Category: today i learned (til)

Badass Biology: Humanity’s Most Important Adaptation

Badass Biology: Humanity’s most badass adaptation

At some point, modern humans started believing that we are somehow special, that we are the center of creation and of the universe and that God loves us most. My point isn’t to argue against such divine egocentricity; we are indeed very special. Hell, no other species has made guns and missiles and stuff. And we are special even from a biological perspective. The reason we’ve done so well as a species is because we have adaptations that have allowed us to do so. So what are they?

We have many. Vertical skeletal structure, opposable thumbs, massive frontal cortexes, and unlimited salad and breadsticks are all commonly cited as being necessary for our species to thrive and dominate. These are all important morphologies. I believe, however, that there is one very overlooked adaptation in our evolution, one thing that, if it weren’t just right, would negate all of the benefits from these other lesser adaptations. So if it’s not our massive brain or our dexterous hands, what is it? Turns out it’s guns and missiles.

Guns and missiles have allowed humanity to reach far beyond our former niche. We now own the planet with such unchecked power that one person can say “I want to blow up that bit of the surface right there”, and his buddy thousands of miles away can instantly reply, “done!”. This adaptation has caused an evolutionary cascade of intermittent……………..ok, I can’t keep this up. I’m full of it. Our most important adaptation is actually our size.

I guarantee that human size was not the first adaptation that would have popped into your brain, but it is arguably the most important. Am I suggesting that all animals our size are evolutionarily successful? Of course not. Am I saying that tiny or huge people are somehow inferior biologically? Nope. However, if we were, on average, significantly larger or smaller, like ten times as large or small, the course of earth’s history probably would have played out very differently.

Much like the famous fairytale porridge, we benefit from being “just right”. Being the right size means there’s space for a brain that prioritizes and categorizes and tells the body to act judiciously. We stand vertically because we’re small enough not to battle gravity as ferociously as we would if we were the size of elephants. We can offer unlimited salad and breadsticks because we’re large enough to farm yet small enough to be incapable of eating the planet’s supply of breadsticks in one sitting. In this article of Badass Biology, I hope to convince you that our dominance stems from our ideal size. Had we been much larger or smaller, the evolution of our intelligence would have played out much differently, meaning no guns and missiles.

Bigger is better, unless you’re Godzilla

What does size have to do with anything? As animals grow larger in size, they tend to become more metabolically efficient. A cornerstone of evolutionary theory lies in Kleiber’s “3/4ths power rule”, stating that for every added unit of mass, metabolic rate only increases as a rate of mass^(3/4) [1]. While the value of the exponent and its real-world meaning is debated, one thing is clear: grow larger, and you’ll use less energy for your size, a comment you also hear regularly from your disappointed girlfriend.

Humans are damn gigantic; 99% of all animal species on earth are smaller than we are [2]. Does the power rule work to our advantage? Yep. Because math. The average human male (7700g) weighs roughly 457 times that of a typical field mouse (15g). Raise both to the ¾ power, divide one by the other, and you’ll find that the human has only about 100 times the metabolic demand of a field mouse despite the 457 fold increase in mass. I’d say that gives us a pretty big advantage in terms of having to spend less time and energy feeding, replacing tissues, respiring, etc. More time for guns!

ENDOTHERMS!! WOOOOO!!!

This sounds great, but if bigger is better, why isn’t every animal huge? Again, because math. Think back to high school geometry. Among the suppressed memories of sitting behind that brunette you thought was cute but wouldn’t pay attention to you unless you were captain of a team sport but that you later reconciled with because she ended up being a relatively heartless and shallow person despite her extreme self-professed piety, or that guy across the room you thought was an asshole to other people because he had a giant triangular face and douchey long blonde hair and a name not unlike “Brittney” until he confirmed his assholiness by being an asshole directly to you about something that absolutely did not matter at all, surely you must remember the formulas for surface area and volume. Basically, a shape that grows larger and keeps its form expands its volume in three dimensions (side x side x side), whereas surface area expands only into two (side x side). Big objects, like animals or guns or missiles, have relatively low surface area compared to their volume because volume mathematically outpaces surface area as objects grow bigger.

This is a really big deal. Think about every process that keeps you alive. Breathing, eating, sensing your environment, playing Civilization 5. All of these processes rely on tissues with some kind of exposure to the outside environment. Oxygen is absorbed as air rushes across alveoli in the lungs. Nutrients are absorbed through countless tiny folds of the small intestine. Tastants and odorants absorb through fluid media in the mouth or nose to trigger sensory receptors. Civilization 5 enters your brain through tiny refractive holes in the middle of your face. These are all parts of your surface area.

The point is this: if we were a lot bigger, like Godzilla-sized, we’d have a lot of trouble performing these same basic functions given our current body shape. This would suck for the most part. We’re already pretty specialized as is; a lot of animals don’t have folds in the lungs or intestines like we do because they’re small enough (thus having enough surface area for their volume) not to need them. But not absorbing things would be only one of our many worries if we were larger.

The earth’s gravity is not all that strong in a cosmic sense, but its impact on surface-dwelling body forms is huge. Let me put it simply: stuff caint grow too big because aint no way they caint get strong enough to stand up. Fighting gravity is hard unless you’re a gun or missile, especially when you’re giantic. Our skeletons would have to be quite different in order to support our huge stature. Bones would need to be thicker yet more pliable.To be Godzilla-sized would be risky, not only because of the inevitable bone weakness and joint decay, but because of imbalance and falling. Even at twice our current size, tripping over a gun or missile would cause a tumble with 16 to 32 times more kinetic energy than it would now.
This all sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Suppose that our bodies do adjust. We grow to Godzilla size, have super-efficient perforated lungs, guts that absorb enough to get by, and bones capable of supporting a small skyscraper that can walk and build guns and missiles. Imagine the caloric demand a body like that would require. How many hamburgers would we need to eat in a day?

Godzilla is, at lowest estimates over his career, 164 feet tall, or about 50m. A quick foray into ideal body weight calculations yields that a 25-year old male this height should weigh around 8106.8 pounds, or 3676ish kg. Plug that into the ¾ power formula, and the daily metabolic demand of our gargantuan is around 84,000 calories per day. The power rule certainly works into this huge person’s favor, because I certainly was disappointed by how low that caloric count was. So what does 84,000 calories look like? Imagine 81 quarter pound hamburgers with white wheat buns, ketchup, and a tomato slice. And that’s only just breakfast; imagine eating that three times per day. BIG PEOPLE PROBLEMS. I’m sure I’ve made my point. The earth would strain to support life of that magnitude. Here’s the kicker: I didn’t even account for added bone mass and musculature necessary to become that tall. Let’s add another 100,000 hamburgers per meal to the calculation just to be safe.

The worst part of being tall would be this: it would be really hard to fit as many people onto airplanes. The airline industry wouldn’t see as much profit from airfares, thus flying would be a privilege only for the super-rich, limiting my ability to go to places like Switzerland. And I really want to go to Switzerland.

I am convinced that Mürren is one of the most beautiful places ever. I encourage my rich philanthropist readers to take note. Did I mention how starving I am?

Why Ant-man is the worst superhero ever.

What if we were much smaller? Well, there’s good and bad news. The good news is that we could adopt simpler body forms, but that’s about it. The bad news? Pfft.

First. we would probably be much dumber than we are. Zoom in closely on the brain of every animal and you’ll find neurons, cells that communicate to one another using electrical or chemical signals. Hundreds to thousands of these neurons form dense and complicated circuits with one another in the vertebrate brain. Such circuits form pathways that tend to perform specific functions in the body. For instance, there are specific regions of the brain designated for movement, for regulating sleep, for hunger, for balance, for typing “guns and missiles”, and for interpreting the sights, sounds, and smells from the world. Our bodies may be able to shrink in size and still function to some degree, but our neurons cannot only be miniaturized and still function with such complex synchrony and elegance. As we grow significantly smaller, we run out of room for neurons very rapidly.

“But Kevin, I’ve always heard that a big head doesn’t mean make you smarter”. Don’t you sass me. But you are right, anonymous naysayer. There is admittedly weak evidence that intelligence correlates with head volume, yes, but that’s among humans of relatively the same size [3]. For example, my fiancée is tiny and adorable, though she’s likely smarter than I am (Fiancée et al, 2014). However, when we’re talking about a difference in scale between us and a mouse, size matters. We have nearly half the number of neurons as the U.S. military has guns and missiles, something around 86 billion neurons [5]. Mice have around 10 million. Ants have around 200,000. To put this into perspective, if each neuron were a person, our brains would outnumber earth’s human population 12 times over. A mouse’s would be constrained to the size of North Carolina. An ant’s would be Laredo, Texas. It’s hard to grow intellectually when you’re Laredo, Texas.

I apologize to anyone from or living in the city limits of Laredo. I did not mean to say your city is dumb. However, it certainly looks that way. I’ve visited your website. It looks terrible.

Come to Laredo and visit our…moon.

Being the size of an insect would present a number of other challenges. The interactions we have with things in our environment (like the water we drink and the food we eat) conform to the laws of physics. As we shrink in scale, these interactions change. To an ant, water seems as viscous as maple syrup. Gravity takes a backseat to air turbulence. As Steven Jay Gould writes, “An ant-sized man might don some clothing, but surface adhesion would preclude its removal. The lower limit of drop size would make showering impossible; each drop would hit with the force of a large boulder. If our homunculus managed to get wet and tried to dry off with a towel, he would be stuck to it for life. He could pour no liquid, light no fire…” [2].

Could an ant-sized version of early man have developed civilization even if intelligence were not a factor? Probably not, at least not at the same rate or with the same level of success. I imagine cultivating agricultural crops, one of the supposed precursors for civilization, would have been near impossible, not to mention cross-breeding them for good yield. Our meat-based diet would be replaced with who knows what, but I suppose it would include plant material and any nearby organism that decides to die. For that matter, hunting would be folly; spears and bows would be completely ineffective because we probably couldn’t put enough force behind the blow. Guns and missiles wouldn’t exist. Our predators would vastly rise in number, distancing us from the top of the food web. We’d be stomped into submission by the elements, by other creatures, and by our own ineffectiveness. Switzerland would be near impossible to get to. So long, Mürren.

What about food? Shouldn’t food be more abundant since, you know, one kernel of corn could feed an entire village of people? That’s true, but there’s a much bigger caveat to this than you’d think. The world’s food is spatially patchy. I don’t just mean that bananas only grow in the tropics or that rice grows best in silty soil. I mean that, when you’re the size of an ant, getting a bug from the ground nearby is a marathon. Food sources are really f**king far apart, but plentiful once they’re found. Many animals that live upon such food sources adopt life strategies to cope with smorgasbord-style resources. Some insects that exploit huge but infrequent foods, including flies like the gall midge, have adaptations that allow them to exploit them quickly. Gall midges typically reproduce sexually, though it takes a long time for larvae to develop this way. When midges find a mushroom, a gold mine on their scale, females reproduce without a male through a process called parthenogenesis. These offspring are formed more quickly than doing things via the sexual route, though it comes at a cost to the mother. Instead of developing externally, the larvae grow inside the mother, eventually liquefying her insides and bursting from her lifeless husk [4]. However, immature as they may be, they are ready to start chomping away on some sweet sweet mushroom bits and rotting parts of their mommah. D’awww. Overall, the flies have more successful babies this way, thus the need for bursting out of their moms and such.

Will humans do that? I dunno. That sounds desperate. But food would likely be lacking for most humans on earth. Maybe we’d be as successful as ants and develop complex chemical signals to communicate the locations of food, bypassing any other weird adaptations like the ones midges have . Maybe we wouldn’t, and we’d fill just another tiny niche in the complex world which we inhabit.

So, I hope you now understand how important our size is for our survival. We are big and scary creatures, and that’s allowed us to hunt and kill and eat meats and make pizzas and build guns and missiles. But we’re not so large that joint damage, eating entire herds of cattle per day, and toppling over and breaking bones would be a daily norm. We’re also not so small either that we can’t take showers or cultivate food. So, here we stand, results of the goal-less, powerful, yet delicate hands of natural selection. Just right.

Nobody comments on my stuff. You should comment on my stuff. Get your friends to comment on my stuff. I will then comment. We can all comment. It will be a great world full of comments.

WE HAVE GUN AND MISSILE CONFERENCES!!! HUMANITY, BITCHES!!!

Literature Sources:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber’s_law

[2] “Ever Since Darwin” by Steven Jay Gould, Norton & Co. 1977

[3] http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brain-size2.htm

[4]http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/ontogeny/p0306.htm

[5] http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full#B24

Image sources:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Apollo_17_The_Last_Moon_Shot_Edit1.jpg

http://images.gadmin.st.s3.amazonaws.com/26758/images/buehne/Muerren_054-1.jpg

http://img.docstoccdn.com/thumb/orig/124825385.png

http://universe-review.ca/I10-83-metabolic.jpg

http://pics4.city-data.com/cpicv/vfiles25324.jpg

March 7, 2014
The Art of Getting Robbed with Gringo Perdido

As a US citizen who travels internationally to conduct research, I’m well aware of the perception that gringos = $$. Sometimes that perception is true and you have money on your person or have access to it. But sometimes you simply represent wealth in some sociocultural way. Regardless of the reason, the fact is that I get robbed sometimes. Getting robbed is no fun, but it does make for some good stories.

Robbers are opportunistic, and travelers are, by definition, out of their element, so opportunities arise to rob travelers. Robberies are also about communication, i.e., “Give me your money now.” Pretty simple, huh? Well, sometimes the solution (i.e., not getting robbed) can be just as simple. If the robber doesn’t speak English and the robbee pretends not to understand the phrase “Give me your money now” then the would-be robbery is at a communications standstill. This dumb gringo trick works great, and I’ll use it as long as no weapons or physical assaults are involved. Before I developed this trick, however, I did wind up engaging a robber in a conversation in his native language.

I was out in the Neotropical boondocks very late one night alone in the rain, catching toads (it’s what I do). A guy on a horse came up behind me and startled me. Yeah, I get really focused on toads, so scenarios like this can happen; and, I don’t hear well. I assumed that I had accidentally trespassed onto his land, so I initiated the conversation of apologizing if I had done so, and promising to leave immediately if I was out of place. Turns out he did not care at all where I was, but he did want to rob me. Immediately, I was kicking myself for making the evidently poor decision a few hours earlier, to put my entire research-travel grant funds in my pocket, rather than leave them in the truck on the highway. Eventually, after a long conversation, I convinced him that my boss (who did not exist) had all of the funds back in the fancy hotel in the capital city because no one with lots of money would ever trust it to some schmuck pathetic enough to be hired to catch toads on a rainy night with all these mosquitoes around. I showed him my bag full of toads as evidence of the veracity of my story. He agreed that this made sense, and then demanded my flashlight. So, I asked him please not to take my flashlight, because then I couldn’t even do my shitty job and I’d get fired. He got off the horse, gave me a hug, and said something to the effect of, “I’m sorry for you my friend, as your lot in life is even worse than my own.” Of course he had a machete, because he was an actual cowboy, but he never raised it at me. If he’d raised that machete, he would have had a few hundred dollars instantly.

So, not all robbers are necessarily bad people. But I’ll tell you who are bad people: corrupt government officials. As robbers, they have a huge advantage and they know it. They have, ironically, the authority of law on their side, and the mere threat of being arrested during my travels is scarier than any gun I’ve had shot in my direction. These guys always have guns. They also have the mandate to set up roadblocks and stop all cars in the name of programs like the War on Drugs. For the corrupt ones, their day job is to make sure that the only people carrying drugs and weapons on that road are the people from the pre-approved local cartel. So they are not kidding when they search or grill you hard about carrying unauthorized drugs or weapons; just don’t conflate their diligence with caring about preventing drug trafficking. Once they clear you at the roadblock, they sometimes settle into robber mode. This authoritarian backdrop makes for some effective robbing. The game becomes a push-and-shove of “how little can I give them” vs. ”how much do I think this guy has on him.” To their credit, they are smart enough to realize that they have to be practical and discrete about all of this because if they just carjack you and take everything, then well it would be awkward to have you sitting there on the curb, and they have the keys to your truck, but they can’t take off with your truck until the end of their shift. These guys are not dumb thugs. They are fully aware of their advantage and thus are really impatient with any attempts you may make to stall the obvious outcome. In other words, I tried the dumb gringo trick at a roadblock exactly once. It escalated very badly, and they got all my money. Lesson learned.

The wandering toad-seeker runs into other brands of robbers as well. Gas station attendants can make a great cover for a top-class grifter. These folks have all day every day to figure out new, and often ingenious, tricks to rip off the customer. Again, they have an advantage on their side. You stopped and engaged them in this transaction, you need the gas that only they can access, and at some point you are going to give them the amount of money that they say you owe them. Add in the ever-bumpy cultural and language barrier plus, in my case, raging dyscalculia, and they definitely have the upper hand. If you do not pay them what they say you owe them, then you are stealing which is illegal (see “getting arrested” above). What are you going to do…drive off without paying? I dare you. The solution is to learn the more obvious scams and block them before they can play out.

Hookers are a complex reality. I want nothing to do with hookers, but, as a male gringo, they come to me. Remember gringo = $$ and, I usually wind up spending a lot of time politely declining the well-crafted and earnest sales pitches of hookers who assume I am rich. One night, however, the terms hookers and robbers became synonymous. After a moderate round of drinking in a large tropical city, my gringo colleague and I were walking back to our shabby hotel. He picked the route back, I argued against it because it seemed sketchy, but he won the argument. So I’m crossing the dark lonely back alley that people like me know to avoid and suddenly I am physically surrounded by three hookers who are busily putting their hands in my delicate areas and busily cramming my own hands into their delicate areas. There are eight hands involved here. My two hands are “occupied” against my will and the other six hands are occupied with violating my privacy and rifling through my pockets. Take-home advice: don’t wear baggy shorts in sketchy neighborhoods at night. It was over in seconds and they were gone. I’m not dumb, so I didn’t have my passport or watch or anything like that on me. They got my six leftover dollars that I had not spent on beer. Ok, so I got mugged or whatever, and they got six dollars. No one got physically hurt, and it was far less terrifying than the threat of getting arrested by corrupt cops. What was really terrifying was my first response to the assault: I launched into my rote spiel politely declining their sales pitch. That is how off-guard I was to the actual situation; it didn’t even occur to me to fight back, or run, or scream or anything remotely more rational than essentially saying “no, thank you.”

Afterwards, and to this day, the truth slaps me hard. I wasn’t being solicited, I was getting robbed. And whether the robber is a street thug, an official, a grifter, or a lady of the night, the victim is always the same: the hapless gringo perdido.

December 27, 2013
Badass Biology: Bat Echolocation

Vision is awesomely complicated. A lot of animals, like the hawk, use vision to detect important environmental cues from vast distances. They use complex eyes and even more complex brains to locate prey, or figure out where the ground starts, or I dunno, check out lady hawks. Hearing is like vision’s less-popular but talented younger brother, the often-forgotten Luigi to evolution’s Mario. Hearing is amazing, yes, but our hearing kinda sucks. We’re not good at it, and so we discount its importance. Instead, we glorify vision as the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, the ultimate sensory weapon against a hostile world. Yes, vision is awesome, and it is reliable, and it is useful for things like looking at steak. I f**king love steak. But other animals use hearing to see their steaks oh man that sounded really stupid so now it’s a run-on sentence now I don’t know how to end it oh no I’m embarrassed lol. The bat is one of the few animals that can accomplish this awkwardly-written steak hearing, and it does so using methods that absolutely amaze me.

It must not come to a shock to you that bats use echoes from their own calls to create a mental picture of the world around them. Bats hear with the precision of a rocket-tipped arrow, which sounds totally stupid because that implies the rocket should blow the arrow backwards and that’s not where the pointy end is, but this is not important. I will explain to you how they use variable auditory frequencies, interaural timing, Doppler shift, and badass brain parts to make a map of their world. In short, they use magic. Bottom line, bats are badass.

PARTS OF THE ECOCHOLOCATION PROCESS THAT ARE BALLS-OUT INSANE BECAUSE THEY GIVE BATS THE HEARING PRECISION OF A ROCKET-TIPPED ARROW.

1-The call

Did you also know that bats are really damn good at determining object size, velocity, shape, and even if it’s fluttering? I bet you didn’t, Mr. Fact Learner. You need to learn up all of your facts except that fact because you know for a fact that this fact is a fact, and that’s a fact.

Small bats usually emit two types of calls. First up are frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps, and bats use these to locate objects in the space around them. These calls are usually quick, and the pitch rapidly drops. This allows bats to emit a range of frequencies to the nearby area. The amount of time an FM sweep takes to return to the bat allows the bat to determine distance. Bats also use the time disparity between frequencies in the left and right ears to tell where objects are on the azimuth, or how left/right they are relative to the head. The pointy shape of their ear also allows bats to use FM pulses to gauge the elevation of objects.

We got three properties down in one paragraph: azimuth, elevation, and distance. Isn’t that enough? Hells nah. They use some of them AT THE SAME TIME. For instance, bats can tell the size of an object by determining how loud the echo is. They can then use all of this information to tell the difference between something like a bird that’s far away and a moth that’s up close. FM calls are sweet.

The second type of call allows bats to tell how fast an object is moving. Constant-frequency (CF) pulses are typically longer, though the pitch does not drop. This allows, and yes I’m serious, bats to determine slight deviations in pitch due to the Doppler effect; a CF echo from an approaching object is slightly higher in pitch. This raises a good question: How can a bat do this if it’s flying toward an object? Wouldn’t the act of approaching an object make the CF pitch higher simply because the bat is moving towards it?

FM and CF calls from two species of bats. Notice how quickly the pitch decays in the FM calls, whereas the CF calls sustain one pitch for some time. Some species even have FM and CF components within one call. Pretty sweet.

This next experiment sounds kind of insane, but I promise it really happened.

Scientists strapped a bat to a swing, pointed the swing at a wall, hooked up some microphones, and let loose. Sure enough, a bat swinging at a wall lowers the pitch of its emitted call. So, bats can compensate for their own movement through space by dropping the pitch of their call, making the pitch of the echo ALREADY ACCOUNT FOR DOPPLER SHIFT BY THE TIME IT GETS BACK TO THE BAT. Totally. Friggin. Badass.

2-The ear and auditory pathway

“Auditory pathway? Ughsheesh. That sounds boring. I don’t want to read about that.” said nobody awesome ever.

Our inner ears are pretty complicated. Without getting stained with details, sound transduction works basically like this:

1) Sounds, which are essentially air pressure waves, vibrate tiny bones in the middle ear that then convert those vibrations into pressure for the inner ear.

2) The basilar membrane, a bendy flap of tissue in the cochlea that looks like an industrial-strength file, vibrates in different spots based on the frequency of these vibrations.

3) The bending basilar membrane causes tiny hair cells adjacent to the cochlea to bend. These hair cells are connected to neurons that can detect when these hair cells bend.

What did we learn here? Basically, pitch matters. Low pitches vibrate different hair cells than high ones. Bats are crazy though. Really crazy. I once saw one bite the head off a human.

Bat basilar membranes, the part of the ear that transduces sounds into nerve impulses, are wider on the part of the cochlea where they detect the frequencies of their echoes. This helps for a number of reasons: 1) It increases the volume of noise in this frequency range, 2) It allows bats to become more sensitive to their own echoes, and 3) it helps reduce sensitivity to their own calls, reducing the odds of confusing those calls (or other sounds) with echoes. It’s also pretty cool to point out that bats contract muscles in their ears when they screech, dampening the sound of their calls further. All in all, bats are pretty much deaf to their own calls but highly sensitive to their echoes. Also, different bats are sensitive to different frequencies, limiting the odds of cross-talk between species.

Left: Bats are sensitive to different frequencies. More hair cells at certain spots along the basilar membrane increase sensitivity. Right: The bat inner ear and auditory pathway.

Alright, this is about to get nuts. I recommend not reading this if you’ve just had a heavy meal, because you may be so amazed that you’ll spew half-digested mush all over your keyboard.

3- The brain

I’m so excited to tell you about bat brains that I’m literally going to get some Oreos. It turns out I was actually excited about the Oreos all along.

The auditory cortex is the part of the brain where auditory information is processed. You and I both have auditory cortexes. This is where information from the ears is organized and sent to other parts of the brain to aid in functions like cerebral processing, speech, and motor function. It’s also the part of the brain that allows us to differentiate between a high E flat played by a piano and a high E flat played by a chainsaw.

Bats have auditory cortexes too. Theirs do many of the same things as ours. But there’s got to be a reason I’ve decided to spend an entire section on their brains. Trust me, there is.

Remember how the cochlea can organize sounds by frequency? We tend to keep nerve impulses of similar frequencies bundled together as we send sound information from our ears to the auditory cortex through various brain structures. So, different parts of the auditory cortex become active when we hear different pitches, giving us somewhat of a tonal map of our sounds. Bats do this too, as do many animals. Here’s the difference: bat brains are capable of producing an ACTUAL map based on sounds.

The bat auditory cortex has two pretty badass regions. One is the FM-FM region. Remember FM pulses? Those are the calls bats use to determine where things are in the space around them. This function is done here. Neurons in the FM-FM area respond to the amount of time in the delay of a call and the harmonics of the call’s echo? What is a harmonic? Click here to find out.

Think of the FM-FM area of the auditory cortex like a 2-D map. Each harmonic excites different horizontal sections from top to bottom, while the left-right axis responds to different delays. So, if the bat detects an echo from the 2^nd harmonic after 8ms, neurons in a specific area of the FM-FM area will start firing. Enough of these allow a bat to tell how the large size and distance of the object is.

Bats auditory cortexes can also produce a mental map of sounds based on their velocity. Recall that bats use CF-CF calls to detect the Doppler Shift of sounds and tell whether they’re moving. They process this information in the CF-CF area of the auditory cortex. Like the FM-FM area, certain cells become active when sound properties are just right. Bands of cells respond to certain CF frequencies, and other bands respond to the velocity, or Doppler shift, of the sounds encoded. What bats end up with is a map of awesome.

Left: FM-FM area from the auditory cortex of the mustached bat Pteronotus. Right: CF-CF area.

So what’s the point? Oreos can get me really excited. And to be specific, I’m talking about the golden ones. For some reason the regular Oreos get stuck in my teeth and I can never seem to get them out. Not that regular Oreos aren’t good, I’m just a little bit more partial to the ones that don’t annoy me. And bat brains, those are cool too. I wonder how they make the crème on the inside of the cookie. DO they keep it in big vats? I wonder how much would I have to bribe a guard to swim in that vat for 20 minutes.

Could you imagine if I ended the article that way? Hahahahaha. I am so funny. But seriously, I am actually going to end the article this way. You don’t get a summary of what I said earlier.

Want to suggest a topic for Badass Biology? Want to tell me how awesome a person you think I am? Interested in funding me? I didn’t think so. Anyway, leave a comment below and I might talk to you about stuff.

A big shout-out to “Behavioral Neurobiology” by Thomas Carew for much of the information and figures used in this article. Dr. Carew, if you’re reading this, you seem like a cool guy. Email me and we will go grab a beer and some Oreos.

December 16, 2013
Megalodon: Fact or Fiction?

Barbies? Yea right. Doll Houses? Please. I was never the little girl who played with mini tea cups and pretended my stuffed animals were my fellow beauty-pageant friends. I was the girl outside shooting Nerf guns at the neighbor boys and exploring the deep ends of the woods in my backyard. I’m sure my mom was thrilled when I brought pet bugs home from school rather than glitter-filled artwork. Nonetheless my fascination for bugs, animals and anything living for that matter started from a very young age. To this day I find myself watching Discovery channel till wee hours of the night or researching the latest species found in the far corners of the Amazon. It was not until recently that I began indulging in my extreme captivation with sharks.

Although I would never want to find myself next to one of these sharp-toothed vigilante creatures, the fear and complete awe I feel every time I read, watch, or hear about them gives me an experience unlike any other animal I have studied. They are powerful, stealthy and the ultimate kings of the water. Many can swim up to 40 miles per hour and some can produce up to 20,000 teeth in their lifetime constantly replacing ones that fall out. However, no shark is as intimidating or interesting than the biggest shark that has ever existed…the MEGALODON. And yes, it was mega. This ancient beast was said to be up to 60 feet long and weighed about 77 tons. Just to give you an idea, that is the same mass as 7 school busses. Its size was almost 4 times as long and 15 times the mass of a modern great white shark. That’s big! The Megalodon usually preyed on blue whales and other large fish. In fact, the Megalodon had the jaw strength to crush a whale’s skull in the same way a human jaw can crush a grape. Imagine what it could do to a human skull. Yikes! It was by far the biggest predator in the seas at the time. Because the fossil record dates back 28 million years and is almost completely comprised of teeth, some scientists debate its size, its strength and even its existence. However what current researchers are still stumped with is answering the question, “Does Megalodon exist today?”

During shark week in the summer of 2013, the Discovery network aired “Megalodon: The Monster Shark that Lives.” On the program a group of researchers and Megalodon-enthusiasts analyzed a wide range of evidence claiming that Megalodon still exists. For shark lovers like me, the prospect of actually seeing glimpses of Megalodon was enough to get me hooked. On top of the shark fanatics, more than 4 million people tuned in nation-wide to watch the special with hopes of learning, seeing, and believing in a modern-day Megalodon. Boy were we wrong. Throughout the show the “researchers” presented photos of half eaten whales claiming only a shark as big as Megalodon could do such damage. They presented eye-witness testimonies of sightings, boat attacks, and big black blurs in the ocean of the supposed Megalodon skimming the surface of the water. The final spectacle showed the “scientists” dragging a huge model whale through the water as bait with hopes of the Megalodon resurfacing and attacking it.

And….it did! Sure enough there was a giant explosion, a blur past the camera, and in a second the “Megalodon” was gone. The only redeeming factor of this somewhat ridiculous ending was that the divers were able to tag the animal that surfaced. Despite everything else in the documentary being completely fake, this part was a glimpse of truth. The divers were able to tag an animal that dove from the surface to below 6000 feet in seconds, a behavior unlike any other shark or any other animal for that matter. In the middle of all the bogus Discovery chose to broadcast, they somehow still managed to instill the belief that Megalodon exists solely by placing hope in a tracking tag. In fact, over 3 million of their 4 million viewers believed in Megalodon after the documentary, including myself. Many marine biologists have clearly stated that Megalodon does not currently exist and went extinct about 2 million years ago before humans existed. There is no doubt in their minds that it is gone. In fact, many of them laugh and scoff at the fact that after showing such phony information, Discovery was still able to convince a large part of their viewers that Megalodon is alive. After much thinking and research I have come to my own conclusion. I do not believe that Megalodon is alive but I still hope it exists. While the documentary was full of misleading information, two unforgettable facts keep me hoping.

First, the tag proves that there is some kind of animal down there that is able to dive that deep that fast. Second, the fact that only 5% of our oceans have been explored leaves the other 95% up to our imagination. Who knows what’s out there? With that being said, is there hope that Megalodon still exists? In the minds of scientists the answer would be a cold solid NO. But in the minds of hopeful shark fans like myself, myth-lovers, and the curious general public, Megalodon may very well still be lurking at the bottom of the ocean in waters we may never be able to explore.

December 6, 2013
Cultural Collisions with Gringo Perdido

In case you’ve ever wondered what happens to the items that are too lame to re-sell in thrift stores in our culture, they eventually get boxed up and shipped off by charity foundations to developing countries. So, rural Guatemala in the early 90s was a walking rainbow of all the poor US fashion choices of the prior decades. It is nowhere more evident how weird is US culture than through the silk-screened, ironed-on legacy of our t-shirts. Everyone appreciates a free t-shirt in any culture, but this forgotten subset of t-shirts winds up on the backs of people who don’t understand what they say. So, while making friends at my field sites I sometimes wind up translating people’s t-shirts for them, because they ask me to. Ok, some of these are so obvious that no one asks (“Coca-Cola”), others require a bit more explanation (“Cheers. Where everybody knows your name” or “Styx”), and others are just inexplicable (like “I’m with Stupid →” or, even worse “Le Shirt”—in case you don’t remember, there once was an ill-advised culture rage in the US to label objects with text bearing their nominate noun in English, and the article in French–Le Car. Le Bag.). Do you get it? I never did, even at the time, and now I have to try to explain it to a curious Mayan guy while we are both trying to communicate using fractured Spanish skills.

Here‘s how this usually plays out, if the two of us are hiking along or resting on a rock or something:

Friend: Hey, can you tell me what my shirt says?
GP: “A Night to Remember. 17 June 1981.” I think it was probably a party for young people of some sort.
Friend: Do you remember the night?
GP: No. I wasn’t at that party.
Friend: Do you think the person who bought this shirt remembers the night?
GP: I don’t think so.Friend: I don’t get the point. Why would you buy a shirt to wear to just one party?
GP: I don’t either. Hey, what kind of frogs do you see around here?

The t-shirt situation got the better of me one day. I was riding in the back of a Toyota taxi-truck, standing up with a group of local women and we were all headed off, but not together in any sense, to the market in the next town down. Mayans, I learned, have core muscles that would put a yoga instructor to shame. The ubiquitous Toyota taxi-trucks have an iron bar welded lengthwise down the middle of the truck bed, so you can hang-on while trying to stand up vertically in the back of a truck pitching along on an impossibly rutted dirt road. Well, only gringos actually need or use that bar. So we are bouncing down this road and I look like a broken pirate-ship mast flailing back and forth holding onto the bar for dear life, as I am very much taller than all the perfectly vertical seemingly motionless women filling the rest of the truck bed. A very important player in the Toyota truck-taxi system is the branch trimmer guy. He sits motionless cross-legged on the top of the cab of the truck, without holding on at all, and uses his machete to whisk away errant branches that might tear out a passenger’s eyeball. I am convinced that this guy is somehow glued or bolted to the cab of the truck, but he is not. He can just do this. But, even though he is sitting on the cab of the truck, I am still taller than him; this is a problem for me, as you can imagine with the branches and all.

Ahead I saw this very, very old gentleman walking on the side of the road in over-sized gym shorts, sandals, a hand-woven straw hat, and a loose black t-shirt. He had his machete in one hand, a walking stick in the other and was slowly walking on the side of the road. He heard the truck come up behind him, and turned to make sure he was out of the way. That’s when I fully can regard his t-shirt. There it is— in all its 70s iron-on white fuzzy font glory, the phrase that helped galvanize punk rock:

Disco Sucks

I was left speechless at this unexpected cultural collision, and I foolishly turned my head to watch it go by. I heard an unprecedented little yelp from the typically stoic Mayan women who always utterly refused to acknowledge my existence in their midst. I turned back forward just in time to a get slammed in the forehead by a large rock-solid un-ripe mango. I saw stars as it whipped my head backwards, like a losing boxer, and I saw it retreat into the distance, pendant and wobbling like a yodeler’s uvula in an arched maw of jungle vegetation. Then it fell to the roadway. I swear I heard a minor giggle emit from somewhere in the back of the truck, but I won’t ever be sure. Everything was spinning and I thought I was going to vomit on my fellow passengers. Back in camp that night, I nursed my swollen skull and demolished ego and wondered if the branch-trimmer guy was mad at me for ruining a snack he had been nurturing on his route for weeks. I still don’t like disco.

July 19, 2013
Varicella-Zoster Strikes Again

Shingles on day 3, 6, and 11

I had chicken pox when I was 8 years old. This was before there was a vaccine for varicella zoster, the virus that causes chicken pox. When I was growing up everyone got the virus and it made you feel like crap and gave you sores all over (most people wound up with at least a few scars) and then you got better. In fact, when the vaccine was introduced in 1995 many people thought it wasn’t necessary because the disease was relatively mild. The 10,000 people hospitalized each year in the US because of complications and 100 people who died every year probably didn’t agree.

And you know what? I don’t agree either. Varicella or Herpes zoster is a tricky virus that goes latent in nerve cells, much like its cousin Herpes simplex virus. Basically this means that when you recover from your infection, some virus hides out, waiting for your immune system to get weak from stress, old age, other infections, or whatever and then it attacks again! I don’t know what triggered it in my case, but a few days ago I got shingles. Shingles is a yucky, sometimes terribly painful, outbreak of the same virus that causes chicken pox. This time I didn’t get a fever and sores all over, just a cluster of sores along one of the nerves on my back. The scary thing about this, though, is that I am infectious. I could actually give chicken pox to someone who hasn’t had a chance to be vaccinated (a newborn baby for example), a pregnant woman, or anyone who is immunocompromised for some other reason like HIV disease or because they’ve had a transplant.

I could also give chicken pox to people whose parents chose not to vaccinate them. These could be children or adults. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a chance to decide whether they wanted to get a life threatening illness because their parents thought it would be “healthier” than getting a vaccine. They also won’t get to choose when they get shingles, and will put other completely helpless populations at risk when they get infected.

Some anti-vaccine people perpetuate the myth that being infected and recovering from a natural infection provides better immunity than getting a vaccine. This is simply not true. Viruses have evolved sly ways of manipulating our immune system, and often the immunity you develop from natural infections will not protect you very well from being reinfected or from the reactivation of latent viruses.

You know, if I had been born a decade later, I would have been able to get the chicken pox vaccine and I wouldn’t have this icky rash on my back. If I were older, my doctor would have recommended the shingles vaccine for me. Unfortunately I am stuck in the middle and got sick, but you don’t have to. Go get the varicella vaccine, and get your children vaccinated.

June 22, 2013
Why Does Hot Water Freeze Faster?

PROFESSOR: Hello class! Welcome to “Advanced Application of Math and Logic in Natural Philosophy” class. Look to your left and look to your right. One out of five in this room will not pass the class.

STUDENT A: Sir, but there are only four of us.

PROFESSOR: (ignoring the student) Ahem. During our first lecture, we will exercise the use of logic and thought experiments to unveil one of the greatest mysteries in the history of science. Even Aristitotle struggled solving this mystery. For centuries many scientists attempted to solve but failed. (drum roll) Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water?

STUDENTS B & C: (smile nervously not knowing whether he is joking or not)

STUDENT A: But sir, hot water needs to be cooled down before it can freeze. So shouldn’t cold water freeze faster?

PROFESSOR: Good point. However, that is not always true. It’s called the (writing on the board) Mpemba effect. Can anyone guess why? It’s okay even if you are wrong. Don’t be shy – that is why I am here.

STUDENTS A, B, C, & D: (silence)

(Satisfied with his authority and the full attention of his students, the professor continues)

PROFESSOR: Actually, experiments showed that hot water will cool faster than water at 60°C. But this is not the case with water below 60°C. Mpemba effect is a combination of multiple factors. Now let’s figure out each of them together. First, tell me what are the characteristics of hot water?

STUDENT B: It has higher average kinetic energy.

The water molecules move faster, which means that they occupy greater volume, similar to how an air balloon expands at higher temperature.

STUDENT C: Wait, that means that if cold water and hot water have the same volume, the mass of hot water will be less. This is because the evaporation is taking place and dissolved gases in hot water escape at a higher rate.

PROFESSOR: Great answers. Water is most dense at 4 degrees Celsius and its density changes according to its temperature. Yes, so 1L of water does not always hold the same amount of mass. 1L of hot water will weigh less compared 1L of water near 4°C. However, the mass difference is slim even when we considering the evaporation of water molecule. So there has to be another factor that contributes to Mpemba effect.

STUDENT: But sir? What about supercooling of water and nucleation? Doesn’t lack of impurities and gases in water lead to supercooling, in which water forms crystal ice at temperatures below 0°C? It has been observed that water can remain liquid at -40°C. If hot water doesn’t have dissolved gas, shouldn’t it be hard to make it freeze?

PROFESSOR: (as if expected) Good point. Except Mpemba effect has been observed in both hot water and cold water removed of dissolved gases. Dissolved gas does not seem to contribute to the process of freezing. You could, however, make beautiful and clear crystal ice by removing dissolved gas before freezing. So what else? What else does hot water do?

STUDENT C: It evaporates faster than cold water..?

PROFESSOR: Yes, the water evaporates faster. But why? And so what?

STUDENT B: Well umm… the temperature of water is the average kinetic energy. At any time, liquid water has molecules with a range of energies. Although most of them have the average kinetic energy of the system, very few have enough energy to escape intermolecular forces such as hydrogen bonds and dipole-dipole attractions. If we were to look at a graph of number of molecules versus energy, it would look similar to a current IQ graph, in which the majority of the population has an IQ of 100 and few have over 140 and under 40.

STUDENT A: (towards student B) Hydrogen bond and dipole-dipole forces are too weak to contain water molecules in liquid form. It’s actually the atmospheric pressure doing all the work.

PROFESSOR: Please let him continue.

STUDENT B: So molecules with higher energy escape, lowering the average energy within the system, and this is evaporative cooling.

STUDENT C: Oh! So the hot water is not only being cooled through evaporative cooling but also from heat conduction and convection inside the freezer.

PROFESSOR: Good answers class. But that is not enough. According to Dr. Takamasa Tkahashi at St. Norbert College, it takes 540 calories to vaporize one gram of water. At above 80°C, the rate of cooling by evaporization is high as vapor draws massive energy from water left behind. To give you an idea how much 540 calories worth, it takes 100 calories to heat up 1 gram of water to 100°C from 0°C.

STUDENT A: (excited) 1 Calorie is the energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1°C! In fact, scientists measured food calories by burning them and heating up water back in old days.

STUDENT D: Wow…is that why greasy foods have high calories?

PROFESSOR: If we neglect heat transfer through radiation or conduction, water will freeze on a desert purely from evaporation. Interesting, isn’t it? We can use zeolites which facilitate evaporation through adsorption to make ice as well. A team of engineers at Rice University built a prototype of ice machine that uses nothing but zeolites and vacuum pump.

STUDENT D: (perplexed) But professor, when hot water reaches the temperature of the cold water, don’t both of them have the same evaporation rate?

PROFESSOR: (impressed and amused) Very good point. I might actually consider allowing one A+ in this class. To answer your question, let’s first consider extreme cases to facilitate our thought experiments. Imagine placing an ice cube onto a very hot plate. What happens?

STUDENT A: (desperate to not embarrass himself) Uh…The ice melts immediately? And while some water molecules evaporate, others boil around the remaining ice cube, making noise from gases and vapor escaping. Noise is also another form of energy transfer.

PROFESSOR: Yes but melting the process does not happen instantly. While the ice is melting, what is the average kinetic energy? It is somewhere in between that of boiling water and ice.

Now, we learned that the energy of liquid water is not perfectly uniform. The faster the change of temperature is applied the greater inconsistency of the energy. Hence, hot water being cooled down to cold temperature has a higher evaporation rate than cold water that remained cold for a prolonged period of time. I think you’ll need to elaborate on this one…

STUDENT A: Also, Newton’s law of cooling dictates that hot water will cool down faster regardless of the evaporation.

PROFESSOR: Yes, of course, faster moving molecules will bounce off of each other more frequently, giving and losing energy through these interactions.

STUDENT D: So that means… initially, cold water has a more uniform temperature. But when hot water is cooled, although the average temperature is cold, there are greater discrepancies of temperature among molecules?

STUDENT A: (being impatient) Yes, and that is why the hot water will be more likely to have molecules with higher energy, which escapes and cools the liquid faster.

PROFESSOR: Like washing a car with hot water during winter, evaporative cooling is more evident with larger surface area. So what else? Does anyone else have any more idea?

STUDENT C: Well… this may seem stupid, but what if Mpemba effect is caused by other effects such as the environment?

PROFESSOR: (intrigued) What do you mean?

STUDENT C: The freezer keeps the temperature below zero all the time. But when the temperature increases, cold air is introduced in order to keep the temperature constant. So if we place hot water inside the freezer, and due to heat conduction, radiation, and evaporation, the internal temperature increases, it will trigger the freezer to blow cold air. You need to elaborate on this… And thus, hot water will freeze faster.

PROFESSOR: Hmm…I like your creative way of thinking.

STUDENT B: Also, freezers have ice dusts inside. And hot water may melt these ice particles within the compartment at contact points of the bowl and the surface. Since water is dense and thus conducts heat faster, hot water will cool down at higher rate. The effect is similar to how ice water cools beer bottles faster than ice cubes.

PROFESSOR: Excellent point! Water is 829 times denser and transfers heat 25 times faster than air. Hot bowl of water sitting on slightly melted ice will definitely cool faster than cold bowl of water sitting on ice dust. Water covers more surface area as well. But aren’t you slightly underage to know how to cool beer bottles?

STUDENT A: (hungry for attention) Sir, what about infrared radiation? We know hot objects emit electromagnetic radiation and thus release energy at a faster pace. A combination of this and everything we discussed today will make hot water cool faster.

PROFESSOR: Now, do you guys remember how water changes its density? Due to heat conduction at contact points, a bowl of water will be colder at the bottom. Let’s consider a cold bowl of water. Cold water near freezing point at the bottom of the bowl will have lower density than water at near 4°C on top. Low density water will rise up switching position with water near 4°C. Neither upper nor lower part of water will freeze until that 4°C temperature is brought to 0°C.

Now what about hot bowl of water? Hot water at the top has lower density than cold water at the bottom. Thus, cold water near freezing point won’t rise up. This means the water at the bottom can freeze before hot water is cooled to 4°C. This effect will freeze hot water faster.

STUDENT C: Whoa… there seem to be a lot of factors that play in Mpemba effect. We discussed mass difference, evaporation rate, freezer compartment effects such as more frequent cold air and melting ice at contact points, and how density can slow or speed up the freezing rate. I don’t think we can come up with anymore explanations.

PROFESSOR: Aha but we are not done! There are more. What are we forgetting class?

STUDENT D: (as if he had more than enough to learn) Not a clue sir…

PROFESSOR: (excited) The internal air pressure of the freezer compartment~!

STUDENT D: But how..?

PROFESSOR: (showing a video clip on a TV) Do you guys watch a BBC TV series called “Bang Goes the Theory”?

STUDENT C: Oh my gosh! I absolutely love that show!!

PROFESSOR: Let’s look at season 2 episode 4. In this episode Dr. Yan shows that when you quickly open a bottle there’s a cloud of white air at the opening. This effect is the opposite of how diesel engine ignites a spark by compressing air. (Professor demonstrates by opening a beer bottle). The air between the liquid and the cap is quickly expanded and loses energy. At this very instant, the temperature drops to around -30°C and this white gas you see is the condensed water molecules in the air.

STUDENT A, B, C&D: (intrigued) wow…

PROFESSOR: As the ideal gas law states, hot air has lower density than cold air under equal pressure and volume. If hot water and cold water were placed in a separate freezer compartments, the one with hot water will have less air molecules inside.

STUDENT D: But professor, why?

PROFESSOR: Because hot water will heat up the air inside the compartment. Of course, the longer you wait before closing the door, the more evident the effect would be. You all saw how quickly air cooled down when I opened the beer bottle. (Takes couple of sips of beer). You can create the same effect by opening the freezer compartment. Now when you open both hot and cold water compartments, the one with hot water will experience greater decrease in temperature; air with lower density will lose more energy when expanded at the same volume as air with higher density. This gives the last minute boost of freezing air to hot water compartment.

But even if you don’t open the freezer, lower pressure will facilitate freezing. Can anyone guess why?

STUDENT A: As we can see on the phase diagram, the freezing point of water is higher at lower pressure. Hence, by lowering the pressure, hot water will freeze at higher temperature than cold water.

PROFESSOR: Excellent! Although the boiling point is lower at low pressure, freezing point is higher. Since ice occupies greater volume than liquid water, applying pressure to ice cubes will turn solid into liquid. Not only does lowering pressure increase evaporation rate, it helps to crystalize ice!

STUDENT C: I see… Mpemba effect isn’t magic. It’s science.!

STUDENT D: (frustrated) But professor, none of these answers answer any questions at all! Why must water evaporate? How come its temperature is not uniform? How come its density changes with the temperature? Why all this?

PROFESSOR: This class is a natural philosophy class for a reason. Science is a study and observation of the universe, finding pattern in its chaotic behavior and thereby hypothesizing the answer with logic. And we test our hypotheses to come up with a prediction. We, scientists, ask the question ‘why?’ and dwell on solving the mystery. But the answer we find is the answer to the question ‘how?’ We observe the mechanism and apply it, but we still don’t know why the universe behaves in the way it does. For example, why does Earth create gravitational attraction? Einstein explained that it is because mass curves the space. But why does mass create a distortion of space and why does the distortion cause attractive forces? We don’t know. All we know is how mass creates gravity

Class, I encourage all of you to pursue knowledge with an inquisitive mind. Scientific knowledge is what shapes our future.

Class dismissed. Write me 50 pages on Mpemba effect by tomorrow. It should be easy now that we discussed it in class.

June 16, 2013
Badass Biology: Toxoplasma gondii

Look, we humans are awesome. We own this planet. If we really wanted to, we could spill every barrel of oil we have into the ocean, light it all into one gigantic fiery blaze, get on fire-proof boats in robot suits, somehow put on war paint inside the robot suits, build obnoxiously large metallic middle fingers, and shout to the heavens “TRY TO IGNORE THIS, MOTHER EARTH!!” Then, if we try really really really hard, we could clean it all up again, because some of us are actually sorry and some of us like to keep our marine food webs and all.

Why orchestrate such a display of power? Because we are the all-powerful movers of earth, the masters of fire and brimstone, and the makers of Haribo Gold Bears because holy freaking balls those things are really freaking delicious. We also have days of the year set aside where we butcher and devour different animals in front of children, purely because that’s what we’ve done for centuries. That right there is true power.

Point is, we are masters of everything we see. Remember in the Lion King where Simba is sitting with Darth Vader, who I guess came back to life to inhabit the form of a lion, and Vader is all “everything the light touches is our kingdom”? Yeah, we humans are exactly that. The only difference between humanity and Darth Vader is this: while the lions behave at the whim of the team of animators and writers that brought them to movie stardom, we are being toyed with by a tiny microscopic parasite that enter our guts, hitchhike a one-way ticket to our brains, and deliberately try to kill us by making us do really stupid and risky things.

I bet if you were eating a sandwich right before that last sentence, you probably aren’t anymore. It’s hard to eat something that’s been catapulted by your own shocked reaction, sending sandwich chunks to the opposite wall mid-chew. Even then, the walls may be really dirty, and that’s just not sanitary. I have no idea when I washed my walls last, and I keep my room relatively clean.

Why is this parasite trying to kill us? Simple. They want to get to our cats.

DAMMIT, MR. SCRUFFLES!!!

One of the reasons I wanted to write this article was to make myself look amazing. This isn’t hard, considering my creative wit and depth of scientific knowledge is nearly endless. The main reason I wanted to write this, though, was to talk about some badass ways that parasites can take over the minds of their hosts. It’s actually not uncommon to find mind-controlling parasites in nature. In fact, there is an entire field, called neuroparasitology, focusing on the effects a parasite can exert on host biochemistry, neurophysiology, and ultimately behavior and ecology.

Science jargon aside, there are some pretty badass parasites out there that tend to turn hosts into zombies. For instance, a genus of fungus called Chordyceps invades the mind of its insect host, forces it to climb to a high place, orders its newly-induced slave to latch on with a deathly grip, and busts out of the host all Alien-styled to shower its lethal spores onto unsuspecting insect hosts below.

Huuuugggghshhh, gross. I’m sorry I did that to you. I even feel a little dirty describing that. So, in an effort to make you and me feel less creeped-out and anxious, I’m going to comfort you by giving you increasingly creepy and troubling examples.

So there’s this non-sarcastically beautiful creature called the jewel wasp that wrestles cockroaches into submission and bites them in the neck to inject a mild dose of venom. This venom paralyzes the roach, and after a short time, causes the roach to move with absolutely no will of its own. The wasp then literally starts a one-float cockroach parade, leading the roach to the wasp’s burrow like a Siren leads a ship’s crew to the abyss to be eaten by mermaids or something. Gotta admit, I don’t fully understand the Sirens’ intentions. The wasp seals the roach inside the burrow with a single egg and a comically large timer counting down the exact moment until the egg hatches. When the timer goes off, the cockroach is devoured to death by the larvae and pupae of the wasp, giving rise to another generation of the most beautiful thing in the universe made entirely of cockroaches. Technically, these kinds of parasites are called parasitoids because they live on or within the organism for a long while, but they ultimately lead to the sterilization or death of their hosts.

The jewel wasp: made from 100% real cockroaches!! Holy balls, I just shuddered. Like, that seriously just happened.

Another badass parasitoid wasp, called Glyptapanteles, lays its eggs in a caterpillar to develop and consume the host. This time, however, the host does not die. IT DOES NOT DIE. No, these tenacious caterpillar hosts, half-devoured and all, cling to life like that chip I just dropped into my bowl of homemade salsa.

I hate when this happens.

However, the wasp is not yet finished with its host. The caterpillar, after having live wasp pupae burst from its insides, spins a web of silk over the developing cocoons, stands upright on its back legs, puts on a lucky Japanese headband, and guards the cocoons with its life. Seriously, I wouldn’t dare screw with a half-eaten caterpillar sentinel, not even if I got a tummy full of wasp bodies as a treat afterwards. Eventually, the caterpillar starves to death, and that sucks, but at least– OK seriously curtains, what the hell are you doing?! Get it together!!!

OK, so I just bought one curtain yesterday, and not only is the color subtly different than the other curtains in my room, but they’re about a foot shorter, too. It keeps moving and I keep staring at it thinking “I can’t wait to give you back to the store”. I have never hated a curtain so much in my entire life. Please, curtain, quit moving and let me write.

Anyway, the point is that there are some pretty bitchin’ parasites and parasitoids that turn their hosts into zombies. You’ll notice though that all of the host examples I’ve used so far are from insects. Insects are little and dumb, and their tiny dumb stupid heads are really easy to invade. I mean, we’ve got huge brains! HUUUGGEEE!!! And they’re so complex, too! I mean damn, your visual cortex is so complicated that if you took every grain of sand on a 50-meter stretch of beach beach and lined them end to end, I’d be really disappointed because you decided to do that instead of listen to me talk about the visual cortex.

No, we are not immune. You read the first couple of paragraphs, so I assume you knew that already. So let’s just jump right into things and talk about Toxoplasma. This little protozoan is microscopic, but somehow it’s able to hijack the most complex brain on the planet like it ain’t no thang.

Braaaaainnnssss. Rat Amygdalaaaaaaaasssss.

Much like a forgotten old woman with nothing to live for, Toxoplasma loves cats. I’m not sure why Toxo loves cats so much, but in reality this is not very strange. See, parasites often have to infect several hosts in order to reach the one it’s really out to infect, called a primary host. All the hosts it infects in order to reach the primary hosts are called secondary hosts, or intermediate hosts. Secondary hosts often don’t feel the full effects of infection because the parasite isn’t reproducing inside of them, but occasionally a secondary host can have its behavior manipulated in order to reach the primary host. This is what Toxoplasma does. In fact, Toxo does this very very well.

The most clear-cut example of Toxo behavioral hijacking comes from the changes it can make to the brains of rats. Since Toxo is out to infect cats, it often causes the prey of cats to become more apparent in hopes that its current host will end up in the cat’s belly, the perfect place to make little Toxo babies. How does it cause rats to become more apparent? It forms cysts in the rat’s brain. In particular, Toxo cysts form near a region called the amygdala, a tiny region that controls fear and aggression. These inhibit the function of the amygdala, and basically cause rats to get sexually turned on by cat odors and actively seek cats by tracking their urine. Seriously not kidding.

Toxo gets really really interesting when we start talking about humans. The tiny protozoan can cause the formation of brain cysts just as it does in rats, though the damage is very subtle at first. These cysts aren’t as selective in their real estate options, so they just kinda form wherever. They release enzymes that convert a dopamine precursor into dopamine itself, triggering the action of receptors of a group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines (which include dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine). Ultimately, this causes people to do some wonky things.

What kind of wonky things? Well, for one, do you remember the Beatles? Well, John Lennon once saw a newspaper article about a car crash and wrote a song about it, which isn’t really relevant but does serve as a good segue into talking about how Toxo can make you crash your car. Just as in rats, Toxo can induce reckless behavior. So basically…man, I gave it away. Gimme a second to recover.

Ah, screw it. Here’s an article on how car accidents are caused mostly by Toxo victims.

What else can Toxo do, you ask?? Well, it’ll deform your babies, of course!! Apparently Toxo can cause some pretty terrible damage to babies while they’re in the womb, causing deformities that I cannot describe to you. Let’s just say that I googled “Toxoplamodium babies” and it’s not likely that I’ll sleep tonight because of that decision. You’re going to google it anyway, aren’t you?? You heartless bastard.

See? It’s a real problem because this floating baby head appears on a banner with the name of the disease. That means it’s dangerous.

These things all seem pretty obvious. Sure, Toxo can cause people to be reckless, and babies are easy to injure as it (Anderson and May, 1967) is so the damage from Toxo seems a bit expected. What else can Toxo do that’s more unexpected? To find out, let’s take a quiz.

Question: Which of the following facts about Toxo is true?

A)     Toxo can cause adult humans to become incredibly attached to their cats

B)      Toxo can spread through dog semen, and can help upregulate testosterone to increase the odds of infecting a female

C)      You’ll have no symptoms of Toxo in the later stages of infection

D)     Toxo is associated with causing schizophrenia.

Answer: all of the above.

I find it absolutely mind-blowing that a tiny protozoan can increase a human host’s risk of schizophrenia. This isn’t some brain augmentation to an ancient area like the amygdala. Inducing hallucinations is not simple to do. On top of that, Toxo can cause humans to acquire ADD, OCD, and can even increase suicide risk. Just read this link. Your mind will be blown too.

Nature is truly out to kill us. How do I know? I am never wrong.

Dat p-value.

How else do I know? Toxo exists. We think we’re so high and mighty, immune from crazy zombie-inducing parasites.We are clearly not. Here’s where I make a point that we are not so different from components of the greater aggregate of beings we call “nature”, and that we ourselves are indeed a part of that. Then, here’s where I get really preachy, talking about how things we do affect the natural world, and here I mention the circle of life and make a funny quip about the Lion King and the irony therein that my argument of the circle of life has referenced an earlier part of this article.

Want to hear me talk about an animal, plant, bacterium, or whatever the hell else that you think is awesome? Leave me a message in the comments! I’ll probably ignore it, unless it’s actually really good. It’s worth a shot to try though.

Come on. Comment. Go for it.

To view the really interesting article most of this information came from, click this link!

Photo credits:

-http://listvisit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/grey-american-shorthair-cat-3.jpg

-http://pcdn.500px.net/7757320/7090f93b289604fab91e62214d1243b8f13ae184/4.jpg

-http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfp2sreXdv1qc9f5v.gif

-http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/parasitic/headers_92320/P_infectionB_toxoplas_1.jpg

May 17, 2013
Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone
Before I moved away from Florida I never realized how much I depended on good weather to motivate me. I’d always believed that optimism and happiness came from within, but now I know this is only half true. Moving to an area that gets less sunshine than from where you came from is a real downer. Atlanta gets a relatively median amount of sunshine per year (compare Atlanta GA at ~217 days; Tampa FL at ~244 days; Seattle WA at ~164 days) but the pitiful winter here harbors few sunny days. Gray skies can last for 3 days straight, the harsh cold wind is relentless, and February seems like the longest month of the year despite having the least amount of days.

What bugs me most is that threatening clouds hover over the city for days but never DO ANYTHING. At least in Florida when clouds come, they produce rain, thunder and lightning for an hour, then get the hell out and the ordeal is over. But here, when the weather wants to be gloomy, it’s taking you down too. It doesn’t help when my family, still in Florida, tells me they’ve taken the boat out every weekend since the beginning of February.

It’s amazing how the weather can be a source of depression. I’m sure you’ve heard of seasonal depression, which is technically called Seasonal Affective Disorder. If you haven’t, it is a type of depression that occurs when bright light and sunshine is limited, most often during the winter months. Sunshine is the obvious treatment for the disorder but just how effective is sunshine? Especially when every dermatologist and health magazine advises you to block the sun?

Studies have shown that the brain produces more of the natural antidepressant serotonin on sunny days than on darker days. This is regardless of the season. Not only are serotonin levels higher on bright days than on overcast ones, but the rate of serotonin production is directly related to the duration of bright sunlight. No other atmospheric conditions are related to serotonin levels (article from WebMD Health News).

When sunlight interacts with our skin, Vitamin D is produced through photochemical reactions. Of course, prolonged UV exposure can be harmful for your skin, but some exposure is extremely beneficial. (DO: Be active in sunlight when possible, with at least 25 SPF on. DO NOT: Lay by the beach all day without lotion). Vitamin D works together with calcium to build strong bones and maintain bone strength. It also has a preventative effect for some cancers including colon, breast, ovarian and prostate. A deficiency in Vitamin D is linked to these types of cancer as well as to depression, lowered immunity, osteoporosis, and arthritis.

You might have been aware that sunshine was positive for you, but here are some fun facts that maybe you didn’t know:
- According to Healthkicker, people tend to buy more lottery tickets on cloudy days because weather-induced bad moods deplete self control, making us vulnerable to temptation. (Ladies, think Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pint intakes – were those ever on bright sunny days?)
- People use more alcohol, coffee, tobacco and chocolate when there’s less sunshine because they feel the need to compensate artificially as means to elevating their mood.
- Getting a daily dose of sunshine increases your number of white blood cells, which in turn enhances your immune system, stated by Natural Health Restored.
- Sunshine encourages healthy circulation by also stimulating the production of red blood cells, which increases the amount of oxygen in your blood.
- A study performed at the University of Michigan proved that sunshine is strongly correlated with daily stock returns. Stocks traded on sunny days yielded nearly 25% more money than those traded during cloudy periods. Psychologists attribute this to people’s tendency to view situations more optimistically when it’s sunny, and less likely to scrutinize an investment they might cast aside when feeling grumpy.
March is only a few weeks away, which means warmer weather is coming. Besides the fact that spring is my favorite season, I am SO excited to shed my layers of fuzzy clothes and to enjoy Atlanta’s parks again. When the time comes, do yourself a favor and GET OUT of the library, frolic in the daylight like a fool high on Vitamin D and always wear some sunscreen!

In the spirit of things: [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/44617965″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Photo by Maria Fiala courtesy of Creative Commons.
March 4, 2013
Berkeley grads grow mushrooms for cash – legally!

Imagine you are in your last semester at college. You’ve done well academically, studied business, and you have a job offer lined up. Your parents are letting up on the constant brow beating about expectations and preparing for the future. The light at the end of the tunnel that opens up to the real world is as close as you have ever seen it. Just a few more classes to get through and you are home free. But, say, during one of those classes the professor says something that catches your attention.

“And believe it or not boys and girls, you could potentially grow gourmet mushrooms from recycled coffee grounds.”

You sit up, stop your doodle and look around. Did everybody just hear that? The professor just told us how we could make money on waste! Free money! Mushrooms! You approach the professor after class as all but one other student in the lecture file out of the auditorium. Though you probably wouldn’t know it at the time you are looking your future business partner in the face. Another light blinks on in the tunnel, and this one is green.

Sound far-fetched? It’s not. That is exactly how “Back to the Roots”, a startup enterprise centered on bringing consumers in touch with their food in a sustainable way – all while turning a profit and benefiting their community of Oakland, California – began. Nikhil Arora and Alejandro “Alex” Velez met for the first time after a lecture at UC Berkeley during their last semester in college in which the professor made the same proclamation I wrote above. Just as the professor had said, you can grow gourmet mushrooms off of waste like used coffee grounds, which is exactly what the pair did. First by experimenting in a frat-house kitchen after watching videos on YouTube on how the process should go, then to selling their mushrooms at a farmers market in Berkeley, California and eventually to their debut product the Back to the Roots at-home mushroom kit which features coffee grounds collected and re-purposed from Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a Berkeley based café, into do it yourself mushroom kits. Just add water at home to grow over a pound of gourmet mushrooms ready to eat!

The Back to the Roots grow-at-home mushroom kit

Within three years of their founding in 2009 Nikhil and Alex who are self-described “urban mushroom farmers” have secured distribution deals with massive retailers including Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond and the Home Depot. They went from collecting coffee grounds headed for the landfill to being paid to haul it away by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, an early supporter of the young startups. As of 2012 they had diverted millions of pounds of coffee grounds destined for landfills. At roughly 3.6 million pounds in 2012 alone, that’s the equivalent of 175 dump trucks of material.

I first became aware of Back to the Roots through their recent Kicstarter campaign to launch a new product – the Aquaponics Garden – which like the mushroom kit is a “grow-at-home” concept herb garden using hydroponics. Growing herbs at home using this method is an old trick, but the mushroom wielding duo (Mario and Luigi?) added an interesting twist of a live fish in the nutrient bath. In this way, feeding the fish encourages it to… “feed” the plants which in turn clean the water for the fishy. The Aquaponics Garden has the same closed loop low waste ethos as the mushroom kit and is thus very much in line with the mushroom kit using recycled coffee grounds.

But I couldn’t avoid the nagging feeling that there was more afoot than delicious herbs and modern architecture inspired fish tanks. Around the same time that the Berkley grads were gearing up to take the DIY culinary world by storm, I began my PhD studies in Atlanta, GA. My new apartment with sweeping views of the side of a building and a dumpster covered in puke didn’t produce the kind of urban living I had expected when moving from rural Virginia where I went to college. Determined to spruce the place up, I wanted some potted plants. After all, there was a spacious balcony from which to enjoy to aforementioned scenery with a cool glass of sweet-tea (Atlanta, remember?). But lo – no direct sunlight. My first batch of plants withered soon after sprouting and becoming spindly, yellowed baby plants.

I turned to the internet – the font of all knowledge – to seek a remedy. Hydroponics was the logical solution. With hydroponics I didn’t need sun or warm weather. Hell, I didn’t even need soil. I settled on one branch of hydroponics – pardon the pun – called “aquaponics” in which the roots of the plant are interwoven into a passive binder, usually clay pebbles, and dangle into a nutrient rich solution. Through my research I found an easy design using a spray-painted plastic storage bin with holes drilled in the top and a fish tank aerator hot-glued to the bottom, a few feet of aluminum flashing to make a reflective enclosure, and a couple of 20 watt CFL bulbs plugged into the sockets of a “make a lamp kit”. Make a lamp indeed. A grow lamp.

Unfortunately, some of the critical supplies I needed couldn’t be found anywhere. I remember inquiring in the garden section of a home improvement store for things like “netpots” and “hydroton” and “rock wool” and “grow max powdered plant nutrients”. After a few minutes of listing name brands to a dumbfounded employee in an orange apron, I told him my intended application.

“I am trying to make an herb garden in my living room. Like basil and stuff.”

I felt it was a reasonable claim. After all, I had just put a few packets of seeds for exactly that – basil and stuff – in my basket.

A knowing look came over the clerk’s face.

“Oh. We don’t have that here.” he said with a little grin.

Back to the internet. It had to be done. A specialty store. I searched everywhere I thought was reasonable – head shops with fluorescent posters and glass “tobacco” pipes, local hardware stores serving as fronts for the mob, Jerry who lived behind the dumpster. Nobody had even heard of the stuff. When I finally found what I was looking for it was on the edge of the city in a run down industrial park. I called the store.

“Do you guys have…” I paused, remembering the clerk at the home improvement store, “Net pots?”

The clerk, “What size?”

This was the place.

When I arrived I found a brightly lit sign over the top of a small warehouse. Inside was every manner of tubing, pots, nutrient and testing apparatus that I had never heard of. They also had camouflaged “grow room tents”. It was an odd mix of completely legitimate looking industrial equipment – hydroponics is a great choice for farming organic produce in otherwise unsuitable locations – and everything I imagine I would need if I was looking for a great way to get kicked out of school.

I bought my supplies and a small booklet on hydroponic gardening. I paid in cash.

Is this aquaponics garden thing legit? I interviewed Nikhil, one of the co-founders of Back to the Roots to learn more. Nikhil and I discussed their recent success with a Kickstarter campaign to raise capital for production of the Aquaponics Garden, lessons learned from development of their grow-at-home mushroom kit, and the business philosophy that has helped them gain recognition.

—

Charged Magazine (CM): So, How’s it going?

Nikhil (N): Doing good. Just wrapping up the year so it’s been crazy. Comes to an end all of a sudden, Ya’ know?

CM: First, I wanted to congratulate you on the Kickstarter thing. You guys were asking for $100K and I think it closed a little less than week ago and you guys cleared almost two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars?

N: Yeah. Two-forty-eight. Almost 250 but it was crazy. It was really cool seeing the response from the community. It was the first time I’d really done something like that, the whole crowd sourcing thing, it just works! People we’ve never met before and don’t know who they were just coming out with their support. It was really cool.

CM: I think you’ve hit on something important – you’re talking about, I guess, the community involvement in your project. Is that the reason you guys decided to go with something like Kickstarter?

N: Yeah. I think we knew had a lot of support for the mushroom kit from our community and we felt that the aquaponics kit could be something similar. And I think to do really well on Kickstarter, and we were like studying it for a while before, you have to try to hit people on a different level. It wasn’t just a transactional thing. People felt more like they were supporting a movement, and they were supporting something bigger than themselves, and that’s why when we launched this product we felt it was something like that. It was something that inspired people and hit the right chord on Kickstarter so it kind of took on a life of its own. It was really cool to see and we got our product improved so much man, the 30 days from where it started off we got thousands of messages from people just out of good will giving us awesome ideas and suggestions. We just signed off on our final design yesterday to send off to the manufacturers and we made so many changes based on feedback we got from people.

CM: Right. And uh, speaking of that feedback, I read in a little bit on your Facebook page regarding this particular product and I definitely see what you mean as far as people who are very interested and passionate about the idea – but of course there was a little bit of negative feedback as well – specifically regarding the fact that you guys would have a live fish in the Aquaponics Garden. But you guys handled it surprisingly gracefully. You know, you said “yeah, we are definitely aware that this is something we need to build into our design” and it seemed you owned it right off the bat and the product is not even on the shelves yet, so I have to commend you on that.

N: Thank you man. It was a big design constraint for us. According to PETA and the most common standards, 1” of fish needs 1 gallon of water. That was our reasoning that for our 3 gallon tank you could have one beta fish in there or two smaller fish so we kept to that. One cool thing about aquaponics and why it’s totally different is that most of the time the health of fish is determined not by the size but more the toxicity of the water. You’re supposed to change the water in regular tanks really frequently, like once a week, to make sure it’s clean and ammonia is not building up but the cool thing with aquaponics is the plants are constantly cleaning the water out so it’s more about the constant quality of water for the fish.

CM: And definitely having the opportunity to grow yourself some fresh herbs at home is a driver.

N: Yeah. I think when you put something like that out into the world, on that kind of platform, we knew were going to get a lot of feedback, and we got some negative feedback and we got a lot of positive feedback that we were able to apply and make changes from. Overall it was a really cool experience and it would have taken us so long to get this data back if we had just launched into retail, because here you have such a direct communication with people I thought it was an awesome way to launch a new product.

CM: So, I think you guys mentioned this during an interview or something, but the connotation with two kids from Berkeley trying to grow mushrooms has a certain connotation – so I thought it was somewhat ironic that the second choice you guys pick is something with an equally, somewhat seedy I guess connotation, that is hydroponics and the whole growing plants in your closet kind of thing. I wonder if that thought occurred to you or what you think of that?

N: Yeah, you know it’s funny we never even thought about it that way. We had been kicking the idea around for a month or two before somebody said to us, “First you guys were growing mushrooms and now you’re selling hydroponics systems?” We just started cracking up and it hit us that we hadn’t even considered that both products have that same stereotype.

CM: Regardless of the stereotype though, I think the market you are attracting is a mix of DIY enthusiasts and people interested in knowing their food and on top of that doing something good for the environment and education. That’s the next thing I wanted to talk about, I think it’s pretty impressive what you guys are doing in the schoolrooms. You guys are doing product demos and have a program where you donate the mushroom kit to classrooms. Do you have similar plans to do that with the hydroponics kit?

N: We are. Actually, for the mushroom kit, every kit that you post a picture of on our Facebook page we donate one to a classroom of your choice. With the Aquaponics Garden we are trying to think how we can make that work. Now we’re thinking because we saw such a cool response to the whole Kickstarter idea, we thought, “Why don’t we implement that on our website?” We are thinking of having people who want to get a kit to a school of their choice can post that school on our website and they can get friends and family to pledge a dollar or two dollars and they can crowd source their own kits for schools or something like that. We are trying to think right now how to incorporate that because we are not launching them until late February or early March. We know this stuff would be amazing for schools because with the mushroom kit, it lasts for maybe a couple crops so maybe you get a month out of it, but with the Aquaponics Garden you buy it once and it lasts you for a lifetime, so teachers can have it for like 10 years you know? We want to see it in every classroom so we are trying to figure out what is the best way to make that happen right now.

CM: It’s way cooler than the class hamster.

N: Yeah!

CM: You and Alex are quite young, and I thought what is particularly interesting is that you guys are kind of wrapped up in the era of the startup culture. I would say some of your contemporaries in the tech fields go a completely different direction. It’s basically they have a handful of guys who work until they spin out an idea and they are seeking venture capital for like a million bucks. You guys every step of the way it seems said “How can we not only build our business and build a community involvement in our business? How can we build these connections where things that are good for our business are also good for getting jobs to the Oakland area?” For example in an interview you guys were talking about trying to find a domestic producer for your fish tanks.

N: Which we did. They are like 20 minutes away from us right here in northern California.

CM: Yeah, which I think is fantastic. I guess do you have a comment regarding your own education or maybe people who would be in your age group as far as the typical way of approaching a startup company?

N: Yeah, I just think for us it’s just been the right thing to do based on our values and I think it goes back to the environment we were in, how we were raised, things like that all played a part into that. But it’s hard to just pitch it to everyone saying “it’s the best thing to do based on our values, based on the environment” but at the end of the day it’s the right thing you do for your business too I think. There has been this transformation towards transparency and community in helping companies grow, and if you are not engaged in community from the start and giving back and being a positive part of that community then you are stunting your own growth. There has been a shift in the kind of companies people want to support and people are really looking for companies that are doing good. That’s the one message we really try to tell people. If you are not going do it because you love the environment or something like that then do it because it’s good for your bottom line. Being open to your community is the next wave of marketing and transparency. There is a really cool movie actually called “The Naked Brand” that talks about how it’s not about clever marketing anymore, it’s about transparent marketing and how transparency is the new clever in how to grow a business. It’s something we’ve become really passionate about and I think us being open about our flaws and what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong has actually helped us grow faster. Admitting mistakes has helped us grow faster. We’ve all graduated in the middle of this whole financial crisis, I think with a sense of “there has got to be a better way to do this.” I think people, consumers, are thinking the same thing that there has got to be a better way to do business and are looking to support companies that they feel are doing it the right way. I just think it makes sense all the way around.

CM: Another thing I thought was interesting is that when you guys were talking about originally doing product research for the mushroom kits you turned to YouTube, and when you were trying to find buyers for your leftover coffee grounds you turned to Craigs List. I am kind of going back to what I was talking about before with the tech startups where of course their business wouldn’t exist without the internet but it’s because their business is on the internet. How has the internet shaped your company?

N: Yeah. That’s dead on. We graduated having no clue about anything to do with mushrooms so we just watched every single YouTube video and found all these articles and books on different websites. It’s just cool how you can teach yourself anything now. There is no longer an excuse of “I didn’t know that, or I didn’t know how to do that.” You can just log on and teach yourself anything. We taught ourselves mushroom farming on coffee grounds from YouTube. It democratizes business and startups and education because you can go to a library and long online and just figure it out.

CM: What are your goals for the launch of the Aquaponics Garden?

N: For us, so much about the Aquaponics Garden has to do with inspiration and education. Our big vision is to see how many classrooms we can get this into. We’ve taken it to some classrooms right now, this one prototype we have, and honestly it is incredible the response you get from kids. I think it’s maybe the combination of the fish, the bubbles going up from the pump or the sound of water coming back down, but it’s so stimulating for them that they just rush to it and ask all these questions. It’s crazy how fast they understand what’s going on with the whole ecosystem. That’s our biggest goal. We want to build this thing out so we can literally get this into every classroom. We feel like for every classroom you can get this in, you are changing 30 kids perspective on food and the environment. You are teaching them that things work together and there is no such thing as “waste” because the fish waste is making the plants grow. That’s our big vision. We really want to get this into schools.

CM: Sure. So my background is in engineering, and actually I have attempted to do my own hydroponics before. I moved into an apartment that had no sunlight, so I really couldn’t do any window planters so I made the whole enclosure with some CFL lightbulbs. When I was building my own design I spent a lot of time online to see what other people had done but I ran into a lot of kind of technical hiccups that I had to work through. So out of curiosity, I’m wondering what are some of the biggest technical issues you guys have run into trying to bring something like this to market?

N: The biggest thing for us has been bring this whole system down to a smaller scale – aquaponics is normally done on a larger scale – we took months of experimentation into how to get the ratios down, looking at flow rates to make sure the system was still functional at such a small scale, how many fish do you need, how many plants can you grow, things like that. It was constant learning, and we finally got to the point where we had produced a ton of these and put them in different households and it we had functional prototypes. Once we saw the basil popping up we got so pumped because we had figured it out. We were always tweaking along the way and we wanted to encourage communal learning around this where people are sharing tips on what worked. We want this to be a platform for people to get really creative with it – people want to try and grow flowers, different foods. One guy emailed us saying he wanted to put shrimp in there. It’s like people hacking into their own creativity.

CM: I’m interested in some of the manufacturing aspects. You mentioned you were able to find a local provider. Was that difficult given the way that everything – at least when you are trying to do it cheaply and in huge quantities – goes overseas? What did you learn from that experience?

N: It was a big learning curve all around. We talked to dozens of manufacturers. It’s funny, because you design something, and then you realize the first go-round when you take it to engineers who tell you “you can’t do this, you can’t do that” or it’ll cost you thousands of dollars so there was a lot of back and forth between design and engineering.

CM: Did you find a lot of pressure from existing industry to abandon your business philosophies as far as sustainability and local design are concerned?

N: We had a really good design partnership and at the end of the day I think Alex and I knew what we wanted to do and we wanted to keep it domestic – we wanted to keep it local – and there is kind of a statement about that so we shopped around until we found a partner who believed in that same vision. It’s tough. It is cutthroat, because every dollar of cost (in manufacturing) ends up being like 4 more dollars of retail because of markups and stuff like that, but we really wanted to keep it at a $50 price point. That was our big goal and we are working our butts off to do that. With that we had to compromise a lot, because we could have added a lot more features, but for us it was more important to get something out of $50 and leave room for people who really want to get into it with add-ons, but we wanted it to be available and accessible to everyone, at least to a lot wider market than having like a $100 price point.

CM: When you project into the future, how do you guys imagine you are going to maintain the regional impact you have in the Oakland area. Eventually you are going to need more space. What’s the plan?

N: Yeah, we are looking at a new space now but we want to stay in Oakland. We see a massive opportunity to connect people to their food and we want to work our butts off to take that on and be the brand that people think about when trying to connect to their food. We want people to feel good that our company is doing stuff in the right way. For us, were not afraid of scale, were not afraid of size so we are working to grow and meet really ambitious goals along the way. The more we grow the more good we can do in the world is how we see it. The more we can develop a platform for our products the more capacity we have to do good and I think the community is going to help us get there. We’re maintaining an open door policy. I’m really pumped. I’m excited for this new year.

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For more information on Back to the Roots products, and a look at their growing list of accolades, you can visit their website: http://www.backtotheroots.com/

January 11, 2013