Politically correct rantings of the incensed

At some point during my life, it became apparent that the things that were emphasized while growing up - compassion, teamwork, respectfulness - are not rights, but merely privileges of which others can/will deprive you at a moment's whim.  Now somehow it's the rhetoric - and not the truth - that matters.  Our political battlefield is exemplary in this right: if someone wants to reduce tax cuts on the rich, they're a socialist and decried as highly unpatriotic, an agent of the evil lurking in unknown caverns around the globe.  But what of our civic duty to seek the kernel of wisdom in all things and to nurture this kernel to fruition?

A grim view of the state of political discourse?

Most of my faith in the institutions instilled in me from my early childhood - largely due to a highly religious upbringing - has been eroded during the process of graduate school.  With very few exceptions, graduate students are expected to behave more as caged dogs than human beings, fighting and clawing our way over the backs of others to get the quintessential result to tout in front of the rest of the world as they gape in awe at our accomplishments.  Scarily, this dog-eat-dog nature is not just interlab, but often times intralab.

This is a perfectly natural phenomenon, when considered.  It's like sibling rivalry, except your parents are supposed to love you, whereas your advisor may remain perfectly apathetic, thereby retaining the option of encouraging the back-biting and undermining - all in the name of science.  It isn't hard to understand why science is misunderstood - even mistrusted - given the atmosphere of competition and 'survival of the fittest' so commonplace throughout the genre.  It's no wonder some scientists are driven to fraud, forging results just to alleviate the constant pressure to make something happen (make just one something happen).  According to Wikipedia:

Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes falsify data to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.
Bibliographical references are often fabricated, especially when a certain minimum number of references is required or considered sufficient for the particular kind of paper. This type of fabrication can range from referring to works whose titles look relevant but which the student did not read, to making up bogus titles and authors.
There is also the practice of dry-labbing—which can occur in chemistry or other lab courses, in which the teacher clearly expects the experiment to yield certain results (which confirm established laws), so the student starts from the results and works backward, calculating what the experimental data should be, often adding variation to the data. In some cases, the lab report is written before the experiment is conducted—in some cases, the experiment is never carried out. In either case, the results are what the instructor expects.

And that's not even the worst outcome that's been seen.  (For the record, this is a link to a late-90's New York Times article on a graduate student at Harvard who committed suicide in an attempt to affect change in the graduate school system - no gruesome pictures, and a very interesting read if you're curious about the psychology that often plagues graduate students.)

So we try to rise above, try to turn the other cheek, remain aloof from the back alley dealings and machinations of Science, as we were once taught so emphatically to do.  The only problem is that distance often seems enough to fully eject us from the mainstream of science.  We lose our competitive edge, we lack comparative dedication, we seem unconcerned with science herself, rather than with the politics and bureaucracy pervading every niche.

The Grad Student Gap (AKA The Bane of My Existence, The Great Demoralizer, etc.)

And there it is - politics.  Is our method of political discourse what leads us astray, even as it spills into other fields?  In our winner-take-all system, compromise is a four-letter word.  To meet in the middle is to show weakness, abandon the interest of your constituents - someone has to lose or we've not done it correctly.  To demonstrate that 'our side' is more meritorious of getting their way, we keep prolific catalogs of every injustice, every mistake, never forgiving or forgetting as it would be disadvantageous to us getting our way.

I don't know about you, but I don't think my father would be proud if I acted like that in everyday situations.  Call me a hippie, but life - to me - is about the interconnections, between people and places and things and ideas.  That's why I find science so fascinating, seeing how everything fits together so perfectly; even the zombie-inducing fungus I mentioned in the last post is really a staggering caper of nature.

What's the use of being 'right' if in doing so we doom ourselves and our world?

So here's your homework assignment, kiddos: go out there and do what you think is right in the world.  Be the change, make a difference.  Try to see something from someone else's perspective.  Enjoy the experiences, whether victory, defeat, or somewhere in betwixt.  Meanwhile I'll sit here and rage against the machine, trying to lead by doing and words rather than just words.

Sci-fi buffet, episode I: Zombies are REAL

It's about time for me to actually start this series, though I do have a number of scientifically relevant things to discuss with you all, dear followers.  But for tonight, let us start with one that will rock your socks off: zombies are real.

For any fans of the Resident Evil series, this should rock your world.  Those of you that fantasize of the zombie apocalypse - or zombpocalypse, as it is know to the hardcore, at least in a phonetic sense - your moment of vindication has arrived.  And if your favorite book is "World War Z" - like Nathan Fillion, who is absolutely the best anything ever *sigh* - here is your proof.

courtesy of National Geographic

ZOMBIE ANTS!!!!!!!

Okay, perhaps not as frightening as the husk of a former human being lurching toward you with that hungry, vacant look in their now-soulless eyes, but we've all got to start somewhere, and it seems like zombie-ism has its foot in the door.

Now this ant is not a reindeer/elk/ant hybrid.  No, the stalks that you see in the picture above growing out of the ants head are in fact one of four species of fungus recently discovered in Brazil which can exert mind control over the host ant.  What this means is that the fungus, once exposed to its host, can take over the ant's brain and wait until the ant relocalizes to an ideal spot for fungal cultivation.  At this point, it then kills the host so that the fungus is able to proliferate and make a go at world domination.

David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State was quoted in the National Geographic article from whence the picture was borrowed as:

 This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery.

Of the four species yet discovered, each appears to be specifically adapted to a corresponding species of ant, over which it can exert optimal mind control.  If there are truly thousands of zombie fungi out there, what else may fall prey to these maniacal mushrooms?  (N.B.: Fungus is more than just mushrooms, so I'm a bad scientist for that alliteration)   Time is the only one who can tell, but let's all just hope that we don't end up pod people to an indigenous strain of fungus, bent on taking over the world.

Also particularly interesting, beyond simply specializing in what hosts to take over, the fungi apparently have evolved different mechanisms of transmission to further the spread of their particular fungi.  For example, some cause the host organism to develop long spines emanating from the thorax, which - upon contact with another ant of the same species - allows the fungi to move to a shiny new host.  Other fungi take a more grim approach, generating explosive spores in the body of fallen host ants which serve as a proximity mine; when any other ant gets too close, GO BOOM! and the spores take their rightful place as the new owners of the ant brain.

courtesy of National Geographic

The fungi continue to replicate and renew inside the ant carcasses until they eventually emerge.  See above for "before" and below for...

courtesy of National Geographic

AFTER!  Diabolical, no?  But highly effective as all the necessary resources for growth can be scavenged from the deceased host.  Life is a game of survival of the fittest, and this fungus is fit to be tied... but I don't want to have to touch it to tie it, so you do it.

The good news is that given how specialized the species of fungus discovered so far have been, we're relatively safe from swarms of zombie ants (so long as we don't live in Brazil's rain forests).  But evolution has a funny way, so imagine what things may come...

Actually, don't.  It's creepy!