(Astute readers may note that it has already been on de facto hiatus for some time. It’s a time of hectic transitions, what can I say?)

We heard a speech from the inventor of Clocky, the alarm clock that launches off your nightstand and zips around the room, forcing you to wake up and catch it. And another from a science writer who is searching for the holy grail of science writing: cataloging all instances of science writers claiming X is the holy grail of Y. Okay, I admit it, I’ve done it myself. But it wasn’t my fault, I swear — I was quoting a source!

We also sampled the Ig-Nobel-inspired Toscanini’s ice cream flavor: Yum-A-Moto Vanilla Twist, named in honor of Ig-Nobel-prizewinner Mayu Yamamoto for the discovery of a method to extract vanillin from cow dung.

But my personal favorite part of the event was Miss Sweetie Poo (an audience member brilliantly suggested that this might have been a better name for the ice cream flavor). Miss Sweetie Poo is an adorable 8-year-old girl who keeps presenters from talking too long. After a speech hits five minutes, she gets up onstage, looks sweetly up at the speaker, and repeats, loudly, as only an 8-year-old can: “Please stop! I’m bored!”

The Miss Sweetie Poo position, which goes to a new 8-year-old girl each year, was created to keep Ig Nobel Prize acceptance speeches from stretching interminably on and on. Having now witnessed the effect, I must say it is far more effective than the oh-so-subtle music fade-in used at the Oscars.

Other notable Ig Nobel-worthy research achievements over the years include:

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

My favorite part is “sometimes,” which seems to imply that yes, on occasion, rats can distinguish backwards Japanese from backwards Dutch. I should add that in a past (highly scientific) experiment of my own, I and a colleague determined that cats are substantially more startled by backwards meowing (their own) than by forwards meowing (also their own).

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock has a must-read post about this one, including suggestions for follow-up experiments.

LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

A post-secondary matriculant to whom I habitually proffered academic assistance informed me that I suffer from this particular predicament. I think he was right.

BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

Aren’t we all?

BIOLOGY: C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

The subtext here seems to be that there have been previously recorded cases of heterosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. Perhaps heterosexual necrophilia is business as usual to the mallard, and thus completely unremarkable. But homosexual necrophilia? Now, that’s just wrong.

And finally, my favorite:

PHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.”

The Ig Nobel Prizes are administered by the Annals of Improbable Research. I am looking immensely forward to their talk at AAAS this weekend.

[For quick background: Each fall, billions of monarch butterflies funnel from the Eastern US and Canada into a handful of tiny pine groves in central Mexico. As they've never made the trip before and they have no parents to lead the way, they must rely on genetic memory to get where they're going. The mechanism they use to pull this off is called a time-compensated sun compass. They use the sun as a guidepost, but they must constantly recalibrate their internal compass to compensate for the fact that the sun appears to move across the sky throughout the day. The timepiece they use for this recalibration is the circadian clock. Okay, now for that excerpt.]

Instead of studying in meticulous detail the circadian clocks of every living being, scientists focus on representatives of particular groups.  For example, the mouse circadian clock is often used as a model for how mammalian clocks are built.  Similarly, the fruit fly clock has long been a stand-in for insect clocks in general.  Circadian biologists could safely assume that the monarch clock would resemble that of the fruit fly more than that of the mouse, because the monarch is more closely related to the fruit fly.  The fruit fly is much easier and cheaper to study than the monarch; its long history as a so-called model organism means that there are many well-established tools and procedures for working with it.  So it seemed like a reasonable, and practical, approximation.

In the fruit fly, as in most organisms, the clock resides in individual timekeeping cells.  It works by manufacturing and then destroying certain proteins in a feedback loop that takes about 24 hours to complete.  This feedback loop can sustain itself indefinitely, which is why the clock keeps working even in constant darkness.  When the fly encounters daylight, though, a specialized protein in the timekeeping cell absorbs the light; it tells the clock that the sun is out by feeding into the loop.  This specialized protein is CRY, the fruit fly version of the protein that illuminated the possible clock-compass connection.  CRY is how sunlight sets the fruit fly’s clock.

But Reppert wanted to figure out how the monarch’s time-compensated sun compass works, so he couldn’t rely on the fruit fly model—fruit flies don’t use a sun compass, time-compensated or otherwise.  He decided he needed to take a closer look at the monarch clockwork, to see how the butterfly clock works.

Because the fruit fly and the monarch are close evolutionary relatives, they share many of the same genes.  Reppert’s group had already found that each of the genes encoding the fruit fly clock’s main gears has a counterpart in the butterfly clock, with a similar gene sequence.  So far, it looked like the fruit fly clock was a good approximation of the monarch’s.  But that would soon change.

In the wake of the discovery of [a] suggestive CRY pathway in the monarch brain, Reppert’s group had begun a series of experiments to uncover the molecular underpinnings of migration.  While these studies weren’t aimed specifically at the circadian clock, they yielded an unexpected insight into the clock’s gears.  Reppert wondered what, at the molecular level, distinguished non-migratory summer butterflies from migratory fall butterflies.  Were there particular genes that were active in migrants on their single-minded southbound treks, but inactive in non-migrants on their desultory northbound hops?  Or vice versa?

Back in the lab, postdoctoral researcher Haisun Zhu was removing hundreds of monarch brains and grinding them to mush.  He made one pool of mush for northbound summer butterflies, and another for southbound fall butterflies.  With the help of another lab, the pools of brain glop were analyzed to catalog all the genes that were active in each.  They found about 10,000 unique genes, more than 400 of which were active to substantially different degrees in the two monarch populations.  These genes, Reppert knew, held the secrets to why and how monarchs migrate—why a monarch hatched in May will go about the normal business of being a butterfly, while a monarch hatched in September will be drawn irresistibly toward Mexico.

Meanwhile, at the University of California, Irvine, Adriana Briscoe—one of Reppert’s longtime collaborators—was looking through a similar catalog of mosquito genes when she noticed something bizarre.  As expected, the mosquito had a CRY gene similar to that in the fruit fly.  But unexpectedly, it also had a second CRY gene—one that looked much more like that of a mouse.

Just as in the fruit fly clock, the mouse clock keeps time using feedback loops.  A number of clock proteins, which interact in an intricate network, are assembled and then destroyed in a cycle that takes about 24 hours to complete.  Because the two clocks have been evolving independently for hundreds of millions of years, the mouse gears are different from the fruit fly gears.  The mouse does have CRY genes of its own—two similar ones, in fact—which are only distantly related to the fly’s CRY.

So what on Earth was a mouse-like CRY doing in a mosquito?

Briscoe called Reppert to tell him the weird news.  Reppert remembers being surprised;  “Really?” he recalls asking her.  She suggested he check the newly minted monarch catalog for a similar gene.

“And we looked,” says Reppert, “and lo and behold, there was a second cryptochrome”—one that bore a striking resemblance to the mouse version.  “This,” he adds emphatically, “had never been discovered.”  It was one of those truly serendipitous scientific moments, when chance and circumstance come together to produce an extraordinary finding.

…

Suddenly there were countless questions to be answered, countless experiments to be performed:  What does it mean that the monarch and the mosquito have two distinct CRYs?  What is the function of each?  Does the mouse-like protein function the same way in the monarch that it does in the mouse?  Are there more insects out there with both kinds of CRY?  Reppert’s group got right to work.

In the fruit fly, CRY is the messenger through which light resets the clock, to keep it in sync with the rising and setting sun.  In the mouse, the CRYs play a very different role.  The mouse proteins don’t absorb light; they instead function as essential gears in the clockwork mechanism, the feedback loop that keeps 24-hour time.

For convenience, the fly-like version of the monarch gene was dubbed CRY1, and the mouse-like version CRY2.  Reppert suspected that CRY1 would respond to light, as in the fruit fly, and CRY2 would be part of the feedback loop, as in the mouse.  To verify this hunch, Zhu and Quan Yuan, another postdoctoral researcher in Reppert’s lab, began to investigate how these proteins behaved.

In the first series of experiments they compared each protein to the light-absorbing fruit fly CRY.  So for each protein they asked, can it sense and respond to light?  When they shined light on the monarch CRY1—and that of the mosquito—the proteins responded strongly.  In contrast, when they shined light on the monarch and mosquito CRY2 proteins, there was no response.  In short, the monarch and mosquito CRY1s were behaving like fly CRY, and the corresponding CRY2s were not.

Next, the group tested each CRY for mouse-like function.  So this time they asked, which proteins can function as a gear in the clock?  To do so, they created an artificial clock-like system.  Into this system they threw each protein, to see if it could integrate itself.  And this time, the monarch and mosquito CRY1s failed the test, while their CRY2s passed.  With the CRY1s, the clock wouldn’t tick; with the CRY2s it kept time.

Taken together, all these experiments suggested that Reppert’s hunch was correct.  Function seemed to match form.  The fly-like CRY1s seemed to behave as light receptors, just as in the fly.  And the mouse-like CRY2s appeared to feed into the central clockwork, just as in the mouse.

In April of 2006, Reppert’s group published these preliminary results in Current Biology, in a paper entitled “The two CRYs of the butterfly.”  Since then, they have continued to experiment with the butterfly’s two CRYs, trying to confirm their disparate functions.  Using an arsenal of new approaches, the group has been amassing more and more evidence to support what amounts to an astonishing discovery with wide-reaching implications.

Inspired by the monarch and the mosquito, Reppert and Briscoe wondered whether other insects might have a second CRY as well.  To find out, Briscoe searched through the gene sequences of several insect species, looking for genes that resembled either the fly-like CRY1 or the mouse-like CRY2.  What she found was that even among the insects—which were all previously assumed to resemble the fruit fly—there are several ways to build a clock.

First was the fruit fly, with just its lone, archetypal CRY1.  Second was the monarch, joined by the mosquito, the Chinese oak silkmoth, and the commercial silkworm.  All these insects had two CRYs—one that was fly-like, and one that was mouse-like.  And finally, a third type of insect clock turned up, in the honeybee and the beetle.  These bugs had the mouse-like CRY2 but not the fly-like CRY1.  Parts of their circadian clockwork, it seemed, might be better typified by the mouse instead of the fruit fly.

In light of these insights, Reppert argues that the fruit fly is an inadequate model for insect circadian clocks.  True, the fly is backed by a formidable edifice of tools and protocols, but among insects its clock is more the exception than the rule.  Perhaps, Reppert believes, the insect clock would be better exemplified by the colorful monarch butterfly.  Incorporating elements in common both with other insects and with mammals, the butterfly clock could help us better understand how clocks work and how they have evolved.

“It’s really a new sort of frontier for clock studies,” Reppert says of the evolutionary insights that CRY has made possible.  He refers to the monarch’s circadian clock, with its two CRYs, as an example of the “ancestral clock”—the kind of internal timepiece from which other clocks have evolved.  In these clocks, one CRY mediates the resetting effects of light, while the other CRY is an essential gear in the clockwork.  The other two kinds of clocks, which have either CRY1 or CRY2 but not both, likely represent evolutionary adaptations.  Those with only CRY1—like the fruit fly—have developed some other gear to replace CRY2 in the clockwork.  Those with only CRY2—like the bee, the beetle, and even the mouse—have developed other ways to sense light.  In the mouse, for example, light enters the clock by way of the eyes.

…

By studying the circadian clock, Reppert and his colleagues are beginning to unravel some of the mysteries behind the monarch butterfly’s spectacular yearly migration.  And by studying the monarch butterfly, they have stumbled upon some unexpected insights into the molecular workings and evolutionary history of the circadian clock.

Below: monarchs in Michoacán, Mexico. Photo by me.

(From icanhascheezburger.com, of course. Again, hat tip to Discovering Biology in a Digital World.)

In 1997 a Japanese researcher named Masaru Okabe was looking for a way to track sperm development. His thought was to cram a jellyfish gene encoding a glowing protein — green fluorescent protein, or GFP — into a mouse’s sperm. Then the sperm cells would literally light up when exposed to a certain wavelength of light, allowing him to track them as they developed. But instead, he wound up with the inverse: nearly everything but the sperm glowed. He had a full-on fluorescent green mouse.

The mistake was fortuitous. Glowing mice aren’t just seriously cool; they’re also medically relevant. For instance, other researchers have similarly tagged human cancer cells with a glowing red protein and injected them into glowing green mice (engineered to be fur-less as well, so that the glow is visible). Then they can track the cancer as it grows and spreads, differentiating it from healthy cells by color alone.

(Left: Fluorescent red cancer cells lined with the fluorescent green blood vessels of a fluorescent green mouse. Right: Fluorescent red tumor in a fluorescent green mouse. Both images from here.)

Below the fold: glowing fishies, bunnies, and kitties…

Next, in 1999, came the fish. Researchers in Singapore also filched the GFP gene from jellyfish, this time stuffing it into the genome of a zebrafish. The result was a zebrafish that glowed green. This was followed shortly thereafter by a red-glowing zebrafish (thanks to a coral protein) and a yellow-glowing zebrafish (thanks to a modified jellyfish protein). Just like the glowing mice, these bizarre creatures had their existence justified by an Important Practical Application^TM: they would be used to detect water pollution.

How would that work? By tacking something called an inducible promoter onto the gene, the scientists want to create fish that only glow in the presence of a certain trigger. For example, they could add an estrogen-responsive promoter that would switch on the gene — and thus the glowing — when estrogen was present. And poof, suddenly you have a fish that will light up in water contaminated with estrogen.

Next came the glowing bunny. This time, the critter was engineered not in the name of an Important Practical Application^TM, but in the name of Art^TM. Artist requested that a French laboratory insert the GFP gene into a rabbit, creating for him a work of “bio art.” He named the rabbit, which gives off a freaky green color under blue light, Alba.

(Alba the glowing rabbit, from www.ekac.org. Although frankly this picture makes me skeptical, because she appears to have green fur. It’s her skin that should glow, partially or totally obscured by her fur coat.)

Alba was a one-off. But it wasn’t long before glowing animals entered the mainstream en masse. Now, anyone in the U.S. (excepting Californians) can purchase their own GloFish — a commercialized version of the glowing zebrafish used in research. Just trick out your aquarium with black lights and you’ll have your very own glow-in-the-dark fish.

(GloFish in various colors. From www.glofish.com.)

Now, for the latest glowing animal incarnation: the glowing cat. Korean scientists have just come out with a trio of kittens that fluoresce red. Supposedly, like those glowing mice, these cats are meant for biomedical research. But given the success of GloFish, and the overwhelming interest received by a (failed) cat cloning service and a (possibly fraudulent) hypoallergenic kitty company, it’s hard not to wonder whether these cats are destined to be marketed as novelty pets.

(Glowing kittens under normal light (left) and UV light (right). Image from MSNBC.)

Hat-tip to Discovering Biology in a Digital World for calling my attention to the cats.

“Eleven Steps” by Steven R. Kutcher
Hissing Cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa)
With gouache on paper, 2003.
Please check out his website at BugArtBySteven.com

This is what the artist looks like:

(Hissing cockroach photo courtesy of berndhaug on Flickr.)

Kutcher has done some absolutely amazing work using insects as paintbrushes. It’s truly a melding of science and art. Science not just because it’s, like, bugs, and stuff. His premise is that he’s making an invisible thing — the tracks of an insect — visible. I like work of this kind, which translates between the senses — in this case between touch and sight. More on translating between the senses later this week.

On his website, Kutcher describes the experience of creating art using a paintbrush that moves on its own, and essentially has a language of its own — a different one for each species — that he must learn to work fluently with. Besides the hissing cockroach, he has created paintings with the honey bee, the sarcophagid fly, the monarch butterfly, the tiger moth, the katydid, and more.

(Photo of Lil’Bit the two-faced cat pinched from the Daily Mail.)

Not only does this cat have two faces — because his faces can sneeze, eat, and sleep separately, his veterinarians think Lil’Bit has two independently functioning brains.

At seven months old, he seems to be faring pretty well, considering his condition. He does have some trouble with the litter box, but his (very obliging) owner has solved that problem with diapers designed for premature babies.

Can you imagine trying to sleep while a second brain convinced your body to gallivant around after a ball of string? But David Harman, commenting on the Living the Scientist Life post, brings up an interesting point: what if one of the brains is dreaming while the other is awake? Normally when the brain is dreaming the body is prevented from acting out the dream by a phenomenon called sleep paralysis. Would sleep paralysis occur, preventing the waking brain from moving the body? Or would it fail, allowing the body to act out the dreaming brain’s impulses?

Actually that makes me wonder whether in general, even while awake, the cat suffers from conflicting signals to the body. What if one brain wants to go left while the other brain wants to go right? Maybe that’s why it has trouble walking and litterboxing.

A little Google-trolling reveals that some other two-faced kitties have made the news. One has mouths that mew in unison, suggesting a shared brain (video here). Another is aptly named Gemini (AP story, via LiveScience, here) and has a somewhat disturbing owner.

(Another photo of Lil’Bit from the Daily Mail.)

I’ve been working over a book idea in the back (and occasionally front) of my mind since January, and I’ve decided quite at the last minute to crank out the first 50 pages in time to apply for these fellowships. It’s fiction with science, which is a thing quite different from science fiction, and which really needs a catchier name.

Accordingly, as the deadline is Friday and I have 25 pages to go, my posts here will be a little anemic this week.