madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

Double your Science Sunday Pleasure: As a theme for next week’s ScienceSunday , Chad Haney proposes Google+ Collaborations. Combine your expertise to create synergy and more awesome #sciencesunday posts. As an example, this beautiful sectioning of a flower, set to the haunting lilts of a waltz, has the hallmark of a post from Rajini Rao . Chad Haney provides expert insight on the imaging. So, what are you waiting for science enthusiasts?

• The Beauty Within: Beauty, as they say, lies in the eye of the beholder. Arabidopsis is an insignificant flowering plant of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) that holds special beauty to plant geneticists and molecular biologists. It has only 5 chromosomes, completely sequenced, and a short life span of 6 weeks from germination to seed maturation. A large collection of mutant lines are freely available as a scientific resource, and genes can be readily introduced by infecting with Agrobacterium tumifaciens. A model organism worthy of modeling in this imaging video.

• Deconstructing a Flower: 248 sections of an Arabidopsis flower that was paraffin-embedded and sectioned at 20 microns. Sections were stained with Safranin and Fast Green and photographed with a consumer-grade camera mounted on a Nikon Eclipse 50i at 20X.

• Chemical clearing vs. digital clearing. The method for plants requires a controlled substance and many samples are too thick for it to work. So they used Adobe After Effects to digitally remove the background making it easier to visualize the sample. They imported JPEGs of each histological slide into AE to create a 3D “stack”. It took 1 hour to align 60 slides after they gained some practice. Images that were lost due to processing issues were excluded. Because they did not use software designed for this, I doubt they were able to get the spacing correct, i.e., have blank slices. There are tons of segmentation algorithms in medial imaging that could have been used. Unfortunately, it would like require some code writing or very expensive medical imaging software. So hats off to them for a cost effective, brute force method. However, as we posted a while ago, the Visible Human Project was funded to develop software that can be used for this project (http://goo.gl/cv2xU).

Video: GRAND PRIZE WINNER in the 3rd ChloroFilms Contest: http://www.ChloroFilms.org

There is a 3D version! Arabidopsis Flower in True 3D

#sciencesunday ScienceSunday Robby Bowles Allison Sekuler

Fill your Stream with Science Goodness! And help keep Science on What’s HOT! 🙂

Originally shared by Science on Google+

General Science Circle (Profiles)

Click on the following link to view the profiles in this circle: http://goo.gl/Yz8KR.

If you have a science related degree, you are a science journalist, you are a K-12 science teacher, or you curate a science page, then add your profile/page to the database (http://goo.gl/yEg7M). Please note that you also have to circle Science on Google+: A Public Database if you would like to be considered for shared circles.

View underlying database: http://goo.gl/Yz8KR

View most recent shared circles: http://goo.gl/nO7rB

Let the #memewar begin! Perfect start to my #sciencesunday 🙂

Originally shared by ****

#BiologyMeme as a companion to Mz Maau’s #PhysicsMeme

For your G+-spot: http://www.tastefullyoffensive.com/2012/05/data-sutra.html

The Demise of Science? Physicists and chemists in the UK protest against dismal funding by delivering a coffin to London’s Downing Street.

• Researchers fear a “Stalinist collectivisation of science” and are protesting against short sighted decisions to stop funding PhD studentships on research grants, limiting fellowships to specific subjects, banning resubmission of most rejected grant proposals and a cooling-off period for “repeatedly unsuccessful” grant applicants. New funding schemes allow allocation of grants by administrators rather than by peer review.

• These are very similar to recent decisions at the NIH relating to grant mechanisms in the US. Success rates for investigator-initiated grants in my field of biomedical research hover around a dismal 10%. This is simply not sustainable for much longer; many labs are going permanently “out of business”.

Read more: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/protesting-scientists-deliver-coffin-to-downing-street.html

H/T to my wonderful grad student Brandie Cross for the link.

FRACTAL PANCAKES! Cooked up by a math teacher to entertain his kids.

May I take your order?

• If your attempt falls short of the artistic, you can always submit them to the Ugly Pancake Contest: http://saipancakes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/ugly-pancake-contest.html

• My favorite, tested pancake recipe is from Shinae Choi Robinson and can be found here: http://goo.gl/WCGwk

H/T to Nathan Baker for the link: http://saipancakes.blogspot.co.uk/

MOTHER’S DAY GLIAL CELL: This glial cell (green) wraps its ample dendritic arms around a neuron (red).

• Although glia, named after the Greek for glue, don’t receive as much attention in the press, they nourish, support and protect our neurons.

• The amount of brain tissue that is made up of glial cells increases with brain size: the nematode brain contains only a few glia; a fruit fly’s brain is 25% glia; that of a mouse, 65%; a human, 90%; and an elephant, 97%.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglia

#happymothersday #sciencesunday #glia

A Biologist’s Mother’s Day Song: Graduate student Adam Cole was taking a class in behavioral human biology when he was inspired to pen this:

“Just like two strands of DNA are spirally entwined

Your nature and your nurture are inspiringly combined

Scientists remind me and I find that it is true

Slightly more than half of everything I am is thanks to you”.

Listen to the song to find out why!

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to moms everywhere.

#sciencesunday ScienceSunday #happymothersday