Chickens don’t have teeth or that’s at least what we’ve all learned (well, except for the ones in Chicken Run). Yesterday, on the way home from work, I heard this great story on NPR about chicken teeth. You see, about 80-million years ago birds had teeth, teeth very much like baby alligator teeth (creepy).

Researchers have been able to grow chickens with teeth by enhancing a genetic trait that exists naturally in birds. The researchers studied 14-16 day-old chicks known as talpid2 mutant chicks. These talpid2 chicks express a protein called catenin which initiates tooth growth. They exposed the chicks to a virus that would cause them to produce even more catenin and the chicks grew alligator-type teeth.

The idea for this was not show that chickens could grow teeth, but demonstrate the genetic history of the birds. We all have a genetic history. Snakes have been known to grow arms and legs like their ancestors. Some humans are known to have a mutation that causes them to grow thick hair all over their bodies, even their faces. Genetic history. We all still have those genes, they just have new functions. In the bird case, the genes for teeth production are now responsible for making feathers.

What a great lesson in evolution! Be sure to listen to the NPR story.

Chris sleeps on the couch. He sleeps on the couch because he loves me. We are incompatible sleepers. I go to bed early; he goes to bed late. His snores could wake people across town and I’m a very light sleeper. Despite all of this, I decided recently that the separate sleeping thing was wrong. The couch is way uncomfortable and recent heating costs have our thermostat set on 60 so it’s way too cold for him out there. Plus, I feel bad. We are a married couple. We should sleep in the same bed.

The experiment has been going on for almost a month and it doesn’t look good. Some nights are better than others. I bought some plastic ear-plugs that I smash into my ear, but they aren’t snore proof like the box suggests. I think I could get used to the snoring if muted through the ear-plugs, but the constant jerking as if he’s been electrocuted thing has to stop. He has no idea he’s doing it and it shakes the whole bed.

The other problem is I probably only sleep a good four hours a night anyway. I usually start waking up and checking the clock around 2:30-3:00 AM and this is generally the time Chris comes to bed. It was so bad this morning that, at 3:45, I tried to tie a sock around his head in order to keep his jaw closed. The sock was too small. Chris ended up back on the couch. Of course, once he was on the couch he stopped snoring. AaaHHHHH!!!

I think I’m going to have to start medicating myself, but I swear as God is my witness, Chris will never sleep on the couch again! We will fix this…somehow.

Via Shelley

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you’ll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

OK, so many people, particularly environmental groups, have a big problem with genetically modified foods. The worries arise from transgenics, the process used to genetically modify things. Transgenics has the capacity to bring in new genes that haven’t been in that particular genome before. For instance let’s say that you want to put a peanut gene into corn for some reason. Using transgenics, you run the risk of inserting the gene that carries the protein for an allergen. Now people with peanut allergies can’t eat corn flakes for breakfast.

A new technology called Tilling could get the same results as trangenics without actual genetic modification. Tilling is short for targeting induced local lesions in genomes. It relies solely on the genes already in the plant and uses reverse genetics to pinpoint mutations that might enhance nutritional value or eliminate food allergens.

Scientists at Purdue University are using tilling to create a hypoallergenic soybean. Soybeans are one of the top eight allergenic foods. The researchers are creating as many mutations as they can in the plants in hopes of producing soybean plants in the population that don’t produce allergens.

The process has already been used by researchers at Davis, California to improve bread wheat.

Chris and I finally got around to watching Transporter 2 which had been sitting on the DVD player for about three weeks. Transporter 2 was on the list to see because it has Jason Statham in it and he is H O T! Yeah, I have a major crush on him.

Unfortunately the cuteness of Jason did not save the movie. It was really bad. Chris and I kept channeling our inner Hispanic gay guy and yelling at the TV “Why you gotta be so stupid like that, you big stupid-head?”.

There was this one line in there that I plan on using a lot. It was the part where this guy with a bad Russian accent was startled by another guy with a bad Russian accent. The startled “Russian” said “You scared the shit in me”. Ha! I’m using that line when ever someone sneaks up on me in the lab.

I found this article perfect for Friday Science considering that the 2006 Olympic Winter Games start tonight. The US Olympic team has their very own physicist. Michael Holden is an aerospace engineer and head of the Calspan-Universtiy at Buffalo Research Center, one of the top hypervelocity-testing facilities in the world. He started helping out the USA team in the 80s when a team official asked Holden if he knew where they could find a wind tunnel.

Holden had a wind tunnel that he had used in previous research. He outfitted it with cameras and modified the floor so he could measure drag on athletes. He applies his aerodynamic research to speed skiers to show them how one careless move could add 20 pounds of resistance, but it’s just not about how the skiers move, but also what they wear. An ill-fitting suit or helmet can add 10 pounds of resistance to a skier.

Holden has applied his physics skills to other winter sports like the luge, speed skating, and skeleton sledding. He built a mechanized apparatus of pulleys and torsion bars that allow read-outs to be taken on jumpers suspended from the roof and contributed to seven US gold metals.

It’s very much like that movie the Ice Princess, where Michelle Trachtenberg uses physics to improve her double axel.

Today is Chris’s Birthday. Happy Birthday! He was polite enough not to blab to the internet world how old I am, so I’m not telling how old he is. Let’s just say he’s older than me. The age difference only shows up when he starts talking about seeing Star Wars in the theater when it was first released. Then he rolls his eyes at me and says “Oh Yeah. I forgot you were still in diapers then�.

Everybody sing Happy Birthday to Chris!

I really got nothing for Friday Science. There all sorts of commentaries on the science that Bush left out of the State of the Union Address, but I didn’t listen to the speech and I don’t want to blog about it. Blog entries like that tend to attract the crazies. So after searching around, I came up with this.

I grew up in a rural Oklahoma town. Across the street from our house was a farm and lots of pasture. It was not an uncommon thing to hear the sad wail of the coyotes on a warm summer night. Now there are houses in that pasture, but are the coyotes still there? Probably.

Urban sprawl is decreasing the habitat for many animals, including the coyote. A research study by Professor Stan Gehrt of Ohio State University shows just how closely the coyote are living to people and adapting to city life. Most of the time people are oblivious to the coyote because they’re hiding in bushes and hunting for food at night. The coyotes can adapt their diet to their surroundings. They don’t eat human leftovers, so it’s not like their foraging in garbage cans and they pretty much stay clear of people. In the 1990s there were about 400 coyote removals over a ten-year period in the Chicago area, mostly for attacking family pets. No human attacks have been reported.

I wonder how long it will take before the coyote becomes domesticated. If people keep feeding their pets outside and feeding wildlife, the coyote is going to start associating that location to dinner. The coyote does a very good job of controlling the rodent and deer populations. But it won’t be too long before we hear some mother screaming in the night “Coyotes ate my baby. Coyotes ate my baby!�.