Category Archives: Oddities

Evidence based hiccup cures

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I feel like I get the hiccups more than most people. I don’t actually know if this is true, but it feels that way. And one thing I’ve learned in my years of hiccuping* is that everyone has their own version of a hiccup cure.

A non-comprehensive list of hiccup cures that people have told me include:

1. Hold your breath.
2. Take a shot of vinegar.
3. Drink from the wrong side of the glass.
4. Stand front forward with your arms up against a wall.
5. Drink from a glass of water with a butter knife in it (this is my mother’s).
6. Eat a spoonful of sugar.
7. Come up with a list of ten famous bald men.

And of course, there’s the always popular “scare the person with hiccups” solution. After Nicole attempted this technique last night, without a lot of success**, and Laura tried to convince me to eat a spoonful of cinnamon, again without a lot of success, I was thinking maybe we should look into evidence based hiccup cures.

After sleeping on it though, I’ve decided I’m not actually that interested in knowing what hiccup cures work. As a scientist, my first instinct is to look for the data and 99%*** of the time that is the right instinct. But honestly, sometimes it’s more fun not to know. Because my hiccups generally resolve themselves, I continue to pick up outlandish and totally bogus hiccup cures, and if you really want to know how to cure hiccups there’s always PubMed.

* Not consecutive of course, which would be terrible and quite possibly drive me to homicide.

** Maybe because she attempted to scare me by telling me I was pregnant, which doesn’t have quite the same effect as jumping out at someone and saying “boo.”

*** Citation needed.

Wanted: Certified snow cave builder

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Given my relative proximity to the ground, it might surprise you to know that the track race I ran most often in high school was the 100-meter high hurdles. It wasn’t because I won or anything (For real, I’m sure I looked like a slow-motion action sequence compared to everyone else); there are just not a lot of people who want to run and jump in the same race. It was something I loved to do, regardless of my talent for it, and it was fun to learn, even if it is not something that one might classify as a “life skill.”

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when my willingness to run and jump in the same race actually came in handy for a second time in my life. In college track, they have a race called the steeplechase, which involves running around the track and jumping over five barriers, one of which has a water pit on the other side, during each circuit. Shockingly, not many people are willing to do this either, so I scored all kinds of points for my team! After all of the times I finished seconds behind everyone else in high school (it’s only a hundred meters, guys, that’s a big difference!), I was tickled that something that I learned in the past helped me so much in the future.

I mention this because I am currently teaching the lab portion of a course called “Populations and Communities,” and our first big unit has been on the genetic structure of Eastern Fence Lizard populations. I am once again tickled that something I learned long ago that didn’t seem like it would ever be useful again- i.e., the microsatellite analyses that I did for my senior thesis in college- is so very useful now. I can get ready for class in a few hours, instead of frustratingly many. I can give students helpful hints about calling alleles and sound like I have at least more than half of a clue what I’m talking about. (This is key with students, the fraction of a clue that you sound like you have.) It’s really great! And it just makes me happy, to think about the good old days at Juniata College, rocking out to Kelly Clarkson and chopping up fish fins with razor blades, and also feel…vindicated? Glad that the time I spent learning something has been tangibly useful, anyway.

Have you ever gotten to shock and amaze yourself or others by whipping out a random skill from your past?

As on the fields of Omdurman

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Did you know that rats laugh?

I didn’t. Not until the other day anyway. The other day I was enumerating the oocysts in Courtney’s Wolbachia laden (or not as the case may be) mosquitoes while at the same time continuing Court’s much needed education into the available variety of BBC wireless programmes. Having exhausted the News Quiz’s back catalogue we had moved onto “The Infinite Monkey Cage,” a fun and at times funny science programme. This particular episode was looking at ‘brain science’ and well into the banter one of the guests, a neuroscientist from UCL, said, almost as an aside, almost as if everyone should know this, that rats laugh. One of the presenters, the physicist Brian Cox, after a moment of incredulity, pulled on the reins and said “hold the phone, did you just say that rats laugh,” or something to that effect, just as I was thinking the same thing.

’Tis true. Rats are ticklish it turns out, particularly around the nape of the neck, and when tickled they laugh. Naturally I can hear you saying, “laugh, are you sure?” and maybe the description has the taint of anthropomorphism. What the rats actually do is make high pitched chirps in the 50 kilohertz ultrasonic range. But since these chirps are distinct from other vocalisations and are only produced in response to being tickled, or ‘heterospecific hand play’ (quiet at the back there) as the jargon goes, ‘laugh’ seems a rather good description. Nor, before you all get carried away, is anyone suggesting that rats have a sense of humour. Giggling in response to a quick scratch of the neck is not the same as laughing at Derek’s jokes. I mean, it is not as though one of the rats gets up after the lights go out in the Read-Group animal room, taps a microphone, “pof, pof, pof,” intones self-consciously into it, “one, two, one, two,” and then goes into its Saturday night routine..

Stand-up Rat: Good evening ladies and gents and welcome to the animal house, lovely to see so many of the same faces here again tonight. A human, a neanderthal and an australopithecine walk into a bar….

.. to the considerable mirth, or approbation, of those assembled in neighbouring cages. Much as it is an image to conjure with there is obviously no nascent Eddie Izzard in the rat diaspora. But the ability to laugh seems real and the pleasure apparent because tickled rats actively seek out the same human hand that made them laugh before, actually start laughing when someone who has tickled them previously enters the room and rat pups prefer to be with adult rats that still laugh. Mice? Don’t know, but laughter is a common mammalian behaviour they say so yes, probably. Ultrasonically. And mice sing anyway. Duet even.

It’s an interesting line of research and one that could easily drag one into a little reading off the set list. But the neuroscientist’s comment made me think in another direction. The vets routinely suggest that we should get in and among our rats. Pick them up as soon as they arrive as barely-bigger-than-mice rats, let them get used to us and to being handled. A bit of neck scratching and the inaudible laughter resulting eases nerves, makes the animals more amenable to handling in the future.

The trouble is that learning a snippet about the private lives of lab animals, particularly where they show a response similar to one of our most treasured and intimate behaviours, creates a certain empathy, an, albeit brief, familial feeling that places in stark contrast our actual aims and intentions for these animals. We can rationalise what we do of course, the lack of alternative, for the greater good etc. But, standing amid the carnage of another experiment I find that the pungent whiff of cordite is very apparent.

The curious case of ice hats

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A key indicator that someone is going to grow up to be a scientist, I think, is a propensity to look at the world and ask “What the…?!?”.

Having a live-in physicist has proven extremely useful for satisfying my (often fleeting) curiosity about lots of things, e.g., what is electricity? Why can’t something go faster than the speed of light? Or — stealing something from Katey’s curiosity — what would happen if there was no moon?

I was therefore surprised when my physicist couldn’t explain my recent curiosity, stemming from a bizarre finding in my freezer (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A picture of my actual ice cube tray and most recent batch of ice cubes. About 83% of the ice cubes in this batch were as expected (hat-less). The remainder had these astonishing little hats.

What the heck was this hat doing on my ice cube?!? I thought this wonder of science was sufficiently interesting to bring it up at lunch with my labmates. They offered a bunch of hypotheses for what could cause an ice hat. Maybe something was vibrating underneath the ice cube tray, or something was dripping from above it. Megan had the most inspired idea: could the formation of the ice hat have something to do with the purity of the water? The water in State College is notoriously hard, containing a lot of calcium. She thought that if I hadn’t filtered my water before freezing it, these impurities could provide a substrate around which the ice crystals could form. Turns out Megan was right, only in reverse.

Water with impurities does form ice around those impurities, but it also forms ice relatively slowly. Without impurities, water freezes so quickly that the water beneath the surface begins to freeze before the surface (which starts freezing first) is frozen solid. Since water expands as it freezes, the developing ice below pushes water up through the part of the surface that isn’t yet frozen. The surface of this emerging water freezes quickly too, so that as the water is pushed up and through a hole in the surface it freezes into a tube, which funnels more water upwards. This process generates what is known as an ice spike (though, I prefer the friendlier ‘ice hat’). The faster the water freezes, the taller the spike. With impurities, the water freezes slowly enough that the surface is frozen shut before a spike is made.

Apparently physicists could have answered my question, I just asked the wrong one. Two physicists published a paper in the Journal of Glaciology on this exact topic. Academia may be the only place where people get paid to satisfy their “what the…?!?” curiosities and that is pretty awesome.

Ice spikes are also pretty awesome. Make ice cubes from filtered water; impress your friends!

Narwhals

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A few weeks ago at the pub, Nicole mentioned that it can be hard gauge when a fellow postdoc (anonymous for this blog post) is being funny on purpose. “Yeah” I said, “I remember s/he said something about narwhals being mythical and I’m still not sure if s/he was joking or not.” And thus began the great narwhal debate of 2012.

As it turns out, Nicole didn’t learn about narwhals until college. An advanced age for what I consider to be basic knowledge, acquired prior to the limits of my memory. This revelation led to wild speculation as to the reason for disparities in narwhal knowledge. Based on the geography of our childhoods, Nicole hypothesized that distance to the ocean is associated with early knowledge of narwhals. Alternatively, I hypothesized that knowledge of narwhals is associated with an affinity for experimental biology, in contrast to modeling.

Since we are scientists, I decided we should confront our hypotheses with data, or at least with a non-random sampling of people on Facebook. Luckily, it turns out that people are always interested in talking about narwhals (something to keep in mind next time you’re in a social situation that requires small talk).

Here is a Google map showing the geographic distribution of responses.

As you can see, responses were heavily skewed towards the U.S. This brings up the first issue with the data: U.S. respondents tended to provide their location to state while European respondents largely responded by country. After consulting with Silvie, I’ve decided to leave the data as is (state level for U.S., country level for non-U.S.) given the size of European countries versus the U.S.

First, testing Nicole’s hypothesis: is there a relationship between narwhal knowledge and geography?

Age of first narwhal knowledge by distance to ocean (estimated very scientifically with the scale bar in Google maps).

Second, testing my hypothesis: is there a relationship between narwhal knowledge and career path?

Age first narwhal knowledge by career class.

As you can see, the data does not support either of our hypotheses. This has lead to follow up conversations, discussing research methodologies and generating alternative hypotheses (e.g. does parental career matter more than your own career?) Again, narwhals are a great conversation starter.

I also polled people on what the letter N stands for. This was mostly an excuse to try making a word cloud in R, but also one of the reasons that I think children learn about narwhals early is because they are often used to illustrate alphabets. Obviously responses were a tiny bit biased by the preceding questionnaire about narwhals but surprisingly, not everyone said narwhals.

Word cloud of what the letter N stands for in an illustrated alphabet.

The Big Gulp

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It’s a catchy phrase.

Despite the fascination of basic biology (e.g., the gorgeous mosquito below), we scientists often fail to explain what we mean without resorting to jargon. So it’s refreshing when researchers coin descriptive names rather than mysterious acronyms. It’s certainly not easy to avoid jargon when describing the life cycle of a complicated organism like malaria, which is essentially a parasitic algae that invades red blood cells and eats them up from the inside. Today I read about the “big gulp“, which is the technical term (really) for the process by which a thirsty malaria parasite takes a big drink of red blood cell. The parasite flattens like a pancake and the edges curve inward to seal around a large chunk of hemoglobin and goo (to use another technical term)–a big gulp that has been captured on film. If another group of researchers had been the first to describe this behavior, they might have named it “intracellular pinocytosis“, which would have been tragic. Nothing fails to convey enthusiasm for basic biology like dry terminology.