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Rivers Of Hydrocarbons, Crashing Into The Moon, Kinky Fish, Nature Versus Nurture, Venomous Primates Found, Depression Neuroscience, Testing The Simulation, Cool It Down, And Much More…
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This Week in Science… coming up next!
BLair’s Animal Corner
Kinky Fish
Mollies are a fish species that exhibit “mate copying,” this means that females prefer males that they have seen copulating before. What’s shocking, though, is that it is equally advantageous for a male to “flirt” with a male as with a female in front of his target mate. Wow, nature, you are into the taboo…
FYI, it’s Nature and Nurture…
According to new research, hatching order effects the behavior of birds for their entire life. Zebra finches are more adventurous as their relative brood age decreases. Those that hatch later have to try harder to find food since their larger siblings can outcompete them. So next time you’re being bothered by your big brother, tell mom that bullying from your siblings could effect you for the rest of your life!
I did not know there were venomous primates
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Dr. Sanford,
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Innovation World
Blair: They’re also an animal that defecates, and then you have them defecating, in your milk!
Kiki: Eww…
Justin: …………. well, there’s that.
Hahahah! This is, possibly, my favorite TWIS moment, ever!
I think Blair was first to notice how absurd a notion this is because she deals with animal shit on a daily basis. 🙂
Obviously, no Russian ever put a real frog in their milk, and later, continued to think it was a good idea.
The poor creature would immediately defecate, eventually drown, then defecate some more, releasing toxic salmonella into your milk.
It would quickly rot without refrigeration, causing your ruined milk to further putrefy in a matter of hours.
This is common sense to all but the most glorious of fools, no matter the century or country of origin.
The myth probably exists as a sort of trolling meme; a joke, where the goal is to fool people into trying it out.
I mean, you don’t have to be Alton Brown to know that frog-shit milk isn’t good eats.
15:26 We might, at times, be too quick to discount the trial-and-error experimentation of our citizen scientists of the past.
15:36 Recent, modern-day researches took a look at one of these practices of the past and found it may indeed have some sort of merit.
I’m not sure where Justin got this editorial from, but this is another damn lie carelessly propagated by the “science media”.
Research on these frogs was NOT motivated by the old Russian “practice” of milk-frogging, which, by the way, is a myth!!!
This is another example of the media just making shit up to create a false sense of mystical ancient wisdom, to entertain; not to inform.
I don’t mean to say all ancient knowledge is worthless. You know what they call ancient knowledge that survives to this day? Science.
Actually, the truth, in this case, happens to be a lot more interesting. Please allow me to explain.
To start off, we’re talking about the November 5, 2012 paper by Samgina et al..
This paper was editorialized in the December 12, 2012 ACS News article, which you quoted on air.
That is the first place milk-frogging was mentioned, a topic that came from an interview with someone named A. Lebedev.
He’s from Moscow State University, and also the one who submitted the paper to the Journal of Proteome Research.
Lebedev seems to be showboating during this interview, when he mentions the traditional experience of rural populations.
I say this because the Russian milk-frogging myth is not mentioned in the paper!
I found one source which explains the thinking behind the myth:
So the myth seems to relate to refrigeration, and so would NEVER have inspired a this biochemical search.
The actual motivation for this line of research is clearly explained by the same team in the earlier paper dated December 22, 2010:
Many people seem to have made the false, milk-frogging connection from reading the December 17, 2012 article by David Schultz at NPR.
In fact, the NPR article has this wonderful caption, which just about gave me the biggest citation needed headache of my life:
Maybe some gullible Russian children believed this, but, like I said before, only a fool would try it themselves, once, and never again.
Anyway, this work by Samgina et al. continues work begun with the publication of the September 29, 1998 paper by John M Conlon et al., over a decade ago.
Conlon et al. went on to publish many papers about frog antimicrobial peptides, in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, etc.
Where was the news explosion then? Hmm, I guess the whole world’s media missed all those papers… somehow.
Or, it might have not have sounded all that important at the time, because it didn’t have anything to do with the traditional experience of rural populations…
Anyway, in 2008 and 2009 that Samgina et al. got into the game.
But what have they been up to in the intervening years?
Well, that brings us to the actual science in the paper. Wait, actual science? What a concept!
The chemicals that ooze out of frog skin are called peptides.
This is just the fancy word for a short protein; a sequence of less than 50 amino acids.
Scientists figure out peptide composition by a process called mass spectrometry.
This process works by ionizing the peptide to generate charged molecules or molecule fragments and measuring their mass-to-charge ratios.
So, like putting together a puzzle, you can piece together the sequence of amino acids in the peptide.
Mass spectrometry has also been used to sequence DNA.
In their previous work, Samgina et al. used something called Fourier transform mass spectrometry.
But in this new work, they used different technique called Electrospray ionization.
This technique is better for organic molecules, like peptides, because it doesn’t break them apart too much.
The longer bits are easier to put together, just like a puzzle is easier to solve when cut into bigger pieces.
1:17:05 The whole idea of viruses causing cancer, we’ve sort of discovered this somewhat recently…
Wrong. By the early 1950s it was known that viruses could remove and incorporate genes and genetic material in cells. It was suggested that these new genes inserted into cells could make the cell cancerous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncovirus
Send me an email! drkiki at drkiki dot tv. I’m happy to talk.