I really enjoyed PZ's jab at the mass male extinction in Brian K. Vaughn's Y - The Last Man. Thanks to Biology in Science Fiction I also found the recent paper he references for the Butterfly study. The whole male genocide deal isn't a very realistic scenario but Vaughn does a pretty commendable job despite some minor scientific technicalities which should only irk the most Bio-wise of comic nerds.

Did I say comic nerds? Because I've been reading Y obsessively since my first year at Waterloo and I can't recommend it enough. Does that mean I hang out pressed against the glass at comic book stores tearin' up over rare Superman crossovers? No!

I can confirm that Y has no stereotypical comic standbys like super human x-ray vision at sexy wonder woman or twisted super-villain plots to blow up new york city. Thank goodness. In fact, I never read a comic other than the funny-pages before picking up Y, so trash Oprah's book club and start up the Jacks of Science comic club!

Bonus: Since the internet has devoured my soul long ago, here is the torrent of comics 1-53 from PirateBay. Suggesting that you go out and buy the comics would be pretty hypocritical of me!

(If you're unfamiliar about how to use torrents or read comics on computer, first grab a torrent application like uTorrent, install it. Then download the torrent file from the link above. Using uTorrent you can select to only download one or two issues at a time by the check boxes. Reading comics on computer is a bit weird, but if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, you can get CDisplay to ease the reading because you just scroll through the pages and they are maximized to your screen size. Enjoy!)

Figure 1: The enemy of humanity.

An important and unsolved problem in biology revolves around the idea that "not all genomes are created equally". For example, liverworts (very simple plants) have genomes almost 16 times larger than humans. This extra DNA grants liverworts many unique powers including the ability to transform into a delicious chocolate cake and the power to direct large meteors into the Earth.

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Ever since computers were intelligently designed they have been flirting with the concepts of evolution. I'm mainly referring to evolutionary computation here. If you don't believe me just watch youthful Richard Dawkins flirt up a computing storm in a BBC Horizon documentary from 1987 around the 14:27 and 26:46 (Don't forget to check out an introduction to the optical disk at 9:05). Actually, according to this random Wikipedia fact:

In the fifties, long before computers were used on a great scale, the idea to use Darwinian principles for automated problem solving originated.

So what you're probably wondering is that if computers and Darwinian principles have been flirting for so long, why don't they just marry each other? Well, according to my exhaustive research, I'm proud to say that they are engaged. It's pretty hush-hush right now. We don't often hear about the two together outside the field of artificial intelligence because Evolution has such strong Christian values. That means no sex until after marriage.

The whole situation is the epitome of daytime drama because computers aren't exactly faithful. Darwinian principles and computers have been dating since the 50's but computers were unsatisfied with the relationship. Things just got so monotonous, that in the 80's, computers started seeing Quantum Physics to secretly add some much needed uncertainty to life. But there are plenty of sites out there that discuss that classically forbidden relationship.

Don't get me wrong, Computers and the principles of Evolution get along great. They have achieved many great things together, see "The Hitchhikers Guide to Evolutionary Computation: Applications of Evolution Algorithms", so there's no question that they would make great parents. All they need is to resolve a few relationship issues, consecrate the marriage, and a little Barry White to welcome to the world an adorable baby child! A child that goes by the name of Evolvable Hardware.

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Whether you like it or not, your gut is host to over one-hundred trillion ooey-gooey microbes. That means that for every one cell in your body there are ten microbial cells livin' large in your intestines.

Luckily, these little guys perform a whole whack of great services for the body, such as the digestion of hard-to-break-down materials. But where exactly do these abdominal amigos come from? A recent article in PLoS Biology discusses research by Palmer et al. that aims to answer that question.

To explore the development of the microbial community found in the human gut, the researchers conducted DNA microarray analyses of fecal samples from babies. This is one of those rare and beautiful occasions where someone gets to take a dump in the lab for the glory of science.

Pooey-diapers aside, the researchers findings were far from fetid. They found striking variation in early microbial community composition between individuals, and suggested that this variation was attributable to differences in chance encounters with microbial species. Other interesting findings included twins (who presumably share the same environment) having similar gut-community profiles, and babies delivered by caesarean section having lower-than usual microbial diversity in their guts (which could be due to them bypassing the rich and fragrant microbial flora the vaginal canal).

For more on pooing in the lab, check out this story over at Everyday Scientist.

...you casually find papers like "Biological Brain-Inspired Genetic Complementary Learning for Stock Market and Bank Failure Prediction" (Tan et. al. , Computational Intelligence Vol. 23, No. 2. (May 2007), pp. 236-261). So don't even give me that "where's my jetpack and hover car!" whining because when a computer can use properties of our brains and genetic algorithms to learn when the stock market is going to crash, you can tell we've come a long way.

This paper attempts to tackle a common problem in the realm of computational finance, using computers to make millions. The use of all our super-computing power for financial applications only makes sense in order to get the maximum amount of cash-money, but when stuff like surfing the internet and word processing causes my computer to crash, it makes you wonder how hard it must be to model something like stock market strategies.

So smart computer scientists take a tip from right at home, our brains, and they use computational intelligence tools such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, Bayesian statistics, and evolutionary computing to give computers a bit of a heads-up. This paper proposes a nice slurry of the tools above in the design of a neural network called a GLC (Genetic Complementary Learning Fuzzy Neural Network) and genetic algorithms to use human pattern recognition and gene selection to learn good financial decisions.

Tan et. al. analyzes the accuracy of the HAL 9000 computational finance tool for bank failure and stock market prediction in many real situations. The GLC performed competently and gave good results on both tests, which is essentially a giant leap towards the hover car. So keep your fingers crossed!

You can get the article mentioned above here or search for it using your library's journal subscriptions.

A recent article in PLoS Biology about coral reef bleaching caused my thoughts to turn to tiny creatures that live inside corals, the zooxanthellae (zoo-ZAN-thell-ee)! These are the little beasties that give corals their fantastic array of colours, along with being one of the most fun biology terms to scream ("ZOOXANTHELLAE!").

Zooxanthellae are not actually beasties sensu stricto; they are algae, which are unicellular plants. So what the hell are algae doing living inside coral? Like lichens, coral have formed a symbiotic relationship with algae. By forming this association, the coral (an animal) receives photosynthetic products (sugars) and the zooxanthellic algae (a plant) receives shelter and the carbon dioxide it needs to survive. Also like lichens, the coral/zooxanthellae symbiotic relationship is "obligate". That is, neither the coral nor the zooxanthellae could survive on their own if they were separated.

Weird under-sea animals aside, obligate symbiosis is by no means an exotic phenomenon in the natural world. For example, the mitochondria and the cells of your body are in an obligate symbiotic relationship. That's right, mitochondria are in reality totally separate organisms from humans. They even have their own DNA. Like the zooxanthellae of plants, the mitochondria produce a resource (adenosine triphosphate) in exchange for a safe and happy environment in which to live their tiny lives in peace.

Jumping on the bandwagon with the cephalopod sensation thats sweeping the blogging nation, I thought I'd post this documentary. If anything just watch the introduction and picture chameleons across the globe eating their heart out. The quality of the video is a bit hard on the eyes, but the Cuttlefish are anything but (actually, you can download the torrent of this documentary in high definition on Demonoid if you have an account).

Some people would say that dropping Asian elephants into nature reserves in North America is irresponsible. Those people clearly didn't consider A) the potentially hilarious and heart-warming results (see Operation Dumbo Drop) or B) that those elephants might have the ability to resuscitate ecosystems that disappeared over 13,000 years ago.

Believe it or not, serious conservation biologists have speculated that if living rough approximations of long-dead megafauna were introduced into appropriate North American ecosystems, they might have the ability to revert those ecosystems back to the state they were in 13,000 years ago. But why should we care about restore crazy ancient ecosystems? Well, the extinction of the original megafauna is attributed to over-hunting by ancient humans! Its our own fault that we're not all living in a prehistoric wonderland!

Humans: driving rare and beautiful animals to extinction since 11,000BC.

Further reading: "The Pleistocene re-wilding gambit" by Tim Caro in the June 2007 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

When I'm not getting my daily lulz from xkcd.com, i'm getting it from Dinosaur Comics thanks to a recommendation from Kieran approx. 3 years ago. Although, today's gem is more true than it is full of lulz, and only solidifies my jealousy of Richard Feynman. Actually, a few days ago I thought this one was hilarious until I saw the following video on Science Notes.

Most of my time this summer will be spent watching bumble bees on a computer screen. Here's a taste of the sheer exhilaration I experience every day: