Headless zombie squid and dead frogs dancing

UPDATE: 2012-01-20 Reader “correcto” asserted that this is definitely not an octopus. In my original post I did say it was a squid, but admitted to being suspicious of mentions of it being octopus based on a few anatomy shots, which persuaded me otherwise. However, I now have a video that shows squid being prepared and it’s more obvious that it’s not an octopus.

It’s still rather grotesque, but I take back what I said about the creature still being alive.

It is possible to re-animate dead appendages with a little salt, either table salt or in solution form as soy sauce. Be warned, this may put you off your breakfast. In the first video (which seems to have first appeared on the web a couple of years ago but a variant of which went viral this week), the dish – Ika Odori Don* – served raw is made to dance by pouring on soy sauce. The sodium ions stimulates still active neurones in the just-dead sea creature. In the second, the frogs’ legs are made to twitch by application of salt, with a similar effect.

I am not sure of the translation here. Squid is “ika” and octopus is “tako”. “Odori” is a traditional dance. Does “don” mean rice bowl? Either way, most sites say that “Ika Odori-don” translates loosely as “dancing squid rice bowl”. The head from a live squid (is it a squid or an octopus?) is removed and served on top of a bowl of sushi rice, accompanied by sashimi prepared from the head (usually sliced ika (squid) and ika-kimo (squid liver) as well as other seafood.

Apparently, the concept was introduced by a sushi restaurant a couple of years ago as a marketing gimmick. Nice. And, they wonder why people become vegetarians…you don’t see asparagus tips dancing when you pour on melted butter, after all, and presumably nor would you want to.

  • What is the difference between a octopus and squid (wiki.answers.com)
  • How To: Harvest your own squid ink (boingboing.net)
  • Steamed squid… (thebloggingpath.com)

Wear sunscreen

Remember that speech that led to that Baz Luhrmann hit, “Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen”? It was good advice and still is. Here, my friend Kat Arney, blogger, broadcaster, cancer expert and harpist, explains the ins and outs of sun protection. It perhaps should also be mentioned that you can burn on cloudy summer days, especially if it’s windy and you’re near water, because UV is reflected by choppy water. “Wind burn” and the “weathered”, or “rosy cheek” look are actually just sunburn.

In terms of sunscreen choice, cheap is fine but make sure you use factor 15 minimum for UVB protection and at least four-star UVA protection, otherwise it’s not going to be effective. Olive oil is not a good sunscreen despite what the locals on the Med might tell pale and spotty Brits…

Higgs glimpse?

Higgs glimpse? – Lots of hype going on around the possibility of having spotted a glimpse of the Higgs boson that, in theory, endows matter with mass. Of course, despite the press conferences and hype, the physicists are still stressing that it is far too early to know whether the signals they have are due to the elusive particle or nothing more than statistical fluctuations, flaws in their computer models or some other glitch. We’ll see. Whatever the outcome, you can bet fellow Segedunumite Peter Higgs will be embarassed by the renown given that the theory that bears his name was developed with five colleagues.

Rosalind Franklin Google Doodle

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 — 16 April 1958) was a British X-ray crystallographer who made pioneering contributions to the understanding of the detailed molecular structures of the genetic code with her data from DNA and RNA as well as viruses, coal and graphite. She died prematurely at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer and so missed out on Nobel recognition. The Nobel committee does not make its awards posthumously and the 1962 Prize for Medicine or Physiology famously went to her colleague Maurice Wilkins and to Francis Crick and James Watson with whom the structure of DNA is somehow now synonymous.

Franklin would’ve been 91 today but as far as I can see she has not had a Google Doodle to celebrate her life. So here’s a simple montage I put together in lieu of such a doodle, showing her X-ray diffractograms and a dodgy DNA doodle. Very dodgy as it turns out, I grabbed the original from a freebie clipart page and modified it, but Nature’s Stuart Cantrill just pointed out that it’s a left-handed double helix rather than the natural right-handed form.

Periodic table of rock and metal

What if the whole of the Periodic Table were all rocks and metal? And what if it were created in 1987 by Jesus, he of the Roadside as a tribute to Guns ‘n Roses?

It is obviously a concept whose time has come, because there are several others around that attempt to knock out the non-metals and the non-rock:

Periodic Metal
Classic Rock Periods
Periodic Table of Rock Music
Chinese Periodic Table of Rock
Metal Chart

It’s not what you know…

It’s not what you know, but who you know. It is something of a cliché, but in a world where the social context of knowledge is becoming increasingly important. Think Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley etc. The data, the information, seems only relevant if we have some kind of peer review, the “+1”, “like”, or “thumbs-up” from our friends and acquaintances. Nowhere is the social content more pertinent than in organisations where knowledge and talent are the currencies of every transaction from the research group to the stock market.

Writing in the EJIM (full reference below), information management expert Eoin Whelan of the University of Limerick, Ireland, explains how social network analysis can support talent management initiatives in knowledge-intensive work environments. His analysis of the working networks and interview data from the R&D divisions of two multinationals shows how “getting” social can help management make the most of their talent pool by ensuring that the right people aer at the right place at the right time for a given task and also developing a strategy for responding to a brain drain or talent raid when star performers suddenly leave the organisation en masse.

Essentially, talent management, a concept that has existed in various forms since at least the mid-twentieth century, needs to go beyond identifying the key positions within an organisation and the skills and characters of individuals. Instead, it must now identify the connections between the different people occupying key but complementary key positions. “Social network theory posits that it is the ties and relationships between individuals – and not individual attributes – that really matter,” Whelan explains.

Indeed, while such a notion might not feel too comfortable from an egocentric point of view, there is plenty of potential for any individual node within a network to grow its connections and to become an important hub with personal benefits, while benefiting the network as a whole.

Research Blogging Icon Eoin Whelan (2011). It’s who you know not what you know: a social network analysis approach to talent management European J. International Management, 5 (5), 484-500

Gregor Mendel on Google

Today’s Google Doodle honours the birthday in 1822 of the most famous friar in science Gregor Mendel (July 20, 1822 — January 6, 1884). Mendel gained posthumous fame as the founder of what would ultimately evolve into the science of genetics. He studied the inheritance traits of pea plants and demonstrated that inheritance followed particular rules, later known as Mendel’s laws. As I wrote many years ago for a booklet for UK TV station, Channel 4, the significance of Mendel’s work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century, when his “laws” were rediscovered by Hugo de Vries, Carl Corrensby and Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg.

  • Early history of genetics revised

Daylight video of the ISS and Atlantis from the ground

According to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy you can see details when the ISS flies overhead with a decent pair of binoculars, but with an 8-inch reflector telescope and a decent video camera set up for astrophotography you can grab yourself a Youtube clip…in broad daylight:

I’ve seen the ISS fly over a couple of times on a clear, dark night, it’s quite an astounding site, especially knowing that it’s only 350 km above you when at it’s at its closest. Bizarrely, the second time I saw it I was on a camping trip with family and friends and remarking on what a fascinating sight it is, when it appeared. Happened again the third time I saw it from a pub garden. I wonder…is it alcohol induced?

UK cancer trends

UK cancer trends – The media has been all over the Cancer Research UK announcements on cancer rates. Specifically, the focus was on middle-aged people and the increases seen between 1979 and 2008.

NHS Choices, as ever, provides some rational words following the media frenzy and cites a few of the stats to which I’ve added percentages of diagnoses for comparison):

The highest rate of new diagnoses is among people aged 75 and over; the rate of new diagnoses in over-75s increased from 1,808 per 100,000 to 2,319 per 100,000. (That’s 1.8% in 1979; 2.3% in 2008).

In people aged 60 to 74, new diagnoses rose from 1075.9 per 100,000 to 1,370 per 100,000. (1.1% in 1979; 1.4% in 2008).

In people aged 40 to 59, new diagnoses rose from 329.1 per 100,000 in 1979 and 388.1 per 100,000 in 2008 (an 18% rise). (0.33% in 1979; 0.39% in 2008)

The lowest rate of new diagnoses is among people under 40; the rate in this age group increased from 29.5 per 100,000 in 1979 and 41.2 per 100,000 in 2008. (0.03% in 1979; 0.04% in 2008).

When looking at the rates of new diagnoses of specific cancers among people aged 40 to 59 years old, CRUK reports that: the rate of new cases of breast cancer in women has increased from 134 per 100,000 women in 1979 to 215 per 100,000 in 2008. The rates of new cases of prostate cancer among men has increased from 8 per 100,000 in 1979 to 51 per 100,000 in 2008. The rates of new cases of lung cancer in men dropped from 93 per 100,000 in 1979 to 35 per 100,000 in 2008. Moreover, despite the increases in diagnoses (actually, partly because of the increases in diagnoses), the number of people surviving cancer [for a reasonable time after diagnosis] has doubled since the 1970s. There were 2152 deaths from cancer per 1,000,000 people in GB in 1979, which fell to 1754 deaths from cancer per 1,000,000 people in 2008. I’m not sure what statistics the tabloids were focusing on with their scaremongering claims about cancer incidence, but they don’t mesh with what CRUK actually said.

NHS Choices points out that the causes of the increases were not directly investigated. However, CRUK say that one factor contributing to these increases is likely to be higher rates of detection due to the NHS breast cancer screening programme and the PSA test for prostate cancer. As opposed to chemicals, radiation, GM crops, sunspots, crop circles, or any other spurious causes. Of course, none of this should detract from the human pain and suffering of cancer, indeed it should be seen as a positive that although incidence is reportedly increasing this seems to be due to better diagnosis and life expectancy has improved because of better treatments because of the efforts of CRUK, other charities and the medical scientists they help support.

 

Caricatures and face recognition

Caricatures and face recognition – The “Ugly, pretty girls” post and video I blogged the other day got lots of interest. It seems face recognition and perception of faces is a fascinating subject for many people. Not surprising, really. Even in this digital age, face to face still beats any electronic interaction. Anyway, Wired have taken up this face recognition issue and report some interesting facts about how and why caricatures are so much more recognisable than the original face.

Our brains are incredibly agile machines, says Ben Austen, and it’s hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than recognize faces. Within hours of our birth, we can recognise face-like patterns. It takes the adult brain just 100 milliseconds to recognise such a pattern as a face. Neuroscientists now believe that there may be a specific region of the brain, on the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, dedicated to facial recognition.