I thought I’d be really good this year and blog more about things other than science, but that idea is not turning out so good. Really there’s not much to tell. No one wants to hear about our plumbing which has decided to clog and back-up on us. I think we’ve got the problem narrowed down to the kitchen sink, but I’d rather poke needles into my eyeballs than call a plumber.

Oh, I did have a birthday. Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes. My birthday was a very low key affair this year. I did some shopping (bought a pair of boots for $45!) and Chris and I went out to dinner. Chris usually gets me a piece of carrot cake from La Baguette’s, but this year I opted for carrot cake from a place called Cheevers. It was good (six layers of good), but I still think I prefer La Baguette’s (no raisins!). Dinner was excellent. We tried a new Indian place called Namaste. Usually we go to Indian buffets, but this was an order off the menu kind of place. Man, was it yummy. It’s now our favorite Indian place.

That’s about it. Someone asked me if I felt any different and I said no. What’s 31 supposed to feel like? Age is relative. After work, making time for yoga (love new yoga mat from Chris), and worrying about getting the house in order I just don’t have the time to worry about growing older. It just means I’m one step closer to retirement or my grave (take your pick). Plus all that worrying can give you wrinkles.

I don’t have much for Friday Science partially because I didn’t plan ahead and I don’t have much time today and this may seem a little off topic, but it all ties in. Trust me. Chris and I have been talking about me getting a scooter. It’s the perfect second vehicle choice for us. We could get one cheap and I would just use it for putting around to work and the Y.

Now I’ve changed my mind. I want this instead. Not only have they managed to make a hydrogen powered motorcycle, but they’ve also made it look pretty darn sexy.

With all the socializing and the ever lingering cold, I fell off the gym wagon during the month of December. I jumped back in the first week of January though and was doing really well. I went every day and sometimes even twice a day (noon yoga class). Now, thanks to the weather, I’m back to not going at all.

For the past three days the drive to work that usually takes about fifteen minutes has taken any where from thirty to forty-five minutes. What looks like a pristine layer of snow is really a very thick layer of ice. Your feet do not sink into it; instead you slide around on top of it. The major street we live off of hasn’t even been plowed. I think they sprinkled some sand on the road when it hit on Saturday, but that’s about it.

In the mean time, we skate. We skate outside to put the dog in the back yard. We skate to and from the car and through the parking lots of Ace Hardware and Wal-Mart. We skate or risk falling on our asses and at my age, I could break a hip.

The current issue of Seed has a very interesting discussion on the evolution of eyeless cave fish and the idea of “use it or lose it�. The evolution of flightless birds and eyeless fish was a problem that confused even Charles Darwin. He believed that disuse would lead to degeneration of organs over time.

The articles author, PZ Myers, says that one possible explanation for why animals living in total darkness should lose their eyes may be an economical adaptation. It takes a lot of energy to form something as intricate and delicate and an eye. Energy that was being spent in this pathway during embryo development could be diverted to other growing organs.

Now lets through a wrench into that explanation. Mexican blind cavefish embryos make eyes. They form an eye cup and beginnings of neural circuitry, but then they stop. That’s a lot of work and energy spent for nothing. Another explanation is random chance, like there is a mutation that knocked out the genes needed for making eyes.That theory doesn’t fly either because the cavefish have all the genes required for making an eye; something is just switching off lens formation.

W.R. Jeffrey and his colleagues suggest the evolution of eyeless cavefish is based on pleiotropy. Pleiotropy means that a single gene may play several roles or have different effects on an organism. A master gene called pax6 controls eye development, but a signaling molecule called hedgehog plays an important role in setting up the midline of the animal. Hedgehog is also expressed in teeth, taste buds and jaw. So by diverting the hedgehog molecule from eye formation, more gets sent to the mouth region making this area more sensitive and easier to detect food in the dark.

PZ Myers plans on discussing the importance of developmental biology in explaining evolutionary phenomena in a regular column.

Laboratory accidents are bound to happen. Someone spills a flask of hydrochloric acid or sets their ethanol beaker on fire. It happens. Just check out the list of possible dangers on the AIHA Laboratory Health and Safety Committee web page. But some of our greatest scientific discoveries come from accidents.

Discovery has a list of 20 scientific blunders that includes gunpowder and LSD. It’s surprising how much is actually discovered through lab blunders. The list fails to mention anything about penicillin. Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while studying the properties of staphylococci. He had a tendency to leave culture dishes lying around his lab and came back from vacation to find a mold growing on all the plates. When he looked closer he noticed that there was a ring around the fungus where the bacteria had not grown. Thus the discovery of penicillin.

We owe a lot to uh-oh moments in science. Quinine, the small pox vaccine, and even X-rays were all accidents. Wilhem Conrad Rontgen won the Nobel Prize in 1901 for the X-ray discovery. He won the Nobel Prize because he was trying to see cathode rays escaping a glass tube. Instead he found that the rays were passing right through his cardboard glass protector and appearing on a fluorescent screen over a yard away. Well, if it could do that surely it could penetrate solids and record skeletal images on photographic negatives.

Chris is always slightly amazed that I haven’t chopped off a digit or set my hair on fire in the lab. I tend to be a little on the clumsy side. But who knows what scientific wonders will come from one of my clumsy moments?

I got some really great gifts for Christmas this year (besides the iPod). Chris gave me season one of the Muppet Show and Mom made us a set of dishes (yes, I said made. They’re really nice). But the best gift by far came from Katrina. She gave me a chocolate fountain. You can use it for cheese too, just not simultaneously with the chocolate.

We took the fountain to our friends’ house on New Year’s Eve and it was awesome. It was like a carnival ride. You would skewer your strawberry, banana, kiwi, marshmallow, and/or pineapple, dip it in the fountain and walk back to the end of the line. Everything can be dipped in the chocolate fountain, even broccoli. The only thing that could have made it better was cheese. Oh wait! Next time we’ll have toadd those little cheesecake bites. Cheese and chocolate together at last.

Now I have to figure out how to clean it so we can use it again…and again…and again.

There really is no excuse for my blogging absence other then laziness. The month of December has taken a toll. The first half of the month had me down with a sinus infection and for some strange reason I was really busy at work, more so then usual. Then came the stress of the Holidays that included everything from getting all presents in order, work related Holiday Christmas socials, finding time for friends that we never get to see, and family. Whew! I’m tired.

I promise to be a little bit more vigilant in my blogging this year. I leave you with this lovely picture I took at Utica Square. Utica Square is a high-end outdoor shopping mall in Tulsa. I was there in November with my sister-in-law. We walked past Ann Taylor’s and this mannequin was standing in the front window. It made us laugh.

Boobies, originally uploaded by Elephant Soap.