Drosophila Karaoke

My students do so many awesome things!

My former doctoral student Birgit Brüggemeier, who got her doctoral degree as part of my group, has a very cool art project called "Drosophila Karaoke Bar" (which, I suppose, is the modern version of of her old Drosophila Disco).

In the installation, visitors can interact with flies by speaking into a microphone. Their speech is then electronically remixed with fruit fly song and played back to flies who visitors watch on a screen. Very cool!

Right now, it is being exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Vilnius. Later this year, it will be exhibited at Ars Electronica in Linz, which is one of the world's largest media-art events.

Gummy Bear Genetics

Stripe orientation appears to be independent of genetic inheritance in Gummy Bears.

Gummy Bear genetics pic.twitter.com/XEkHuoSAz2

— Scott Kerr (@scott_kerr) February 25, 2018

A Fine-Scale, Historically Awesome, Genetic Map of the U.K.

A new genetic map of the U.K., which is the product of several-years-long collaboration between geneticists, historians, and others. This looks really neat, and I recommend looking at the map at the other end of the link.

The first line of the news article articulates how cool this is: A remarkable new map of Britain shows how the nation was forged by successive waves of immigration from continental Europe over 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

Again quoting the article: Geneticists and historians collaborated closely on the 10-years project and have been astonished to find that patterns in the DNA of Britons living today reflect historical events going back centuries, and in some cases millennia. Take a look in the news article for some specific examples.

I am sure that there is a ton more than one can do with the data---and of course, I wonder how much one can improve on the analysis (and, without having looked with seriousness at the Nature article, naturally I have no scientific opinion on its correctness). Many of the coauthors are my colleagues at Oxford, so maybe I will eventually have a chance to play with the data? :)

Update: Taking a quick look at the paper, one could certainly try to use more sophisticated clustering methods. Whether that would have any effect on the qualitative conclusions remains to be seen.

A More General Set of Branching Processes Now Give Realistic Processes

Sometimes the outcome of important legislation has unintended consequences---like the fact that a more general set of branching processes than before now give realistic models of genetic transmission.

Really, all governments should determine the outcome of legislation based on what makes more mathematical models into realistic models. :)

(More seriously, I'm glad to see this approved for nonmathematical reasons.)

Epigenetics and Enhanced Brain Connectivity from Reading a Good Book

These are actually from two separate series of studies --- and the former technically is referring to a single study --- but they have in common that they're both really interesting and both with strong connections to neuroscience (which of course has tons of cool things up its sleeves).

Epigenetics sounds like science fiction, and it includes behavioral epigenetics, which refers to genetic experiences that an animal (including humans) can have based on experiences of their ancestors. (You may be interested in the wikipedia entry on epigenetics.) It is also easy to see why this is a controversial subject.

Meanwhile, it was demonstrated in a recent study that brain connectivity (in the resting state) can increase for 5 days after reading an engaging novel. The popular article to which I have linked indicates that "function" increases, but it is a leap to go from the conclusion of increasing connectivity (which one can measure, e.g., using tools from network analysis) to that of increasing function. I only looked at the paper very briefly, but from a scientific perspective I am currently much more comfortable claiming the former than the latter. Note, however, that this is very consistent with loads of anecdotal evidence and what many people have claimed about their own reading experiences for a very long time. I view it as somewhat akin to exercise and do think the strong form of the big-picture conclusion to be pretty damn likely (and the result is both sensible and intuitive), but the bar for scientific comfort naturally must be very high (and obviously is much higher than what intuitively I believe to be valid).

(Tip of the cap to Stephen Heise for neurological tips on reading a good book and to Susan Baldry Dole --- Stephen's friend on Facebook --- for posting the link to the popular article on behavioral epigenetics.)

Let's Vote on the Baby's Gender!

CNN.com, you're doing it wrong!