Category: Science

SFSYO Scientist of the Month: Philipp Schiffer

November 5, 2012Genetics, I Am Science, Interviewing, Science, Science For Six Year Olds, ZoologyPhilipp Schiffererin

Science For Six-Year-Olds (SFSYO for this school year) is a recurring segment on Science Decoded for Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class at Lincoln-Hubbard elementary school. This year the posts are inspired by #iamscience (also a Tumblr) and #realwomenofscience two hashtags on twitter that drove home for me the importance of teaching people who scientists are and what they really do.

Hello first graders! I hope you are all okay and back at school after hurricane Sandy. Now that it is November we have a new scientist of the month. I am so excited to introduce you to Philipp Schiffer who is finishing up his PhD at school in Cologne, Germany. Like I did with Dr. Penny, I asked Philipp a bunch of questions to find out more about what he does. I hope you will enjoy learning more about him. Below you can read my interview with Philipp, and if you’d like to ask him any questions, be sure to leave them in the comments!
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Erin: What type of scientist are you?

At work in the lab. Courtesy of Philipp Schiffer.

Philipp: I’m an evolutionary biologist [this means he studies genetics, DNA, and how different living things came to be,] currently I’ve morphed into a computer geek but I’m hoping to move away from the computer screen a bit more in the future.

Erin: What did you study in school, and where did you go?

Philipp: I studied Biology, majoring in Zoology with minors in Genetics and Palaeontology. I did most of my studies at the University of Cologne, Germany with some time in Australia studying and catching wombats. I’m currently finishing my PhD thesis in Cologne, but I’ve also studied at the University of California Riverside where I was learning about nematodes. I also got to spend some time in Edinburgh in Scotland.

Erin: Where do you work and what does a typical day at work entail?

Philipp: It’s called the Cologne Biocenter, in the middle of Köln am Rhein. At the moment I am spending most of my working hours in front of my computer, doing science in-silico, which means I am analyzing data from the genome sequencing assays I conduct. In between I hop over to the lab to study the nematodes, look at their DNA or run some other experiments.

Erin: Why did you decided to become a scientist?

Philipp: I have always liked to think about things. I guess when I was in the 9th or 10th grade I wanted to tackle the big problems/questions like finding a cure for diseases. Now of course, I do something totally different, which I actually like better!

Erin: What is your favorite thing about your job?

Out of the lab. Courtesy of Philipp Schiffer.

Philipp: There is a new and intriguing question to answer every day, more than one on most days. That is the main thing, I am really interested in answering questions about life – why it is the way it is and how did it become like that? Why are species different and how does it happen. There is a woo hoo! moment when things finally click into place and make sense, which is really cool. It is also really nice to work with people around the world – I like the exchange of thoughts and ideas in different cultures. I enjoy talking to colleagues very much, and working with students. It is also fun to be able to listen to music when working, and so much more.

Erin: What is something about your job that might surprise us?

Philipp: There is no magic in science, actually most ideas or experiments don’t work the way you think they will, and once something really works the main thing is to wonder why did it work this time? So there is a lot of frustration in being a scientist, but then there is also a lot of fun. Still, the first thing is the most important, science is hard work.

Erin: What are your favorite things to do for fun?

Philipp: Science IS fun. I also like wind surfing and sailing, I like rugby too and wish I had more time to do that. I also read about history, politics, and the world in general as much as I can. I very much enjoy chatting with friends over coffee.

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What do you think first graders? I think Philipp has a pretty cool job, and he’s gotten to go to school in so many different places, can you find them all on a map? If there is anything you’d like to know about his research, make sure to ask him questions in the comments.

For any of my regular (adult) followers you can catch Philipp on Twitter @evolgenomology. If you’d like to be featured as a scientist of the month send me an email or DM me on twitter, I’d love more volunteers and thank you Philipp for lending us your time to share what you do!

Vacation Adventure: The La Brea Tar Pits

July 28, 2012Science, Science HistoryLa Brea Tar Pits, Travelerin

During my nearly three week blogging hiatus (caused mostly by the fact that I moved and started a new job) I also took my first trip to California. It was recommended to me on twitter that I check out the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, which when I looked it up led me to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. The Page Museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of late Pleistocene fossils and is the only constantly active urban Ice Age excavation site in the world. Mammoths? Yes, please. So my family (also intrigued, though not as much as I was) agreed to make a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits during our trip, and boy was it a tar pit. But it was also so much more.

Yup, that would be tar. Credit: Erin Podolak

The La Brea Tar Pits are located in Los Angeles. The area of Hancock Park (where the lake pit pictured above and the museum are located) has crude oil underneath it. The oil seeps up along fault lines and when it reaches the surface it forms pools and becomes asphalt. The tar has been seeping up for tens of thousands of years, and at times would be deep and thick enough to trap animals. Water, dust, or leaves would obscure the tar, and when animals would wander into the pit they would become trapped. The struggle to get out of the tar would attract predators, which could also get trapped in the tar and eventually die. The remains of these animals would then be enveloped in the tar, which does a remarkable job at preserving the bones.

While the tar pits were known about as early as the 1780’s it wasn’t until 1875 when William Denton, a professor at Wellesley College, visited the Hancock family’s property at Rancho La Brea and identified a piece of bone as a tooth from a saber-toothed cat that the remains from the tar pits were identified as belonging to a species that wasn’t just a typical modern animal. Despite this it wasn’t until 1901 when geologist William W. Orcutt, who was checking out prospects for oil production on the land, noticed a piece of armored hide from an extinct ground sloth in the asphalt that the real process of uncovering the La Brea area’s hidden fossils began.

A display of 400 dire wolf skulls at the Page museum
Credit: Erin Podolak

Excavations of the area have been ongoing since the initial 1913-1915 project began. The 23 acre Hancock estate was officially turned over by the family to Los Angeles County for scientific exploration. The density and richness of the La Brea area is really remarkable. Several examples of prehistoric species have been uncovered at the La Brea Tar Pits including mammoths, mastadons, dire wolves, short-faced bears, ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. I think it can be easy to forget that until only 11,000 years ago North America had some tremendous large mammals that were all driven extinct. My favorites are definitely the short-faced bear and the ground sloth. By comparison, dinosaurs last roamed the Earth 65 million years ago. The last ice age dates to 0.3 million years ago. The Pleistocene, when many of the La Brea animals would have lived dates from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago. Several of the bones have been dated using Carbon-14 radiometric dating, which showed some of the oldest remains to be 46, 800 years old.

Despite all of the fossils that have been recovered from the area, the tar pits still continue to give up more. According to the Page Museum’s website since 1906 more than one million bones have been recovered representing over 231 species of vertebrates in addition to 159 species of plants and 234 invertebrates. An estimate of the size of the Page Museum’s collection is at about three million items. Three million. Excavations are still going on today at the La Brea Tar Pits with Project 23, a series of 23 crates of samples from the pits that were uncovered when the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art excavated the area to build an underground parking lot.

You just can’t visit the La Brea Tar Pits without riding the
ground sloth. Or at least, that is how I felt.

What I loved about the La Brea Tar Pits was the ability to ignite a sense of imagination. I thought it was great to try to visualize what the area would have looked like some 40,000 years ago. Trying to imagine an animal like a mastodon just wandering by you as you watch tar bubbling up to the surface of the lake pit definitely peaked my sense of wonder at the world. If you find yourself in the Los Angeles area, I definitely recommend the La Brea Tar Pits as a must see for kids and adults. The museum is fun and informative and the grounds that you can walk around and peer into the pits are definitely interesting to see. Really, who wouldn’t want the chance to ride a ground sloth?

Book Review: Jurassic Park

June 24, 2012Book Review, Dinosaurs, Genetics, Science, Sequencing, TechnologyJurassic Park, Michael Crichtonerin

I’m about two decades late to the party with this book review, but considering I was two years old when Jurassic Park was first published my interest in dinosaurs, genetics, etc. needed a little more time to develop. I have finally read Michael Crichton’s iconic Jurassic Park, and not really surprising anyone I loved it. I have been exposed to the cultural premise of Jurassic Park my whole life, but I’d never read the book or seen the movie, so really it was like my first exposure to the story in its entirety. I found my Dad’s old copy from back when it was first released and decided to rescue it from the book donation bin. I’m glad I did.

In case you live under a rock and are thus unaware the premise of Jurassic Park is that scientists develop a way to pull dinosaur blood samples out of mosquitoes fossilized in amber. The blood is used to decode the genetic sequence for a variety of dinosaurs and they are then grown and hatched in a lab. An eccentric billionaire funds the project because he believes he can make billions by using the dinosaurs as the main attraction in a theme park. What could go wrong genetically recreating dinosaurs for a modern day tourist attraction? Everyone involved in the project thinks nothing could go wrong, yet things do go awry on the island where the theme park is built causing much dinosaur related havoc.

I can only speculate what reading the book when it was first published must have been like and how I would have perceived the ideas and lessons in the context of early 90’s technology. Still, even in our current age of high speed genome sequencing I think the warnings in Jurassic Park continue to hold true. Things go wrong because the people working on the dinosaur project don’t give nature enough credit. They think there can’t possibly be a way for their fail-safe measures (creating only female dinosaurs and making them lysine dependent) to be overcome by the dinosaurs. They doubt the intelligence of the life forms they create and their ability to adapt. They also don’t appreciate that they have created something new instead of just recreating the past.

The desire to profit off the dinosaurs is the main priority, leading to a lack of understanding about them and the process that created them. Living in an age of even more advanced scientific ability, I think remembering that there can always be unexpected outcomes with any scientific experiment is important. I am a firm supporter of genomic research, but the key word there is research. Creating a profitable enterprise like the one in Jurassic Park shifts the priority from understanding to economics. Understanding should always be the goal with scientific inquiry and processes, because if we are going to use technology to manipulate, change, or create we need a firm grasp on the what and the how.

Ultimately I think what I took away from Jurassic Park was a sense of respect for science and nature. We can’t take ability for granted. Ethics are important. Why we do things matters as much if not more so than just our base ability to do them. While I know (obviously) that Jurassic Park is a work of fiction, I think it gives a reader a lot to think about regarding research and real-world applications, even after so many years. It is also pretty entertaining, the plot is great but the characters are also well developed and it is definitely action packed. I now need to find the time to watch the movie, and read The Lost World. I’m totally hooked. Have you actually read Jurassic Park? Just seen the movie? How old were you? What did you think? I’d love to know what other people thought when they first encountered the story.

Science For Six-Year-Olds: The Bear Skull

June 19, 2012First Grade, My Personal Life, Science, Science For Six Year Olds, ZoologyBear, Skullerin

Science For Six-Year-Olds is a recurring segment on Science Decoded for Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class at Lincoln-Hubbard elementary school. This year in first grade we’ve also learned about groundwater in Africa, noctilucent clouds done an experiment with butter, talked about hurricanes and sugar maple trees, and learned a song about the states of matter.
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This science for six-year-olds post is a little different than my previous posts, because this time I’m back-blogging about a presentation that I already gave to the first graders in person. Since I’m now back in New Jersey, I was able to visit their class to talk about my favorite subject, bears. While we know I’m partial to polar bears, in Mrs. Podolak’s class we talked about black bears.

Black bears are the type of bear that can be found in New Jersey. The reason I decided to talk about them with the first graders is because I brought Bob in for a bit of show and tell. This is Bob:

Photo by Erin Podolak

I was also impressed with their existing knowledge of animals. The class has been working on research projects to learn more about specific animals of their choosing. We talked about whether or not black bears are predators and if they are dangerous to people. I started to explain to them that black bears are omnivores, which means that they are opportunistic eaters and will consume plants, berries, bugs, or meat. The kids already knew what omnivore meant, and they were also able to tell me about cartilage and that sharks are cartilaginous fish. It was a lot of fun to see what they already knew about black bears, and to listen to their observations.

Bob is a black bear skull that a friend passed along to my Dad a couple of years ago. The skull was found by a hunter in the woods in northern New Jersey within the normal range for black bears (Ursus americanus) in this area. The skull was pretty clean, but we boiled it just to be sure and now it makes for a great show and tell item to talk about the species and how it lived. The kids really loved getting to hold Bob and take a look at his jaws. They asked some great questions, like “where did his brain go when he died?” To answer that we had to talk about decay and how bacteria will break down tissue that isn’t alive anymore. Deep stuff for first graders, I was impressed.

Photo by Erin Podolak

There have been confirmed sightings of black bears in all 21 counties in New Jersey, but they are more concentrated in the northern area of the state. I just wanted to share a few more facts about black bears that we didn’t get to talk about in the time we had in class:

Black bears are the largest land mammal that can be found in New Jersey
Female black bears can weight around 175lbs, while males weight around 400lbs
Black bears have very strong senses of smell and hearing
Their habitat typically includes hardwood forest areas, but they can also be found in dense swamps or forested wetlands.
The most common problems humans experience regarding black bears occur when the bears are attracted to garbage that has been left outdoors.
Black bears can run as a speed of 35 miles for hour.
Contrary to their name, not all black bears have black fur. Some black bears are brown or cinnamon colored, or they can have a white patch on their chest.
Black bears stand about three feet high when on all fours, and can reach five to seven feet tall when they are standing upright.

For more information about black bears in New Jersey, you can check out the New Jersey Department of Fish and Wildlife website (they have some good resources specifically for kids!) It was a great learning experience for me to try to communicate science to first graders. I was continually surprised by the complexity of the material they were able to understand and often stumped, but impressed, by their questions. I hope everyone who reads this blog who isn’t in the first grade also enjoyed the subject of these posts. Happy summer vacation, everyone!

Lessons From Neil deGrasse Tyson

May 17, 2012Grad School, Guest Lecture, Public Perceptions, Research Funding, Science, Science History, Twitter, VideosAstrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tysonerin

On the day I attended the last college class of my higher education experience, I also attended a talk given by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. For me, it was my commencement. I’ve made the decision not to walk at graduation for a number of reasons chief among them that none of my colleagues are walking and it didn’t make sense to me to do it alone. So I won’t be getting the cap, gown, prominent speaker send off typical for most people who complete a Master’s degree. Still, the University of Wisconsin-Madison gave me a great parting gift. The opportunity to sit at my favorite place on campus surrounded by other students on a gorgeous day and listen to a person whom I have admired for years talk about the future is the best goodbye I could have asked for.

Photo by Erin Podolak

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist (please don’t ask me to explain astrophysics further than saying it is physics in space) at the American Museum of Natural History but he is also an author, speaker, host, and even a meme. You might have seen him on the Colbert Report or the Daily Show throwing down some truth and clarity. He is eloquent, funny and honestly one of the people I admire most in the field of science communication. He pulls no punches, while still being extremely passionate about space and all the other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

The talk, which took place 5/10/12 on the Terrace here at UW-Madison, started with Tyson talking about the role science plays (or lack thereof) in our culture. He used the example of money, by asking us which scientists appear on U.S. currency. The answer is none. You can make the argument that Benjamin Franklin was a scientist, but his experiments are not what is highlighted on the $100 bill. He is there for his political achievements. This is just an example of the way as a culture we have not placed a strong emphasis on science.

Tyson then went into talking about the history of the U.S. interest in space exploration. He said that historically there are three reasons why people invest a lot of money in a risky exploration: fear of death, promise of economic return, and praise for royalty and deities. If you look at the U.S. push to get to the moon we were acting under #1 fear of death. Our investment in NASA and the space program had everything to do with the Russians and the Cold War. When the communist threat was gone, the space program started to decline. I think Tyson really drove home this point when he said that if the Chinese decided to declare that they were building military bases on Mars the U.S. would get ourselves on Mars within 10 months. We could if we wanted to, we just don’t invest in the necessary programs. We need to feel threatened before we actually do anything, how very American of us.

Photo by Erin Podolak

After going through the history of the space program, Tyson started talking about the economy and why investment in space and science overall can help. People in general seem to have this impression that NASA gets a big chunk of the federal budget, but Tyson pointed out that if NASA actually got what people think it gets NASA would be rolling in it. The perception of the budget is pretty skewed. What I love most about Tyson is that he says things that just make sense. When talking about innovation he said that the way you keep jobs in the U.S. is by making things that no one else can. Well, duh. But then where is the big push to invest in innovation? We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by not trying to invent. Perhaps my favorite line from his talk (which was full of quotable one-liners) was “If the dinosaurs had had a space program, you can bet they would have used it” basically about how to save us from ourselves.

Seeing a speaker like Neil deGrasse Tyson meant a lot to me. He lived up to the hype. I was impressed with the caliber of his ideas in addition to his stage presence and the great dynamic he developed with the audience. All of us sitting there, the sea of students strewn on the concrete in front of the stage, get to walk away from this year at UW-Madison having heard from a man who is without a doubt one of the biggest bad asses in science communication. I mean he paused at one point to tweet his own talk (@neiltyson) that takes some cojones and an awesome sense of humor. It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to read Tyson’s new book!