistics, based on real observations — and some very uncomfortable staff meetings. But do the conclusions have any statistical significance? If the number of observations is ten million, sure. If the number is two (which it is), then no, more observations are needed. You should take these stats, and all others with low (or ambiguous) statistical significance, with a healthy grain of salt.

Also, a huge pile of kitty litter. But preferably not from your mom.

Actual Science:
StatPac – Statistical significance
Scientific American – Statistical significance and its part in science downfalls
Statistics Done Wrong – When differences in significance aren’t significant differences
STATS.org – Climate change, statistical significance, and science
Nylon Calculus – Freelance Friday: When does a small sample size stop being small?

Image sources: ScienceNews (p-value roller coaster), Discovery/TLC (cat-wrangling mama), Daily Caller (“Watch out, guys; we’re dealing with a badass ‘stache over here.”), The Awl (8-ball uncertainty)

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Tumor Suppressor


· Categories: Biology
What I’ve Learned:

Tumor suppressor: I'm no hero; I'm just doing my job.
“Tumor suppressor: I’m no hero; I’m just doing my job.”

Fighting evil isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

First of all, it’s hard. Evil is basically everywhere outside of Walt Disney World, so there’s always another battle on hand. Also, evil is fiendishly creative. Just when you think you have it in check, it’ll pop up behind you, tenting its fingers and snarling, “Excellent.”

But the worst part about fighting evil is that you’ll never be recognized for anything else. That must get old for heroes. Sure, Captain America gets medals for thwarting villains — but maybe he writes poetry, too. Nobody talks about that. What if Superman is a great baker? Or Wonder Woman is a two-handicap golfer? Who would even know?

That’s how it is for so-called tumor suppressor genes. These are genes that have perfectly useful functions in normal cells, merrily toiling along, getting their jobs done. But nobody cares about those jobs — outside geneticists, who nose around everything a cell does. Instead, most people focus on one thing:

If these genes are knocked out of a cell — silenced by mutation or deletion or runaway genetic regulation — then the cell may turn cancerous. With tumor suppressors around, no cancer. Without them — watch out.

The thing is, these genes don’t exist to prevent cancer, exactly; the very name “tumor suppressor” is misleading. In their mild-mannered day jobs, these genes get translated into proteins, and those proteins mostly control whether the cell they live in should grow or not. If it’s not time yet, don’t grow. If the cell is damaged, don’t grow. If it’s badly damaged, try and fix it. And if it can’t be fixed, smash it to bits and storm off in a huff of cytoplasm.

(So basically, tumor suppressors are like eight year old children building a Lego set. “Evil fighters”, my ass.)

The “smash it to bits” part is kind of important. If certain tumor suppressors are working properly — but the rest of the cell isn’t, the bum — they can trigger a process called programmed cell death, also known as apoptosis. This is pretty much what it sounds like — slapping a proverbial “KILL ME!” sign on the wall of the cell, and letting the body rip it limb from limb.

Gruesome, maybe — but better than having a mutated cell grow out of control, and eventually form a tumor. Any good horror movie will tell you: better to off yourself in an emergency than to join the mutant zombie horde. All that shambling around is exhausting, and who wants brain stuck between their teeth?

Anyway, tumor suppressors are very important genes; they’re just not named especially well. Fighting evil — or tumors — gets so much attention that the real everyday jobs these genes naturally do barely gets recognized. Instead, they’re known for a function they serve almost by default.

It’s like labeling a butt plug a “poop suppressor”; technically true, but not really what the thing is actually used for. Which, as any Parisian can tell you, is a giant Christmas tree.

I bet that thing would suppress the shit out of some tumors. Ho ho ho.

Actual Science:
CancerQuest – An introduction to tumor suppressors
Stomp on Step 1 – Oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes
Nature Scitable – Tumor suppressor (TS) genes and the two-hit hypothesis
Stanford University – Tumor suppressor also inhibits key property of stem cells, researchers say
UC San Diego – Enzymes believed to promote cancer actually suppress tumors

Image sources: CISN (crash into cancer!), Government Executive (Burns, tenting), Sparkles and Crumbs (sweet-tooth Superman), HugeLOL (apoptosis, post mortem), BoingBoing (Parisian Christmas tree art, aka “O Pluggenbaum”)

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Trans-Neptunian Objects


· Categories: Astronomy, Physics
What I’ve Learned:

Trans-Neptunian objects: Stuck where the sun don't shine (very much).
“Trans-Neptunian objects: Stuck where the sun don’t shine (very much).”

In the beginning, there was the Earth.

Meaning, that’s the first solar system object humans knew about, mostly because we kept tripping and falling face-first onto it. Early humans weren’t particularly coordinated.

The sun was also pretty hard to miss, what with the light and heat and occasional scary eclipses. By the 2nd century B.C., eagle-eyed up-gazers had also spotted Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Not bad for people who didn’t have a LensCrafters at the local mall, probably.

It took a couple thousand years — and eyeglasses, binoculars and telescopes — to find the remaining (current) planets, Uranus (1781) and Neptune (1846). And then we had a problem. Based on calculations of the outer planets’ masses and shapes and favorite Hostess snack cakes, it appeared they were being influenced by some unseen astronomical force — other objects, further out, pulling the strings on Neptune’s orbit. (And pre-packaged dessert preference, apparently. Team Ho-Hos forever.)

So scientists went looking for these mystery bits of rock, called “trans-Neptunian objects”, because they spent (most of) their time chilling outside the orbit of Neptune, thirty times further from the sun as Earth. In 1930, they found the first trans-Neptunian object, and called it Pluto.

On the good side, Pluto was pretty much where astronomers thought it would be. On the bad, it wasn’t large enough to explain the discrepancy in Neptune’s behavior. Better measurements of Neptune determined its orbit actually made perfect sense, so they chalked it up to dumb luck, Pluto became the ninth planet, and nobody looked much for more trans-Neptunian objects for a while.

But Pluto seemed awfully lonely, way out there in a dusty corner of the solar system. So when a second trans-Neptunian object was spotted in 1992, the search was on again. Since then — because even our telescopes have LensCrafters now, probably — more than 1,500 trans-Neptunian objects have been found. So many, in fact, they get grouped into weird classifications like “twotinos” and “cubewanos” and “plutinos”.

(It sounds like the lineup for a Saturday night at the Mos Eisley cantina. But that’s really what they call them.)

All this family reunionizing was great for Pluto, presumably — until it wasn’t. In 2005, a trans-Neptunian object called Eris was found. It looked like Pluto. It had a moon, like Pluto. And it was bigger than Pluto — but no one was quite convinced it should be called a planet. So astronomers got together in 2006 and worked out criteria that said no, sorry, Eris is not technically a planet.

And oh, by the way, if you use the same criteria, neither is Pluto. Ouch. Finding Eris was like going on a date with someone who you don’t like very much, and instead of making you miss your previous relationship, you just realize you had bad taste in dating all along. Maybe you should try OKComet instead.

But there’s more. As astronomers discover even further-out hunks of rock — called extreme trans-Neptunian objects, because they drink Red Bull and get tattoos and stay out past curfew, I assume — an old problem reemerges: they don’t look quite right. In fact, a recent paper studying the orbits of some of these way-out objects says that apparently they are being influenced by something (or somethings), legitimately planet-sized and dark and mysterious even further out. So far, scientists haven’t seen them — or agree they exist — but some are now squinting their telescopes outward, just in case.

Here’s hoping they have a good LensCrafters nearby.

Actual Science:
Space Answers – What are trans-Neptunian objects?
National Geographic – Pluto gets 14 new neighbors
Universe Today – The Dark Energy Survey begins to reveal previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects
Space.com – Mysterious Planet X may really lurk undiscovered in our solar system
The Quantum Tunnel – The big bang theory of trans-Neptunian objects

Image sources: NASA/JPL-Caltech (Sedna, the sexy TNO), Simon.com and FreePik (‘Scopes heart LC), Princess Burlap (“I said, Team Ho-Hos!”), Electronic Cerebrectomy (Mos Eisley cantina band), FB-Troublemakers (sad Pluto)

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DNA Origami


· Categories: Biology, Chemistry
What I’ve Learned:

DNA origami: when you're done with your genes, fold 'em up.
“DNA origami: when you’re done with your genes, fold ’em up.”

You may be familiar with origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. In modern Western society, origami usually pops up in one of three places:

  • fancy folded paper in art classes I’m not talented enough to get into
  • fancy folded napkins in restaurants I can’t get reservations for
  • fancy folded towels in hotels I can’t afford

Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of origami experience.

However. Clever scientists — who presumably can’t get into swanky hotels or eateries, either — have recently found something else to fold: DNA.

Like its predecessor, DNA origami started mostly as an art project. Biologists knew that the four bases in DNA — represented by the letters A, C, G and T — pair up in a very specific way (A with T and C with G) to form the double helix structure Watson and Crick were all aflutter about back in the 1950s. They also found that certain strings of bases affected the physical shape of the DNA molecule, making bends, kinks and folds in the structure. With a few careful adjustments, they thought, bits of DNA could become their personal nanoscale genetic-coded Lego set.

So they built some stuff. DNA origami isn’t quite a full-on Lego kit — you can’t make a Millennium Falcon or model Taj Mahal out of genetic material, yet — but the early attempts were still pretty impressive. In 2006, a group managed to assemble DNA triangles, smiley faces, tiny maps, banners, snowflakes and more. So if DNA origami wasn’t exactly DNA Lego then, maybe at least it was DNA Play-Doh.

Since then, the technology has advanced a bit further — and scientists aren’t playing around any more. They’ve got CAD (computer-assisted design) software to design their shapes and calculate molecular bend angles. They’ve also ramped up to try some pretty useful applications. Many of these involve using folded-up DNA structures to deliver drugs like cancer treatments directly into malignant cells. Or basically, using DNA origami as nano-teeny FedEx drivers.

(Assuming FedEx drivers are in the habit of delivering poison to disreputable households.

Which maybe they do. But that sounds like more of a UPS thing.)

There’s still more to do with DNA origami, though. By using long strands of sequence along with complementary base-pairing “staple” strands to reshape, twist and build bigger structures, much more may soon be possible. Last fall, researchers built the largest DNA origami structure yet, roughly seven times larger than anything previously designed — and it mostly self-assembles. DNA-based nanocomputers — and even nanorobots — are also in the works, and may be next.

And that’s all great and everything. DNA origami is cool. I just want somebody to teach me how to fold one of those stupid napkin swans.

Actual Science:
Popular Mechanics – How DNA origami creates supermaterials
Wall Street Journal – Gene expression: origami at the molecular level
Phys.org – Researchers use DNA strands to create nanobot computer inside living animal
The Scientist – Giant DNA origami
io9 – Researchers turn DNA into robotic “transformers”

Image sources: DVice (shiny happy smiley DNA faces), FireHOW (swanny towel), DavidGiuffre.com (“Lego Falcon, yeeeeeah!”), CBS News and ProSportStickers (United *Poison* Service driver)

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