Monthly Archives: February 2006

Biolicious Blog and Ion Channel Media Group

I came across this blog via one of my Technorati keyword watchlists. The parent site/company, Ion Channel Media Group, was a bit hard to figure out from just their website. According to the CEO, who was kind enough to reply to my inquiring email, the company does, “citation analysis to create alerts for researchers in specific life sciences fields. We use this information to produce a number of portals and then sell advertising, email marketing and PR campaigns.”

It’s curious, to be sure. Nonetheless, the blog looks pretty interesting, and the latest article covers something I was going to do a complete post on — the recent scandals over fraudulent scientific research. There are also some interesting stories on electrophysiology — automatic patch clamping and the like. It’s probably worth checking out if you follow electrophysiology, but I find the whole site/company/webring a bit strange.

Biolicious Blog

fresh research in biomedical science – from Ion Channel Media Group

New WTUL recording script

Last year I posted about a script I wrote for recording WTUL (Tulane University’s radio station). Since Katrina, they’ve been running a different stream, rebroadcast by Stanford. It’s in the open-source OGG format, and it only took a small modification of the script to adapt to it. I’ve posted the new script. All of the directions are otherwise the same (and are on the script page). You still need mplayer and so on.

Using Retinal Imaging to Screen for Systemic Diseases

Found via Slashdot, an article on how images of the retina can be used to screen for common diseases, including heart disease and hypertension:

LiveScience.com – Window to the Heart: New Eye Exam Spots Disease Risk

Tien Wong of the Center for Eye Research Australia at the University of Melbourne has shown in several large-scale studies that abnormalities of the blood vessels in the retina can be used to predict patients’ risk for diabetes, hypertension (or high blood pressure), stroke and heart disease.

As the article notes but doesn’t focus on, this could become a major aspect of diagnosis and triaging, since retinal photographs are cheap, fast, and easy to acquire.

Wasp zombifies cockroaches, then lays eggs on/in them

I’ve been trying to keep the blog more cardiac electrophysiology oriented lately, but I saw this on Slashdot, and I just had to link to it:

(Warning – contains pictures of wasps and cockroaches)

The Wisdom of Parasites. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head. The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears. From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash. The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes. The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

That is so very cool.

My New Home Network

In the last week or so I’ve finished setting up my home network. It includes

  • A Linksys WRT54GL
  • A Linksys NSLU2
  • A LaCie 500GB external disk
  • A Motorola SurfBoard cable modem

The WRT54GL is running a custom Linux firmware (DD-WRT), which allows me to tweak all kinds of settings (including radio power), log in with SSH, and if I solder an SD card onto the motherboard, load all sorts of additional software. The management software is much nicer than what it comes with.

The NSLU2 is also running a custom linux firmware (OpenSlug). It’s somewhat Debian-like. I added a 1GB memory stick to one of its USB ports, and hooked up the LaCie 500GB external disk to the other. The operating system resides on the 1GB memory stick, while I serve files, run backups, and serve iTunes music (with mt-daapd) from the 500GB drive. The iTunes music shows up as a shared library on the macs, available for streaming. The custom firmware also allows the use of a usb hub. Once I get one, I’m probably going to hook the printer up to it, and use it for print serving as well.

The cable modem doesn’t do much. It just hooks us up to the ‘net. Here’s a picture of the set-up. Notice the penguin in a slug suit on the NSLU2 (because the devices are referred to as slugs).

Home network