In for a penny, in foraminiferan

Sam Bowser gave an entertaining inaugural Skidmore Microscopy Imaging Center Annual Lecture today, on foraminiferans (forams). Forams are unicellular marine critters that construct shells from materials in their environment, branching trees and nautiloids and things that look suspiciously like ocarinas, and Dr. Bowser is trying to figure out how they do that—they are, after all, just single cells, albeit huge ones (millimeters long). The structures exhibit tensegrity, or tensional integrity—the same precise balance between tension and compression that keeps a Buckminster Fuller dome standing. Tiny dabs of glue, precisely placed, hold together grains of sand, and smaller grains pack the spaces between them, and still smaller grains pack the spaces between them, in an impressive display of fractalline construction. Given unfamiliar materials, like tiny glass spheres, forams happily make little hi-tech homes for themselves. (A micrograph of a glass-sphere foram appears on the front page of Bowser's site, linked to above.)

He was a funny guy, who deep-sea dives in Antarctica and sounds like Alan Alda. Two (maybe) amusing anecdotes:

1. Forams eat anything. Bowser told us about introducing a nutcracker-jawed shrimp to the dish to determine what forams were prey for, then returning from dinner to find a jumble of exoskeletal bits and a very content foram in its shell. "The shrimp swim about for a while, then one foot gets stuck in the foram's glue," he said, miming the action. "Then they reach down to pull it out, and that foot gets stuck. And so on..." and when he ran out of limbs he toppled to the floor and continued his gruesome description of the death throes from there.


2. They did a cladal regression analysis to determine a common ancestor for these hundreds of different morphologies, which returned an ancestor about ten billion years ago. The earth is four point some billion years old. The next PowerPoint slide: FORAMINIFERA FROM OUTER SPACE! complete with 50s sci-fi music. "We decided then that the age of the earth would have been a good limiting factor for the program," he said.

He ended on sort of an awkward note, agitating against funding nanotech in favor of investigating foram-like cellular assemblers. (It seems to me, at that scale, the distinction between a nano-factory and a cell is rather moot.) But the lecture was fascinating, and contained many pretty micrographs, and I got free cookies; I'm happy I went.

Wind up your radios

<shameless self-promotion>

A few weeks ago, I sent one of my parodies (Seven Bladed Razor) to Dr. Demento. He liked it, and he's gonna play it on his show this weekend. If anyone would like to listen, there's a list of stations here. Most of them air the show Sunday night, but some air it on Saturday. If you don't have a local station but still want to tune in, several stations stream Dr. D over the net. (I'll be listening to WPYX, which both broadcasts and streams Sunday at 10PM.)

If y'all don't know, the Dr. Demento Show is a nationally syndicated radio show that's been running for about 35 years. He plays "mad music and crazy comedy from out of the archives and off the walls," and I listened to him obsessively in middle school. He's a big part of the reason why Weird Al, the Frantics, The Existential Blues, Barnes & Barnes, and manymany more got national exposure in the US. I am very very excited about this. :)

</shameless self-promotion>

[Edit: if you haven't heard of the White Stripes, you can listen to the original (and watch the video) here.]