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A fluorescent image of a mosquito heart (Image credit: Jonas King, Hillyer Lab, Vanderbilt University)

What does a mosquito’s heart look like? I would never have expected that it would look like this, a fluorescent image taken by Jonas King, a student at Vanderbilt University, which won first place in the Nikon Small World photography competition.

King, working in the lab of biologist Julián Hillyer, took the image as part of research into the circulatory system of one of the species of mosquitoes that spread malaria, Anopheles gambiae. The green dye illuminates the heart’s muscle cells while the blue dye marks the DNA inside all the cells.

A mosquito’s heart isn’t like ours. For one, it pumps a clear liquid called hemolymph, usually towards the head but sometimes in the opposite direction. The heart takes up around two-thirds of the insect’s entire circulatory system, which is just a long tube that runs from its head to its tail (the long tube in the middle of the photo). The heart works like a series of valves that pump by expanding and contracting. The triangular shaped structures in the photo hold the heart to the mosquito’s back.

Hillyer says that learning more about the mosquito’s circulatory system and its role in spreading the malaria parasite could help in developing strategies to control the disease.

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People who have a gene that makes them get tipsy quicker are protected from alcoholism, according to a new study (image courtesy of flickr user rpeschetz)

My grandma was one of those people who would get drunk on half a glass of wine. I’m not much better. But being a cheap date might have a hidden benefit: a new study shows that people who carry a gene variant that makes them prone to getting tipsy quickly may also be protected against alcoholism.

Researchers have known for years that people who easily become tipsy are unlikely to become alcoholics. The new study, which will appear in the January 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, illuminates the genetic basis of this association.

The gene is CYP2E1, and about 10 to 20 percent of people carry a variant of it that makes them feel inebriated after consuming smaller amounts of alcohol than what affects the rest of the population. The CYP2E1 gene encodes an enzyme that breaks down alcohol in the brain (most alcohol is processed in the liver, but the brain also metabolizes a small amount) and generates free radicals, which can react badly with brain cells. Exactly how the “tipsy” variant of the gene works, though, is still under investigation.

“It turns out that a specific version or allele of CYP2E1 makes people more sensitive to alcohol, and we are now exploring whether it is because it generates more of these free radicals,” said one of the study’s authors, Kirk Wilhelmsen, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina. “This finding is interesting because it hints at a totally new mechanism of how we perceive alcohol when we drink. The conventional model basically says that alcohol affects how neurotransmitters, the molecules that communicate between neurons, do their job. But our findings suggest it is even more complex than that.”

In the future, researchers may be able to develop drugs that induces a tipsy-like effect in non-tipsy gene carriers to prevent or treat alcoholism.

Darwin's finches tattoo. Image courtesy of Carl Zimmer

This month’s Smithsonian magazine has a fun little arts and culture story about a photographer who has traveled the world in pursuit of tattoos. The images are gorgeous black and whites—the photog, Chris Rainier, is a protégé of Ansel Adams, and it shows—and he seeks out the meaning behind the tattoos:

In New Guinea, a swirl of tattoos on a Tofi woman’s face indicates her family lineage. The dark scrawls on a Cambodian monk’s chest reflect his religious beliefs. A Los Angeles gang member’s sprawling tattoos describe his street affiliation, and may even reveal if he’s committed murder. Whether the bearer is a Maori chief in New Zealand or a Japanese mafia lord, tattoos express an indelible identity.

“They say, ‘this is who I am, and what I have done,’” Rainier says.

But, frankly, those tattoos are idle doodles compared to some of the science tattoos collected by Carl Zimmer in his The Loom blog. I spoke with him this morning about the project, which started three years ago with an open question (with a sweet backstory) about whether the few science tattoos he happened to have noticed were the tip of an iceberg. They were.

“It was a little overwhelming at first,” Carl says about the flood of images. The site is up to about 230 tattoos, and some of them are breathtaking. One of his favorites is a landscape with Deinonychus dinosaurs that he describes as “artistically pretty amazing.” But as Carl points out, “the only problem is that we now know it should have feathers.”

One recurring tattoo theme is Charles Darwin—Darwin’s sketch of the tree of life, four Darwin’s finches (my personal favorite), Darwin and King Kong. But the physical sciences are well represented. One guy wrapped the entire periodic table of the elements over his forearm (note this post’s advice to future ink-etched wretches: wait until the bruising has healed before sending in a photo).

Carl (who, like photographer Rainier, has no tattoos on his own skin) is working on a book of science tattoos. It will be called “Science Ink” and will be published in late 2011. Just in time for holiday gifts, as he says, “for every geek in your life.”

The robot dancing to "Swan Lake". Photo by Kerstin Gauffin

A Swedish research team recently unveiled “The Dying Swan,” a robotic waterfowl that flaps and writhes to the melodramatic strains of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” I’ll say this—the designers did a good job conveying the special misery of a sick bird. Its tattered black plumage would be sad on its own, but the droopy tutu-like garment around the bird’s midsection verges on tragic.

Watch the video here.

The point of the performance–which premiered at a Gothenburg book fair last month–is to “explore the limits of what a robot can do, what human expressions it can mimic, and how it affects people’s perception of the robot when it makes an appearance in art and dance,” says creator Lars Asplund, a computer scientist at Sweden’s Malardalen University. Some viewers were reportedly moved to tears. (If that’s the general reaction, maybe the robot could be recast as a Canada goose and used to protest New York City’s controversial geese-gassing programs.) But other onlookers, I’m guessing, were amused despite themselves. It’s not really the robot swan’s fault that it’s funny. It only has 19 joints, whereas the ballerinas who typically dance the role of Odette have a gazillion.

In some ways, though, it’s actually easier for a robot behave like a prima ballerina than a human baby. While reporting a piece last year about social machines, I learned that that the most daunting robotic tasks aren’t always the ones that seem most difficult. It’s apparently simple stuff, like reaching for a particular object, or recognizing an individual, that trips up programmers. Complicated choreography, by contrast, they’ve occasionally mastered (check out this neat fan dance with Michael Jackson-esque flourishes.) If high art applications are more achievable than basic social interactions, robots could soon have a role on our stages, mimicking everyone from Beyonce to Pavarotti.

The Japanese recently showed off the “divabot,” a comely young robo-woman who warbles in a cartoon-like voice. And this fall the MIT Media Lab debuted “Death and the Powers,” an “opera of the future” that features robots that dance and discuss the meaning of death. Naturally, the opera is about an inventor who has downloaded himself into the environment because he wants to live forever. Up next: “The Marriage of C-3PO.”

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art. Roger de Piles, 1635–1709 "Abregé d'anatomie, accommodé aux arts de peinture et de sculpture," Paris, 1668. Engraving and letterpress David K. E. Bruce Fund.

The Renaissance may be best known for its artworks: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and “David,” and Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and “Vitruvian Man” have without a doubt shaped the course of art history. But a new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, “The Body Inside and Out: Anatomical Literature and Art Theory,” reveals that during this formative period in art history, one primary source of inspiration for artists was actually the anatomical sciences.

The relationship between artists and physicians during the Renaissance (roughly 1300 to 1600) was symbiotic. Artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, who were interested in exacting the human form in their art, observed physicians at work to learn the layers of muscle and bone structures that formed certain parts of the body. In turn, physicians contracted artists to draw illustrations for the high volume of texts coming out in the field of anatomy, made possible by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press around 1440. Some artists even forged partnerships with specific physicians (Titian and Andreas Vesalias are perhaps the best-known example), in which the physicians would allow the artists to assist in dissections (highly restricted at the time) in exchange for anatomical drawings and illustrations.

Some of the best artists even conducted their own anatomical studies, making new discoveries and expanding the field. While most artists limited their investigations to the surface of the body and observed live, nude subjects, some went so far as to produce écorchés, corpses in which the artist would peel back successive layers of muscle, tendons and bones, all in order to gain a better idea of how to portray the human body in their art. Da Vinci, it is said, conducted the first correct anatomical study of a human fetus.

The rare artists’ manuals and anatomical texts on display in a petite room in the National Gallery’s West Building depict the proportions of the human form. Some focus on the human face, some (above) depict the musculature of the body. Both the anatomical texts and the art manuals look strikingly similar, a testament to the confluence of art and anatomy during this monumental period in European history.