2011: The Year In Hair
- Hair is important! More specifically, it is critical for the detection of disgusting, blood-sucking insects.
- Hair is really important! It has now been conclusively shown (to the tune of seven supplemental figures in Cell) that different classes of mechanosensory neurons innervating the skin associate with different types of hair follicles in a stereotyped manner. This means that the relative amount of displacement among follicle types produces a population code that can be used by the brain to figure out the properties of a tactile stimulus. For hilarious CGI reconstruction of mouse fur, see above.
Perhaps 2012 will bring a cure for male pattern baldness (hopefully before Doomsday).
Maria Bethânia and Jorge Ben - “Mano Caetano”
My epitaph shall read, in part: “SUCKER FOR HAND-CLAPS AND PORTUGUESE”
Finally, an anterograde transsynaptic viral tracer! It’s a Christmas miracle!
What he has to show is indeed a long way off, and perhaps concerns us little, but all truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful.Samuel Johnson, on William Herschel, as quoted in The Age of Wonder, and the finest defense of basic science if I’ve ever heard one.
Gotye - “Smoke and Mirrors”
Someone said this was Phoenix plus Sting, which is accurate.
I Did A Ten-Week Rotation And All I Got Was This Lousy JPEG
NB: It is a single cell in the fly subesophageal ganglion, labeled with GFP in green and Denmark (a marker of the somatodendritic compartment) in red. You can see its axon (green alone, on the right) and its dendritic arbor (yellow, on the left). It is affectionately referred to as an “anter cell.”
On the growth and form of the gut across species +citation
Is there anything that cannot be made beautiful with careful surgery and Photoshop?
George Harrison - “Run of the Mill”
Suppressed during the Lennon dictatorship, if you can believe it.
Fly facts of the day:
- “A pair of houseflies beginning operations in April could produce enough flies, if all survived, to cover the earth 47 feet deep by August” (via this excellent article).
- At 5.8 centimeters, males of the fruit fly species Drosophila bifurca have the longest (uncoiled) sperm of any organism on the planet. That’s centimeters. The ejaculate is bigger than the ejaculator.
Björk - “Virus”
Inevitably, Björk is the person to make viruses sympathetic.
Allen & Allen - “Heavenly Baby”
Henri Cartier-Bresson perving out.
This transfixed me today in class. I sat, slightly agape, imagining poor australopithecines with slightly deformed ear bones getting devoured by lions while their more auditorily gifted brethren skulk away to safety.
YACHT - “Utopia”
When thread factories were worthy of artistic interpretation.
