Why Fly Remote Controlled Airplanes When You Can Fly a Fly?

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on Army research to remotely control a beetle's flight path via a neural microchip implant. Don't believe me? Check the video. Its fascinating!

"The beetle's payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals' optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that's controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle's optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively."

Hat tip to mocost via Twitter.

Digimorphed Invertebrates

At The Open Source Paleontologist I noticed his recent posting Welcome, Longhorns. I have never been a big school spirit rah rah rah type, but having lived in Texas as a kid I have always loved UT and it was where I was going to go when I first got out of the Army. So naturally I followed the link to the class and found myself eventually at the site Digimorph.org. If you're not familiar with it (I wasn't) Digimorph is an NSF funded project at UT that is part of the digital libraries initiative. It has an amazing collection of digital morphology studies created using CT scans. They have over a terrabyte of data covering living and extinct species of interest to active research and eduction. Most of the focus for the project in the past was on vertebrate species, but they are adding more and more invertebrates now.
The data is available online as Quicktime movies and still images and a very cool java applet that lets you pick the slice you want to view.


They have 750 or so specimen available online right now, including a small number of inverts such as this Mespilia globulus which has movies and imagery available from all three imaging planes:



I really love this site as it combines so many of my past things together: 3D (including 3D printing and animation), visualization, computers and biology. Guess who just found a new timesink! Gotta get some invertebrates into the most popular.

Southern Fried Linkage

A couple of quick links that I wish I had more time to write up, but I don't want to wait to share:

These two links are from Southern Fried Scientist, a graduate student from the lab Kevin works in at Duke, who has splashed into science blogging with both feet.

This semester he is TA'ing an Invertebrate Zoology class for Cindy Van Dover, and made a request for "the best marine invertebrate zoology blog post". It's a great list with many entries from TO95, DSN, and from all over the blogosphere. I really have to thank SFS for prompting me to go back through most of the postings from here to pick the meatiest ones so I can highlight them for future applications (hopefully that won't be needed for a while!)

Also connected to his TA'ing activities is an awesome series of posts featuring short video productions, by the students in the class: Topics in Marine Invertebrate Zoology.

Dung Beetle Mistakes Millipede for Dung

A cool story developing about researchers who found a species of dung beetle that switched diets somewhere along its evolutionary history. From farmer to predator, the little bugger uses its hind legs for grappling with the millipedes while decapitating them with its jaws. These are the same hind legs used all other dung beetles for rolling dung into balls and the same jaws that once extracted bacteria from piles of dung...

It's a fascinating story at the BBC with a video of the act!

Bring out the Tats Round 1

DSN recently posted Ocean Tattoos from the illustrious Love Lab at UCSC UCSB. Of course mindful of the historic Invertebrate Wars and the recent artful attempts by pro-echinoderm agents to renew the conflicts, I thought maybe a survey of science tattoo subjects could be used as a proxy to head it off.

With that in mind I headed over to Carl Zimmer's science tattoo galleries for a pilot study. I figured out of the 200 or so science tattoo's in his gallery at most a quarter of them were of animals so that would provide a nice sample size I could handle between classes. Sure enough, I ended up with 41 tattoos for which the animal was the subject, and that wasn't of a specific personality (e.g. no Darwin tattoos). I then evaluated each tat for the main subject phylum, except the case of the chordata, where I evaluated as invertebrate chordates and vertebrates (this being an invert centric blog after all)

The score:
Vertebrates: 16
Invertebrate Chordates: 1 (Pikaia)
Arthopoda: 13
Cnidaria : 2
Echinodermata: 2
Lobopodia: 1
Mollusca : 5

For the invertebrate war phyla, I was surprised that both echinoderms and molluscs are so under-represented in the gallery. I may have to get a tat for graduation, and another when I get a masters.

Hopefully the Love Lab won't be so vertebrate skewed...

Hmmm... who belongs to this winning one?

Missed Conference

From the twitter traffic and initial reports posted I missed a great conference with co-blogger Kevin and a whole host of your online science favorites. Next year I've got to make it to this one! In the mean time I'm hoping or some more details to emerge as I dive into the coverage!

Blogging for Darwin

Forget blogging for dollars, the spineless are going Blogging for Darwin!

Here (and at Kevin's deep sea haunt DSN, in their shiny, new, untethered diggs) we're going to participate in the Darwin Celebrations in a variety of ways, including by Blogging for Darwin... Be sure to tune into both blogs (you do anyways right?) and check out all the other participants who are conveniently listed at the Blogging for Darwin page. After the celebratory week is over well all be nursing our hangover...er I mean... all the best Darwin blog postings will be gathered together at BlogForDarwin.com. Already that site is full of Darwin goodies all collected together for your convenience.

Larval Juggler

Larval Jugler
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes

My son Johann enjoying some juggling practice with his new juggling balls and wearing an awesome sweatshirt from Kate at the Radula. She has them available at her Cafe Press store along with a number of other great invertebrate and science based designs.

Invert Inspired

Planktonic Postdoc

Calling all recent Biogeochem Ph.D.'s, come on over to the dark side and play with the plankton. Come on, if you're reading here already you know you want to, besides ALL the cool kids play with plankton and inverts!)

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences is looking for a good biogeochemist (or plankton physiologist) for an 18 month post doc position studying iron storage in marine phytoplankton. How cool is that? Ocean field sampling plus playing with a synchrotron.

You know the process... CV, letter of interest and contact info for three references to jobs at bigelow dot org with the reference #PD09-3 in the subject.