Welcome to the newest edition of Berry Go Round, a blogcarnivaldevoted to highlighting recent blog posts about any and every aspect of plant life. This is the third time I am hosting BRG (see #7 and #31) which is not so bad for a zoologist š
There is not much more I can add, and the entries this month are wonderful, so instead of wasting your time with my own musings, let’s dig into the carnival itself!
This unseasonably warm winter has seen the blossoming of crocuses, daffodils and snowdrops in gardens throughout Ireland a lot earlier than usual. It makes a change from the previous two years, when this blog noted that daffodils had yet to bloom by March…
Hollis at In the Company of Plants and Rocks: Leaving Home:
Isn’t it interesting that many humans have a hard time letting their children go, while most animals and plants take the opposite approach — rebuffing, excluding and even hurling their progeny into the unknown…
Confession: As a nerdlet of nine or ten, I decided to help flowers get fertilized. I loved seeing the glossy seeds hidden inside the fat green ovaries of dead flowers when I split them open with my thumbnail. I must have watched one of those nature specials where the scientists climb up to the top of the Alps and dust pollen onto endangered flowers with a paintbrush, because I started going around roadside fields with cotton balls and gathering pollen. Partway through my project I realized that these particular plants were doing fine without human intervention, and abandoned them…
Fruits in my fruit bowl tend to rot into a mulchy mess after a couple of weeks. Fruits that are chilled in permanent Siberian ice fare rather better. After more than 30,000 years, and some care from Russian scientists, some ancient fruits have produced this delicate white flower…
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit: a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. In 1893, however, the highest court in the land ruled in the case of Nix v. Hedden that the tomato was a vegetable, subject to vegetable import tariffs. Unfortunately, the vegetal confusion did not end in 1893. Indeed, confusion over botanical categorization has a proud history in America. Just recently, the US Congress mistook pizza (or, specifically, the tomato paste found on what passes for pizza in school lunchrooms) for a vegetable! And a Fox News anchor apparently had trouble distinguishing between peppers and military-grade pepper spray.
There are several different types of native shrub communities in Knowland Park, but none is as rare or fascinating as the remnant stand of maritime chaparral located on the northwestern side of the park. Chaparral is a quintessential California vegetation, and winter is an excellent time of year to explore the chaparral at Knowland Park. As you follow the path into brush, youāll find yourself in a maze-like realm of twisted, lichen-encrusted trunks and unique plant life. Truly wondrous!…
The desert has secrets, and it doesn’t give them up freely. This patch of Low Desert I’m camped on east of Joshua Tree National Park seems a quiet bit of desolation, a few scraggly shrubs separated widely with non-descript gravel between them. A few aging beer cans, a few tracks across the landscape left by off-road vehicles. The surroundings mostly seem to contain wind, and cold sun, and silence. Not much to write home about, a person might think.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest in my series of Pollination Methods videos that I make as part of my thesis project. While carrots and beets are not closely related, they share similar life cycles, pollination methods, and even breeding goals ā so I put both of these root vegetables in the same video…
Every now and then I stumble across a graph in a paper that blows me away. Some show patterns I hadnāt imagined, while others show patterns far stronger than Iād thought possible. The other day I came across an āin your faceā graph thatās worth sharing…
The fact that IRGC 59101 (which is pictured below, thanks to Ms de Guzman again) is a bit of a strange morphological variant isnāt mentioned in the genebank database, however. Not the electronic version, anyway. Ms de Guzman simply remembered the variety and dove back into her notebooks to find it. Next time I think about venturing into Genebank Database Hell, I want her as my guideā¦
Spinescent. Now thereās a word! It simply means having spines and one of the first things many visitors to the African savannah notice is that everything is covered in thorns. Or, in other words, Africa is spinescent. Itās not a wise idea to brush past a bush when youāre walking, and you certainly want to keep arms and legs inside a car through narrow tracks. These are thorns that puncture heavy-duty car tyres, let alone delicate skin. But why is the savanna so much thornier than many of the places visitors come from? Or even than other biomes within Africa, such as the forests?…
Having last week given you the bad news about the biological warfare that plants with thorns are engaging in, I thought it only fair to share some tips that may help you stave off those tropical nasties threatening to kill you… So the good news is that some of those very same thorny trees that are out to get you also hold the cure in their sap…
Gladiolus is latin for ālittle swordā, a fitting name for a plant whose flowers grow along giant spikes. While these plants are ubiquitous in gardens across the United States, they actually are complete foreigners. Of the 260 species around the world, almost all are from southern Africa, and none are from North or South America…
Our seeds from last week were tough to identify, but thank you to everyone who sent guesses. I appreciate your attempts because they give me great ideas for upcoming mystery seed posts š The mystery seeds were from a giraffe thorn tree, Acacia erioloba. It is also commonly called camel thorn…
It’s surprisingly easy these days to find information on the medicinal use of plants (there’s a great list for the Samuru people here, for example), such as the Commiphora uses we covered last week, but many plants have cultural significance beyond the simple medicinal uses and it’s often much harder to find information about these uses…
How native is native? We have to applaud the trend toward using more native species in efforts to reclaim natural landscapes after disturbance, don’t we? Sometimes, unfortunately, the gesture backfires no matter how well intentioned it may be. Such was the case several years ago (about 2006?), when the Town of Morrison built a water pipeline through the local open space park (Mt. Falcon)…
There are various methods to reconstruct the plant community of a past landscape. Flowering plants produce pollen grains composed by a chemically very stable substance named Sporopollenin, therefore pollen grains usually are well preserved in sediments (but as correctly noted in the comments not in soils). Identifying and counting the pollen deposited over time on the bottom of a lake or conserved in the layers of a bog we can infer the vegetation that once surrounded these sediment traps. In such sediments also plant detritus can be conserved…
The orchid genus Dipodium, collectively known as the hyacinth orchids, includes somewhere between 20 to 30 species native to Southeast Asia and Australia. Interestingly, the majority of the species are leafy epiphytes – well, terrestrials that climb and then become epiphytes – dispersed throughout Southeast Asia. A small group of these plants, however, have lost the leaves entirely and live as terrestrial parasites at the base of Eucalyptus trees in Australia…
Right now the various species of Prunus are in flower all over northern California; the ornamental plums that are so popular as sidewalk decor are shedding petals everywhere, apricot blossoms are peeking out from yards, and the almond trees that crop up as renegades from the big orchards near Davis and in the central valley are covered in popcorn-y pinkish white flowers. With constant reminders of stone fruit everywhere but none actually in season to eat, Iāve been doing a lot of baking with almonds and almond extract…
I have a soft-spot for plant biology. In my final year at university, having exhausted all of the bacteria-related biochemistry lectures, I took a bacteria-related lecture course with the plants department. It was a smaller department, and seemed a lot friendlier and nicer. Also the biscuits in the tea-room were cheaper. So I do like to write about plants every now and again, and it isnāt a very difficult task because like every other multicellular organism on the planet, plants also suffer from bacterial infections. Unlike humans, they donāt have a blood stream to carry immune cells around, so they instead rely on bombarding bacteria with nasty chemicals, quickly killing off any parts of the plant that get infected and acquiring a kind of plant resistance to stop attacks occurring again…
With that, we conclude this month’s edition of Berry Go Round. Next month’s carnival will be hosted by Greg Laden. Send in your submissions and volunteer to host.
Posted onFebruary 29, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Clocks in Bacteria II: Adaptive Function of Clocks in Cyanobacteria
This is the second post in a series of five, originally published on April 05, 2006:
In the previous two posts, here and here, I have mentioned how the discovery of circadian clocks in Cyanobacteria changed the way we think about the origin and evolution of circadian clocks. Quite soon after the initial discovery, the team from Carl Johnson’s laboratory published two papers [1,2] describing a more direct test of adaptive function of circadian clocks in the Synechococcus elongatus.
Wild-type and various clock-mutants in Synechoccocus, when raised in isolation in light-dark cycles, have comparable reproductive rates. When raised in constant light, they fare even a little better, i.e., multiply faster. Thus, in isolation, clock does not appear to confer adaptive advantage.
However, when the strains are cultured together, two strains grown in the same petri-dish, and exposed to light-dark cycle, the strain whose endogenous period is closer to the period of the environmental cycle “wins” the contest. This suggests that circadian clock confers fitness in rhythmic environments. In constant light, arrhythmic mutants outperform rhythmic strains.
Here is how Johnson describes the experiments (from a book chapter not available online):
“The authors’ laboratory tested the adaptive significance of circadian programs by using competition experiments between different strains of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus (Ouyang et al., 1998; Woelfle et al., 2004). For asexual microbes such as S. elongatus, differential growth of one strain under competition with other strains is a good measure of reproductive fitness. In pure culture, because the strains grew at about the same rate in constant light and in LD cycles, there did not appear to be a significant advantage or disadvantage in having different circadian periods when the strains were grown individually. The fitness test was to mix different strains together and to grow them in competition to determine whether the composition of the population changes as a function of time. The cultures were diluted at intervals to allow growth to continue. Different period mutants were used to answer the question, ”Does having a period that is similar to the period of the environmental cycle enhance fitness?” The circadian phenotypes of the strains used had freerunning periods of about 22 h (B22a, C22a) and 30 h (A30a, C28a). These strains were determined by point mutations in three different clock genes: kaiA (A30a), kaiB (B22a), and kaiC (C22a, C28a). Wild type has a period of about 25 h under these conditions. When each of the strains was mixed with another strain and grown together in competition, a pattern emerged that depended on the frequency of the LD cycle and the circadian period. When grown on a 22-h cycle (LD 11:11), the 22 h-period mutants could overtake wild type in the mixed cultures. On a 30-h cycle (LD 15:15), the 30 h-period mutants could defeat either wild type or the 22 h-period mutants. On a ”normal” 24-h cycle (LD 12:12), the wild-type strain could overgrow either mutant (Ouyang et al., 1998). Note that over many cycles, each of these LD conditions have equal amounts of light and dark (which is important, as photosynthetic cyanobacteria derive their energy from light); it is only the frequency of light versus dark that differs among the LD cycles. Figure 1 shows results from the competition between wild type and the mutant strains (Ouyang et al., 1998).
Clearly, the strain whose period most closely matched that of the LD cycle eliminated the competitor. Under a nonselective condition (in this case, constant light), each strain was able to maintain itself in the mixed cultures. Because the mutant strains could defeat the wild-type strain in LD cycles in which the periods are similar to their endogenous periods, the differential effects that were observed are likely to result from the differences in the circadian clock. A genetic test was also performed to demonstrate that the clock gene mutation was specifically responsible for the differential effects in the competition experiment (Ouyang et al., 1998). Because the growth rate of the various cyanobacterial strains in pure culture is not detectably different, these results are most likely an example of ”soft selection” where the reduced fitness of one genotype is seen only under competition (Futuyma, 1998).
In a test of the extrinsic versus intrinsic value of the clock system of cyanobacteria, wild type was competed with an apparently arrhythmic strain (CLAb). As shown in Fig. 2, the arrhythmic strain was defeated rapidly by wild type in LD 12:12, but under competition in constant light, the arrhythmic strain grew slightly better than wild type (Woelfle et al., 2004). Taken together, results show that an intact clock system whose freerunning period is consonant with the environment significantly enhances the reproductive fitness of cyanobacteria in rhythmic environments; however, this same clock system provides no adaptive advantage in constant environments and may even be slightly detrimental to this organism. Therefore, the clock system does not appear to confer an intrinsic value for cyanobacteria in constant conditions.”
It is telling how many control experiments they had to do in order to eliminate various alternative explanations. They had to show that mutations in clock genes do not have additional effects on the ability of the cell to grow and reproduce. Check. They had to show that clock mutations do not affect the ability of the cells to utilize the food and light energy. Check. They had to show that clock mutations do not affect any conceivable way by which one strain can, perhaps by secreting chemicals, actively disrupt the health of the other strain. Check. And in the end, although they demonstrated that “resonance”, i.e., similarity between environmental cycle and the intrinsic period confers some advantage, they still could not state with certainty that this “proves” that the circadian clock has an adaptive function. Here is Johnson [3] again:
“The original adaptation of circadian clocks was presumably to enhance reproductive fitness in natural environments, which are cyclic (24h) conditions. We can refer to this situation as an adaptation to extrinsic conditions. However, some researchers have proposed that circadian clocks may additionally provide an “intrinsic” adaptive value (Klarsfeld 1998; Paranjpe 2003 and Pittendrigh 1993). That is, circadian pacemakers may have evolved to become an intrinsic part of internal temporal organization and, as such, may have become intertwined with other traits that influence reproductive fitness in addition to their original role for adaptation to environmental cycles. Note that a rigorous evolutionary biologist would no longer consider an intrinsic value for clocks to be an adaptation if their original extrinsic value has been lost. However, if clocks retain extrinsic value and additionally accrue intrinsic value, then they would still be considered an adaptation.”
Testing if a trait is an adaptation is a very difficult task. Testing if something as ubiquitous as a circadian clock is an adaptation is even harder. Can you imagine testing if using ATP for energy storage, or using DNA for information storage are adaptations? Are there organisms that do not use these, so we can use them in comparative or competitive studies?
In his book Adaptation and Environment (1990), Robert Brandon came up with five criteria that need to be satisfied in order to determine if a trait is an adaptation (thanks to Robert Skipper for a reminder of this):
“One must have
1. evidence that selection has occurred;
2. an ecological explanation of the fact that some types are better adapted than others;
3. evidence that the trait in question is heritable;
4. information about the structure of the population, including both demic structure and the structure of the selective environment;
5. phylogenetic information concerning what has evolved from what.”
The early cyanobacterial studies have shown criterion #3 to be correct. The competitive assay studies started cracking the criterion #2. In the next post on this topic, I will describe some studies that started investigating the criterion #5, with some additional evidence for criteria Nos. 1, 2 and 4. Apparently, we still have a long way to go. Johnson again:
An example from the circadian literature of a ”just-so” story that the author has personally promulgated is that of ”temporal separation” of photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria. In nitrogen-fixing unicellular bacteria, nitrogen fixation is often phased to occur at night. Nitrogen (N2) fixation is inhibited by low levels of oxygen, which poses a dilemma for photosynthetic bacteria because photosynthesis generates oxygen. Mitsui et al. (1986) proposed that the nocturnal phasing of nitrogen fixation was an adaptation to permit N2 fixation to occur when photosynthesis was not evolving oxygen, and the author has repeated this hypothesis in several publications (Johnson et al., 1996, 1998). This hypothesis would predict that cyanobacterial growth in constant light would be slower than in a light/dark (LD) cycle because nitrogen fixation would be inhibited under these conditions and therefore the growing cells might rapidly become starved for metabolically available nitrogen. The problem is that cyanobacteria grow perfectly well in constant light–in fact, they grow faster in constant light than in LD cycles, presumably because of the extra energy they derive from the additional photosynthesis. This result is inconsistent with the ”temporal separation” hypothesis. It does not mean that the ”temporal separation” hypothesis is incorrect–in fact, the author believes that under appropriate (but as yet untested) conditions of medium, light, and carbon dioxide, the ”temporal separation” hypothesis will emerge triumphant. Nevertheless, the point here is that ”temporal separation in cyanobacteria” is an example of a ”just-so” circadian story that we like to tell without its being rigorously supported by appropriate data. This was the conclusion of Gould and Lewontin (1979) for many investigations in the field of population biology, and this criticism is on target.”
References and image sources:
[1] YAN OUYANG, CAROL R. ANDERSSON, TAKAO KONDO, SUSAN S. GOLDEN, AND CARL HIRSCHIE JOHNSON, Resonating circadian clocks enhance fitness in cyanobacteria, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 95, pp. 8660-8664, July 1998
[2] Mark A. Woelfle, Yan Ouyang, Kittiporn Phanvijhitsiri and Carl Hirschie Johnson, The Adaptive Value of Circadian Clocks: An Experimental Assessment in Cyanobacteria, Current Biology, Vol. 14, 1481-1486, August 24, 2004,
[3] Carl Hirschie Johnson, Testing the Adaptive Value of Circadian Systems, Methods in Enzymology, Volume 393 , 2005, Pages 818-837
I posted 16 times in February. That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions).
Following #scio12, I wrote a long summary of the event, with personal thoughts included:
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Invitation to the NRC opening - click to see large!
The new Nature Research Center (NRC), a technology wing of the existing North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, is opening on April 20, 2012. Everyone is invited! Invitation attached (click on the image left)!!! It will be a 24-hour science party! There will be live feeds in the SECU Daily Planet multi-media theater from scientists around the planet, ongoing activities in each research lab by our own “rock-star” NRC scientists, food and events related to science, and citizen science take-home ideas. …. and More. My recent article in the Observer summarizes all the stats about the NRC — read and enjoy!
The theme of the new NRC is “how we know what we know.” All exhibits explain how scientists work to solve mysteries that affect our daily lives. The Daily Planet is four stories high, and the giant Earth-shaped structure houses a round multimedia theater featuring global science adventures. Awesome footage, ranging from exploration of forest canopies to digging up ancient dinosaur bones, will be broadcast. Schools can attend live presentations, or access recordings through an extensive virtual library.
Canopymeg with the heirs of Ethiopia's forests -- kids who are disciples of the Coptic church take on the stewardship of conservation in this unique situation where the last forest fragments exist in church yards, otherwise called "church forests".
My passion continues to be mentoring youth in science, especially minorities, and also global forest conservation. I hope the new NRC will offer role models for kids from all walks of life, so that diverse youth are inspired to seek careers in science. During my own childhood, I never had a woman science teacher throughout my career, which made me pretty anxious at times about pursuing ecology as a career. I hope that the emerging generation will never experience that anxiety.
My other passion is conserving global forests. Not only are they the lungs of the planet, but they are also the drug stores, the carbon storage agents, the climate control, the gas exchange headquarters, the biodiversity libraries and the spiritual and cultural meccas of many societies. My recent work in Ethiopia was just published in a short piece in Science Magazine (hooray!) and has seen some great success with the simple solution of working together with the local priests to build stone walls around their church yards which house the last remaining forest patches in Northeastern Ethiopia (read more on my website). Read more in my recent nature column.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am totally excited about using social media as a “hook” to get young people engaged in science at our NRC. Our new and amazing Science Communication Director, Dr. DavidKroll, is awesome in creating these pathways and it is a privilege to work with him on this. With his blogging and all of our staff’s global research and outreach, we should be twittering and facebooking and blogging our way into many K-12 classrooms as well as into folks’ everyday lives with exciting science and more science!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best part of Sci Online is always the people – I would also love to see a Techno-Geek table next year, where those of us in mid-career can get a tune-up to make sure our mobile phones are tweeting and facebooking to our best capabilities. Little things like image size and how to transmit videos make a big difference in our science communication. I would also love to host something at our SECU Daily Planet technology theater at the NRC next year, where we actually take some of the rock-star attendees of the conference, and broadcast our own TED series to students around the state and the country, using our internet capabilities and cool visual technologies.
Looking forward to 2013!
Thank you! See you at the NRC opening and at ScienceOnline2013!
From the Archives: first in a series of five posts on clocks in bacteria first published on March 08, 2006.
As I stated in the introductory post on this topic, it was thought for a long time that Prokaryotes were incapable of generating circadian rhythms. When it was discovered, in 1994 [1], that one group of Prokaryotes, the cyanobacteria, possess a circadian clock, the news was greeted with great excitement. This was the first definitive demonstration of a circadian clock in a bacterium (I intend to revisit the E.coli saga in a later post).
Synechococcus
All three hypotheses for the origin of the circadian clock suppose that it first evolved in an aquatic, unicellular organism. While protists fit the bill quite nicely, having a bacterium with a circadian clock pushed the origin of the clock further back into the past. This made the researchers happy as it supported the notion that the clock was a universal property of life, as well as that it evolved only once in the history of Life on Earth. This also suggested that clocks in all organisms use same or similar intercellular mechanisms for generation of circadian rhythms.
At the time that clocks were discovered in cyanobacteria, only two circadian genes were characterized: period in fruitflies and frequency in Neurospora crassa. The second fly gene, timeless, was discovered the following year, and the first mammalian gene Clock and the first plant gene Toc were discovered some years later. Thus, at the time, it was still plausible that all of life used the same mechanism for the circadian clock, just as all of life uses ATP for energy storage and DNA for information storage.
However, studying genetics in bacteria is a much quicker and easier task than in the large multicellular eukaryotes. Very soon, the cyanobacterial clock genes were discovered and it turned out that they had no resemblance to fly or mold genes. KaiA, KaiB and KaiC (as they were discovered in Japan, they were named “kaiten”, which implies a cycle of events reminiscent of the turning of the heavens) have no homologies with any of the clock genes found in any other group of organisms and the internal logic of the bacterial clock is different from that in plants, fungi and animals, i.e., it is not a typical transcription-translation feedback loop.
Method for studying the cyanobacteria clock
The clock in cyanobacteria is better thought of as a relay switch. It turns about 2/3 of the genome on in the morning (and off in the evening) and turns on the remaining 1/3 of the genome at dusk (and off at dawn). Recent findings about bacterial, plant, protist, fungal and animal clocks suggests as many as five separate events of the origin of a circadian clock on Earth – one for each major group of organisms.
Mutations and deletions [1,2 5,6] of either one of the three Kai genes affect the circadian phenotype, either by altering the inherent period of the freerunning rhythm, or by abolishing rhythmicity altogether. Interestingly, Synechococcus cells appear to have a “memory” of the circadian phase in which they find themselves and this memory gets transmitted from parental to daughter cells during cell division.
Synechococcus rhythm
Actually, under certain conditions, cell division is a much more rapid process than a circadian cycle. In other words, Synechococcus may undergo several cell divisions over a period of a single day, yet the colony as a whole keeps its circadian rhythms running all along [2,3].
Next time, I will focus on the contributions of cyanobacteria to the understanding of the origin, evolution and adaptive function of circadian clocks.
~~~~~
References, sources of images, and further reading:
[2] Circadian clocks in prokaryotes by Carl Hirschie Johnson, Susan S. Golden, Masahiro Ishiura & Takao Kondo, Molecular Microbiology, Volume 21 Page 5 (July 1996).
[3] Circadian Rhythms in Rapidly Dividing Cyanobacteria by Takao Kondo, Tetsuya Mori, Nadya V. Lebedeva, Setsuyuki Aoki, Masahiro Ishiura and Susan S. Golden, Science, Vol. 275. no. 5297, pp. 224 – 227 (10 January 1997)
Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your background? Any scientific education?
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and went to college on a swimming scholarship. After graduating from Iowa State University in journalism with a minor in biology, and after putting in a couple of years as a business reporter for the Des Moines Register and Tribune, I moved west.
I ended up in San Francisco in the mid-70s, working for a trade paper put out by Fairchild Publications. As San Francisco bureau editor for Electronic News, I made regular trips to Silicon Valley to cover the new chipmakers, known as the semiconductor industry, composed of companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. I came out of a liberal arts background, but was asked to cover Silicon Valley based on my editorās belief that journalists who could learn the science were preferable to a staff of engineers who understood the technology behind it all, but couldnāt write their way out of a paper bag.
As I found out later, I was one of the first reporters in America to cover Silicon Valley as a full-time beat. It was a brutal learning curve, but I canāt imagine a better training ground for science reporting. I interviewed people like Ted Hoff, inventor of the microprocessor, and Robert Noyce, president of Intel and co-inventor of the integrated circuit. I ended up writing a book about it called The New Alchemists: Silicon Valley and the Microelectronics Revolution.
Eventually my wife and I moved out of San Francisco and plunged into the woods of northern Minnesota, where I wrote a novel, a technology thriller called The Seventh Level. I freelanced for computers magazines, and later on, I picked up an MA in Humanities at Cal State.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Somewhere along the way, my interests migrated from computers and machine intelligence to the human brain and neuroscience. I wrote a draft of a book about recent scientific research on addiction, for interested laypeople, but my agent had absolutely no luck finding a publisher. The only thing publishers wanted to hear about were drug confessionals. Newspapers and magazines were no longer a trustworthy market, and my two previous books were out of print. Luckily, I had started a modest blog called Addiction Inbox as a landing site on the Internet for discussion of the bookājust the odd post about biochemical aspects of addiction, mostly press release rewrites, sort of a holding pattern, because I didnāt really know anything about blogging. But the blog grew slowly and steadily and took on a life of its own.
And of course, all of this coincided with the revolution in neuroscience, and our whole understanding of the brain changing due to insights about synaptic neurotransmission. I interviewed dozens of key researchers and decided to focus on pharmacological approaches to treatmentāfighting fire with fire. In the book, I concentrated on explaining brain function, and particularly the function of reward systems. Eventually, I self-published the book, called The Chemical Carousel, in both paperback and Kindle formats, and continued to blog. Iāve been an online journalist ever since.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The blogging led to a stint as senior contributing editor for the online addiction and recovery site The Fix. And Iāve stepped back into magazine freelancing, including a recent news piece at Scientific American about the ways in which alcohol affects women differently than men. A lot of my professional energy over the past year went toward establishing a daily news blog at The Fix, but Iāve stepped away from that to spend more time on stories at Addiction Inbox. Iām also interested in continuing to freelance as a science writer. And Iām looking at some e-book projects. And forever trying to finish another novel.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Iāve always been drawn to the places where art and science meet. Thatās a good description of the key components of science blogging, I think. Youāre writing about science and technology for digital media, in an entertaining way, with attention to the design details of your blog or website. The Science Online conferences are another good example of a science/technology/art/ mash-up.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
My primary writing activity at present is blogging. My recent book helps pay for that, since Iām an unaffiliated, independent operator. As for social networks, I wasnāt really interested until I discovered Twitter. With Twitter, there was suddenly this space on the web where information and intelligence and humor were being exchanged in real time by some very interesting and hard-working scientists and writers. And itās basically a meritocracy. Itās also a fairly safe, nonjudgmental atmosphere for interacting informally with brilliant, accomplished womenāand what, really, is more fun than that? Author William Gibson didnāt beat around the bush when he said that Twitter was āthe most powerful aggregator of shared novelty humanity has yet possessed.ā
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites?
I came into the picture right when ScienceBlogs blew apart a few years back, and there was this frantic game of musical chairs, with science bloggers trying to find institutional homes, or branding themselves as independent bloggers. I thought maybe I had just wrapped up the shortest blogging career in history. Then along came what evolved into Independent Neuroblogs, the network where Addiction Inbox found a home, and then ScienceSeeker, the big science blog aggregator. That helped make it easier to join the party and keep track of things and get listed officially as a science blog.
But what really made it work for me was the early support I got from established science bloggers. People like Drugmonkey, Maia Szalavitz, DavidKroll, Scicurious, Daniel Lende, among others, were all very open and encouraging in the early going. And Dr. Shaheen Lakhan at Brain Blogger encouraged me to write for him, giving me an early outlet to the greater blogosphere. Psychologist Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks was particularly helpful. He retweeted a lot of my stuff in the early going, for which Iāll be forever grateful. That brought attention to Addiction Inbox that couldnāt have happened in any other way.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2012 for you?
Iāve never attended a conference quite like it. It reminded me of some of the earlier collaborative stuff, like The Whole Earth Catalog and The Well and the Electronic Freedom Foundation. A highlight for me was sneaking off to the North Carolina Museum of Art to see a Rembrandt exhibition with a group of attendees that included two Pulitzer Prize winners.
The sweet spot where art and science meeting is definitely on the Web now, and it spins off into stimulating real-world activities like Science Online 2012. Iām really pleased to have managed to insinuate myself into the online structure, so to speak. I think as time passes, and as more science and science writing migrates online, itāll get tougher and tougher for journalists to get back in the game if theyāre offline.
Thank you so much for the interview, and I hope to see you back next year, at ScienceOnline2013.
From the Archives: this is the first in a series of posts on circadian clocks in microorganisms , originally published on February 23, 2006…
Many papers in chronobiology state that circadian clocks are ubiquitous. That has been a mantra since at least 1960. This suggests that most or all organisms on Earth possess biological clocks.
In the pioneering days of chronobiology, it was a common practice to go out in the woods and collect as many species as possible and document the existence of circadian rhythms. Technical limitations certainly influenced what kinds of organisms were usually tested.
Rhythms of locomotor activity are the easiest to measure. Rodents, as well as large walking insects like cockroaches, will turn running wheels, each revolution triggering a switch that sends a signal to the computer. Songbirds will jump from one perch to another, each perch flipping a switch connected to a computer. Lizards, while walking around the cage will tilt the cage from left to right around an axis – a metal bar on the bottom – which will turn a switch. Plants that exhibit leaf movements (closing at night, opening during the day) were the prime experimental models for a while (e.g., Kalanchoe, mimosa, tobacco).
Monitoring rhythms in other organisms is much harder: it is mighty difficult to make a fish run in a running wheel, or build hopping perches sensitive enough to be triggered by the landing of a butterfly. That was even harder back in the late 1940s and early 1950s when most of this work was done.
The tree of life.
It is no suprise that nobody looked at microorganisms back then – it was just technically too hard. The fact is that most of the pioneers in the field came in from vertebrate physiology, ethology or ecology. It is easy for us, large mammals, to forget that we are not among the dominant life-forms on the planet – that title goes to bacteria, in terms of numbers of individuals, in terms of biodiversity, and in terms of total biomass. See if you can find mammals, or even all animals on the Tree of Life:
Some old papers, mostly parts of Conference Proceedings of various kinds, mention as fact that Bacteria do not have clocks but do not provide any citations. It took me years to dig out three papers (Rogers and Greenbank, 1930, Halberg and Connor, 1961; and Sturtevant, 1973) with relevance to this question and all three are ambiguous about the final verdict. Why is nobody revisiting this with modern molecular techniques?
Being unicellular does not preclude one from having a clock, though, as single-cell Protista and Fungi all have circadian rhythms, which have been studied quite extensively since the 1970s or so (I intend to delve some more in that literature and write some posts on them in the future).
Cyanobacteria
One group of bacteria does have a clock – the unicellular Cyanobacteria (if you are above a certain age, you may remember them under their old name: blue-green algae), in particular those species that do not form chains, e.g., Synechococcus and Nostoc. This was discovered very recently – only ten years ago (Mori et al. 1996). I was two years into my Masters when that paper appeared and I remember the excitement. I will certainly write a post or two on those soon [Note: yes, those posts are written and will be republished here over the next few days].
There has not yet been a single study of any kind of rhythmicity in Archaea [Note: there has been since this post was first published]. Most of those microorganisms live in strange places – miles deep under the surface of the earth, in rocks, in ice, on the ocean floors and in the hydrothermal vents. They mostly do not inhabit rhythmic environments, so perhaps they do not need to have clocks – but it would be really nice to know if that is really the case.
Archaea
Old Faithful, the famous geyser in Yellowstone park contains Archea. As the geyser erupts every 45 minutes or so, the microbes are suddenly exposed to very different environment: light, turbulence, lower temperature. Should we expect them to evolve a 45-minute clock that will help them predict the eruption so they can limit some sensitive biochemical reactions to the quiet periods and switch on the defenses against light and cold every 45 minutes?
“… should be possible to demonstrate the effect by bacterial selection experiments in a chemostat. By alternating the nutrient influx from glucose without oxygen, to oxygen without glucose, to alanine and oxygen, cells would be forced into a three-point metabolic cycle.” and “… reversing the order of the driving cycle, it should be possible also to select cells whose clocks run backward.”
In a later edition (after we learned that cyanobacteria have clocks) he suggested, instead, to use
“one of the species of cyanobacteria that revealed no circadian rhythms in surveys before Mori et al. (1996), and use light as the alternative nutrient”.
E.coli
As of today, nobody has performed such an experiment, although Elowitz and Leibler (2000) came pretty close with a study in which they produced oscillations in Escherichia coli with periods of 3-4 hours, which are slower than the cell-division cycle:
So, if most of Life on Earth is Prokaryotic (Eubacteria and Archaea), and those groups do not have clocks, then clocks are not ubiqutous, are they? In my papers and in my Dissertation I try to hedge a bit by stating that they are found in “organisms that live on or close to the surface of the Earth”, thus at least avoiding the deep-oceanic, deep-soil, and parasitic microorganisms (as well as burrowing and cave organisms that may have secondarily lost their clock).
The very last event, ‘Beyond 42: How science can use stories to explain life, the universe and everything’ (title coined by Desiree, not meant to refer to my age, or to NYC’s famous old Studio 42), will be outside of campus, in town, at The Artery, where several local science storytellers, Robin Woywitka (with his band Super 92) and I will be telling science stories and generally having great fun.
So, if you will be in Edmonton that week, come by and say Hello (if you are at the University, ask Marie-Claire for the schedule of campus events you may be interested in attending).
I originally published this post on May 23, 2007, on the day of the 300th birthday of Karl Linne.
When it’s someone’s birthday it is nice to give presents, or a flower. Perhaps a whole boquet of roses. But if the birthday is a really big round number, like 300, and the birthday boy is the one who actually gave names to many of those flowers, it gets a little tougher. Perhaps you may try to do something really difficult and build, actually plant, a Flower Clock. After all, it was Carl von Linne, aka Carolus Linnaeus, today’s birthday celebrator, who invented the flower clock. He drew it like this, but he never actully built one:
The first one to make (and write down) an observation that some plants (in that case, a tropical Tamarind tree) raise their leaves during the day and let them droop down during the night, was Androsthenes, an officer who accompanied Alexander the Great. In the first century, Pliny the Elder made a similar observation, repeated in the thirteenth century by Albertus Magnus.
In 1729, Jean Jacque d’Ortous de Mairan, an astronomer, not a botanist, reported an experiment – considered to be the first true chronobiologial experiment in history – in which he observed the spontaneous daily rise and nightly fall of leaves of Mimosa pudica kept in a closet in the dark. The experiment was repeated with some improvements by Duhamel de Monceau and by Zinn, both in 1759.
Another Swede, Arrhenius argued that a mysterious cosmic Factor X triggered the movements. Charles Darwin published an entire book on the Movement of Plants, arguing that the plant itself generates the daily rhythms. The most famous botanist of the 19th century, Pfeffer, started out favouring the “external hypothesis”, but Darwin’s experiments forced him to change his mind later in his career and accept the “internal” source of such rhythmic movements. In the early 20th century, Erwin Bunning was the first to really thoroughly study circadian rhythms in plants. For the rest of the century, animal research took over and though there has been some progress recently, the understanding of clocks in plants still lags behind that of Drosophila and the mouse.
But it was Carolus Linnaeus back in the 18th century who, fond of personifying plants (mostly in regard to sex) named this phenomenon “sleep” in plants. Soon, he switched his focus from movements of leaves to the daily opening and closing of flowers and performed a broad study of the times of day when each flower species opened and closed:
Linnaeus observed over a number of years that certain plants constantly opened and closed their flowers at particular times of the day, these times varying from species to species. Hence one could deduce the approximate time of day according to which species had opened or closed their flowers. Arranged in sequence of flowering over the day they constituted a kind of floral clock or horologium florae, as Linnaeus called it in his Philosophia Botanica (1751, pages 274-276). A detailed and extended account of this in English will be found in F.W.Oliver’s translation of Anton Kerner’s The Natural History of Plants, 1895, vol.2, pages 215-218. As many of the indicator plants are wildflowers and the opening/closing times depend on latitude, the complexities of planting a floral clock make it an impractical proposition.
While it is not easy to make a functioning flower clock, people have done it. There is one in his hometown of Uppsala, for instance. It has been made in the classroom (pdf) and one can pretty easily find locally useful lists of plants to try to build one.
Linnaeus; in writings titled Philosophia Botanica wrote about 3 types of flowers:1. Meteorici, A category which changes their opening and closing times according to the weather conditions.
2. Tropici, Flowers which change their opening and closing specifically to the length of the day.
3. Aequinoctales, Most important here to this story, are the flowers having fixed times for opening and closing, regardless of weather or season.
It is only those last ones that could be used for buildiing Floral Clocks, while the first two groups were important for the studies of vernalization and photoperiodism in plants in the early 20th century.
You can find some more detail of the flower clock history here. And the idea of a flower clock was also picked up by artists of various kinds:
Linnaeus’s idea for a collection of flowers that opened or closed at a particular time of day was taken up by the French composer Jean Fran aix in his composition L’horloge de flore (The Flower Clock), a concerto for solo oboe and orchestra.———————
A floral clock features in the fictional city of Quirm, in Soul Music, one of the books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and animals did different things at different times of day or year did not raise any eyebrows. Thatās just how the world works ā you sleep at night and work during the day, and so do (or in reverse) many other organisms. Nothing exciting there, is it? Nobody that we know of ever wondered how and why this happens ā it just does. Thus, for many centuries, all we got are short snippets of observations without any thoughts about causes:
āAristotle [noted] that the ovaries of sea-urchins acquire greater size than usual at the time of the full moon.ā(Cloudsley-Thompson 1980,p.5.)
āAndrosthenes reported that the tamarind treeā¦, opened its leaves during the day and closed them at night.ā(Moore-Ede et al. 1982,p.5.)
āCicero mentioned that the flesh of oysters waxed and waned with the Moon, an observation confirmed later by Pliny.ā(Campbell 1988, Coveney and Highfield 1990)
āā¦Hippocrates had advised his associates that regularity was a sign of health, and that irregular body functions or habits promoted an unsalutory condition. He counseled them to pay close attention to fluctuations in their symptoms, to look at both good and bad days in their patients and healthy people.ā(Luce 1971,p.8.)
āHerophilus of Alexandria is said to have measured biological periodicity by timing the human pulse with the aid of a water clock.ā(Cloudsley-Thompson 1980, p.5.)
āEarly Greek therapies involved cycles of treatment, known as metasyncrasisā¦.Caelius Aurelianus on Chronic and Acute Diseasesā¦describes these treatments.. .ā(Luce 1971, p.8.)
āNobody seems to have noticed any biological rhythmicities throughout the Middle Ages. The lone exception was Albertus Magnus who wrote about the sleep movements of plants in the thirteenth centuryā (Bennet 1974).
The first person to ask the question ā and perform the very first experiment in the field of Chronobiology ā was Jean-Jacques dāOrtous de Mairan, a French astronomer. What did he do?
In 1729, intrigued by the daily opening and closing of the leaves of a heliotrope plant (the phenomenon of āsleep in plantsā was well known due to Linneaus), de Mairan decided to test whether this biological ābehaviorā was simply a response to the sun. He took a plant (most likely Mimosa pudica but we do not know for sure as Linnean taxonomy came about a decade later) and placed it in a dark closet. He then observed it and noted that, without having access to the information about sunlight, the plant still raised its leaves during the day and let them droop down during the night.
However, De Mairan was an astronomer busy with other questions:
āā¦.about the aurora borealis, and the relation of a prismās rainbow colors to the musical scale, and the diurnal rotation of the earth, and the satellites of Venus, and the total eclipse of the sun that had occurred in 1706. He would waste no time writing to the Academy about the sleep of a plant!ā(Ward 1971,p.43.)
He did not wanted to waste his time writing and publishing a paper on a mere plant. So his experiment was reported by his friend Marchant. It was not unusual at that time for one person to report someone elseās findings. Marchand published it in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Paris as he was a member, and the official citation is: De Mairan, J.J.O. 1729. Observation Botanique, Histoire de lāAcademie Royale des Sciences, Paris, p.35.
In the paper Marchant wrote:
āIt is well known that the most sensitive of the heliotropes turns its leaves and branches in the direction of the greatest light intensity. This property is common to many other plants, but the heliothrope is peculiar in that it is sensitive to the sun (or time of day) in another way: the leaves and stems fold up when the sun goes down, in just the same way as when touches or agutates the plant.
But M. de Mairan observed that this phenomenon was not restricted to the sunset or to the open air; it is only a little less marked when one maintains the plant continually enclosed in a dark place ā it opens very appreciably during the day, and at evening folds up again for the night. This experiment was carried out towards the end of one summer, and well duplicated. The sensitive plant sense the sun without being exposed to it in any way, and is reminiscent of that delicate perception by which invalids in their beds can tell the difference between day and night. (Ward 1971)ā
Marchant and de Mairan were quite careful about not automatically assuming that the capacity for time measurement resides within the plant. They could not exclude other potential factors: temperature cycles, or light leaks, or changes in other meteorological parameters.
Also, the paper, being just a page long (a āshort communicationā, see image to the right), does not provide detailed āmaterials and methodsā so we do not know if āwell repeatedā experiments meant that this was done a few times for a day or two, or if the same plants were monitored over many days. We also do not know how, as well as how often and when, did de Mairan check on the plants. He certainly missed that the plants opened up their leaves a little earlier each day ā a freerunning rhythm with a period slightly shorter than 24 hours ā a dead giveaway that the rhythm is endogenous.
The idea that clocks are endogenous, residing inside organisms, was controversial for a very long time ā top botanists of Europe were debating this throughout the 19th century, and the debate lasted well into the 1970s with Frank Brown and a few others desperately inventing more and more complicated mathematical models that could potentially explain how each individual, with its own period, could actually be responding to a celestial cue (blame Skinner and behaviorism for treating all behaviors as reactive, i.e., automatic responses to the cues from the environment).
The early 18th century science did not progress at a speed we are used to today. But the paper was not obscure and forgotten either ā it just took some time for others to revisit it. And revisit it they did. In 1758 and 1759 two botanists repeated the experiment: both Zinn and Duhamel de Monceau (Duhamel de Monceau 1758) controlled for both light and temperature and the plants still exhibited the rhythms. They used Mimosa pudica, which suggests to us today that this was the plant originally tested by de Mairan.
Suspecting light-leaks in de Mairanās experiment, Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau repeated the same experiment several times (Duhamel du Monceau 1758). At first, he placed the plants inside an old wine cave. It had no air vent through which the light could leak in, and it had a front vault which could serve as a light lock. He observed the regular opening and closing of the leaves for many days (using a candle for observation). He once took a plant out in the late afternoon ā which phase-shifted the clock with a light pulse. The plant remained open all night (i.e.., not directly responding to darkness), but then re-entrained to the normal cycle the next day. Still not happy, he placed a plant in a leather trunk, wrapped it in a blanket and placed it in a closet inside the cave ā with the same result: the plant leaves opened and closed every day.
So, he was convinced that no light leaks were responsible for the plant behavior. Yet he was still not sure if the temperature in the cave was absolutely constant, so he repeated the experiment in a hothouse where the temperature was constant and quite high, suspecting that perhaps a night chill prompted the leaves to close. He had to conclude: āI have seen this plant close up every evening in the hothouse even though the heat of the stoves had been much increased. One can conclude from these experiments that the movements of the sensitive plant are dependent neither on the light nor on the heatā (Duhamel de Monceau 1758). He did not know it at the time, of course, but he was the first to demonstrate that circadian rhythms are temperature compesated ā the period is the same at a broad range of constant temperatures.
The research picked up speed in the 19th century. Augustus Pyramus de Candolle repeated the experiments while making sure not just that the darkness was absolute and the temperature constant, but also that the humidity was constant, thus eliminating another potential cue. He then showed that the period of diurnal movements of Mimosa is very close to 24 hours in constant darkness, but around 22 hours in constant light (using a bank of six lamps). He also managed to reverse day and night by using artificial light to which the plants responded by reversing their rhythms (De Candolle 1832) after the initial few days of āconfusionā.
Another astronomer, Svante Arrhenius argued that a mysterious cosmic Factor X triggered the movements (Arrhenius 1898). He attributed the rhythms to the āphysiological influence of atmospheric electricityā. Charles Darwin published an entire book on the Movement of Plants in 1880, arguing that the plant itself generates the daily rhythms (Darwin 1880).
The most famous botanist of the 19th century, Wilhelm Pfeffer, started out favouring the āexternal hypothesisā, arguing that light leaks were the source of external information for de Mairanās and Duhamelās plants (Pfeffer 1880, 1897, 1899). But his own well-designed experiments (as well as those of Darwin) forced him to change his mind later in his career and accept the āinternalā source of such rhythmic movements. Unfortunately, Pfeffer published his latter views in an obscure (surprisingly, considering the short and catchy title) German journal Abhandlungen der Mathematisch-Physischen Klasse der Kƶniglich SƤchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, so most people were (and still are) not aware that he changed his mind on this matter.
In the early 20th century, Erwin Bunning was the first to really thoroughly study circadian rhythms in plants and to link the daily rhythms to seasonality. He and many others at the time mostly studied photoperiodism and vernalization in plants, two phenomena then thought to be closely related (we know better today). For the rest of the century, animal research took over and only recently, with the advent of molecular techniques in Arabidopsis, has the plant chronobiology rejoined the rest of the field.
Here is a movie of Mimosa pudica closing its leaves due to mechanical stimulation:
And here you can see a movie of a plant sleeping and waking over several cycles (you can download an even better one here).
References:
Arrhenius, S. 1898. Die Einwirkung kosmicher Einflusse auf physiologische Verhaltnisse. Skandinavisches Archiv fur Physiologie, Vol. VIII.
Bennett, M.F. 1974. Living Clocks in the Animal World. Charles C Thomas ā Publisher.
Campbell, J. 1988. Winston Churchillās Afternoon Nap: a Wide Awake Inquiry into the Human Nature of Time. Aurum, London.
Cloudsley-Thompson, J. 1980. Biological Clocks, Their Functions in Nature. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Coveney, P. and R.Highfield, 1990. The Arrow of Time: A Voyage Through Science to Solve Timeās Greatest Mystery. Fawcett Columbine, New York.
Darwin, C. 1880. The power of movement in plants (assisted by F. Darwin). Murray, London.
De Candolle, A.P. 1832. Physiologie Vegetale. Paris: Bechet jeune.
Duhamel de Monceau, H.L. 1758. La Physique des Arbres. Paris: H.L.Guerin & L.F.Delatour.
Luce, G.G. 1971. Biological Rhythms in Human & Animal Physiology. Dover, NY.
Moore-Ede, M.C., F.M.Sulzman and C.A.Fuller. 1982. The Clocks That Time Us. Harvard University Press.
Pfeffer, W.F.P. 1880, 1897, 1899, (reprinted1903.,1905.), Pfefferās Physiology of Plants, Volumes I -III, Ed. and Trans. Alfred J.Ewert., Oxford .
Ward, R.R. 1971. The Living Clocks. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Posted onFebruary 22, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Tomorrow in Charlotte: “How the Web is Changing the Way Science Is Communicated, Taught and Done.”
I will be giving a public talk about the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done on the campus of UNC Charlotte, tomorrow, Thursday February 23rd, at 6:30 p.m. in the Bioinformatics Lecture Room 105.
If you can, come to the talk, don’t be shy to approach me and say Hello, and perhaps join us for dinner and drinks afterward.
The persistence of circadian rhythmicity during long bouts of hibernation in mammals has been a somewhat controversial topic in the literature. While somestudies suggest that circadian clock is active during hibernation, other studies dispute this. Apparently, the truth is somewhere in-between ā it differs between species:
Not all hibernating animals retain apparent circadian rhythmicity during the hibernation season. Whereas some species, such as bats and golden-mantled ground squirrels, maintain circadian rhythmicity in Tb [core body temperature] throughout the hibernation season when held in constant conditions, other species, such as European hamsters, Syrian hamsters, and hedgehogs, lose circadian rhythmicity in Tb.
The outputs of the clock measured in these studies range from body temperature and brain temperature, to timing of waking, to metabolic and behavioral parameters. But, to my knowledge, nobody has yet looked if the circadian pattern of expression of ācore clock geneā persists during hibernation.
Thus, it was really interesting to see a study on the state of hibernation in a completely different kind of organism ā a tree. About a year ago [Note: that was in 2005, this is a re-post from the archives], a group from Spain did exactly what was needed ā they measured the levels of expression of circadian clock genes in the chestnut tree.
They measured the expression of clock genes both during naturally occurring winter dormancy and in the laboratory experiments involving chilling of seedlings combining with exposure to different photoperiods. In both cases, the core molecular mechanism of the circadian clock stopped entirely if the temperature and photoperiod both indicated āwinterā, and was revived by warming-up the seedlings or the onset of spring.
Circadian clocks exhibit temperature independence, i.e., the period of the rhythm is not affected by temperature, within relatively broad limits. Apparently, the winter temperatures are outside the lower limit in the chestnut tree. Furthermore, it appears that the chestnut actively stops the clock with the onset of winter.
How can we interpret these data?
Overwintering is the stage in which all energetically expensive processes are minimized or shut down. However, workings of the clock itself are not very energetically expensive, so this is an unlikely reason for the elimination of rhythmicity during winter.
Second interpretation would be that, as the tree shuts down all its processes, there is nothing for the clock to regulate any more. There is also no feedback from the rest of metabolism into the clock. Thus, circadian rhythmicity fades as a by-product of overall dormancy of the plant.
Third, the clock itself may be a part of the mechanism that keeps everything else down. In other words, a clock stopped at (for instance ā this is a random choice of phase) midnight will keep giving the midnight signal to the rest of the plant for months on end, keeping all the other processes at their normal midnight level (which may be very low). Thus, the clock may be central to the overall mechanism of hibernation in trees ā i.e., the autumnal stopping of the clock is an evolved adaptation.
Posted onFebruary 21, 2012byBora Zivkovic|Comments Off on Berry Go Round – send in your posts for the next botanical blog carnival
Berry Go Round is a blogcarnivaldevoted to highlighting recent blog posts about any aspect of plant life.
If you have published a blog post about plants since the last issue on January 30th, send me the link by using this submission form.
Officially, the deadline for submissions is February 25th, but I am lenient – even if you send it as late as 28th at noon, I will still likely include it, and will post the carnival on the morning of the 29th of February. But sending early is appreciated. If you see a post by someone else that you think fits the concept, send it in (but insert a note to me that it is not your own post).
Berry Go Round covers all thing botanical. That is, featured articles should just be about plants, from cells & chemistry to plant ecology and communities. Pictures can also be submitted whenever a minimum amount of information is given (such as scientific name, family and the like), and recipes may also be featured if the main ingredient is a plant and provided a decent botanical account follows.
So yes – small plants, big plants, common plants, rare plants, extinct or extant, mosses, liverworts, horsetails, ferns, with or without flowers, microscopic or giant trees – all of them are eligible. Biochemistry, molecular, cellular and developmental biology, physiology, behavior (yup, plants behave), evolution, genetics, paleontology, biogeography, taxonomy/systematics, ecology, conservation – anything goes. It can focus on a recent finding, or a historical account, it can explain the basics, or it can be a timeless truth, it can be basic or applied, or you can write a personal account of awe in encountering a baobab for the first time in your life.
Apart from text, we welcome original art, illustration, photography, cartoons, podcasts, videos, animations, infographics or any other forms of multimedia (especially if all mixed into a single post). If you are using someone else’s art, please properly credit and link to the original artist in your posts.
Still digging myself out of dozens of “starred” must-reply-in-detail emails after ScienceOnline2012, as well as editing some blog posts and articles, etc, before I get back into my regular blogging routine. I am on the train to NYC right now, to work in the office for a few days, attend meetings, meet with colleagues, etc., as well as attend a couple of classes at NYU. But in the evenings, there are plenty of cool events this week, and I intend to go to these three:
A Motherās Love: Memoirs in the Digital Age – A Valentineās Day event about family, love and heartbreak, brought to you by The Atavist. February 14 at Melville House, 145 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY at 6:30 p.m. Featuring: Clive Thompson, Cris Beam and David Dobbs.
“Brains” – a Story Collider storytelling event: Wednesday the 15th of February, 2012, at Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY.
With these three events attracting some of the same crowd, we feel there is no need to organize an additional #NYCSciTweetUp – let’s assume that all three events combined also serve as one long three-day tweetup.
On your way to ScienceOnline2012, your plane finally lands at Raleigh-Durham International airport. While you slowly taxi to the gate, what do you do? Naturally, you turn on your smart-phone, open up your favorite Twitter app, and announce to the world: “#scio12 – I have landed at RDU. Anyone else here? Want to share a ride to the hotel?”.
If you are lucky, you’ll find a couple of other attendees have landed at about the same time, so you meet them at the baggage claim (fortunately, Terminal 1 is under renovation so everyone had to land at the same over-crowded Terminal 2), and share a shuttle or cab into town.
This is the first moment of serendipitous meetings, as you introduce yourselves to each other, who are you, where you come from, what you do, what brings you to ScienceOnline… you just made your first #scio12 friends.
Twenty minutes later, your taxi pulls up at the Doubletree/Brownstone hotel. As you and your fellow passengers exit the car and start gathering your luggage, this tall, skinny, bespectacled, excitable creature runs out of the hotel, waiving his arms, and starts hugging everyone. Oh, that must be Bora! So, you get a hug. And naturally, the next thing you do is take your iPhone out again and tweet: “#scio12 has officially started: #IhuggedBora!”
And so the adventure begins… (most of the images in this post are thumbnails – click to see them larger)
The Close-contact community
In 2007 we met at UNC. The following four years, we convened at the wonderfully scienc-ey Sigma Xi. This year we moved to McKimmon Center at NCSU. We keep moving to bigger spaces, but our community keeps getting larger, so the density remains high. Thus, wherever we met, we were always tightly close together, rubbing shoulders with each other. There are hugs (not just with me, but among others).
This is me, getting a hug from the NCSU chancellor – photo by Tim Skellet:
There is some (though controversial) research showing that hugging and close contact increase mutual trust, thus strengthening the community. Close proximity to friends, by increasing oxytocin levels, may help people get bolder, perhaps speak up at conferences, which is a good thing at unconferences like ours.
But there is a flip-side to this coin. Strengthening of bonds within an in-group weakens the bonds to people outside of it. If you are all hugged-out at #scio12, are you then suspicious of perfectly nice passers-by on the streets of Raleigh as you are walking to a restaurant? Are you going to tip your waitress less because she is not a part of the in-group? Are you more unpleasant when replying to emails, tweets or blog comments by people who are not at the conference? We certainly do not want that side-effect to happen!
And then there is the question of new people at the meeting. As veterans, now old friends, hug each other (and me), do the newbies feel left out? Are they now out-group and treated as such by the in-group? Judging from the feedback, generally not, but at least initially some may feel that way until they realize how welcome they are by everyone else. Those are some hard questions we want to ask (and I asked a few times on Twitter after the conference), because we do not want anyone to feel left out – at the conference physically, or watching from afar online.
The introvert reaction to #IhuggedBora
With the fast growth of the conference, there were more newbies attending this year than repeat offenders veterans. This had a potential of changing the atmosphere of the conference, so we did our best to prepare the new people, as well as to recruit the veterans to actively welcome new people to the community. Blog posts by Pascale, Zuska, Janet and me, as well as asking the question on Twitter, we hope, helped new people prepare better for what they will be experiencing. The “SXSW of science”, “SciFoo, but democratic”, The Bonnaroo of the Blogosphere, or “Burning Man for scientists” – those are some comparisons made with ScienceOnline over the years (and see for yourself), so we wanted to make sure that new attendees understood this well in advance.
But not everyone is ready for such a close-contact and furiously-paced event. Some people are introverted. Others are shy. Some may be both introverted and shy. Some may be suffering from the impostor syndrome at the beginning, not knowing if they fully belong to this community. Some are not active on Twitter (or not on Twitter at all – 64 did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form, and most of them I could not find there with searching either) and thus may not know the rest of the community well yet.
I probably have mild Aspergers (not diagnosed, but people who know me very well – including a psychiatrist – agree that all signs are there), so had to spend decades studying people’s body language and training myself to recognize subtle cues and respond appropriately. As people walk in, especially new people, I have to quickly figure out if the person will be comfortable getting a hug from me or not. I don’t want to assault anyone, or make anyone uncomfortable. I had to make fast to-hug-or-not-to-hug decisions on the fly, and I hope my success rate is not too bad. So some people got a handshake or a nice word instead. Some of the same people gave me spontaneous hugs three days later, some did not. I want everyone to be comfortable and to get the most they can from the conference. Not everyone is here in order to become my personal friend (Dunbar be damned) and that is OK.
But not getting hugged may make people feel like they are not a part of the in-group. Perhaps there is a hugged circle, and an un-hugged outside group. This would be against the ethos of our meeting, but this is the BlogTogether spirit that was the original inspiration to the conference – that being in the same space as others, with hugging or handshakes or just eye contact, helps us know more about each other and affects our online relationships. But I want to try something different next year. I have no idea how and when #IhuggedBora tradition started (a couple of years ago), and it is fun, and I like it, and many others like it. But there should be a way for non-hugged people to feel just as welcome. Perhaps a second hashtag?
Someone on Twitter suggested high-fiving. But then I remembered when I first arrived in the USA I was unfamiliar with the gesture. I worked at a horse farm, working with young horses in the mornings and teaching riding school in the afternoons. There were a couple of big, burly guys working at the barn, feeding horses and such. They would come down the aisle of the barn, raise their hands and say “Hi, five” and I would step to the side and do this:
Hi Five!
I had no idea I was supposed to come toward them and that our palms were supposed to meet! Obviously, a cultural difference…
Perhaps this Web-savvy community has seen the “Like” button enough times to understand the “thumbs-up” gesture (despite the thumbs-up gesture being considered rude in some cultures)?
Thumbs up!
We have a year to think about this, and welcome all of your feedback, but we will definitely ponder a number of ideas on how to make the event more comfortable for people who are new, shy, introvert, or just plain exhausted and overstimulated.
Perhaps we can designate a “silent room” where there is no talking, where people can come in for a few minutes to recharge their batteries (both their mental batteries, and those charging their elecronic devices), get online and write in peace, perhaps take a nap, meditate, do some yoga….the Cafe room is awesome for interactions, but it is anything but quiet.
We may also try to do some veteran-n00b pairings ahead of time, essentially providing each new attendee (or at least the students, or people who indicate at registration they would like this) with a “go to” person for questions and help, perhaps starting the conference with an event designed to get the pairs to meet each other for a few minutes. A broader, speed-meeting rotation (like speed-dating events) to get people to break the ice and talk to someone new, may also be considered.
At ScienceWriters meetings, there are all sorts of ribbons one can attach to the name-tag, including “first-timer” and “talk to me”, the latter indicating a veteran willing to field questions or help the new people. Perhaps we can do something similar.
And of course, serendipitous meetings of small groups of new people are already embedded in the program – random banquet seating, bus rides to and from the hotel, tours you sign up for without knowing who else will be going there with you, chairs all over the Cafe room and the main hallway, parties at the hotel, going out for dinner at a restaurant – opportunities for talking to new people one-on-one or in small groups are numerous.
Obviously, we are obsessed with details. Not just because it frees you up to focus on the proceedings, but because not paying attention to detail can actively hinder and spoil the experience for some people.
Diversity
We had attendees from 40 states of the USA (if you count D.C. as a state), five Canadian provinces, and seven other countries.
Unsurprisingly for the host state that is a hotbed of science and technology, North Carolina was represented by 119 people (plus four locals who snuck in for a single session without registering, but that is OK). There were 56 attendees from New York, 34 from California, 21 from Massachussets, 15 from Washington D.C., 14 from Maryland, 13 from Virginia, 12 from Illinois, and 10 from Wisconsin. There were also representatives from Pennsylvania (9), Washington State (8), Minnesota (7), Florida and Colorado (6 each), Arizona, Indiana, Montana and Connecticut (5 each), Ohio and Texas (4 each), Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Utah (2 each), and one person each from Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Maine, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.
Canadians were represented by 8 Ontarians, 4 people from British Columbia, 3 from Alberta, and one each from Quebec and Nova Scotia. From other continents, we had 13 guests from the U.K., 5 from Germany, two from Denmark, and one each from the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Mauritius. Of course, those are people’s current addresses. If we asked for the place of origin, it would have been even more geographically distributed (Peru, Hong Kong, Costa Rica…). After all, Nadja Popovich and I spoke Serbian to each other at the conference, as we were both born in Belgrade (which also continues the tradition of having someone from Serbia every year)…
The diversity of people attending ScienceOnline, in terms of geography, gender, race, ethnicity or culture, means that everyone brought something different to the meeting – different background, history and culture, different angles and goals and needs. While here, they cross-fertilized their ideas, told their stories and learned from others. This also means that people have gone home to all those distant places and are now sharing what they learned, teaching, influencing their colleagues, neighbors and students, thus enlarging this community even more.
On the wearing of many hats
According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers (high time to defenestrate the notion that this is a ‘bloggers conference’ when half the people don’t blog), 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.
Thus, the success in cross-fertilization of ideas at ScienceOnline is not just due to it being a rare event bringing together people who do different things in science, e.g,. researchers, teachers, journalists, bloggers, web developers, publishers, public information officers, librarians, artists, historians, students, etc. but because almost everyone at the meeting is currently (or has experiences in the past of being) in multiple roles. Not because people here wear different hats, but because everyone wears many hats.
There was an interesting moment at the end of the closing plenary panel, moderated by David Kroll with panelists Maggie Koerth-Baker, Seth Mnookin and myself. Someone in the audience grumbled that the scientists were not represented on the panel. David and I looked at each other in puzzlement. David just boxed up his lab equipment a couple of weeks before the event, moving from full-time research to full-time communication. How is he so suddenly not a scientist any more?
Although most of us at ScienceOnline play multiple roles, it seems that people have an automatic tendency to assign only a single “profession” to each other, mainly guided by the most recent place of employment. Some people think of me as a freewheeling, provocative blogger. Others think of me as a ‘journalist’ because I am an editor at a respected media entity. Others think of me primarily as an educator because I teach BIO101 to adult students and blog my lecture notes and am a Visiting Faculty at NYU school of journalism.
I am all of that, for sure. But if you forced me to identify myself with just a single word, I would easily choose this one: “scientist”. Just because I haven’t messed around a lab for a decade does not mysteriously make me a non-scientist. ‘Once a scientist always a scientist’, because being a scientist is not a profession but a worldview. I cannot quit being a scientist now. Not to mention that I still have research collaborations that occasionally lead to publication. Which is why I tend to take the scientists’ side in various scientists vs. journalists debates.
The realization, after the conference already ended, that we are all a bunch of misfits, pioneers, and generally crazy risk-takers, led to an amazing new hashtag – #IamScience. Inspired by unlikely career trajectory of Mireya Mayor, our keynote speaker, Kevin Zelnio finally let it all out – an incredible and courageous story of his life and how he got into science, and into and out of a research career. Hundreds of tweets, and dozens of blog posts are being now assembled on a Tumblr blog, while Allie Wilkinson started a photo-Tumblr with pictures of scientists – This Is What A Scientist Looks Like – and Mindy Weisberger put together a video:
There are many blog posts already posted, some old some new, and here is just a small sample of posts I could find most easily: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
It seems that #scio12 attendees are not the only ones with unusual and circuitous career trajectories in and out of science. Perhaps the “usual” path is the most unusual of all. There is a lesson in this somewhere….
Move aside, C.P.Snow, we bridged dozens of cultures
Writing text is not the only way of communicating science. And it can only reach certain audiences. There are many other ways to communicate science, either independently or in conjunction with text, each method potentially reaching a different segment of the target population: art, illustration, photography, maps, data visualization, sounds, music, animation, video, games…possibilities are endless.
We’ve always had sessions on art and video, but this year we really upped the ante. There was a whole slew of workshops on art, photography, data visualization, making maps, makingvideos, etc, and many sessions discussed the relationship between science and various areas of art, photography and music.
Artists submitted their art for the Art Contest. Their submissions were projected on a screen in the Cafe room and were given prizes in the end. Videographers, likewise, sent in their work ahead of time and their videos were projected during the Film Festival, again with prizes.
Maggie Pingolt, Russ Creech and Brian Crawford took most of the “official” photos at the conference, but others did their share as well. Probably the most popular was the #youhavebeenframed series – many of the people in those photos now use the images as their new Twitter avatars.
If you look at Flickr sets tagged with scio12 or scienceonline2012 or YouTube videos tagged with scio12, you will see that many participants used the conference to practice their skills – some with amazing results.
Podcasts are still coming out, but listen to Nadja Popovich’s official ones here. Finally, several videos were made at the venue, some still in production, some embedded into this post, others easily found on YouTube.
And then….oh my! Some attendees decided to make art permanent, on their own bodies! They went to Dogstar Tattoo Company for a Science Ink tour. After hearing Carl Zimmer talk about the history of tattooing, and having his book signed, several participants got their own tattoos (less courageous of us got temporary tattoos, provided to everyone at registration).
From the Raleigh News & Observer: Rebecca Guenard, center, and Russ Creech, left, watch as Christie Wilcox, who is getting her PHd at the University of Hawaii, gets a lionfish tattoo from Kathryn Moore at Dogstar Tattoo Company in Durham Friday, January 20, 2012. Wilcox is one of the attendees in the ScienceOnline2012 conference in Raleigh.
And it is not just art – history, philosophy, sociology, ethics, politics, mathematics, literary narrative and humor kept cropping up in many sessions and events, some dedicated to it, some not. Music had its own session, but also made an appearance in discussion of crafting a longform narrative, in a session on data journalism, and in discussions of video. And at the Open Mic, we could see that many scientists and science communicators have tremendousmusical talents.
Math had its own two sessions and two Blitz-talks, yet also invaded many other talks and sessions, from narrative to altmetrics. I doubt anyone at #scio12 is such a stereotypical data-robot not to be moved and impressed by this interweaving of a whole slew of ‘cultures’. After all, it’s all about context. Person most excited exiting the altmetrics Blitz-talk was a historian! If years of library digging – stuff that makes a PhDs in history – can be replaced by a few clicks to get patterns of citations and mentions over time, then historians can finally focus on the real deal: analysis and interpretation of such patterns. Can you imagine the time-saving and re-focus that discipline can have?
Storytelling, though part of the discussion in several sessions, also had a DIY component – the Monti storytelling show during the banquet. Humor was discussed in a dedicated session (as well as in a couple of others), and then there was Brian Malow, switching from theory to practice, doing stand-up science comedy (which also included art) during lunch.
Heck, even sports snuck in somehow – we all got an introduction to the wonderful world of curling.
To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before…
A lot of the discussion at ScienceOnline2012 was, without stating so overtly, about the distinction between push and pull strategies for reaching new audiences. We are pretty happy with what we can do – and the quality of work – at science-dedicated venues, be it the science section of NYTimes, or pop-sci magazines, or specialized science radio shows, or blogs, podcasts and websites. People working at such venues tend to be good at what they do and they tend to be… at ScienceOnline!
As the now famous diagram by Ed Yong demonstrates – the good scientists and good journalists talk to each other about bad scientists and bad journalists who are conspicuously absent. But those bad scientists and journalists have to be reached or replaced. How? They work in mass media we cannot penetrate, addressing audiences we cannot reach. How do we also get there and reach those same vast audiences with well-done science stories?
It’s hard, but it can be done. There were more than several people at the meeting who do it, daily or occasionally. They have great success and their new audiences appreciate them. The resistance mostly comes from our own ranks!
When a scientist publishes text and data in a scientific paper (especially behind a paywall), the audience is miniscule and the effect on popular understanding of science and trust in scientists is zero. But when a scientist decides to show up in the media as a source, s/he gets tagged as a “media whore” by the colleagues in the department (or in the entire discipline). The ‘Sagan-Gould effect’. If you popularize science, your research must be suspicious, right?
And if on top of appearing in traditional media you also do some of your own blogging, or engagement on social networks, the eye-rolling and ‘tsk-tsk’-ing must be endless. You may have to do this pseudonymously because your PI or your Department Head may explicitly forbid online engagement. In some places it is the government that prohibits scientists from talking to the media. It takes some courage to go ahead and do it anyway. The problem is not the audience, but one’s bosses and colleagues. People who do this anyway are at ScienceOnline. But how do we reach people who are too afraid to do this – they are too afraid to come to ScienceOnline as well!
Scientists are also chastised by their colleagues if they voice a political opinion, even if it comes to policies that directly affect them, e.g, opposing the RWA bill. The instinct to present an apolitical face is strong among scientists (as well as many journalists), with sometimes devastating consequences.
Other science communicators push the envelope by doing something else – publishing in unlikely venues or trying to reach new audiences by going where those audiences are.
You may go where the cheerleading fans are, then serve them science. The audiences love it, the traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
A reader of Playboy magazine may read it for the Vonnegut stories, but then gets served science. The target audience loves it. The traditional science communicators accuse you of sexism.
Your audience may go to BlogHer to get sex advice, and get served science. The audience loves it. The traditional science communicators think you are not really up to par.
Your audience may follow the links to hear some hip-hop, and there they get served science. The audiences love it, but since the traditional communicators do not grok that culture, they may not think you are good enough. Seriously?
You start pushing hard science and skepticism at the super-popular website infamous for its richness of dangerous medical quackery and ridiculous New Age pseudoscience. The audience laps it up. The traditional science communicators are skeptical.
You may have an unusual background, unusual career, unusual “looks” for a scientist, more balls and ovaries than the remaining 456 people in the room for the Keynote lecture, go where most guys have no courage to go, face certain death five times, discover a new species, still do your own lab science, are a role-model for balancing career with life as a parent, but since you are on TV, with your own show, this must mean that you are a bad scientist or no scientist at all, right? It does not matter that TV is the hardest medium to penetrate, and the hardestmedium to get science done right (it is a very male, ego-driven culture, full of people who “know what works on TV” and thus will not listen), and that we are all saying that someone’s gotta do it because everyone watches TV – that’s where the real “mass” audience is. But when someone does, and does it well, we are all up in arms? We invited Mireya to do the keynote specifically to break those biases among ourselves. It seems it worked. And everyone who got to chat with her during the remainder of the meeting has a new appreciation for her as a person with passion, for her science, for her work as a science communicator, for her groundedness and level-headedness, sense of humor and overall humanity. She’ll be back next year, as one of us, doing something fun, TBD.
If we want to reach broader audiences, we have to get out of our own comfort zones, adopt the cultures of those audiences, and serve them science wherever they are, in ways they can like and appreciate. Hard to do. But if the ScienceOnline community does not lead the way, who will? We may think, from our perspectives, that some of those cultures are imperfect for various, often valid reasons (e.g., sexism). But are we going to avoid communicating science to all the people we deem imperfect? If so, all we are left is our own echo-chamber. We need to break out of it – isn’t that what the Web is good for?
We keep saying that we should divert attention of people who are browsing the Web looking for celebrity gossip, or politics, or attractive human forms, to cool science stories instead. Let’s do even more of that! And support those of us who are trying.
Your feedback
So far, 186 out of 457 attendees responded to the feedback form. If you have not yet done so, please do it now (we’ll later have a separate feedback form for people who attended virtually).
We read your responses very carefully every year, many times throughout the year, and try to address the issues you identify, or incorporate your ideas. Your feedback is extremely valuable to us so we can always try to make the conference better than the previous year.
I take it as a sign of generally even and high quality of the program that so many sessions are picked as the “strongest point” or “highlight” of the conference, instead of one or two sessions dominating that question. On the other hand, each session that was identified as “weakest point” by some people was also touted as the best session by someone else – just goes to show that tastes differ.
This also tells me I need to work closer with moderators in making descriptions of sessions as crystal-clear as possible as to what exactly they will cover, at which level, for which audiences (though unconference format can lead to a different session anyway), so people have a better idea what to expect. And some of the feedback noted serendipity – attending a session that was very different from expected and learning a lot from it nonetheless. We are also happy that many informal events got frequent mentions as highlights – Keynote, The Monti, comedy lunch, several tours, evening at the Museum…
The reaction to the Keynote was overwhelmingly positive. Some extremely positive. About a dozen respondents (all women) replied in a similar vein – they came in with trepidation and skepticism and came out enlightened and with their worlds turned upside-down, the same reaction Zuska wrote about in public. And Janet’s banquet story was a perfect book-end to it as well. There were only three strongly negative responses, including one by a person who did not attend the Keynote or talk to Mireya in person, carefully protecting one’s a priori biases from potential challenge.
And every time we get an email notification that a new feedback form came in, we have the urge to respond, to answer your questions. I will not break your anonymity, but I can speak to some concerns in general terms. In some cases, our reaction is “Hey, we sent out this information in advance, you should have read our email messages”. In other cases we think “Oh well, we have to make sure to use ALL methods of communication, and repeatedly so, and not hope that one tl:dr email and a few tweets are sufficient.
Different people have different communications habits, and different personal schedules (travel, work, teaching, ups and downs in ability to respond), so each piece of information needs to be sent out multiple times by email, Twitter, G+, Facebook, blog, etc., in order to reach everyone and make sure that everyone has all the information in timely manner. As I noted above, 64 attendees did not enter a Twitter account into their registration form (and most of those really are not on Twitter), while some others may use it rarely, or are new to the platform and still do not know how to follow hashtags and lists well. So Twitter, while it reaches most of our participants, does not reach 100% and we need to keep that in mind.
For many other questions, comments and suggestions in the forms, we have a generic response: “Yes, we wanted to do that, but could not due to reasons X, Y and Z”, where X = insufficient funds, Y = insufficient time/manpower, and Z = there are legal or administrative barriers to doing this.
– Hotel. It would be great (and so much easier for us and everyone) if all the attendees were housed at the same hotel. We’ll try to do that for next year. Now that Doubletree has survived us once, saw that we can fill the hotel during off-season, make a little noise but no damage, and can clean up the bar supplies every night, I bet they will like to have us back again next year (though not sure they have enough room for all of us). We can negotiate with them earlier in the year for more rooms for everyone.
– Shuttles. We’d love to have more buses going at more times, but that is an extremely expensive part of our budget. As a quarter of our attendees are locals, we can try to summon them to do more carpooling of guests next time. Or if a good sponsor comes along, we can perhaps provide more buses.
– Banquet. It is absolutely wonderful working with the McKimmon crew and the NCSU people. It is due to them that we could have a small miracle of actually serving alcoholic drinks at the banquet. McKimmon is on state property and has to abide by state laws and regulations. Serving alcohol requires a lot of paperwork being approved by several layers of bureaucracy, but our hosts helped us navigate that potential quagmire with grace and ease.
As you know, Doubletree/Brownstone hotel was just renovated… except the ballroom which is still under renovation. By this time next year, their ballroom will be looking good again, so perhaps we can have the banquet there, allowing us to spend more time there, have a greater variety of food and drinks, and not worry about transportation to and from it. This can have an additional effect of bringing the locals to the hotel bar to mingle with the guests from out of town a little more.
– Technical stuff. There were some glitches in some sessions – screens going up, laptops requiring passwords we were not given etc. Happens when one moves to a new building after four years of intimate familiarity with every detail of the old building. The McKimmon crew is very responsive and is actively seeking our feedback. I am sure those problems will be eliminated by next year (but, as is normal with technology, who knows what new problems will arise).
– Wifi. This is the third year in a row that our friends from SignalShare provided wifi for us (I bet they are providing wifi for SuperBowl as I write this – they’ll read this later). It rocks! With 450 highly-connected people constantly uploading and downloading stuff, tweeting, blogging, etc., no building can support our conference with its native wifi.
It seems from the feedback forms that one or two people erroneously chose one of the NCSU or McKimmon wifis instead of the official “ScienceOnline2012” one, in which case they reported some slow-downs and hiccups. We’ll try to make sure to communicate this little detail repeatedly next year, so people know what to do. Despite getting a good deal on this from our neighborly crew, wifi is one of the biggest items in our budget – if your organization is interested in sponsoring wifi next year (with the banner with your name occasionally showing up at the bottom – just start scrolling and it disappears), let us know as soon as you can.
– Livestreaming and recording. This is by far the most expensive item on our list and this year we just did not have the funds to do it. We tried until the very last day to find a sponsor (we had people lined up, ready to do it) but it did not materialize. In retrospect, we should have abandoned the idea earlier and focused more strongly on Plan B – providing a bunch of tripods and Flip cameras and asking our student-volunteers to record all the sessions and instantly upload them.
This way, we had to do it in a rush and rely on voluntary action of participants. We brought in a few Flips and issued a call for people to come and get them and to film sessions. Luckily, several people did, so many sessions are now online (just search YouTube for “scio12“). Hopefully a couple of generous sponsors will come in to fund this important service next year, or if the date is right we may explore a partnership with the Elon University school of journalism and hire their students to do this – livestreaming and recording are essential for including the virtual participants.
– Twitter and screens. We wanted to have a big screen with Twitterfall in the hallway, as well as to project the Art Contest entries on a larger screen, but this also fell by the wayside due to insufficient funds. Hopefully next year…
Twitter.com is actively blocking people from collecting tweets. A Twapperkeeper with about 11,000+ tweets generated before the conference is now gone, but I copied and pasted them all into an RTF document. There is roughly a day-long break during Tue-Wed of active tweeting where we have no collection I know of. There were apparently more than 17,000 tweets generated during the conference itself. And many more since then.
I have all of those tweets saved in my Gmail – I use tweetymail.com service which sends me notifications whenever the #scio12 hastag is used, usually sending it in batches of 20-100 tweets. That is still hundreds (perhaps thousands) of email notifications, but I have them and if I find a free hour or two I may also copy them into an RTF file – useless for Storifys, but if anyone has a use for them, let me know and I can compile and send. Finally, there are some collected subsets of tweets here, here and here that you may be able to use for Storifys, stats, etc.
– Babysitting. We want to make the conference family friendly. There were several kids (and even babies) at the conference – luckily we had LEGOs and plenty of fresh fruit. Unfortunately, we cannot legally organize or hire babysitters and have the kids be taken care at McKimmon. The best we can do is provide information in advance, e.g., names and recommendations for local babysitters or services, and let the parents make their own arrangements. We will also look into options for science-themed kids programing off-campus, since we are not allowed to make any such arrangements on campus.
– Cafe room. Big hit of the conference. Kudos to Karyn for her creative vision in organizing this space. LEGOs, coffee, food, tables for laptops, comfy chairs for chatting, power strips, books, art, bones, armpit swabs, more coffee, and the man behind the curtain! Definitely the center of activity for the entire conference, a place for serendipitous encounter and fun conversations.
– Swag. Most people are very happy with our decision to reduce the swag from an enormous bag of stuff to a nifty little notebook filled with stickers and temporary tattoos. The book lottery was a huge hit as well. So was the ThinkGeek swag served for the banquet dinner. But we were floored as to how many people mentioned in their feedback forms how much they loved the automatic dispensers of M&Ms with the #scio12 and Mendeley logos. Note to self: repeat something like this next year.
Next year
Yes, we will do this again next year. We do not have the date yet. First we need to confirm that McKimmon will have us again, then see what is on their calendar. It will be at roughly the same time – second half of January or perhaps very early February. Different people have different dates for their first day of classes, or attend different conferences. Still, once February comes, the density of other conferences becomes so high, we are bound to conflict with many of them. But let us know about the big ones that our attendees are likely to attend in large numbers, e.g., TAM or SICB.
At this point, there are 209 names on the waitlist. We did not “clean it up” as we went, so a couple of dozen of those people actually registered and attended, but that is still a large number. The mention and link in the New York Times article earlier in the week sent a flurry of new applicants to the waitlist, some as late as Saturday afternoon when the conference was already wrapping up. I guess people know that getting on the waitlist also automatically means getting on our mailing list, so they can get alerts in advance for the next year.
So, what do we do next? It seems that with 457 people we have reached the limit. Anything bigger than that and there is no way the intimate feel of the meeting can remain. Already a common theme on Twitter, after the conference ended, was people lamenting missing meeting some of the others.
In his post, Ed Yong stresses that we “rig things so that the most passionate people show up”. But that is only half of the picture – as I explained a couple of weeks ago, the excitable and tuned-in folks are essential but not sufficient for the success of the conference. Yes, they help shape the program throughout the year, they hit the ground running on Day One, they know how to do the ‘unconference’ method of leading sessions, they are more than welcoming to the newbies, but without newbies there would be no ScienceOnline. They refresh us every year. They bring in new ideas. They connect us to different communities back home once they leave.
They may be exactly the kind of people we want – non-blogging scientists, “bad” journalists, high school students, senior citizens with decades of media experience under their belts, as well as representatives of different groups, cultures or subcultures that can inject new ways of thinking into our community. They may belong to groups that are traditionally not welcome at the table so they may be reluctant to push their way in by being super-fast during registration times, but rather need to be invited, with a genuine welcome they can trust.
So we actually “rig things” so we get a little bit of both – as you could see this year: half veterans, half new people, more than half women, less than half bloggers or journalists, a quarter locals, many representatives of different scientific, geographic, professional or ethnic communities. The excitable veterans may fill first 100 slots within two minutes, but there are ways to bring in others as well – as moderators of sessions, as volunteers, as scholarship recipients, as Keynote speakers or Blitz-talk presenters. As the conference grows, and more and more people really, truly want to be here, this task becomes more difficult. We welcome other ideas that can help this happen.
As I also explained a couple of weeks ago, we do not want to change our funding methods. We don’t want to accept a large sponsorship from a large company that can then turn around and start shaping the program, e.g., insisting their CEO gives the Keynote lecture, or veto-ing a session. And we don’t want to substantially increase the registration fee because it is important to us to provide few barriers to people who cannot really afford to come here – we’d rather help them by waiving the fee and providing travel grants.
But this does not scale well. The registration fee does not pay for the participant. For $150 (or $75 if you are student), you get 6-7 complete meals, three whole days of coffee and snacks, rocking wifi, free transportation, entertainment, swag, books, personalized M&Ms, the Keynote speaker, use of equipment, and a good feeling that your fee or personal donation went toward travel grants for students, people without steady jobs, or people traveling from other continents. All of that needs to be sponsored and we prefer to have many small sponsors, each paying for one element of the event, rather than one or two huge sponsors who cover everything. Thus, we have to work hard to use every single dollar in the best possible way, often pondering late at night what would be the best use of the limited funds we have. We are pondering alternative methods of funding as well – from crowdfunding to setting up a swag store – and are interested in your thoughts.
According to Jeff Jarvis and his commenters, at this point, a popular conference can go in two ways: it can keep growing, like SXSW, and become more corporate and less of a community event; or it can limit the growth, like TED, and become exclusive, expensive and elitist. We don’t want to go either way.
It is likely, if the trend continues, that next year we’ll have more people stuck (and unhappy) on the waitlist than people registered. Thus, doing much more to include virtual participants is essential. We are also working on releasing some of that pressure by organizing additional events, either by ourselves, or in partnership with other organizations like Nature Publishing Group, or releasing our brand name to other groups to organize on their own. Sorta like TEDx events soften the exclusivity of the original TED, or the way 140conf has branched out to different cities and topics.
There are three potential models for this. One is an annual large event in other cities, like Science Online London. Another is a smaller monthly event with a single evening session, modeled after Science Online NYC. The third is a completely informal gather-and-drink monthly event, like #NYCSciTweetUp (now already copied in Washington DC and in Chicago, with Raleigh and Seattle doing some thinking about doing the same). We are exploring all of these options with potential partners for San Francisco this year, and potentially Austin, Chicago, Vancouver, Belgrade and Antananarivo in the future. Also, a topical Science Online Teen (#sciojr) is being planned for New York City in 2013. Events that occur entirely online are not out of the question, either.
Call to action
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to get ScienceOnline to slowly move from just talking to also doing. This year we did it – I think quite successfully – with art, photography, music, podcasting and video, as I already described above in the “bridging the cultures” subheading. In each of these areas we had workshops where people learned new skills, sessions where people discussed the applications of these skills, and events or opportunities to practice those skills on the spot.
Next year we want to do more. This year moderators got a gentle nudge to try to have goals, hopefully actionable goals, for their sessions. Next year, we’ll work in advance to make sure that some such actions materialize. There is already a discussion about a Hackaton on the 2013 wiki, with potentially multiple activities – some involving coding, some involving online activity not requiring coding skills, and some involving offline activity (yes, this year we had LEGO blocks for practice, but no clear goal as to what to do with them).
We are also interested in heeding Dave Wescott’s call for preparing action in countering politically motivated anti-science movements, both those coming from the Right (GW denialism, creationism, ban on stem cell research, etc.) and those coming from the Left (animal rights terrorism, anti-vaccination movement, New Age woo, anti-GMO-foods, etc.) – the two may require different strategies. Suggestions as to how to do this right are welcome – or just add ideas to the wiki.
Citizen Science projects are especially of interest to us. Last year, a number of participants got their navels swabbed, and the bacteria from them subsequently cultured. This year, the people from Rob Dunn’s lab were back, taking samples from the armpits. I am afraid to ask which orifice they intend to sample next year…and we hope we can do some other stuff as well.
Inspiration
We really like the way ScienceOnline inspires people to do more, or to start new projects with people they just met, or dig into information they first heard at the conference and write about it in greater depth later.
In the years past, many such projects had their first seeds at our meeting, and often were officially announced at the same meeting a year after. For example, ScienceSeeker was unveiled at last year’s conference, while some nifty upgrades were announced during this one.
This year, I understand that the session on using music and geometry to craft longform pieces will soon result in a webinar of sorts. Rachel Nuwer was inspired by the Lemur tour to dig deeper. Robin Lloyd and Matt Shipman were impressed by the Forensic Anthropology tour (as well as the table of bones the lab brought to McKimmon Center). Helen Chappel, Elizabeth Preston, Anna Kuchment and Brian Switek heard or saw something new and quirky at the two (Raleigh and Durham) Museum tours and wrote pieces with more details.
That’s the spirit!
See the current listing of blog and media coverage of #scio12 (and add any missing links if you know of them, please). If anything else comes out of the meeting, please let us know. And see you online, for the online year-long #scio13 until we meet again in person next January.
I posted only 6 times in January. That is, on A Blog Around The Clock only (not counting the posts on The Network Central, The SA Incubator, Video of the Week, Image of the Week, or editing Guest Blog and Expeditions). I guess I was just too busy with ScienceOnline2012 and managing the rest of the blogs…. But here they are:
Welcome to the newest edition of Berry Go Round, a blog carnival devoted to highlighting recent blog posts about any and every aspect of plant life. This is the third time I am hosting BRG (see #7 and #31) which is not so bad for a zoologist š
A Blog Around The Clock 