Friday Quickie

I love doing what I do here on Science with Moxie, but I've got to admit that I'm a little jealous that I wasn't the one interviewing bassist Chris Cain from We are Scientists for a real live science publication.

Check out the interview with The Scientist, and find out Chris' opinion on whether it's easier to get laid as a rock star or as a scientist. I can't really speak to what I think of that, but I can say that I share his opinion* on what instrument Charles Darwin would play.

*Admittedly, for completely biased reasons.

SciMuse: Jim Holmquist, of Peat Bogs and Ukuleles

My second SciMuse interview subject is Jim Holmquist, who is a paleoecologist by day and the fearless leader of The Long Holidays by night.


So tell me a little about the science you do by day.

I'm a second year graduate student at UCLA in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I use peat cores from areas adjacent to the Hudson Bay in Canada to reconstruct climate and ecology from macro and micro fossils. I then compare those reconstructions to the rates of Carbon accumulation in the cores. Essentially we're looking for how they reacted to past drought and patterns in warming to understand how they may react to future climate change.

What is a peat core and does it contain fossils? How do you get them?

So a peat core is a continuous sample from the top to the bottom of the soil. It's shaped like a cylinder and gets older as it gets deeper. We have special tools that are like metal cylinders with a flap and a trap door that you can shove into the ground, twist and pull up an intact core.

Here's a picture of a tool used to collect peat cores. Jim drops these from helicopters into the soil of peatlands in the Canadian Hudson Bay!

The reason that we gather them is because peatlands store a lot of carbon in their soils in the form of poorly decayed plant material. This is carbon that is currently not in the atmosphere causing greenhouse warming. However if the climate gets dry and warmer in the future a lot of this soil can decay and put more C back into the atmosphere. Alternatively soil warming can possibly cause increased plant growth and peat formation causing increased C storage in the soil.

The cores contain a record of the rates of C storage and a fossil record of the plants that form the soil. So they do have fossils in them from the recent past... recent meaning as old as about 10,000 years ago.

There are macro-fossils, large pieces of mosses, leaves and wood and micro-fossils, such as microscopic animals called amoeba, and pollen grains. I pretty much go down the core, meaning back in time over the last few thousand years, and look for large changes in the macro-fossil record which could indicate a major change in vegetation.

I also use testate-amoeba's, a microscopic animal that is very sensitive to moisture, to calculate past surface moisture with complex mathematical functions. Overall these two records tell me when there was past climate change in the area. I look at how past climate change has affected the rates of past C storage to see if they were increased or reduced under different climate scenarios.

A picture of a testate-amoeba.

So how'd you get into this stuff?

Originally I was interested in marine biology because I liked snorkeling, scuba diving and surfing as a kid. I was really into nature docs and aquariums. In college I got involved in a multidisciplinary research project that involved wetland ecology, chemistry and environmental science. Me and my mentor tracked metal pollution in Los Angeles wetlands using plant tissues. After that I really like the idea of learning more about wetland ecology, especially paleoecology and Glen's work at UCLA was a great fit.

How long have you been playing music?

I've been playing music since 2000 where I started on guitar. My brother, me and two of our friends started a surf rock band called Caution Heavy Surf and we made two albums "Caution Heavy Surf's Greatest Hits: Vol. 1" and "Oh Yeah! Another Summer."

After I started college at Loyola Marymount I learned how to play ukulele and started a new band "The Long Holidays". We're a bit more eclectic in our influences span the gamete from country to folk to rock and a little bit of surf and uke.

Jim, ukulele in hand, captivating a dog.

How do you find balance between science and music?

The music kind of helps keep me sane through all of the grad school craziness. I'm always trying to learn new instruments so I'm always challenged. Plus, songwriting and performing can be very cathartic.

I think my science helps get me some really cool songwriting perspective. Many of my songs are nautical themed and inspired by my adventures scuba diving. "30ft beneath the waves", from our newest record "The Adventure Through Liquid Space", is actually a description of night diving. I write a lot of ecology into my songs, such as "Suburban Coyote" I use the setting of the regular burning california chaparral as a metaphor for change in life being part of a natural and cyclical progression. In Growing Gills I talk about sedimentary rocks and oil forming at the bottom of the ocean as a metaphor for a relationship becoming less real as it becomes more distant.

These are a couple of examples but these type of themes make there way into a good number of my songs.

I found this on your website: "According to Sean our fan base should be… “goofballs and smart-asses, who like nautical shit and old sci-fi movies” (I paraphrase)." Is this a conscious decision you made when forming the band? Or is it something that naturally extends out of your personality?

In terms of our fan base, the goofballs and smartasses are pretty much just our extended group of friends. I'm trying to reach out to like-minded people on the internet who we think would be fans of the music. Your article may actually be a pretty good outlet for this.

There is a fair bit of smart-assery at the shows, partially because the fans are mostly our friends who like to heckle me (I heckle back of course). We're also pretty loose on stage and I improvise new lyrics and jokes into the songs that we've been playing forever.

What's the lineup of the Long Holidays and how did you put together your self-produced record,"The Adventure Through Liquid Space"?

I put the record together with Kevin who's my main collaborator, but doesn't play live very much. He played drums and piano on most of the songs. Sean and I have been playing together ever since we were roommates in college together, but it took him a while to actually start playing with the band. He plays acoustic guitar on the record and presently in the band. The
record also has contributions from my friend Rob Farley (who has great solo work) and members from my old band Caution Heavy Surf.

For the record premiere I put together a completely fresh line-up to give the songs a completely new sound. Gabriel de'Santana plays drums. He's a real pro, and he always wears suits... makes us look bad. Andy Worshill plays bass and trombone and he always encourages me to be crazier and stranger on stage... bad influence. They were both friends of friends who I jammed with a couple of times and really meshed with.

The whole fluid nature of the band and the music works really well with our theme and image as "Adventure Rockers". We always want to be adventurous, try new things and never be totally sure what's going to happen when we get on stage. Adventure as a theme permeates, not only the lyrics and music, but also the process and presentation.

Thanks so much to Jim for doing this interview. You can check his band out on myspace.

Richard McLaughlin, Local Renaissance Man.

If you live in the Research Triangle area and are a fan of really awesome music and really awesome science, you definitely need to check out what's going down in Chapel Hill tonight.

Rich McLaughlin, of The Pneurotics, will be speaking at the University of North Carolina's Morehead Planetarium tonight at 7 pm on his research that involves underwater oil plumes and how they relate to the BP oil spill. This event is FREE and part of Morehead's Current Science Forums held every month.

Rich is getting a lot of amazing press lately for his research with fluid dynamics. Recently he was mentioned in a New York Times blog AND appeared on CNN.

To add to the awesome, immediately after Rich drops some science at the planetarium, he is heading down Franklin St. to play a rock show at the Local 506. If that isn't the SciMuse lifesyle, I don't know what is. I wonder if the organizers of the Science Forums know about Rich's double life.

I have a new SciMuse interview almost ready to post, and the aforementioned summer beats review is almost ready, but tonight I'm psyched to be nerding out, and then rocking out. Hopefully I'll get to feature Rich on the blog soon.

Summer Rhythms.

Hello loyal readers.

As you might have noticed, it's been a really long time since I've posted here. That's for a few reasons that I will explain below.

I was all ready to post about an article on the the brain and beat perception last night, but then started to feel like I needed to do a lot more research on neuroanatomy and functional brain imaging before I felt qualified enough to talk about it here. I will definitely post about the article soon, but before I did I wanted to ask for a little bit of input from anyone who reads this blog.

What kinds of things do you want to see here?

I really enjoy writing summaries of scientific research papers that render them easier to understand by a general audience, and I have a ton of papers on the intersection of neuroscience and music that I want to yap about here, but at times I avoid posting on this blog because these papers often require a lot of research on my part in order for me to feel like I'm summarizing them properly. Of course, this will get easier as I learn more about neurobiology, but for now it's resulted in months without any posts.

Thus in order to have some more frequency and variety in posts, I started the scientists and musicians (SciMuses) interview series so this blog would be a little more exciting. I have some exciting prospects that will be showing up here soon as well. But between reading up for current science research posts and tracking down awesome scientists/musicians to interview, I was wondering what I should post about here. Music that I'm currently listening to? Links to related news articles? Things in general I find exciting?

All I'm asking is, let me know! I definitely want to be posting more here, so finding things to post that don't require so much effort to research before posting might be one way to do it.


I'll leave you with my current favorite summer jam:

The Inaugural SciMuse Interview!

I'm pleased to present the subject of the first Scientist-Musician series of interviews, Toaster Sunshine, who is a self-described immunologist, hacker, and musician. This guy is doing so many amazing things that it's hard to not be inspired by his creativity in multiple areas. I'm honored to have him as the first interviewee.


First of all, where did you go to school and sort of research are you doing?

I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in Cell and Molecular Biology with an unpragmatic minor in German. I am still working on getting into grad school and am still awaiting word on many of my applications out in this current cycle. I now do research in adaptive immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Specifically, I am studying the dynamics of T- and B-cell proliferation in non-lymphatic organs in response to infection. This means I grind up a lot of organs and run them through a flow cytometer.

What got you interested in both science and music?

I was interested in music before I realized I was interested in science as more of a career than as school classes. In fact, at one point in high school while I was in both the school's jazz band (upright bass) and a death metal band (bass guitar) I viewed college as a fallback career if the music I did after getting my degree didn't work out. Heh.

I also played chamber music (and some industrial jazz) through college on cello, but have had to lay the cello aside due to how technically demanding it is to focus on science and making stuff. I also make computer music with Reason 4 and have amassed several hours of finished music. Some of it smashed classical instrumentation together with hip-hop/industrial beats while other bits are more like dubstep.

Do you have any additional projects outside the lab?

When I'm not in the lab, I'm usually working at the hackerspace I am helping to found in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We're called All Hands Active and we maintain a common pool of tools and parts where anyone can build anything they want to. I hope it also becomes a start-up incubator.



In this space, I have built a 2-string slide electric guitar out of a glass bottle, wooden plank, copper wire, and drywall screws and am currently trying to build some flex sensors to be the variable resistors in an Atari Punk Circuit. This latter is a prototype for the suit of flex sensors I intend to build to feed through MIDI to make music based upon my movement.

Lots of the other hackers at All Hands Active make musical stuff as well. One of them recently made a tonal drum out of a propane tank (link to a video of it here!), others are building carbon fiber instruments, and there's one guy who likes to tape piezos to old speakers and route it through an amp, then modulate the resulting feedback by tearing holes in the speaker cone with chopsticks.

Where do you see your multiple interests taking you career-wise? Is science still more of a "fall-back" career for you? Or do you plan to create a career out of a combination of all your interests?

You've asked a good question that I'm wrestling with right now. The biological engineering programs I applied to for this coming fall don't seem to have worked out, so I'm currently trying to suss out the flaws in my plans and records. I really like immunology, it's complex and chaotic and runs all over the place like pancake batter through a sieve. But at the same time, I really like mathematics and computers and building robots and things that go "blwtaga;gb!". I want to merge all of these things together into 1 career of awesomeness, but as of yet I haven't found a viable way forward that encompasses all of these things. Computational immunology seems like a possibility, but then again at the same time I'm currently trying to figure out if I'd rather go for founding a start-up company or whether to continue polishing myself on paper to get into grad school and then worry about possible entrepreneurship afterwards.

Thanks again to Toaster Sunshine for volunteering for the first interview of the Sci-Muse interview series. For more of his creative undertakings, you can check out his blog, Mad Scientist Jr. here. All Hands Active was recently featured on the Make Zine Blog, so check that out too!

If you'd like to participate in this interview series too, please don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Science, Music, Machines, Technology!

Before I leave to play the first show of tour with my band, Pink Flag (check us out if we're coming near you), I just wanted to make a quick post with a couple of things that I feel embody the spirit of Science with Moxie.

First, this whimsical little video by OK Go that has been making the internet rounds recently:


And second, this really rad sinewave synthesizer that makes it easy and fun to create your own little pretty ditties.

I've got some Scientist/Musician interviews in the works, but always looking for more volunteers. Now all I need is a name. All I got right now is SciMuses. I'm open to suggestions.

PLos ONE Blog Post of the Month!

I'm honored to have my post Musical Emotions: Chills Edition selected as Blog Post of the Month by PLoS ONE!

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has open access model of research publishing that really appeals to me, since many scientific papers are unavailable for viewing without paying a significant fee. This fact puts a major roadblock to scientific discovery by both the general public and people doing research at less-funded institutions. You can read a little bit more about the open access model of publishing here. I'm a big fan!

I'm really excited that my Research Blogging is going well, and you can definitely expect more posts on interesting science publications to come!