Tag Archives: Please Don’t Kill My Hive

Please, don’t kill my hive! (a Science Rap Academy production)

In celebration of an upcoming event in Vancouver (Canada), “Honey, Hives, and Poetry,” I’m including this April 17, 2015 news from David Bruggeman (on his Pasco Phronesis blog),

Tom McFadden has debuted the first video of this year’s Science Rap Academy.  Seventh and eighth grade students at the Nueva School prepare a music video based on a science concept, usually reworking a rap or hip-hop song.

Here’s the first installment in this year’s Science Rap Academy series, Please Don’t Kill My Hive,

There are many posts on this blog about Tom McFadden and his various science rap projects (many of them courtesy of David Bruggeman/Pasco Phronesis). Here’s one of the more recent ones, a May 30, 2014 posting.

Getting back to David’s April 17, 2015 news, he also mentions the latest installment of  “Science goes to the movies” which features three movies (Kingsman: The Secret Service, The Lazarus Effect, and Them!) and has Neil deGrasse Tyson as a guest. David has embedded the episode on his blog. One brief comment, it’s hard to tell how familiar Tyson or the hosts, Faith Salie and Dr. Heather Berlin are with the history of the novel or science. But the first few minutes of the conversation suggest that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the first novel to demonize scientists. (I had the advantage of not getting caught up in their moment and access to search engines.) Well, novels were still pretty new in Europe and I don’t believe that there were any other novels featuring scientists prior to Mary Shelley’s work.

A brief history of novels: Japan can lay claim to the first novel, The Tale of Genji, in the 11th century CE, (The plot concerned itself with aristocratic life and romance.) Europe and its experience with the novel is a little more confusing. From the City University of New York, Brooklyn site, The Novel webpage,

The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its closeness to the medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella, meaning “a little new thing.” Romances and novelle, short tales in prose, were predecessors of the novel, as were picaresque narratives. Picaro is Spanish for “rogue,” and the typical picaresque story is of the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits. The development of the realistic novel owes much to such works, which were written to deflate romantic or idealized fictional forms. Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-15), the story of an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance, explores the role of illusion and reality in life and was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel.

The novel broke from those narrative predecessors that used timeless stories to mirror unchanging moral truths. It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance of individual experience. They believed that reality could be discovered by the individual through the senses. Thus, the novel emphasized specific, observed details. It individualized its characters by locating them precisely in time and space. And its subjects reflected the popular eighteenth-century concern with the social structures of everyday life.

The novel is often said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). Both are picaresque stories, in that each is a sequence of episodes held together largely because they happen to one person. But the central character in both novels is so convincing and set in so solid and specific a world that Defoe is often credited with being the first writer of “realistic” fiction. The first “novel of character” or psychological novel is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740-41), an epistolary novel (or novel in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters). It is a work characterized by the careful plotting of emotional states. Even more significant in this vein is Richardson’s masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48). Defoe and Richardson were the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. They established the novel’s claim as an authentic account of the actual experience of individuals.

As far as I’m aware none of these novels are concerned with science or scientists for that matter. After all, science was still emerging from a period where alchemy reined supreme. One of the great European scientists, Isaac Newton (1642-1726/7), practiced alchemy along with his science. And that practice did not die with Newton.

With those provisos in mind, or not, do enjoy the movie reviews embedded in David’s April 17, 2015 news.  One final note,David in his weekly roundup of science on late night tv noted that Neil deGrasse Tyson’s late night tv talk show, Star Talks, debuted April 20, 2015, the episode can be seen again later this week while deGrasse Tyson continues to make the rounds of other talk shows to publicize his own.

Three Vancouver (Canada) science events: Vancouver Public Library on April 27, 2015, Café Scientifique on April 28, 2015, and the Wall Exchange on May 26, 2015

Monday, April 27, 2015, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm is a combined bee/poetry event at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. From the Vancouver Public Library “Honey, Hives, and Poetry in the City” event page,

Celebrate National Poetry Month by investigating food and poetry as a means of cultural and social activism and community building. Featured will be:

  • Rachel Rose, Poet Laureate of Vancouver
  • A collaborative reading by scientist and author Mark L. Winston (Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive) and award winning poet Renee Sarojini Saklikar (Children of Air India)
  • Readings from author and poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner and the Thursdays Writing Collective.
  • Presentation and honey tasting with Hives for Humanity.

Location:

Address: 350 West Georgia St.
VancouverV6B 6B1

  • Phone:

Location Details: Alice MacKay Room, Lower Level

[ETA April 21, 2015 at 1000 PST: I’ve just embedded a video which launches a new year of Science Rap Academy (Tom McFadden) in my April 21, 2015 post titled: Please, don’t kill my hive! (a Science Rap Academy production).]

*Change of Speaker for April 28, 2015  Café Scientifique, see Café Scientifique (Vancouver, Canada) makes a ‘happy’ change: new speaker for April 28, 2015 posting.”*

The day after the bee/poetry event, Tuesday, April 28, 2015  Café Scientifique, held in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], will be hosting a talk on pain (from the April 13, 2015 announcement,

Our speakers for the evening will be Dr. Matthew Ramer and Dr. John Kramer.  The title of their talk is:

Knowing Pains: How can we study pain to better treat it?

Pain is arguably the most useful of sensations.  It is nature’s way of telling us to stop doing whatever it is we are doing in order to prevent damage, and to protect injured body parts during the healing process.  In the absence of pain (in certain congenital conditions and in advanced diabetes, for example), the consequence can be loss of limbs and even of life.

There are circumstances, however, when pain serves no useful purpose:  it persists when the injury has healed or occurs in the absence of any frank tissue damage, and is inappropriate in context (previously innocuous stimuli become painful) and magnitude (mildly painful stimuli become excruciating).  This is called neuropathic pain and is incredibly difficult to treat because it is unresponsive to all of the drugs we use to treat normal, useful (“acute”) pain.

Ultimately, our research is aimed at finding new ways to minimise suffering from neuropathic pain.  Prerequisites to this goal include understanding how normal and neuropathic pain are encoded and perceived by the nervous system, and accurately measuring and quantifying pain so that we can draw reasonable conclusions about whether or not a particular treatment is effective.  We will discuss some historical and current ideas of how pain is transmitted from body to brain, and emphasize that the pain “channel” is not hard-wired, but like the process of learning, it is plastic, labile, and subject to “top-down” control.  We will also tackle the contentious issue of pain measurement in the clinic and laboratory.*

Both speakers are from iCORD (International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries), an interdisciplinary research centre focused on spinal cord injury located at Vancouver General Hospital. There’s more about Dr. Matt Ramer here and Dr. John Kramer here.

*Change of Speaker for April 28, 2015  Café Scientifique, see Café Scientifique (Vancouver, Canada) makes a ‘happy’ change: new speaker for April 28, 2015 posting.”*

The Wall Institute for Advanced Studies is bringing Dr. Bonnie Bassler, the bacteria whisperer, to speak in Vancouver. From the Wall Exchange series event page,

Dr. Bonnie Bassler, Molecular Biology, Princeton University

The Secret Social Lives of Bacteria

May 26, 2015
7:30 pm. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
Vogue Theatre, 918 Granville Street, Vancouver

Tickets available online, 2015 or by calling the Vogue Theatre Box Office: 604-569-1144

Learn more:

Bacterial behaviour may hold key to combatting antibiotic resistance
The Wall Papers

Here are some more details about the tickets, the event, and the speaker from the Northern Tickets event page,

Bonnie Bassler
The Secret, Social Lives of Bacteria
Vogue Theatre
Tuesday May 26th, 2015
Doors 6:30PM, Begins 7:30PM
Free Entry
**Tickets must be redeemed by 7:15PM to be valid**

Dr. Bonnie Bassler is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Squibb Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. The research in Dr. Bassler’s laboratory focuses on the chemical signaling mechanisms that bacteria use to communicate with each other known as “quorum sensing.” Therapies that block quorum sensing activity may represent an important new strategy for combating bacterial infections. Her research reveals new insights into the basic biology and ecology of bacteria; findings that may have direct application in the future treatment of disease.

Vogue Theatre
918 Granville Street – Vancouver

Go forth and enjoy!

* Removed ‘,t’ at very end of Café Scientifique excerpt on April 24, 2015.