Everyday Scientist

SPRAIPAINT

Great paper from my previous lab. And with a ridiculously hilarious acronym (a play on Hochstrasser’s PAINT): superresolution by power-dependent active intermittency and points accumulation for imaging in nanoscale topography (SPRAIPAINT). This acronym fails almost all my ”GINAP” rules for initialisms, but I still love it because it joins the plethora of acronyms in the super-resolution microscopy field: PALM, FPALM, STORM, dSTORM, STED, GSDIM, PAINT, RESOLFT, SMACM, FIONA, SHREC, SHRIMP, SIM, SOFI, NALMS, … and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. This acronym shitstorm certainly deserves more. In all honesty, I think we should drop all the acronyms and just call it “pointillist super-resolution microscopy.”

The images in this paper are just beautiful! The bacteria they image are very small, basically at the diffraction limit of a conventional microscope. But they are able to image three-dimensional helices of protein filaments inside these tiny guys!

The movies are awesome:

(Click here for Movie 2)

Cool. Keep up the good work, Moerner lab.

sam’s three most important safety rules

Top three safety rules, especially for new students:

1. If you’re unsure about any safety issue, ask someone!
2. Wear safety glasses when freezing things.
3. Wear a face shield when piranha etching.

An addendum rule is to not work sloppily in general. Or when you’re very tired.

Of course, there are many other important rules. But these are my favs.

2011 nobel predictions

Wow, it’s already Nobel season! ChemBark and the Curious Wavefunction already have predictions. My 2010 Nobel predictions are here (and, of course, the Simpsons had their own last year). I don’t have too much to add to my 2010 predictions; instead, I’m going to put my chips all in and give just one prediction for each category.

Physics: Moerner, for single-molecule spectroscopy

Chemistry: Matyjaszewski, for polymer synthesis

Medicine: Djerassi, for The Pill

Peace: Twitter, for liberating Egypt

Literature: Twitter, for making literature shorter

playstation joystick control on electron microscope

Fancy electron microscope…

…uses a game controller to manipulate the internal robots. Ha!

405 nm laser fun

I bought a 10 mW (30 mW, actually, according to our lab’s power meter) 405 nm laser from Amazon. No this pointer isn’t for presentations, for reasons I have already stated. This pointer is for fun.

For instance, I’ve enjoyed shooting the beam through tonic water and seeing the fluorescence from quinine. Here’s some total internal reflection:

Any other ideas for cool “experiments”?

(Note, please be careful with this or any laser pointer. Although the purple light emanating from this pointer doesn’t look bright, it can damage your eye or skin. Even if your eyes aren’t sensitive to 405 nm, that doesn’t mean they can’t be damaged by 405 nm. This pointer is dangerous to be viewed even in diffuse reflections.)

(P.S. The sorta shitty photo credited to E.Y.L.)

UPDATE: It turns out that urine is also fluorescent:

Especially after taking a multivitamin.

extraordinarily repeatable data

UPDATE: My friend on Facebook pointed out that Figure S5c in the supporting info is even more fishy (click on the image below to see a zoomed-in version). Clearly, some portions of the image were pasted on top of other parts. On the right, it is obvious that the top part of the image is from a different frame as the bottom part. On the left, it looks like there’s another image hidden behind (see the strip showing through on the left top part of the image). I’ve added red arrows to aid the eye.

This could possibly be mistakes by someone who doesn’t know how to use Photoshop layers, but I’m thinking there might have been some intentional manipulation of the data. Either way, this type of slicing and stitching and Photoshopping of scientific data is totally unacceptable. I think Nature editors and referees should be more than ashamed to have let this slide.

Nature editors announced that they are investigating.

(Original post below.)

This paper in Nature contains some serious errors: some of the images that are purportedly from different samples (different mice, even) appear to be identical! Note the triangle of spots in the two images below:

Many commenters have noticed the weirdnesses in the figures. This is my favorite comment so far:

2011-04-22 09:31 AM aston panda said:
This is an excellent article shows extraordinary .. skills and amazingly repeatable data. for example
Fig.1a, 2 middle vs 3 bottom left
Fig.1c, 2 right side vs 3 left side
Fig.S4, 1 left side vs 2 right side
Fig.S5, c4 middle right vs e4 middle left
GOOD JOB

I suspect that some sloppy organizing by the authors led to them mixing up some files on their computer. That’s my optimistic view. If they were trying to fabricate data, they wouldn’t use the same region of the same image of the same sample! It must have been sloppy bookkeeping. I hope their results stand up after they correct these errors.

It just goes to show that real science can’t get accepted into Nature and Science. ;)

UPDATE 2: RetractionWatch is surprised that this paper eventually was published with only a correction!

why is the left bike pedal left-hand threaded?

Any cyclist knows that the left bike pedal is left-hand (i.e. reverse) threaded. This is so the pedal doesn’t unscrew itself while you’re pedaling. But go grab a bike and spin the pedal and crank around and you might be a little confused. Last time I did this, I thought, Wait why isn’t the right pedal reverse threaded? When you spin the pedal and crank forward, as if you’re actually powering the bike, the effective spinning of the pedal around its axle (AKA the spindle) should actually unscrew both pedals: lefty-loosey on the right pedal and righty-loosey on the left. Did every bike manufacturer get this wrong?!?

Of course not, and the real answer blew my mind. (Probably because I’m not a mechanical engineer.)

It is not, not mind you, because of the effective unscrewing force from the non-zero friction of the ball bearings. Instead, it is an effect that works in the opposite direction (in this case): mechanical precession:

“Precession is the process of a round part in a round hole rotating with respect to that hole because of clearance between them and a radial force on the part that changes direction. The direction of rotation of the inner part is opposite to the direction of rotation of the radial force.”

The source of the unscrewing force is thus radial on the spindle—the downward force you put on the pedal—instead of the twisting force from the ball bearing friction. This radial force translates into an unscrewing force because there is a small amount of clearance between the spindle and the threaded hole in the crank. I picture it like a pencil in a toilet-paper tube: crank the end of the pencil around, and there is a force that wants it to rotate on its long axis (from friction with the wall of the tube).

The unscrewing force from precession is much stronger than the unscrewing force from friction of ball bearings, so bike manufacturers ignore the latter.

I wish I could find an animated gif of mechanical precession, but I haven’t found one. Anyone have a book on “advanced thread theory” and want to make an animation?

UPDATE: Here’s a nice figure. Not an animation, but it might be helpful:

wtf?! acs fall meeting deadline is already passed?

Before the Spring meeting has even started? This is not cool.

It’s almost impossible to actually find out, but the deadline for submitting an abstract to the ACS Fall meeting in Denver has already passed. This is how I tried to find out:

First, I went to the ACS website, and clicked on the “Meetings” tab. The Fall 2011 meeting isn’t even listed there (see screenshot on the left). OK, that’s silly.

Next, I searched “deadline” from the ACS homepage and clicked on the top link, “Events & Deadlines.” That brings me to the Events & Deadlines page. Where the Denver meeting doesn’t even have a link. The Anaheim meeting’s link is live, but you can’t click on the Denver meeting. OK, maybe that means the deadline is so far away that you don’t need to worry about it. Wrong. Apparently, the Events & Deadlines page is only for past deadlines. Why have a deadlines page only for past deadlines?!? Wouldn’t future deadlines be a bit more helpful? I guess, the “Events & Deadlines” page is more a shrine to the deadlines you’ve already missed, not intended to help you meet future deadlines.

OK, let’s try going directly to the Denver meeting homepage. Not a lot of info there. But it turns out that, if you click on the symposia link, you’ll find that many of the deadlines have already passed!!! And the Spring meeting hasn’t even started yet! (There’s also this strange PDF I found somewhere on the ACS website; it list different deadlines.)

That really, really sucks. I feel like, with all the stupid emails I get from ACS every day, I’d have seen this deadline coming. I suppose it’s all my own fault: I should have been paying attention. But I figured that the deadline for the next meeting wouldn’t be before the current meeting starts. And I do blame the ACS website: I’ve been looking at the “meetings” tab for info on Denver, but it isn’t even there yet.

My suggestion: Why doesn’t ACS have one deadline for all the divisions, have it after the current meeting is finished, and actually announce that deadline on their webpage?

I am annoyed.

great escape

Fun paper:

Harvey, A.; Zukoff, S. Wind-Powered Wheel Locomotion, Initiated by Leaping Somersaults, in Larvae of the Southeastern Beach Tiger Beetle (Cicindela dorsalis media). PLoS ONE 2011, 6(3), e17746. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017746

Escape mechanisms in the animal kingdom can be pretty cool. Or just downright entertaining. This little guy does a somersault, grabs his tail, and rolls away in the wind (see Video 1). Check out Video 4 for a slo-mo version.

why is author ID taking so long?

DOI is magical. Why is it taking so long for the same thing to happen with authors? Arguably, having unique author IDs is more important and helpful than document identifiers. Yet it’s 2011 and there’s no standard way to ID an author.

Thompson has it’s ResearcherID, but it hasn’t really seem to have caught on. And it’s certainly not a open or universal standard, given it’s based off of ISI. ORCID seems to be (slowly) working on a solution to that. NIH claims that it’s working on a Pubmed Author ID project, but what’s the holdup? Hasn’t the problem of multiple authors with the same or similar name been recognized for years?

There must be some technical and economic hurdles that I don’t quite understand. DOI seemed to arrive on the scene pretty early after the internet started becoming mainstream. That was a few years ago.

chemistry should not focus on the origin of life

Several chemists (e.g. here and here) have recently suggested that the origin of life (OOL) should be the next big question the field of chemistry could tackle.

Here’s why I disagree:

• OOL research is not (directly) practical. Studying OOL won’t directly result in new technologies, products, or cures that the public can use. I prefer the Deutch and Whitesides approach. There are more pressing challenges that chemists can contribute to solving (cancer, disease, chemistry of biology, global warming, alternative energy sources, etc.). OOL comes across as an intellectual pursuit for armchair chemists.
• OOL is politically, emotionally, and religiously charged. The last thing we need is idiots trying to cut chemistry funding because their faith says something different than the science. Studying OOL is the perfect way to offend a bunch of folks and make the field of chemistry a target of religious nuts. I don’t think we should guide our research on what religious nuts want, but why kick the beehive?
• OOL is basically unanswerable. We might be able to test theories of the OOL, but we won’t be able to observe the true origins of life on this planet. Until we invent a time machine. That makes OOL research speculative and uninteresting to me. And even if we could find out, who really cares? Will that change our day-to-day life? OOL seems like more of a religious question than one of science.

Of course, some chemists should work on OOL. Just like some physicists should work on counting the number of alternate universes. But I don’t think chemistry as a whole should devote a major portion of its efforts to the “big questions” like OOL and what the universe was before the Big Bang. Chemistry is a practical science that answers questions about our everyday life. Let’s harness that power instead of trying to be as “cool” and big-question oriented as physics.

There. I hope I offended everyone who works on OOL. :)

P.S. Harry Gray and Jay Labringer have a recent editorial in Science stating that the Big Questions in chemistry are harder to see. They suggest understanding photosynthesis as one of those Questions.

papers2 review

Scientists have many options for organizing, reading, and syncing PDFs of articles: Papers, Mendeley, iPapers, Endnote, BibDesk, Zotero, and more.

My favorite is still Papers. It’s clean and simple and beautiful. It works awesome on my iPad: reading PDFs is more enjoyable on the Papers iPad app than on my laptop. Syncing to the iPad over wifi is simple and practically bug-free. Syncing libraries between my home and work computers is also possible by putting the Papers folder in Dropbox. (Although Dropbox syncing isn’t technically supported by Papers, many folks use it to sync across computers. I’ve been doing that for half a year without a problem.)

The major downside with Papers is that it works only on Mac OS. On my PC, I use Mendeley. Mendeley is nice because it is free and has native syncing to the web and between computers. The reason I’m not completely sold on Mendeley is that it’s just not as clean as Papers yet. Mendeley is not as buggy as it was a year ago, but it still doesn’t seem to find metadata as well as Papers. But, if you’re starting from scratch, Mendeley is a great option.

And now Papers2 was just released! Honestly, Papers2 is a little disappointing, so far. But I suppose I was expecting a lot. But I still have high hopes for it. The support staff is working very hard to fix bugs and add functionality that users are screaming about on the discussion boards.

Some of the cool features of Papers2 include:

• A quick way to add citations to Word (or any other application on your Mac) directly from Papers
• Easier keyword tagging
• Automatic metadata importing (although I haven’t seen this work, yet)
• Linking supplemental info to the paper it corresponds to
• Searching multiple databases (e.g. Pubmed and arXiv) simultaneously

The automatic metadata grabbing might be nice, if it ever works. Mendeley tries to do that, too, but I’ve never been impressed. I really liked that Papers1 made manual matching easy (by highlighting the DOI, for instance). The new interface and searching mechanism seems much clunkier in Papers2, and the support staff has already acknowledged as much.

There are several other issues, that make Papers2 feel very beta. Given that it’s brand-new, that’s not exactly surprising. But Papers1 was so refined, that Papers2 seems very clunky in comparison. But I think Papers2 does have a lot of potential.

For those worried about trying Papers2, have no fear: the new version doesn’t overwrite your Papers1 data and PDFs, so you can use both versions side-by-side until you’ve made up your mind. During the 30-day free trial, for instance.

For the Mac, Papers1 has been the cleanest, coolest, and bestest PDF organizer. Hopefully Papers2 cleans up nicely and becomes my new favorite. But right now, Papers2 is not clean enough for me to recommend anyone using Papers1 switch over to the new version.

UPDATE: In the last two weeks, Mekentosj has provided two updates to Papers2 that have made it significantly better. Papers2.0.2 has fixed a lot of the bugs and annoyances in the version I reviewed above. For instance matching is much much better. Like I expected, the folks behind the program are working really hard to make it the best program, evar!

UPDATE2: I use Papers2 daily and I love it. It still has some things on the wishlist that I look forward to, but I think it’s a great program. I guess it just had some bumps at the beginning.

UPDATE3: Papers2.1 is now out at better than ever. Definitely better than Papers1. I can recommend without hesitation that you get this software!

what your laser pointer says about you

Red: You either don’t really care if anyone can see what you’re pointing at or you’re cheap and you use the free pointer you got from a vendor at the expo. Of course, you could be one of those considerate folks who buy very bright red pointers, because you stubbornly like what red looks like even though human eyes are not sensitive to 633 nm. That’s fine.

Green: You want your audience to see what you’re pointing at. Unless you bought a 5+ mW laser (either because you’re showing off or because you didn’t realize how sensitive the human eye is to 532 and bought the brightest laser you could find). In that case, you’re blinding your audience. If you’re going to get a 5 mW laser, get it in red. That’s classy and visible!

Blue: You’re a bad-ass. You don’t care that blue lasers are more expensive and slightly harder to see, you want the audience to know that you’re a real laser jock. (Or maybe you’re worried about leaking 1064 nm from green laser pointers.)

Purple: You’re so bad-ass you’re crazy. You don’t care that the human eye can hardly detect and can’t focus on 405 nm. You want to show that you support Blu-ray.

Yellow: You think blue lasers are soooooo 2009.

Invisible: You have a UV or IR laser pointer? Maybe a tripled or undoubled Nd:YAG? You’re nuts.

Maser pointer: I want one.

anyone going to BPS?

I’ll be in Baltimore Saturday-Wednesday for the Biophysical Society meeting. If you’re going to be there, leave a comment with your poster or talk number and I’ll try to swing by!

interrupting student

A (grad?) student walked into a seminar lecture, went up the the speaker in mid-sentence, and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but can I borrow some chalk?”

Everyone in the seminar room started chuckling at the kid. It was strange and awkward.

What a dumdum.