As attentive readers may know, Freezersaurus died over a month ago. We’ve been thankful for the winter’s chill that slowed the thawing process of our treasure trove of specimens while we complete the move to a temporary freezer. The gelid torch was thus being passed to the next walk-in freezer at a glacial pace– but with the glacier-scale force of Team Hutch’s collective muscles.
Stomach-Churning Rating: Hmm tough call; 6/10 if you know what it’s like to clean out a nasty freezer, 4/10 if not.
Aww. The freezer-moving team is not thrilled by the task ahead, and is exerting their frowning-muscles. (photo: Sophie Regnault)
Santa (Jim Usherwoodclaus) brings a bag– of elephant feet! (photo: Sophie Regnault)
Yet this week it all ends. With Crimbo’s long break ahead and an uncouth urinal smell pervading the dripping carcass of Freezersaurus, we have to clear out our little frozen ark. Some specimens have had to meet the incinerator early; others have returned to frozen limbo pending our future attention; and some are now just clean bones.
One of our many young emus that needed cleaning after thawing; here, just the left leg bones.
Quite a puzzle: one young emu’s skeleton to reassemble in the future. Thanks to Sandy Kawano et al. for cleaning help!
Horse forelimb from an old joint range-of-motion study we did; now reduced to bones (why did I keep this frozen anyway? who knows).
So our temporary new freezer could use a name; Freezersaurus II just won’t do. In the spirit of democracy (and Yuletide), I’ll open the floor to nominations. Nothing could go wrong with populism, right 2016? Hello? Oh crap.
Last cartful of elephant feet! (also: keen eyes may spot some gory graffiti)
Last look at Freezersaurus: Inside looking out.
Last look at Freezersaurus: outside looking in. Ice still lingering on the cow and horse legs from old XROMM studies, at the back, past the slurry of blood.
Enjoy some photos of the move, and please make freezer name suggestions in the Comments.
Our new digs, for the time being.
And, if I don’t post again in time, Happy Holidays! May the dark times not Krampus your style.
-John, Dean of the Demochilling Polarpublic of Freezevania
Let’s let Mike Ness sing us out…
UPDATE:
OK we have, via various forms of social media, these nominations for our temporary freezer’s name (I took one from each person suggesting a name; I hope I caught them all); so let’s open it to a poll!
link:
[Wordpress is not showing the poll on all browsers so you may have to click the link]
(The nominations: Freezersuchus, Freezertherius, Freezopolis, Eofrigidum, Narnia and Pleistoscene)
While you’re at it, check out Anatomy To You’s new blog post: do turtles wiggle their hips and if so how much? Now we know!
Well, that was an eventful week for me, although today’s post will focus on one event: the debut of the film Jurassic World. Briefly though, the awesome “T. rex Autopsy” documentary debuted (I was going to post more about it but all I’d have left to say is that I was very pleased with the result), I also showed up briefly in “Top 10 Biggest Beasts Ever” talking about the giant rhinocerotoid Paraceratherium and the stresses on its feet, our paper on ostrich musculoskeletal modelling was published (more in a future post) after ~12 years of me diddling around with it, and much more happened. Then to cap it all off, very shortly after I hit the “publish” button on my last post, I had four tonic clonic seizures in a row and spent a hazy night in the hospital, then the past week recovering from the damage. Nothing like another near-death (no exaggeration there, I’m afraid) experience to cap off an exciting week. But strangely, what I feel more interested in talking about is, like I said, Jurassic World, but this is not a review, as you will see here.
Stomach-Churning Rating: 0/10; just SPOILERS if you haven’t seen the film yet!
I guess I have to give a brief review of the film and say that I was entertained, to a degree, but it was not a great piece of film-making. It was a far cry from the original but then so were the sequels, and maybe it was better than them. The mosa-star was the most novel, memorable bit. I didn’t care for the Indominus villain, but then when you bring genetic engineering into a film like this, you’ve basically thrown out the rulebook and can make your dinosaurs as magical as you want; we’re already in “X-Men” territory here and almost in “Pacific Rim”-land.
Chris Pratt has signed on for at least another sequel to Jurassic World and the ending of the film already started that ball rolling. So I find it fun to speculate wildly, and certainly incorrectly, on what the sequel might do. What does the Jurassic future have in store?
First of all, who survived to re-appear in the next film? We’re left with the Bryce Dallas Howard character, who probably will return with Pratt to further develop their rather uninteresting social/romantic dynamic, rather than start afresh with someone else. The kids of course survived, as always, and as always they won’t return, as that’s not interesting and they didn’t have much to do except scream and (highly implausibly) hotwire an old car. Much as I’d like the parents from my hometown of Madison, WI to return, they won’t either for the same reasons. But we really only need Pratt and his high-heeled sweetie for the next film. Everyone else memorable(?) seems to have died, although it would be wonderful to bring Goldblum back for some smarmy wit (please!).
Second of all, the next film can’t be set in Jurassic World. There’s not much left to do there (JW already spent much of its time hearkening back to JP), and there’s no way the park would re-open. We need something new. I think by now we’re (very) tired of characters running around islands full of dinosaurs and the Blackfish parallel was milked dry in the latest movie. We need to spend a film with the dinosaurs amongst humanity (as Lost World briefly did), and much as I’d love to see the crazy drug lord/kidnapping plot happen, it won’t. But JW did set one thing up that has to happen now in its sequel: the paramilitary role of engineered, trained dinosaurs. We now know they can sort of train their dinosaurs and they can forge them to be anything they want to in terms of geno/phenotypes. They’ll learn from some mistakes of JW and engineer (or already did by the end of JW, at some remote site) some more compliant, deadlier animals, having largely given up on the public exhibition angle. The naked raptors and T. rex probably have to re-appear (sigh), but enough already of the giant uber-theropods like Spinosaurus and Indominus. The latter was already enough of a reprise of the former (plus psychic talents and chameleon powers etc.). Something truly novel is needed.
Unless they engineer a hyper-aggressive, intelligent sauropod or ceratopsian, which would admittedly be neat, I have this prediction (which is probably wrong but hey!): they have shown they can hybridize anything. There must be fewer and fewer “normal” (1990s…) dinosaurs now in the JW universe. So the next big step, which someone in the JW universe surely would do, is to hybridize dinosaurs and humans. Maybe some raptor-human hybrids, maybe also saving a tyranno-human hybrid for a surprise late appearance. But this is the sensible next step because it allows them to play with the (tired) Frankenstein monster trope but also touch on the hot topic of human cloning and human GM.
And by unleashing dino-human hybrids, or at least some freaky clicker-trained and engineered super-dinos, they could also explore the military theme, which the JW universe still hasn’t delved into much. What if those hyper-smart, deadly hybrid dinos, led by Pratt and Howard’s expert training, were used to combat an ISIS-analogue terrorist threat? Dino-Avengers in the badlands of Afghanistan or Iraq? Too predictable perhaps, but that’s a film that the public will want to see. Yeah there’s plenty of stupid there, but there’s no turning back– each film ups the ante, as JW ironically reminds us several times. We’re already in firmly in stupid-land, and the science has largely advanced to the point of magic. My idea is too uncomfortably close to the abandoned John Sayles plot, true. Darn. And (groan) kids have to be involved in some way to make it a family film so it rakes in the $$$ again, so either they get caught in the middle of the paramilitary mess or they are the ones that have to be saved… or the hybrid dinos are cute-ish kids themselves that Pratt and Howard must manage… (shades of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Kick-Ass?) I’ve found that more fun to think about than dwelling on the flaws of the movie, which is frankly too easy.
(Another good theme that Vivian Allen suggested to me would be climate change and invasive species—i.e. planet warms, dinos are already loose and go feral in waterlogged Central America, ecological disaster is looming and something must be done to round up the dinos… could work in some other bits like ecotourists or drug runners?)
That’s as far as my wildly speculative ruminating has taken me, but I wanted to turn it over to you, Freezerinos. If you were to make the next film (will it be “Jurassic World 2”? “Jurassic Army”? or as I’ve proffered in the post’s title, “Jurassic Future”?), what would it be (A) in your ideal world where you call all the shots (yes, lots of colourful feathery dinos, I know), vs. (B) in a more likely (less daring, more Hollywood) reality, along the lines of what I’ve tried to do here? (but I surely will be wrong, although we’ll see in 2-5 years!)
Title says it all? Sometimes a spade needs to be called a spade.
From time to time the Structure & Motion Lab at the RVC gets cool videos of animals doing different behaviours, be that slow-mo/high-speed videos, x-ray videos. motion capture or whatever. Actually, we get cool videos pretty much every day but some of them (such as a racehorse galloping on a treadmill) seem mundane to us, much as our visitors are impressed.
Here are some examples of the stuff we’ve filmed recently. It all seems to belong on this blog as an example of anatomy in motion, but has no good home here otherwise and no other cohesive threads uniting the disparate videos.
Hence the title. Enjoy!
The above two videos were made by Renate Weller, Emily Sparkes and others. Looping GIF of the last one, via Marko Bosscher:
Shin-Ichi Fujiwara, myself and others made that video some years ago; research yet to be finished.
The above two high-speed videos were captured many moons ago with Alexis Wiktorowicz, Karin Jespers and others; more research yet to be finished.
Ashley Heers made this video for the “Fossil Wonderlands” documentary in 2013-14.
Hey I almost forgot, it’s the blog’s second anniversary! What the hell happened this year?
Stomach-Churning Rating: there’s an 8/10 photo of ostrich guts here; otherwise 2/10ish.
I bring you tidings from the past and future!
This was the Year of the Rant, and I enjoyed ranting to you on this blog. Sometimes you ranted with me, and that was even better. It kicked off with that cat documentary that spurned me in a feline dismissive fashion, then I lit off on documentaries in general and how they should give more back to scientists (what a discussion in the comments!!!!). Ooooh that felt good. And helped me sort out my thoughts about the topic. And after then, I got paid more often and still did a lot of documentaries– if you haven’t been watching Secrets of Bones on BBC4, you should be weeping bitter, bitter dregs (and be scrambling to get access). Catch me tomorrow (Tues) night with some of our emus! They paid me reasonably and in return I worked hard for them; before, during, and after filming, and I think we all felt good about it. Or I did anyway. The show is excellent, so I feel even better!
Sneak peek from BBC4’s Secrets of Bones episode 3… recognize anyone? (from their website)
But no ranting palaeo-related blog would be complete without a good T. rex rant, and I did that this year. Took a big dump on the scavenger-predator non-troversy. That went over so well, Slate picked it up– I never had expected that to happen! I also appreciated how many colleagues joined in to condemn the senseless perpetuation of this dead issue by the media and a few scientists.
Darwin greets Chinese visitor Microraptor in my office.
When I asked for suggestions last year, you wanted more coverage of other people’s stuff, and so I did that to a degree, reviewing the All Yesterdays and Unfeathered Bird books. And then I fell off that wagon, which I may come back to. But along the way I realized I don’t enjoy writing about papers that other people have already published because, generally, I then lack the personal experience of doing the science and showing it in progress, which is what this blog tends to be about and what excites me on a personal, visceral level. Once the paper is out, I feel like the cat is out of the bag and it’s not as fun to talk about unless it’s totally mind-blowingly (A) cool or (B) idiotic. Anyway, I might do a solicited post if someone gets me excited about a paper before it comes out, or who knows, I may change my mind.
Entirely unfeathered Indian peafowl in matching views, with Unfeathered Bird’s author-illustrator.
I also posted on a fabulous blog that more people need to hit, because you may be surprised just how fascinating it is- Veterinary Forensics. I get the feeling often, both on my blog and from scientific colleagues, that veterinary anatomy/pathology issues are seen as “lesser science” than basic, even descriptive anatomy. Somehow, insanely weird diseases or pathologies don’t excite people as much as insanely weird “normal” anatomies. I know there are exceptions to that generalization, but I think it’s a common (mis)perception people have, and part of it is likely because those fields (veterinary medicine and zoology, for example) are historically separate, and people tend to see anatomy and pathology as separate things- as opposed to points along a continuum. Since coming to the RVC, I have come from that kind of a misperception to one in which pathology enormously enriches my understanding of form, function and evolution. I also love the “applications of basic science to helping animals live better lives” angle. We should all be trying to do that as scientists, but from time to time I notice that it isn’t taken seriously (I even get reviewers’ comments bluntly stating that it’s none of our business as basic scientists, or for anatomy/experimental biology journals to mention!). Whoops better stop there or I’ll be writing a new ranty post!
Can’t get enough of this x-ray GIF, so here it is again.
Toward the end of the year I got some guest posts going, by two main people from my team: Sophie Regnault on rhino feet, and Julia Molnar on crocodile spines. I liked those posts a lot, and so did you, it seems, so there will be more of those coming in year 3. Quite a few are planned already.
One of my favourite papers I’ve ever done came out this year, by Vivian Allen et al. on dinosaur body shape/postural evolution, and that went nicely as a blog post with tons of extra context and stuff. Digital 3D dinos, what’s not to love?
Speaking of Freezermas: It happened, it was terrifying, and we’ve all grown from the experience of surviving it. I had a blast dissecting that ostrich, and the x-ray pics were a hit with everyone, too!
And we ended the year by ending the ongoing drama of the Mystery Anatomy competition, starting off a new year with a new scoreboard. We got more poetic and lyrical in 2013 with the answers to those mysteries, and that will continue (groans from those who are poetically challenged).
Elephant skull mystery x-ray
Some brief numbers: view-wise the blog has been pretty close to last year; about 87,000 views in the past 12 months for a total of almost 200,000, wow! This year, Twitter just barely edged out Facebook for bringing people to the blog (3,134 vs 3,022 clicks) but then geenstijl.nl bizarrely brought 2,732! There was no big Reddit or other social media site moment this year, but various sites and links continued to bring in a steady flow of visitors to add to the Google-search-firehose’s. Thanks to folks who linked here!!!
What google searches brought people here the most often? The top 3 are the most interesting; the fifth one just makes me laugh because I’ve never discussed Deepstaria enigmatica anatomy here, but will continue to promote people finding the site by searching for it, if only to annoy cnidariologists:
rhino
83
giraffe
76
camel anatomy
62
what’s in john’s freezer
60
deepstaria enigmatica
56
I’m a little surprised “elephant” and “dinosaur” don’t bring as many searches here, but there are probably more sites about those animals and hence I get fewer of the hits. Looking forward to more hits on “ostrich anatomy”…
My two top rants were the top posts this year, and that’s no surprise given the comments and other attention they got. Thanks for helping by participating! Those were nice group-rants. Healthy and vigorous. Shockingly, a poetry round of mystery anatomy came in 3rd! People just liked the chickens + bones + poetry. Those, and some hits from year 1, broke the 1000-views marks.
Americans came here in a 3:1 ratio to Brits, which means that Brits punched above their weight per capita (~5:1 ratio)! Canadians, you tried, too. Here, have some back bacon of dubious provenance. 🙂 Saint Kitts and Nevis with 670 views, wow! Very unexpected- you beat Italy and many others!
Most importantly, the blog has been about sharing my passion for anatomy (as preserved via freezers). I shared a conference talk about this subject here, using the blog as a prime example, to a warm reception. I want to try experimenting in new ways to use the blog to share things this year. I think you will like what I (we!) have lined up. Thanks for showing up and staying with me!
I’ve been meaning to revisit a Rankin-Bass (yes, of The Hobbit animated film fame!) classic stop-motion film, “The Year Without a Santa Claus” (1974). I grew up on it, and now I can share it with my daughter because she’s of an age at which it now won’t scare the shit out of her. Rankin-Bass also did that uber-classic Crimbo flick with Rudolph and the Abominable Snowman– they knew how to handle cold-themed programming, those folks did!
I still think of the “Bumble” almost every freaking time I reach up high to grab something for someone that is vertically challenged– i.e. this scene:
I’m OK with being the Bumble. He’s pretty cool.
ThunderCats was rambunctiously rocking, too– snarf. The Last Unicorn, too. Rankin-Bass, R.I.P., sniff… Anyway, back to “The Year Without a Santa Claus”, and the topic for today.
The film has some fabulous big band music, especially in this sequence with smooth operator Mr. Snow Miser (and that blowhard Heat Miser; you know who this blog favours!). If you’ve never experienced it, or like me it’s been >25 years since you’ve seen it, check it out via the magic of YouTube:
Summer is coming to our northern hemisphere, and winter is coming to the south, so let’s all celebrate the cold/hot dichotomy together now.
Here is the whole film (50 min):
(for once I agree with a YouTube commenter: the Misers steal the show!)
I’m writing my talks for the ICVM conference and need some breaks, for which social media is very therapeutic. But I’ll be sharing at least one of my talks from that conference here on this blog, so stay tuned– the blog will be featured prominently in that talk!
Sneak peak here, of the intro slide, to whet your appetites I hope–
Extra bonus plug:Dr. Monica Daley, Senior Lecturer at the RVC’s Structure & Motion Lab, has a team that is blogging about their research-in-progress on using experimental studies of living birds to help build better legged robots — and using the robots to understand the birds, too! Check out their new ATRIAS blog here– http://atriasatrvc.wordpress.com/ and the wonderful video just posted, of Greg the Guineafowl’s excellent running!
(video by Dr. Yvonne Blum, postdoc with Dr. Daley’s research team; I take no credit)
I’ve been either super busy or on holiday and low on creative energy, so although I have five or so blog posts frozen in my mind, I haven’t progressed them far enough yet. To whet your appetite, they include a review of the bird book AND exhibit “The Unfeathered Bird”, a summary of our recent PeerJ paper on croc lungs (Schachner, Hutchinson and Farmer; see here and also here), a rant on optimality in biomechanics, and a summary of a new and (to us) very exciting dinosaur paper that is very-soon-to-come, and something else that I can’t remember right now but it probably is totally awesome.
But here’s an interlude to keep you stocked on freezer-related imagery. We did an annual inventory and massive cleanup (and clean-out!) of all our freezers, throwing out some 300ish chickens and other odds and ends, and finally loading all cadaveric material I have into a single database, which I’ll share here shortly! It was a long time coming, and took ~6 people about 4 exhausting hours; last year’s attempt was just a holding maneuver by comparison. Here is how it went.
Freezersaurus gut contents being sorted. A cold drizzle was falling. It was not pleasant work.
Large specimens, especially horse legs and the remnants of an ostrich hind end or two, being moved into the walk-in freezer.
Research Fellow Jeff Rankin wrangles some horse legs into their freezer. I like this photo for his knowing smile as he stands amidst horse limbs spread akimbo.
Postdoc Heather Paxton helps sort out elephant foot tendons and “predigits” in their freezer. Nice view of our long line of chest freezers in action, too.
And, as an extra reward if you made it to the end, here’s what I was doing for the past week (check out my Twitter feed for more)– seeing amazing art and architecture and food and stuff in Rome, which is just dripping with wicked anatomical portrayals (e.g. in this image; click to embiggen and oggle the classical physiques).
First, the usual consideration of statistics: wow! I never expected the blog to be this successful! I’d sort of hoped as much, but for such a niche blog it was far from guaranteed in my mind. However, the initial response was overwhelming: 4210 hits in its first month, many of them on the first day!
Since then, although the usual number of blog views are around 100-200/day, there are now 76 blog followers, and a total of ~111,000 views! According to ImpactStory and Topsy, the blog has had 48 tweets (7 of them “Influential”), 111 Facebook likes, 105 Facebook comments, and 53 Facebook shares. Nice!
The biggest day was April 27, 2012: 10,564 views– ZOWIE! That was fun. More about that below. I’m amused that my very first post only has 85 views even to this date, but it didn’t really contain much.
Visitors tended to come from browser searches (23,243 hits!), in particular hunting for images of the feet/limbs of elephants, rhinos, giraffes and other megafauna (looks like my intended purpose worked– vets and other anatomists want this rare information!). Oddly, from a few of my tweets that got listed on my blog, “deepstaria enigmatica” (remember that craze?) became one of the most common terms (214 to date!) that brings people here via the intertubez. Giraffe anatomy and patella are also major sources of search strikes. Interesting!
But don’t dismiss the power of Facebook (4,399 oggles on WIJF total) versus the somewhat surprisingly smaller impact of Twitter (2,036 pings). I say surprising because I push the blog much harder on Twitter than anywhere else, but Facebook pages like Perez’s Veterinary Anatomy (>33,000 members/likes!) have done far more than my mere ~1,300 Twitter followers can. Other blogs like the Chinleana palaeo blog (1,008 palaeo-hits here) and the ubiquitous Pharyngula (791 athe-hits) have helped a lot, too– thanks to all those bloggers and science writers who have linked to my humble little blog!!!
Who are YOU? You mostly come from the USA and UK, of course, but Japan is 3rd on my visitors ranking, followed by Canada, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands. Russia: we want more of you, too. Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu and Liechtenstein- you as well, please! North Korea, keep trying.
So this is all great; really great. I’m rather amazed.
Definitely the blog has succeeded in what I aimed: to present the fun, awesome, curious side of anatomy in all its raw glory, using the freezer as a common theme (although I’ve felt free to deviate from purely freezer-based science when it pleases me). And it has crystallized for me just how important and powerful a single picture of anatomy can be.
That is what this post emphasizes- the pictures of the year from this blog. Enjoy the walk down morphology lane.
MOST POPULAR POSTS AND PERIODS:
Certainly the post; indeed the single photograph; that stands out for this blog is that of the elephant with its guts spilling out, from my Inside Nature’s Giants post on 13 April (so it took 2 weeks to gather momentum before the views spilled out like so many bowels). In a single day I had thousands of visitors from Boing Boing, Metafilter, Reddit, Gizmodo, io9, pinterest (which still sends me a lot of hits daily), and more! So here once again is that beastly image:
Stunning emergence of The Guts
The post even got re-discovered by Reddit (the dreaded repost), leading to another surge. 24,330 views of the blog post so far!
A distant second to the elephant guts in terms of broad popularity was the “how thick is a rhino’s skin?” image; another Reddit favourite; with 4,719 views of the post from World Rhino Day 2012:
But also the “Animal: Inside Out” review did very well here (2,338 views to date), which was quite gratifying because I did a lot of detailed but enjoyable research for that one. It continues to bring people here, long after the NHM exhibit closed (it is now at Chicago’s excellent Museum of Science & Industry), which is quite cool.
Thanks to the poll results from last week, I’ll be doing more exhibition reviews like this– see below. My favourite image from that post is this: the bull (but don’t forget the camel, either):
Great exhibit. No bullshit.
Once we’re past those top 3 pages, things settle down to numerous posts with ~1000 or less views to date– highlights include the big rhinos and giant rhinos post:
Here are a few thumbnails of the greatest hits from those posts and some others– which do you remember and why?
…and we’ll never speak of the freezer-penis again…
Of course, there were the puzzles and mysteries, too. When I think of those, the image I think of most is this one; one of the first. Remember what it is?
I’ll be defrosting some new ways to puzzle you this year.
I also featured a lot of movies here- if you want to peruse them, they’re always on my Youtube account here— >22,000 views so far; not bad. One of my favourites is this one, of a pumpkin being smashed in slow motion:
Furthermore, in terms of effort writing and researching, my very detailed post on chimeras and Jenny Hannivers and such is very memorable for me, and more recently the Freezermas series was a huge undertaking– which gave me needed breaks but also soaked up a lot of time during some intensive grant-writing!
I predict that the pangolin post, in particular, will proceed to provoke a promiscuous proportion of people to pass by this blog.
But the WIJF blog has always been about including you too, my loyal Freezerinos– what about you? Please thaw out your memories of past posts and comment below on what sticks out as your favourites and why. I’d love to hear about it!
Eggs: full of bountiful promise and symbolism for the future.
THE FROZEN TUNDRA OF THE FUTURE:
A final duty for this post, heralded by my poll earlier, is for me to peer into my frosty crystal ball and report on the future of this blog:
As promised, it will continue for a year or more; as long as I feel I have something new to say and someone to tell it to.
The poll convinced me, as I’d hoped, to venture into more reviews of museum/other exhibits that I visit locally or abroad. Now and then I’ll also tackle a new or classic paper, good or bad, that tickles my anatomical fancy, and give my perspective on it. The mysteries and puzzles will continue; I was checking in that poll to see what the enjoyment level was, and it is clearly still reasonably high. I’ll continue presenting my own research here, especially when it’s quite anatomical (stay tuned for something new and VERY exciting in a few weeks!). As I’d hoped, hardly anyone found the self-promotional aspect of this blog (presenting my own research) to need downplaying, but I think over the coming year you’ll see more diversity of what is presented in terms of current research by anyone. I welcome suggestions of cool anatomical science to cover. I will try to cover mostly postcranial anatomy, since other blogs/Facebook pages already do such a good job with cranial morphology, and postcranial is much more my expertise.
But generally I will just keep on keepin’ on with what I’ve been doing!
Examples of what’s yet to come: some close encounters with my collection of specimens– the cast of characters that populate my freezers. What exactly is there, and what are the odd things I haven’t yet even mentioned here? I’ll also just grab some specimens and thaw and dissect them for the purpose of blogging it (live-tweeting too?), and going through some of the anatomical talking points for each. And much more! You may even see Cryogenics, Yetis, or Snowball Earth come up in features touching on the theme of freezerness, general science and critical thinking.
But– IMPRESSIVE IMAGERY, again, is what WIJF is truly about. It’s what I’m about, too- I became an anatomist partly because the visually arresting nature of anatomy grabbed me and won’t let go.
Here are some NEW images to ponder. One is… unpleasant; one is more abstractly technical; but both are about the bewitching power of anatomy. The coming year will run the gamut between these extremes:
Thanks, everyone here, for helping to make blogging fun for me and for others, and for enduring my self-indulgence – especially in this post – but I hope you enjoyed a ramble through this past year in my freezers.
Keith Feinstein of Eureka Exhibits sent me this sketch he did, and when I expressed my reaction of hey-dude-this-is-awesome, he welcomed me to put it up on the blog. Well why the hell not? Awesome belongs here. Dinosaurs (especially space-tyrannosaurs) belong here. Astronauts go into space and space is cold– like an ultra-freezer? So there you are. Additional context: we’ve worked together on Eureka’s “Be the Dinosaur” simulation/exhibit and are now doing “Be the Astronaut.” I suppose this sketch foreshadows the next step: “Be The Astronaut Riding the Dinosaur in the Land of Badassedness”.
…a daily picture of anatomy! And today it is two pictures, tra-la-lee!
Welcome back to Freezermas! And HAPPY DARWIN DAY! Last year our whole lab got involved in DD2012, but this blog was just a twinkling in my keyboard back then. This year it was a more mellow, somber occasion for DD2013. But Heinrich Mallison of the dinosaurpalaeo blog took part, and took photos (all credits go to him), and the result kicked ass and took names. Bring it on!
Here is Darwin amidst a selection of greatest hits from my bone collection; post-freezer denizens. How many can you identify? Have a go in the comments below. A few should be quite familiar to blog followers… More about these bones later this week. Incidentally, Darwin is standing on a Kistler forceplate. So biomechanics afficionados can geek out about this, too.
And here I am hamming it up again. Give it a rest, John! But ’tis merely a humble offering to The Master. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Any guesses what it is?
Happy Freezermas! Sing it: “On the second day of Freezermas, this blo-og gave to me: one tibiotarsus, a-and two silly pictures with Chucky D!”
At the Structure and Motion Laboratory, we’re not boring scientists who robotically focus only on writing grants and publishing papers, much as senior management might want us to pretend. We’re human. We like fun. And we like Halloween. And brainssss! What follows is some good, jolly, Halloweenerly, spooky, sciencey fun that we came up with yesterday (in between writing grants and papers, ahem).
First, our surreal B-movie extravaganza: It Came From the Biomechanics Laboratory. See if you can piece together the plot:
(subtitle: Open John’s freezer… if you dare!!!)
And in case you want more of the ritual sacrifice of the pumpkin at beginning, here are two versions in glorious slo-mo, from our AOS high-speed digital video cameras:
and
Finally, an outtake from the film, in which Gary, the RHex robot from Andrew Spence’s Spencelab, takes his gory vengeance on a hapless cameraman, and then turns on his masters!
RT @3rdreviewer: Mind blown 🤯:
It turns out that somatic cells turn *on* a regulator that increases mutation. This complex is turned off in… 9 hours ago
What's In John's Freezer? 