Reliable Info on Swine Flu

Check out Otterman’s post on “Communicating the Swine influenza A (H1N1) crisis” at the Biorefugia

For the H1N1, I find these same (as in SARS) international and local sources useful:

* WHO Disease Outbreak News

* Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Swine Influenza (Flu): cdc.gov/swineflu/

* CDC has a twitter account, @CDCemergency!

* Ministry of Health, Singapore: Update on Global Human Swine Influenza – helpfully this URL: moh.gov.sg, brings you right there.

New sites I refer to include:

* Channel News Asia special on the Swine Flu Outbreak - note the useful, simple URL: channelnewsasia.com/swineflu/

* CNN Health: Swine Flu

* BBC: Swine Flu Special Report
* News aggregators (search term = “swine flu”): Google and Yahoo

The Just-in-time Swine influenza lecture

As a result, here it is: “Just-in-Time Lecture: Swine influenza A (H1N1) Outbreak in US & Mexico: Potential for a Pandemic,” by Rashid A. Chotani. Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). Updated daily. The html and powerpoint versions are available at this Supercourse site at the WHO Collaborating Center, University of Pittsburgh.

Cheng Puay does a good post here at his blog to educate his students

The Paper Airplane Guy is here

The Science Centre is a regular place we visit with the kids – but today, there was a special treat; we got to see the Paper Airplane Guy – John Collin showing us how to make various paper airplanes that left the audience mesmerised with a craft that was both clever in terms of the science of flight and artful incorporation of Origami into the making of paper airplanes… This must rank as one of the most entertaining demonstrations I have been to.

See what I mean here

Almost all the airplanes are folded from a single sheet of US letter sized paper. My favorite are the planes built from phonebook pages which stay in flight when he walks with cardboard to create a draft below the craft and the bat plane, which flaps like a bat.

Catch him at the Singapore Science Centre (2 more days left) – see below

Josh and Matt waiting for the autographed paper airplane book by John.

[He inspires a new category - "wow" in this blog]

Plant Viruses

Got activated by Siva yesterday to think about how to identify plant viruses for his Plant Virus pract. Fancy the zoologist doing a botany fieldtrip! But I understand he is helping out Prof Wong Sek Man. I don’t mind helping such a great prof out anyway.

Always one to seize such opportune and useful displacement activity, I scoured the net for search images of plant viruses and here are some useful links that I “delicioused” under the tag plant_virus. I put together a document that Otterman and I could use as a rough guide to spot plants that have been infected.

Siva lost his phone so by the time I had finished my meeting and made my way to the Bot Garden, it was hard to locate him and the students, so after 15 mins, I gave up and decided to do my own thing. My first aim was to locate the Canna hybrids which apparently are notoriously susceptible to the Yellow Streak Virus which cuases the pale streaks running parallel to the leaf veins; a closer look would show lots of speckles.

Another surprise I had was how many plant species showed the tell-tale signs of virus infection – chlorotic spots and ring spots with yellowing and vein clearing. The two pictures below were of leaves from Heliconia psittacorum

I decided to check out palm valley and lo and behold quite a few species were also infected. Here’s the majestic Corypha umbracaulifera (Talipot palm) clearly down with a bug.

Anyway, too bad I missed the group of students but the learning journey at the Bot Gdns was a welcome break. Here are some beautiful scenes; gosh how I miss the plants.

Conjuring Heaven

Quite a few years ago when I was in University (year 1), I attended a talk by a priest who said.. heaven begins now, and he quoted some words from John in the new testament..

Fast forward many years to just 3 years ago, Br Broughton describes how he told students that they experience heaven as they meet up in a fast food restaurant and have fun and laughter over a meal, enjoy the company of close friends, and all worries and anxieties dissipate as they conjure up heaven.

A couple of days ago I was facilitator for a group of students on their 4 day camp. The 1st day’s campsite was pretty near the beach and after setting up the tents and having dinner, it was just 7.30 pm. The nightsky was beautiful; there was no light pollution at all and the stars just dotted the nightsky. In the morning when I awoke, the cool and fresh air filled my lungs – a long lost feeling from fieldtrips to Malaysia.

The memories of dragonboating, wakatobi, rafting and mangrove planting will remain… but the heaven conjured by the youth in those 4 days come remind me of those insights by the holy men. Why wait till we die? Heaven is here…

The Biophilia Programme

One fieldtrip left and a seminar series at the science centre before the Biophilia programme draws to a close for the year. Hopefully we can run it again next year. The idea is to arouse biophilia in students, who otherwise would not have an authentic experience of nature here in Urban Singapore. But its more than that. Besides the place-based learning, the students come up with their projects here and all we do as part of that process is socratic questioning. Its a bit frustrating for students and its not easy to come up with a scientific question. But we’ve been to the fieldsite for about 5 times already and each time we spend about 3 hours there (what a blessing to have enthusiastic and supportive colleagues taking turns or even coming regular for this). We’ve seen some “ecological literacy” developing so that’s a nice development.

Here’s a pair of anemone shrimps. We found 2 pairs on two different anemones. They are delightful creatures to watch and they are, as we found out through the weeks on the Biophilia programme, almost always there when there is a submerged carpet anemone. They are known to wait out in a nearby pool if the anemone is totally exposed during the low tide, and return again.

This is the second time I have seen it in the flesh/carapace, and they provide a nice source of distraction from the world. The seem to potter about busily around the tentacles of the anemone and its been recorded that they fend off any outsider (be it a fish) that comes close to the anemone. So the pair’s highly territorial. Their almost transparent body makes them hard to spot but once you know there’s a high chance of spotting them beside the nice obvious bloom of the anemone, their movements give them away. The smaller one of the pair is the guy.

For much better pictures and a sciency account go to the Annotated Budak post

Nat Low and I were debating over this row of eggs. I had roughly remembered it to be some mollusc that would lay such eggs. She, being more cephalopod-biased, suggested it was too big for small snails… well not too big for the spiral melongena I guess.

Here’s a nice picture of the spiral melongena from Dai Jiao’s photostream in Flickr.

Because the tide was low, we decided to hope over to another stretch of rocky beach on the southern most point of Singapore and saw this pair of horseshoe crab doing their thing. What an interesting sight for students who have not even seen the creature before, seeing the mating ritual of the horseshoe crab. I am sure they, like me before, find it interesting to know that the horseshoe crab has blue blood, as unlike us, they have copper instead of iron as the prosthetic group to carry oxygen. The blue blood is very valuable as it has anti-bacterial properties that scientists have been studying. See the youtube video here.

Introducing mer-dog

Meet mer-dog, who appeared in my dream. In the dream, I was fishing and after a second cast of the line, I got a bite and I jerked the rod to get a strike.. it was a big turquoise and red fish… but lo and behold, as I reeled it up, I noticed that the head resembled my mum’s schnauzer – Emily. I quickly released the hook from its mouth and pet its head…. then the dream ended. Was it because I had, in that evening been to my mum’s place and while my dad, shaved my head, I was stroking Emily and staring at her.

Yesterday at the RICE talk, I whipped out this picture and related it to Biophilia, man’s innate urge to affliaite with other creatures. This was a talk I gave as part of a mini-symposium on “The open laboratory”. Siva and Cheng Puay were part of the team to give their own presentations on biology field-trips. Cheng Puay had finished way early but could have stretched a bit more as he was presenting those interesting fieldwork he had carried out over 3 year periods with students. Our rapport with the crowed wasn’t as we had liked it. Siva was the good boy, surprising us with a clear and well thought out paper.. I knew our rapport hung by a thread so when it came to my turn.. I whipped out the picture and spoke about how dream metaphors of animals were some expression of biophilia…

It was great to catch up with Thomas and Ivan Chew, my band-mate and intellectual and mega-blogger and secondary school classmate.

Multiple Intelligences

An Ode to Whales

There is something fascinating about whales and dolphins. I remember giving a lecture in school on Lipids (an ‘A’ level biology subtopic) and as a digression, I told the class a story about Whaling in Nantucket in the 18th century. Its somewhat related to lipids as the whaling industry was mainly based on the lipid found in the spermaceti of the sperm whale. A large whale could provide up to 3 tons of that valuable wax which was odorless and non-oily to the touch.

Anyway, I played some sound clips of whales singing (yes, they do sing and in different dialects too, depending on which pod they belong to) and after that auditory experience, the students (about 300) clapped and cheered. There must be something mesmerizing about whales in our human psyche. I was glad to know that most students displayed a sense of biophilia, sensu E.O. Wilson.

Scientifically, Cetaceans are animals belonging to the Order Cetacea, which, include whales, dolphins and porpoises.

Actually the reason why I am posting here is because I came across this article about whaling in Japan and its just inexplicable that whaling still occurs. Hey, I understand if the Iñupiat Eskimos do it to survive (see my post on a book I read about Eskimo whaling) but to state scientific reasons for whaling is entirely beyond reasonable acceptance. Its like killing cats randomly and saying we need data.

Note this statement – “Over a six-month period, it will kill 1,000 whales as part of what it says is a scientific research programme.”

I am no whale fanatic but they are just lovely creatures. I have had nice dreams about dolphins and whales too and those were deep and meaningful ones for me. They at least represent the wonders that nature has produced. And at most, are inspiring to many people. Scientifically, the are really peculiar and interesting ends of the evolutionary tree. See link below about the recent fossil discovery that shed new light on the evolutionary research to trace which extinct land-dwelling mammals were the probable ancestors of Cetaceans

Ivan’s Dolphins Galaxia and Into the Deep feature some whale and dolphin sounds. They are so enchanting and give a sensitive dimension to the music.

My point is “Stop Whaling!”

Free song to download from Queen

I love songs when they are free. But I also think we need to buy them… or else how the musicians survive.. then again, some of them survive too well.

Here’s a free song from Queen entitled, “Say its not true”. Its really a heartfelt song about raising Aids awareness dedicating it to Mandela’s work.

Here’s a quote from the website –

“Taylor wrote the song as a gift to Mandela and performed it live for him for the first time with Brian May and Dave Stewart at the inaugural 46664 concert in Cape Town that month. The song carries the message that HIV AIDS is something that can affect any one of us no matter our sexual or racial status.”

Go download it. Click on the picture below to go to the website.

Improve your vocab and feed the hungry at the same time!

Was listening to an interview on the BBC about how this guy developed this website to feed the hungry and teach his son some vocabulary. The rice goes to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Just makes me wonder about the food we waste each day…

Here’s a snapshot of the website. Click on image to go there.