Understanding the relationships between species is hard. Usually, its just not clear who evolved from who and when. On top of this, we're not even exactly sure what a "species" is!

Luckly, the information age has made inferring phylogenies easier than ever. Many software packages now exist to help weakling biologists figure out their complex datasets. Unfortunately, many of these otherwise great packages are Windows only! Since I have to do phylogenetic analyses on DNA sequence data all the time, and all I have is a paltry MacBook, I've had to find some alternatives. Here they are:

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A juicy cake-load of short animations were recently released on the National Film Board's HotHouse website. The idea behind Hot House is to showcase imaginative animation techniques across Canada. They are all awesome, but check out the video below, it's like a mini-version of Powers of Ten with a better ending!

Thanks drawn.ca!

I guess I'm a bit of an exhibitionist. In the image above you can see many of my juicy organs. Very attractive! My only fear is that this particular full frontal shot may have adverse effects on my future dating.

Although, I heard a rumor that beauty is only skin deep. I volunteered for a neurology experiment at work today and I got my hands on the dataset. I loaded it into Osirix for 3D volume rendering and created this awesome video.

I have to admit, having MRI's of my brain and internal organs is really comforting. It helps me reassure myself that I'm not a robot in times of doubt. How confident are you that you're not a robot?

I don't know about you, but I like eating stuff. Over my next few posts I'll share a few food discoveries I made recently with the common lesson of paying attention to what you eat.

So I had to buy some yogurt for an Indian sauce base I was making a few nights ago. No Frills had individual yogurt servings ranging from $0.50 to $1.23 organic Liberte brand so naturally I opted with the Liberte to see what all the fuss was about. Well, the yogurt tasted really creamy in my Tandoori Chicken sauce but I couldn't help but notice this hot fact on the container:

"With Active Acidophilus, Bifidus and L. casei Cultures"

That was it. Honestly, how many consumers actually knows what those things are? Upon internet research it was clear in no time they were active bacteria cultures which, as Wikipedia put it, "intended to assist the body's naturally occurring gut flora to reestablish themselves".

Naturally, the addition of probiotics couldn't make it to the shelves without some science to back it up, or at least one would hope. I immediately pounced on the Criticisms Wikipedia section and was quick to note that it was questionable if these cultures actually make it to the gut in the first place. Science says yes.

Kind of disappointed that there weren't very many criticisms I retired to the boring health benefits section. Reppin' Canada, I'd recommend you check out Dr. Gregor Reid's lab at St. Joseph's Health Center in London, Ontario, otherwise known as the Canadian R&D Centre for Probiotics. They even have a sweet video [40 megs].

So, I got information overload upon discovering a wealth of microbiology papers over my head at Reid's site and decided to call it quits. I even accidentally learned that Acidophilus is also naturally present in vaginas. I'm still not sure why that wasn't listed on the packaging. (Why didn't I go into advertising?)

Actually, advertising is one of the problems with the growing number of yogurts marketed as "Awesomely Probiotic, Dude!". None of them actually state how many bacterias you get per delicious serving size.

CBC Marketplace got together with Dr. Reid and actually tested bacteria levels in yogurts back in 2003.

Scientists say there should be one million to one billion active cultures per gram to be probiotic.

Astro BioBest started with the most - 794 million live bacterial cultures per gram. But near the end of shelf life, almost two-thirds had died. That's still in the ballpark.

Organic Meadow and Danone stayed above the million mark on each test.

"They claim to have active cultures, in which case their claims are correct," Reid noted.

Liberty fared the worst on our test, starting off low at just 118,000 live bacterial cultures per gram — and dropping to just 4,000 after two weeks.

Reid believes there's not much probiotic benefit in that.

Damn Liberty ripped me off on the bacteria count! Now if only I could explain to the grocery store clerk why I want a refund...

If you didn't feel sorry for the ID crowd before, you will after these videos. These people do a much better job of making fools of themselves than anyone else ever could.

4. Peanut Butter - THE ATHEIST'S NIGHTMARE!

"Any theory on the origin of life on this planet...is a fairy tale."

Nice try, chuckles. That would be abiogenesis not evolution.

3. Kirk Cameron and Bananas (THE ATHEIST'S NIGHTMARE Pt. II)

"The banana and the hand are perfectly made for one another!"

Yes, its amazing what thousands of years of selective breeding by humans will do to an organism. This fact was obviously lost on expert evolutionary biologist Kirk Cameron. Wild bananas and hands were, in fact, not made for each other.

2. Four Problems With Evolution

"I'm going to talk about four of the crises facing evolution today."

1. Wrong.
2. Wrong.
3. Wrong.
4. Wrong.

You're on a real roll, Chuck.

1. The Science of Evolution

"Watch the evolutionists use the language of speculation in this 6 min clip from the DVD "The Science of Evolution".

If by evolutionists you mean totally random people off the street, then yes, watch them. As a bonus, you can also watch your brain leak out of your head as you accept total fiction as reality.

As we saw in the last post it sometimes takes the cold, calculating eye of a machine to truly capture the beauty of nature. Such is the case with my current research project at school, where I am looking at the fine-scale social dynamics of our friend the bumble bee. I won't go into the details, but I will show you some pretty pictures that I've generated.

This psychedelic mush is actually the sum of the movement paths of six bumble bees around their colony over a period of twelve hours, where each bee is represented by a different colour. The colony was reared in a plastic box, the floor of which can be seen behind the coloured mass. Jackson Pollock, anyone?

More bumble bee psychedelia. The nectar feeding dish can be seen in the near-top-left portion of this trace. Evidently, these bees weren't very hungry. Probably just colony collapse disorder.

Here's a zoomed-out view of group of individual bumble bee movement traces, which are combined together to make the psychedelic-mush-o-grams pictured previously. Each square shows the movement vector of one bumble bee over a period of one hour (so, five hours for five bees in this case).

That's all the weirdness I have for now. If you are in interested in seeing some more traces like these or actually learning about my research project, please leave a comment!

It would be an instantaneous science crime for me to not blog this paper NMR Imaging of the Honeybee Brain which was published in the Journal of Insect Science circa 2003. Not only because Kieran, my temporarily missing Jacks of Science co-author studies such insects obsessively and not only because I'm working full-time right now on some MRI software but because those brain volume renderings are wildly awesome. Come to think of it, you're better off going here to read the paper because it includes hot bee brain videos as well. Unfortunately, no Bee Brain Boat videos but it's probably for the best.

 Found this at Revising MRI blog while googling Fourier tranforms. Nice find!

This is the first in a (weekly!) series of posts about interesting/creepy/crawly/mushy/furry/woody species I come across in my zoological hypertext travels.

As I'm sure you're aware, spiders are the bad-asses of the Arthropod world. They sit around in their nests and webs and eat insects like they're going out of style. Of the 40,000 species of spider, Tarantulas (Family Theraphosidae) are probably the most well known and feared. Most people in their right mind will not screw with a Tarantula, but the Species of the Week is not a person. Its a big fucking wasp.

Tarantula Hawk Wasps (Genus Pepsis) enjoy long flights on the beach, wildflowers, shopping for the latest aposematic fashions, and laying eggs in the bodies of paralyzed male Tarantulas. They make short work of unsuspecting Tarantulas by stinging and injecting them with powerful venom:

Tarantula's aren't the only thing Pepsis wasps sting. In fact, they have the #2 most painful sting in the world according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Schmidt, on the experience of being stung by a Pepsis wasp:

Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).

Ye-ouch! Anyway, once a Pepsis egg is laid in a paralyzed Tarantula's body it develops over time into a squirming larva. The larva will slowly eat the (still living!) Tarantula until it has sufficient nutrients with which to pupate, and become an adult.

Now if that isn't a gross life cycle, I don't know what is. I'm really quite glad I live nowhere near these things, cool as they are.

Hope you enjoyed Species of the Week #1! Next week: monkey + (cat x raccoon) + bee = ???

Above is my heart imaged on one of the good ol' 1.5T MRI's at Sunnybrook. It's one of the great perks of being a co-op student, you can take MRI breaks to help out researchers. The image is acquired in real time using a spiral pulse sequence. You can see the spirally imaging artifacts.

Taxonomy, the scientific discipline concerned with the naming and classification of organisms, is quickly becoming a lost art. There is simply too much work and too few new taxonomists. It is ironic that a discipline that should have been super-charged by the Internet and modern molecular techniques has somehow instead begun to stagnate.

Doom-saying aside, in recent years a number of extremely high-quality taxonomic databases have appeared on the Internet. All of these are excellent for casually learning about the evolutionary histories of organisms you know and love (you want to do that, right?). For example, did you know that loons and penguins are very closely related? Thanks to the Internets, now you do!

Online Taxonomy Resources

Tree of Life Web Project

Wikispecies

The Encyclopedia of Life

Animal Diversity Web

Species 2000