WebWatch

Thinking Confocally

Combine high-powered optical techniques with the storage capacity of a modern computer, and you can view living art in a totally different way—through beautiful confocal images. Provided as a means of comparing complex visual information, Image-Surfer is a software tool from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that will open many eyes to the world of 3-D data analysis. Anyone who has stared at rotating 3-D confocal images, knows how easy it is to get lost in the surface views of them. ImageSurfer takes scientists “deeper,” with its strong data analysis tools that include height analysis on 2-D slices from the data and accompanying graphs that help to reduce complexity by restricting analysis to a small subset of the total information. At the ImageSurfer site, visitors can, not only view spectacular rotating images, but they can also download the ImageSurfer software and use it to measure what the eyes can (and can’t) see.

www.imagesurfer.org

Virus Splicers

From the early DNA replication studies on ⊘X174 to the insights provided by adenoviruses and simian virus 40 (SV40) into cellular transformation, viruses have provided important insights for molecular biologists studying cellular processes. Viruses as research tools are still with us, but increasingly, the focus for their use is gene therapy and other novel applications. The Recombinant Virus Database, hosted at Riken Resource Center in Japan, provides visitors with keyword searches of recombinant viruses for research and downloadable protocols for studying adenoviruses, hepatitis C, and retroviruses in the lab.

http://www.brc.riken.jp/lab/dna/rvd/

Dollars in the Sand

If asked to name the largest phylum that lacks any freshwater or land organisms, what would you say? Think sand dollar, but don’t stop there. Include brittle stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and starfish in the list, and you’ve just named the most prominent members of the phylum Echinodermata. With an interesting pentameral design (most members of the phylum have 5-fold symmetry), echinoderms are, to say the least, an unusual collection of organisms. Most creep around to move. Few can swim or float. They are predators (starfish), filter feeders (crinoids), and even eat algae off of rocks (sea urchins). Learn more about these “old world” organisms at the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology Echinodermata site.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu:80/echinodermata/echinodermata.html

Living Canvas

The almost spooky looking images at this web site are beautiful at first glance, but closer examination reveals that not only are they artistic, they are also biological. Bioglyphs, hosted at Montana State University, is one of the most unusual amalgams of art and biology to be found. Light-emitting organisms have been cleverly employed here to create “bioluminescent paintings,” and the effect can probably only be approximated by pictures on the web. Designers of Bioglyphs have cleverly taken pictures showing the displays with lights on (revealing the Petri dishes on which the organisms are grown) and with lights off (showing only the light they produce), reminding us that a true work of art makes the canvas disappear.

http://www.erc.montana.edu/Bioglyphs/default.htm

Public Defender

Times are tough in the public schools. Funding shortages and challenges to the content found in science textbooks make it a difficult time to be a teacher. One of the hottest areas of conflict for school boards concerns the teaching of evolution, and these battles continue to spring up around the country. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit membership-based organization that provides information for anyone interested in keeping evolution in public school science education. The NCSE succeeds, at least partly, by focusing on consensus rather than confrontation and has intervened in one important legal advisory case. With supporters that range from the National Academy of Science (NAS) President Bruce Alberts to the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the NCSE certainly has expert witnesses on its side.

http://www.ncseweb.org

by Kevin Ahern
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