A few years ago, we had a lab meeting to discuss a paper in Plos Computational Biology on “Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science.” One of the conclusions of the paper is that for Ecology and Evolution, traditional writing rules don’t help. Writing papers that are short, easy to read and simple don’t have very high citations rates. Instead, citations are more likely for papers that use the present tense, signal novelty/importance, and use words that are classified as “superlative”, “pleasant”, “active” or “imagery.”

I don’t like the conclusion. It gets under my skin a bit (clearly, I am still thinking about that lab meeting 3+ years later…). What the conclusions suggest is that clear writing doesn’t improve the dissemination of science. Scientists who play the game of exaggerating the importance of their work, writing how “novel” and “important” it is with lots of superlatives can get more people to cite and pay attention to their work than someone who does a good job of writing, presenting unbiased results and conclusions and letting the reader decide how important or novel the work may be.

A more recent paper came out last fall about another trick scientists can use to increase citation rates: Twitter. The more twitter activity a paper has after publication, the more likely that paper is to receive citations. (Maybe this will finally convince Andrew to get a twitter handle…?). Again, it seems like the dissemination of science is more rooted in marketing our work rather than it may be in the actual content. Say how novel, important and sexy your work is, tweet all about it and get citations. Write something grammatically sound, simple and easy to read, get fewer citations. Still doesn’t make sense to me.

One possible exception to these “rules” of science writing for scientific journals might be writing for the popular press. A couple months ago, Andrew and I collaborated on writing a piece for the AP news company the Conversation on microbes that can get transmitted through money. The article was published in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Popular Mechanics and a number of newspapers and news sites. It was re-published by 37 news outlets, and read by over 140,000 people on the Conversation website. That’s more than the number of people I can ever hope will read one of my scientific articles over the course of my lifetime. And what does the editor of the Conversation say is one of the most important parts of writing? Make it readable. To ensure that writers do this, the website where writers submit articles, has a tool on the top of the editing page that gauges how “readable” the article is. When the article is detected as readable, the bar turns green and you can submit to the editor, and when it is sensed as “unreadable,” the bar turns red and you better not submit to the editor. Here’s a screenshot of one of my more recent project’s for the Conversation:

It seems like readability does matter. In ever evolving apps and programs on our computers, I came across an interesting feature that can be added to gmail to sense “readability” of emails. This one is fancier than the word editor for the Conversation. Not only does it sense readability, but it will give you a prediction on how likely you are to receive a response to the email if you send it.

Boomerang Respondable predicts how likely you are to receive an email reply

Making something readable always sounds like a good idea. The idea that it decreases citation rates is going to continue to irk me. I think someone should make an app to add to a word processing program that can predict how “citeable” articles are when we write them…

One of the worst things about being an Academic Editor for journals is trying to decide if something is sufficiently interesting to send it to review. It’s so subjective. One reason I dislike it so much is my experience on the receiving end of these calls, not least the following. They concern our 2015 paper, Imperfect vaccination can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens.

Science: “The overall view is that while your paper will be of great interest to the field it is not one of the most competitive in terms of general interest.”

Nature: “[W]e do not believe that it represents a development of sufficient scientific impact to warrant publication in Nature.”

PLoS Biology:

Rev 1: “The findings are important, not only for the field of MDV research, but also for the field of vaccine research in general.”

Rev 2: “This is an important topic and should be of broad interest.”

Rev 3: “[T]his work has broad significance to all of disease evolution, and the results are unassailable.”

Rev 4: “It’s an important paper that should be published.”

News just in: ex-grad student Megan Greischar, now a post-doc with ex-post-doc Nicole Mideo in Toronto, just won the 2016 Fisher Prize. That’s for the best paper from a PhD published in the journal Evolution in a given year. She got it for Greischar, M.A., Mideo, N., Read, A.F., & Bjørnstad, O.N. (2016). Predicting optimal transmission investment in malaria parasites. Evolution 70: 1542-1558. I am ever so pleased. The cognoscenti should be too. This is the dueling splines paper, which Megan first featured on this blog in 2014. She’s talked more passionately about splines than anyone else I know except uber-geek Bill Nelson. Amazing where passion takes you.

There is a saying that the only thing that unites academics is a common interest in parking. I think we are also united by a common interest in time management.

Megan Duffy drew my attention to this absolutely fabulous article. It is well worth the 30 mins it will take to read and think about. Following my last post, a snippet about how we might proceed:

“…we might try to get more comfortable with not being as efficient as possible – with declining certain opportunities, disappointing certain people, and letting certain tasks go undone. Plenty of unpleasant chores are essential to survival. But others are not – we have just been conditioned to assume that they are. It isn’t compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realize our potential on every dimension, or fit more in.

In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

As a new method for malaria control, a brief glance at the abstract of this article in Malaria World / Malaria Journal this week seems to suggest keeping a chicken in your house will prevent An. arabiensis from coming near.

This is both a case for house chickens (they do sell chicken diapers) and for outside of the box thinking for new mosquito control ideas.

… name four of the six best-selling deodorant brands of 2014. It was trivia night last night for the Read-Thomas lab and it was a good thing most of us work inside Convirons set to 80 degrees. We know our deodorant brands. 1. Old Spice, 2. Secret, 3. Dove and 4. Degree. The remaining two were Suave and Axe. It was a good thing we didn’t say Speedstick! (or my suggestion of Arm and Hammer to which Jessi reasoned “That’s a hippie brand, Jo”).

The team won by a single point after wagering our entire point count on the final question. “Go big or go home,” Mike said. We went big and we did go home but we went home with a $25 gift card to Pickle’s to pay for the next trivia night.

Trivia night is like scrabble, it helps if you have smart people on your team but it’s also a game of luck. Categories last night included U.S. Presidents, Science & Medicine and U.S. states. Most fun was having interesting conversation, watching Jessi run back and forth to the table to deposit our answers, eavesdropping on the table next to us chinking glasses to capitalism, and having Lillian dominate with the number of answers she knew.

Shelley managed to snap a picture of us all on her phone with help from some people at the bar. Here’s the winning team:

Over the course of the past few months, the majority of my work-related conversations have been on developing artificial diets to mass rear mosquitoes. The result has been heaps of suggestions for what to use as an alternative to live blood meals. People have suggested an array of alternatives. Some alternatives have been strange, e.g. coconuts, raw eggs, cheese. Some less strange, e.g. milk, whey, salt solutions. But one thing that repeatedly comes up is the idea of using salvaged blood from the meat industry. Salvaged blood would presumably be less expensive than the cost of purchasing live animals or blood from a blood bank, and might pose less disease risk if it is considered food-grade. My argument for using insects over all of these other alternatives has been that insects are easy. Insects are less regulated, faster to rear, cheap, less prone to giving us disease and contain hemolymph presumably more similar to mammalian blood than, say, a coconut. But after what felt like the ten-billionth time I’d been asked the slaughterhouse question, I felt I needed to see for myself — how hard is it to collect slaughterhouse waste?

That question is what led me to find myself on Wednesday morning covered boots-to-neck in a yellow rubber apron, one hand holding onto a turkey head, and the other clinging to a ziplock bag. I was collecting blood from a turkey slaughter at the Poultry Education and Research Center (PERC). The center is not far from the insectary, found by a small store that sells eggs and packaged meat. The slaughter house is just beyond the store, behind a biohazard gate. If you’re looking for locally sourced meat, this is the place. I had emailed the manager of the PERC, Scott Kephart, a few weeks back asking whether Penn State salvages any of the slaughterhouse waste for research purposes. His short answer was no, but he was willing to let me try.

Slaughters happen at least once a week, sometimes turkeys, sometimes chickens and sometimes pigs and sheep in the other meat labs on campus. Wednesday happened to be turkey. So on Wednesday morning, I woke up early and headed to the campus slaughter house to meet Scott, an accompanying veterinarian, and a guy named Steve who would actually do the slaughtering. We walked through the education center, stepping through a foot wash on the way in and a foot wash on the way out, crossed a gravel parking lot and headed into a barn-like building, the abattoir. The turkeys came in. They walked around the enclosed room, while we suited up into blood-splatter-proof aprons. Turkey slaughtering goes something like this: (1) the turkey is grabbed by her feet, (2) in one sweeping motion, the turkey’s flipped upside down and her talons are slid into a ceiling foothold, (3) the turkey gets dizzy from being upside down and passes out, (4) a trained professional makes one deep slit in an external jugular vein, and (5) the turkey hangs until the blood drains out before butchering.

The slaughtering process is quick, clean and efficient when done by people who know what they are doing. The turkeys didn’t move and showed no signs of suffering, no lugubrious sounds, no attempts to resist. The room was quiet when the necks were slit. The only sound came from the sound of the blood coming out. Blood drains fast from the jugular. The force of the heart is surprising, more energetic than the word draining implies, the blood rushes out, gushing in one thick stream. My gallon bag was empty and then it was full, filled with enough blood to feed at least a thousand mosquitoes, one turkey’s worth.

I had brought with me an anticoagulant, CPDA, aliquoted into tubes. I then transferred blood from the collection bag into tubes and shook to mix the anticoagulant into the blood. So far so easy. I brought the tubes back to lab and did my first turkey feed on Wednesday afternoon. Some mosquitoes supposedly lay more eggs off of bird blood than mammalian blood, possibly because of extra nutrients found in nucleated red blood cells. Small boosts in fecundity could make a huge difference in the success of mass rearing efforts. For results on whether Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes also lay more eggs off of slaughterhouse-salvaged bird blood vs blood-bank-sourced human blood, stay tuned at the next lab meeting.

The Powerball jackpot is now in excess of $1 billion, which means that there is a flurry of popular press articles discussing the lottery, statistics, odds, and expected value.  All of the articles use slightly different numbers and logic but basically come to the same conclusion: the lottery is a poor investment because the expected payout is less than the cost of a ticket.

I take issue with this claim.  Sure expected value can be an important consideration, but another important consideration that is often neglected is the variation in outcome.  Variation is what gamblers pay for.  Nobody would use a slot machine if it returned exactly $0.95 after each $1.00 pull.   But slot machines don’t work that way.  They return $0 most of the time, and large amounts much more rarely.  So if I pull the lever once, I will likely walk away a loser, but I may walk away a big winner.  People who gamble enjoy this variation, because any given person on any given day may be able to start playing with very little money and leave with very much.  The lottery takes this idea to the extreme.  For $2 you can become a pre-tax billionaire.  It is by definition a high risk investment, and whether the expected return is positive or negative is essentially irrelevant in deciding whether the investment is good or bad.

Consider a thought experiment.  What if the fraction of each ticket sale that went towards the jackpot were increased such that the expected return of the lottery were positive?  You are still you, and so you still only have enough money to buy a small number of tickets.  The odds of any ticket winning are still unchanged, and so you would almost certainly still end up with nothing.  Even if the long term expected return were positive, it would likely take hundreds of lifetimes before you realized that positive return.  That doesn’t sound like a very good investment to me.  In other words, the expected return is not the key factor in determining whether a lottery ticket is a good investment — the perceived value of variation in outcome is.  People who feel like they have enough see this variation as a cost.  People who feel like they do not have enough see this variation as a benefit.

Some people say the lottery is a tax on people who don’t know math.  I disagree.  The lottery is a tax on dreaming of wealth.

A few weeks ago Eleanore shared with me this gem of a paper. It’s a case study of a 456 lb man who fasted for 382 days, eating nothing but a multivitamin with “no ill effects”. It’s content possibly only rivals this one in terms of uniqueness in the diet literature: an 88-yr old man who eats 25 eggs per day and has normal cholesterol levels in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The question of why we eat what we eat has a lot of proximate answers. We eat the foods we eat because the taste and textures appeal to us, or some combination of appeal and availability, price or season. Presumably, the 88-yr-old egg eater really likes eggs. But that doesn’t explain why all humans don’t like eggs this much. And why certain foods that appeal to me seem less appealing to others. Shouldn’t we all need to eat the same things? What does an “optimal” diet look like and why might there be variation in what we eat or want to eat?

It’s a question my grandmother was wondering the year my mom made tofurky for Thanksgiving and one I’m often asking with mosquitoes. In both systems, taste preferences seem to lack ultimate answers. We (and mosquitoes) don’t always prefer to eat things that are “healthiest” for us. If I could increase my fitness by eating watercress, why can’t watercress taste a bit better? If mosquitoes can lay more eggs off of eating mice than eating me, why don’t they eat more mice?

A few weeks ago I was chatting with an insect mass-rearer named David. David said that even if we could provide a perfect, optimal diet with all the nutrients an insect needs to live long and make lots of insect babies, it would only be a good diet if the insects wanted to eat it.

“Imagine,” he said, “that a bunch of insects were developing an artificial human diet and they watched us for a while and said ‘Hmm’ humans eat this hamburger stuff. Live cows have the same nutrients. Let’s feed humans the live ones, it’s less work.”

A live cow diet to rear humans would likely fail because most humans wouldn’t take a bite of raw cow if they were put in the same pen. I don’t think this is because we couldn’t survive a long time eating steak tartar, but because much of what we eat might be learned behavior rather than instinct (as a non-anthropologist, I have no idea if this is true). It’s strange to me that the cravings of our sensory system may be out of sync with what our other bodily systems crave. If my digestive system wants fiber and my vascular system wants iron and my skin wants fats and my teeth want calcium are my cravings for different foods loosely reflecting the needs of various systems? Or are we all captives to vestigial cravings to seek efficient high calorie foods that led to fitness optimums in scarce resource environments of the past? Optimal foraging theory in humans suggests that cravings derive from reducing risk of energy-depletion but that one other way we can reduce risks of having too little food is a strategy called sharing — a holiday-appropriate result.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And happy foraging to an optimal micronutrient intake.

Everyone seems to have a different favorite holiday.  My favorite happened just this past weekend.  Just to be clear, I’m not talking about Halloween, I’m talking about the end of Daylight Savings.  This holiday is simply the best.  In addition to always getting the day of Daylight Savings and the day before off from work, it is a holiday that provides the most valuable gift of all — the gift of extra time.  A lot of people I know use their extra hour right away, choosing to drink for an extra hour on Saturday night, or sleep for an extra hour on Sunday morning.  But that seems like such a waste to me.  I like to save my hour and use it as needed.  So far, I’ve spent 15 minutes on Monday sleeping in, and another 5 minutes writing this blog post.  That leaves me with 40 minutes.  I look forward to seeing how I’ll spend the rest in the weeks to come.  Happy holiday!

Paul Ewald has lots of interesting ideas, but this one got me thinking. He theorizes that the common diseases are are plagued with (from cancer to heart attacks) will be found to be caused by infectious organisms. (Cartoons lifted from this awesome site)

At first I was skeptical, but it does make some sense that chronic low-level infections could be missed for years while doing damage to our bodies. Examples of cervical cancer (HPV) and ulcers (H. pylori) are convincing, not to mention more obvious examples like Tazmanian devil facial tumors.

There was recent NPR coverage about surgical instruments used in the brain potentially spreading a prion-type protein causing Alzheimer’s. Prions are scary.

Looking into it further I found that the American Cancer Society has a publication on infections that cause cancer, ranging from viruses to parasitic worms. This is really something to think about. 

…three scientists working on parasitic diseases, including the scientist who discovered artemisinin. Here‘s the link to today’s NYT article. Nice to see malariologists representing!

Lately I’ve found reading Science and Nature to feel a bit like reading science fiction. On September 18, an article in Science reported the invention of “An ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light,” which, as the title suggests, describes how to construct an invisibility cloak (albeit for very small objects, not yet usable for human-scale disguises). This came a day after Nature published a neuroscience article on using laser beams to erase memories, and a few weeks after PLOS ONE published an article demonstrating human mind reading via brain-to-brain interfaces.

The next generation of humans is going to be high-tech. I like to think that in general I support new and improved technologies. And for the most part I do, especially in respect to the technologies that have been used for benevolent functions, e.g. the Internet and social media’s positive impacts on housing international refugees, alleviating hunger and disease, and increasing education. But mind-reading, invisibility cloaks and very literal brain-washing: Is this for the better?

My grandparents likely asked the same question when they first heard the Beatles, and my mom, when I started a Facebook account. Reading scientific journal makes me wonder what will dig the next generation gap. Will it be kids with brain chips and cyberthinking skills? Brain chips or no brain chips, new technology comes with the prospect of a new and often scary future.

What I find most interesting is that the “scary” part of this future might have less to do with the nature of the technology and more to do with our conception of it’s normalcy. Go ask someone on the street about his or her opinion on brain chips, and most of the responses will be vague, related to concerns about brain chips being not “normal” or not “natural.” Very rarely will someone discuss logistics such as where the on/off switch would be. Or do they cause headaches? Or would a chip change one’s sense of creativity? In many ways this parallels the arrival of airplanes, telephones, iPhones and other technological devices that revolutionized communication and connectivity. Initial response is apprehension, secondary response is a revolution. Welcome to the world invisibility, mind reading and mind cleaning. I’m apprehensive, but so was my great-grandfather about indoor plumbing.

I love this stuff.

There will be a full moon this Sunday appearing about 14% larger than average. On top of this Supermoon (already darn cool), there will be a lunar eclipse! How awesome is that! And it won’t be this big and awesome again until 2033, so make sure to watch. It will start a little after 9pm, and be fully eclipsed at 10:11pm the night of Sunday September 27th.

It’s a bonus that the eclipsed supermoon with its reddish tint looks a bit like an oocyst in a mosquito midgut. There, now this is relevant information.

There are two twitter feeds that I follow mostly for entertainment value. The first is the Centre Daily Times. My all time favorite tweet by the CDT is a link to “Details about the Incident at the Waffle Shop”. I think this would make a great title for a novel. If you were wondering, the incident was somebody’s pepper spray going off in their bag.

The second twitter feed shouldn’t even be in the same league. And yet, the CDC routinely tweets things that elicit exactly the same sense of bemusement as central Pennsylvania’s finest news source. For example, there was recently a tweet urging me to celebrate National Girlfriends’ Health Day. What is National Girlfriends’ Health Day, you ask? It’s a day when, as a lady, you speak to your lady friends about being healthy. Things like exercising, getting a pap smear, and eating right. Split an entree, suggests the CDC.

Did the CDC really just suggest that I shame my friends into eating less? This advice comes at the top of the page, but I have to scroll all the way to bottom of the page to find the National Domestic Violence Hotline number, which seems somehow more important. Maybe it’s just that, despite being a lady with lady friends, I’m not the target demographic for this particular message. But it seems so poorly thought out that I can’t imagine who the audience is here. It strikes me as a public health intervention devised by somebody binge watching Sex in the City. Or maybe a cliche stand up comedy routine? Women, always talking to each other. Am I right?

Not to go on a rant here (she said, mid-rant) but it adds insult to injury when U.S. senators are currently launching another attack on the health care providers that actually work to keep women (and men!) healthy. I don’t want my friends to talk to me about getting a pap smear, I want my tax dollars to fund pap smears for people who can’t otherwise afford to go to the doctor and get a pap smear.

I realize that Planned Parenthood and the CDC aren’t exactly in the same business, and not to diminish the good work that the CDC does actually do, but surely there are better ways to improve public health than National Girlfriends’ Health Day?

I am, however, looking forward to Brovember: National Bros’ Health Month.