algae, bees, and chemists

The roundup of German pieces published in June includes red algae caught stealing, bees being invited for coffee, and chemists in high office.

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 61, 647
Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Extremophile Rotalge des Gen-Diebstahls überführt

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 61, 623
Ausgeforscht: Wir sind Papst (und mehr)

Chemie in unserer Zeit 47, 146
Koffein stärkt Gedächtnis der Bienen Abstract and restricted access to PDF file

one of the bumblebees buzzing around on my flickr photostream.

Vénus noire

review of the film

Vénus noire by Abdellatif Kechiche (France 2010)

This film from the auteur of Cous cous (La graine et le mulet) and this year’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the warmest colour (La vie d’Adèle) tells in epic breadth the sufferings of Sarah Baartman, one of the African women shown around as a curiosity ("the Hottentot Venus") in European cities at the beginning of the 19th century.

While mentions and images of the historical Venuses are familiar to many, I think they remained curiosities so far. The film very successfully lifts the human being caught up in this show off the page and makes her experience of hopes, disappointment and exploitation the focus of the story. With the benefit of living in a (slightly) more enlightened age, we can see that she is beautiful, intelligent, and talented in ways that the contemporary audiences – neither the workers in London nor the aristocrats and scientists in Paris – could hardly fathom.

Seeing her strength in the face of adversity is uplifting, but watching her European audiences and the males that exploit her is very uncomfortable if you happen to be white and/or male. The underlying curiosity for people who are different from one’s own is of course not a bad thing, but without respect for the otherness it can have devastating effects.

I find it rather puzzling and depressing that this film didn’t get a UK release (not even on DVD - I bought mine in France, and amazon UK offers an import version). In many ways the London episode (where anti-slavery campaigners even try to liberate Baartman from her employer in a court case) is the less depressing part of the story.

Image from amazon.co.uk

1000 photos

Tomorrow marks the 3rd birthday of my Flickr photostream, and as it happens, I am also celebrating my 1000th picture there. Oh, and I even got used to the new design. Looks kind of cool as long as you don't scratch the shiny surface and it saves me money on the pro membership ...

The most-viewed photos are still the same ones as last year, so instead I'm posting a brand-new one here, photo number 1000:

This is of course Calatrava's Liege Guillemins station.

emotional science

In my latest feature in Current Biology I've explored how science, after centuries of trying to shut out all emotional and subjective things, is now rediscovering emotion. After all, we now know that feelings show up in MRI scans, so they must be real. And in some contexts, from conservation through to medicine, they might even be useful.

Can science relate to our emotions?

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 12, R501-R504, 17 June 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.056

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The blue marble that I got from Wallace J Nichols whose work is discussed in the feature. It symbolises our watery planet as it can be seen from space, and also points to his views on the "blue mind."

Update 5.8.2024. Wallace J. Nichols died in June 2024. Some links to reflections on his work:

• Easkey Britton for The Conversation, 12.7.2024
• Michael Roberts in Outside Online, 2.7.2024

amor (celos de ti)

I just came across an audio file of Shakira performing this song on tumblr and didn't recognise it (it doesn't appear on any of her CDs). Investigating further, I found the video:

The song is by Puerto-Rican composer Pedro Flores and according to this site it was recorded for an anthology of his work.

control freakery

Each time I’m taking the Eurostar to continental Europe I am left wondering, why is a single passport check ok to travel out, but two or three are done on the way back?

Coming back from Germany via Brussels last Sunday (on the Eurostar departing Brussels at 19:52) we had our passports checked three times (by Belgian and UK authorities in Brussels, and then by UK people again in St. Pancras). The ticket was also checked three times, by the machine at checkin, by the UK passport control in Brussels and by a train manager on the train.

I don’t really see the need for any passport controls within the EU. If I can fly from Madrid to Helsinki or Athens under the Schengen agreement without border control, what’s so special about the UK and Ireland that they can’t join? I’m really not buying the argument that these countries are so attractive they need extra protection.

Then, if you do need passport controls, why not do them once in the right place, and be done with it? If I’m a legal traveller on the first contol, I’ll surely still be legal on the third one. To me, the third passport control on the same leg of the journey really is where security measures end and harassment begins. It didn’t improve my mood that a steward, as I was stepping up to the counter with my son who has autism and needs constant supervision and assistance, shouted at us “one at a time”. If he had actually looked at us before, he could have figured out why we went ahead together.

My personal gripes apart, surely, it can’t be good for the UK economy if people who may be travelling to London on business get harassed this way?

New art work suspended from the roof of St. Pancras station.

bees memories

Recent research and the EU's temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides has brought the threats to bees and other pollinators on the agenda again. While manufacturers insist that neonicotinoids aren't toxic to bees in concentrations found in the environment, the interest now focuses on the more subtle effects the substances may have. For instance, by making bees forgetful, even sublethal doses can endanger the survival of the colony.

Read all about it in my feature that came out in Current Biology last week:

EU ban puts spotlight on complex effects of neonicotinoids

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 11, R462-R464, 3 June 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.030

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(one of my many bumblebees on Flickr)

Incidentally, in this month's issue of Chemie in unserer Zeit I also have a piece on bees' memories. Unlike the neonicotinoids, caffeine seems to improve it.

Pflanzeninhaltsstoffe: Koffein stärkt Gedächtnis der Bienen

Chemie in unserer Zeit

Volume 47, Issue 3, page 146, Juni 2013 DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201390029

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cultural history of geek speak

review of Netymology, by Tom Chatfield

Over the last two decades, the world-wide web has rapidly evolved to become the focus of a world-wide super-culture shared by several billion people using it. This culture has developed new standards of communication and civility, virtual communities (some with their own distinctive cultures), and terminology.

Just with a brief discussion of the etymology and usage of 100 of the termini of the internet age, Tom Chatfield has achieved much more than just creating an annotated list of fancy new words. While one could use it as a reference to look up words that have remained unfamiliar or puzzling (though an index would help with this kind of use), a cover-to-cover reading conjures up a cultural history of the internet age. Each of the words and concepts discussed also serves as a mirror reflecting the behaviour of web users and online communities from a different angle.

Along the way there are lovely little factoids waiting to be picked up. My favourites include: Thomas Edison writing about “bugs” in his inventions; the patron saint of the internet (St. Isidore of Seville, apparently); the use of “OMG” in a 1917 letter addressed to Churchill; and the fact that there is a Wikipedia entry on the gender of connectors and fasteners.

In some cases, the the 3-pages standard length of the chapters left me yearning for more, but then again, the book might have easily become unwieldy, and for those who want to investigate further, there’s always the internet …

PS: on a related topic, also see my recent feature on the evolution of online culture.

my inner fish

I somehow managed to miss Neil Shubin's excellent book "Your inner fish" when it came out a few years ago. Now, however, I had the chance to read it and catch up with my inner fish on the occasion of the publication of the coelacanth genome.

Shubin's discovery of an intermediate fossil, Tiktaalik, and the genomic comparisons of coelacanth with other vertebrates tell us some amazing things on the transition from fish to land-living animals. What I find most mind-boggling, however, is this: If you look at the tree of life from the perspective of the coelacanth, you'll find that mice, chickens and humans are closer relatives than herring or zebrafish, or anything that lives in an aquarium, and never mind sharks and rays. Try to get that into your brain if you're just a fish.

By coincidence, the reference genome of the zebra fish was published almost at the same time, so I could combine one fish that tells us about our evolution with another that tells us about our development, into a feature that is now out in Current Biology;

What fish genomes can tell us about life on land

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 10, R419-R421, 20 May 2013

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.068

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Source (via H2origins)

cognitive enhancers

Not that I've felt the need for brain doping (beyond caffeine) so far, but I've been following the field of cognitive enhancers from a safe distance for a while now and have summed up the current state of affairs in a feature for Chemistry & Industry, which is out in the May issue:

Smart New World

Chemistry & Industry No. 5, pp32-35

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In the same issue, I have a review of the book:

Gold nanoparticles for physics, chemistry and biology

on page 47.

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Maybe the smart pills could magically convert me into this guy:

gut feelings

This week's issue of Current Biology has a special section of food and biology. My contribution is a feature on the gut microbiome and what it can tell us about widespread problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Does the gut microbiome hold clues to obesity and diabetes? Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 9, R359-R362, 6 May 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.047

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The issue looks like this:

censorship in the UK

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has banned this ad:

according to this report in the Guardian, and I'm having a huge problem with this decision. The posters don't show anything at all apart from the drink, just words, and (as the ad slogan itself suggests) any associations are purely in the mind of the beholder.

If we've reached the point of not being allowed to use words that have several meanings because some readers may associate them with a meaning that they themselves will then find offensive, I think we've arrived in a kafkaesque nightmare of censorship. If people are offended by their own thoughts, it should be their own problem, right?

To use a visual analogy, if looking at a lighthouse makes you think of male genitalia, that doesn't give you the right to ask for images of lighthouses to be banned. The association is exclusively your own problem.

And that's essentially the point that the ad itself tried to make in a playful way. Clearly some people at the organisation in charge of such things were unable to grasp this subtle philosophical point.