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Labs around the world open their doors to aesthetic creation.

An interesting reading. I stay with these words of my countryman Luis Álvarez-Gaumé:

“Science is inevitable; art is fragile. Without Einstein it may have taken many, many years, and many people working on it, but we still would have come up with his theories. If Beethoven died at age 5, we would not have the sonatas; art is not repeatable.”

anecosystemofexcess

Interesting

allthingslinguistic

Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji

An interesting study by Hannah Miller and colleagues at GroupLens looks at how different people interpret emoji differently. Key quotes:

What this figure tells us is that if an iPhone user sends a Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes to a Windows Phone, Samsung, LG, or Nexus user, the iPhone user is sending a mildly negative emoji to someone who will receive it as a relatively positive one. […]

One finding that really surprised us is that a good deal of the potential for miscommunication may come from different interpretations of the exact same emoji rendering. In other words, two people looking at the exact same emoji on the same smartphone platform can interpret that emoji quite differently. For example, in the case of the Apple emoji Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes, there were some people who thought it was more positive while others thought it was more negative. […]

Overall, we found that if you send an emoji across platform boundaries (e.g., an iPhone to a Nexus), the sender and the receiver will differ by about 2.04 points on average on our -5 to 5 sentiment scale. However, even within platforms, the average difference is 1.88 points.

The results are from their paper in the proceedings of the 2016 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2016) – the full paper (pdf) is here.

I’d be interested to see if people’s perceptions of emoji meaning change over time. For example, when I first used to see the face with tears of joy emoji, I used to get it confused with the crying emoji, but now I think of them as VERY distinct. And I just avoid using the Apple grinning face with smiling eyes emoji because I couldn’t figure out whether it was happy or not.

ucresearch

Are we asking the wrong questions about ocean trash?

From microbeads to the Great Pacific garbage patch, scientists have sounded the alarm on ocean trash. But what is the true extent of the environmental threat?

Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at UC Davis, launched an investigation to see if things were terrible…or just very, very bad. She and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impact of plastic debris.

It turns out that there are a lot of studies that look at how plastic influences an individual animal — like a seabird that eats plastic bags — or the effects that plastic has on an animal’s cells or tissue.

Often, these studies don’t tell us how many birds (or other sea animals) could die from the pollution. And they typically don’t examine how the death of one species could impact the rest of the ecosystem.

“But the truth was that nobody had yet tested those perceived threats,” says Rochman. “There wasn’t a lot of information.”

If ecologists can understand how the slow-moving disaster of ocean garbage is affecting ecosystems, they might be able to prevent things from getting worse.

“We need to be asking more ecologically relevant questions. We don’t ask the right questions early enough.”

Asking the right questions and interrogating studies can help scientists and policy makers prioritize problems and figure out where to focus their attention, Rochman explains.

Read more: How bad is ocean garbage really?

#plastic #turtle #ecosystem

From Mother Nature Network's Russell McLendon: Sea turtles around the world are eating plastic at an unprecedented pace, a new study reveals, with some species downing twice as much as they did 25 years ago.

#ocean waste #ocean

themedicalstate

Strange Findings on Comb Jellies Uproot Animal Family Tree

"It’s a paradox," said Leonid Moroz, a neurobiologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville and lead author of a paper in Nature about the biology of the comb jelly nervous system. “These are animals with a complex nervous system, but they basically use a completely different chemical language” from every other animal. “You have to explain it one way or another.”

The way Moroz explains it is with an evolutionary scenario—one that’s at odds with traditional accounts of animal evolution.

Moroz and his colleagues have been studying comb jellies, whose scientific name is ctenophores (pronounced TEN-o-fors), for many years, beginning with the sequencing of the genome of one species, the Pacific sea gooseberry, in 2007. The sea gooseberry has 19,523 genes, about the same number as are found in the human genome.

The scientists enlarged their library to the genes of ten other species of comb jelly (out of the 150 or so species known to exist) and compared them to the analogous genes in other animals. And when they looked at the genes involved in the nervous system, they found that many considered essential for the development and function of neurons were simply missing in the comb jelly.

Some of those missing genes are involved in building neurons in embryos. The cells in any animal start out in the embryo as stem cells, looking pretty much identical to one another and capable of turning into any particular type of cell. Only later in embryonic development do some stem cells switch on specific genes that transform them into neurons. This process is much the same in humans as it is in flies, slugs, and just about every other animal with a nervous system.

But comb jellies, Moroz and his colleagues found, lack those neuron-building genes altogether. Which means that comb jelly embryos must build their neurons from a different set of instructions—instructions no one yet understands.

Nor do comb jellies use the standard complement of neurotransmitters found in other animals, the scientists found. The genes for most of the neurotransmitters in other animals are either missing or silent in the comb jelly—except for one, the gene for the neurotransmitter glutamate. No wonder Moroz likes to call these creatures “aliens of the sea.”

Instead of the typical neurotransmitter genes, the scientists found, comb jellies produce a huge diversity of receptors on the surface of their neurons. Moroz can’t say yet what the receptors are doing there, but he says they’re probably grabbing neurotransmitters, maybe as many as 50 to 100 neurotransmitters in all (comparable to the number of neurotransmitters in the human brain).

Rewriting Evolutionary History

The unique nature of the comb jelly nervous system led the Florida scientists to hypothesize a new evolutionary history for these marine animals, which they laid out in the Nature paper. The earliest animals, according to this new theory, had no nervous system at all. The cells of these early animals could sense their environment directly, and could send signals directly to neighboring cells.

Millions of years later, those signals and receptors became the raw material for the nervous system. But its evolution, according to Moroz, took place in two separate lineages. One led to today’s ctenophores. The other led to all other animals with nervous systems—from jellyfish to us.

If there was indeed a parallel evolution with two separate lineages, the split would have happened long ago. Fossils that look a lot like modern-day ctenophores date back some 550 million years, making them among the oldest traces of complex animal life.

But precisely how and when the comb jelly split off from other animal lineages remains controversial. To draw the animal evolutionary tree, Moroz and his colleagues analyzed the similarity of DNA in different species. According to the authors, ctenophores belong to a lineage all their own that split off from the others at the tree’s base.

In finding that relationship, the new paper confirms the findings of a team led by Andy Baxevanis, head of the Computational Genomics Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who arrived at a similar conclusion in December after sequencing the genome of another ctenophore species, the American comb jelly (Mnemiopsis leidyi). “You couldn’t ask for a better outcome,” he said about Moroz’s research. “It really shakes up how we think animal complexity evolved.”

Gert Woerheide, an evolutionary geobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, who was not involved in the research, agreed that Moroz and his colleagues have made a thorough case for their revised view of brain evolution. “I think, in this respect, this is a great paper,” he said.

But in terms of the actual shape of the animal family tree, Woerheide is less convinced. He isn’t sure that comb jellies branched off at the base of the tree, he said; sponges, for example, might have branched off first. In Woerheide’s view, the exact reconstruction of the tree reaching so far back in evolutionary history remains an open question.

No matter how the nervous systems of comb jellies evolved, though, everyone agrees that they are weird—and thus worth getting to know better. As Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the research, pointed out, comb jellies are turning out to be “even more different from other animals than had previously been appreciated.”

Waste could be released into world's oceans as world warms

Results from a survey of the seafloor off the European coast reveal the depths our garbage can reach. Bottles, plastic bags, fishing gear, and various crap have been found as deep 4.5 kilometers below the surface, and in areas far as 2,000 kilometers from land.

The Index is a comprehensive scientific measure of the oceanâs overall condition. It advances ocean policy, compares future progress, and informs decisions regarding marine ecosystems worldwide.

#microplastics

Background: What is PCB and how is it harmful? The Norwegian Institute for Air Research estimates that between 1930 and 1977, the United States alone produced more than 600,000 tons of polychlorina...

#plastic #phytoplankton #pcb

#ecosystem

#digestive

PVC is used to make pipes and plastic medical devices. From the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

#toxicology #toxic #pvc

A collaborative study between Newcastle University, England, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science published in the open access journal 'PLoS ONE'

skin cancer

Cindermedusae - latest

#Vimeo #cinder #opengl #glsl #generative #art

Chemicals in plastics and other products seem harmless, but mounting evidence links them to health problems and Washington lacks the power to protect us

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an ecosystem of excess