And who but T. Ryan Gregory would have done such a thing? (Actually his graduate student Joao Lima did it.) This is the same T. Ryan Gregory who agreed to play Spore for weeks with me and a few other scientists for this scathing review of the game in Science.

Ryan studies genomes, how they evolve and generate biodiversity. But he does other cool stuff, too. He speaks his mind with a great science blog called Genomicron. He has an online shop where he sells hip geek threads. And now he’s outdone himself by launching an online art gallery devoted to paintings made out of microbes:

Created by Eshel Ben-Jacob

The original granddaddy of microbial art turns out to be none other than Alexander “Magic Bullet” Fleming, credited with discovering penicillin and hence saving humanity from immense microbe-induced suffering (at least until multiple drug-resistant bugs take over).

Check this out.

Made of microbes? You got it!

“Even in Fleming’s time this technique failed to receive much attention or approval. Apparently he prepared a small exhibit of bacterial art for a royal visit to St Mary’s by Queen Mary. The Queen was ‘not amused and hurried past it’ even though it included a patriotic rendition of the Union Jack in bacteria.” (From a 2002 biography of Fleming)

Oh how times have changed. Who wouldn’t want a microbial portrait on their wall?

Keep an eye out for next week’s issue of Science. It will be featuring one of the microbial objets d’art from Ryan’s gallery.

Goal:  Quantitatively describe the “Jenga Effect”, a meme that seems to have popped into existence just 4 years ago and radiated into several new cultural niches.

Results…

1.  A simple Google search.

“Jenga” = 934,000 hits. “Jenga effect” = 1060 hits. The top-ranked webpages are related to the Slate article about the “Jenga Effect” in architecture. The next is my own post about the “Jenga Effect” 2 days ago! This meme has certainly not saturated the Internet yet.

2. A search on Google News archive.

“Jenga”-related media coverage grows steadily to the present day, but “Jenga Effect” generates 0 (zero) hits in the Google News Archive!  Strange.

3. So what does Google Trends have to say about Web searches for “Jenga” over time?

Not much. There seems to be no obvious trend in Web searches related to “Jenga” since 2004.

4. How about using the new Google Insight search?

These two searches were performed:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Jenga&cmpt=geo
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=wii+jenga&cmpt=geo

There seems to be a strange annual cycle of searching for “Jenga”. It spikes in the summer months and dips through the winter. (Since when is Jenga a summer game?) And weirdly, Estonia emerges as the clear number 1 country interested in Jenga, followed by the UK. The US comes in 7th place, in spite of being the largest market for selling the game. Very odd indeed.

5. Finally, what about that geeky memetic tool, the Sucks/Rocks Index?

Really? Yes. You just take the ratio of the following Google search outputs:
“Jenga sucks” = 257
“Jenga rocks” = 646
And (646 – 257) / 257 = 151% net rock for Jenga.  Well, people do seem to like it.
Conclusion (so far):

We’ve established our memetic baseline. But what does all of this tell us (if anything) about the Jenga Effect meme?  Stay tuned for the next installment!

Lieberman-Aiden’s method is the one and only method in the running that was originally described in dance form. You might think that I’m joking. But no, here’s the YouTube video of Lieberman-Aiden leading a team of other scientists in a Hi-C dance last year:

What’s crazy is that the dance turned out to work even better as an experiment in the laboratory… And that the results of the experiment  revealed the 3-dimensional fractal-globular origami structure of the human genome… And that the paper describing all this made the cover of Science!

Incidentally, I hereby propose that Erez Lieberman-Aiden is the first PhD student in history to be first author on research papers that appeared on the covers of both Nature and Science. (He scored the Nature cover by determining the mutation rate of the English language, among other evolutionary properties.)

If you know someone who has already earned this distinction, please share the reference in the comments below. Until I hear otherwise, Erez Lieberman-Aiden shall be known as the reigning PhD Dance King.

Vote for Lieberman-Aiden!

Consider this meme:  The Jenga Effect. It keeps cropping up all over the place, for example in ecology, architecture, economics, computing, and psychology.

I had dinner recently with Leslie Scott, the inventor of Jenga, and we tried to figure out how this meme pandemic broke out. She created the game while living in Africa in the 1970s, just as Dawkins was coining memes. (The name Jenga is the imperative form of the Swahili verb, kjenga, to build.)

The game is wonderfully simple: Players takes turns removing pieces from a stacked tower of blocks and placing them on top, trying to not be the one who causes the inevitable crash. After Scott moved to England, she mass-produced the game, the giant toy company Hasbro began selling it, and Jenga entered the pandemic cultural stream.

So what is the Jenga Effect? That’s not so clear. For most, it seems to refer to the continual subtraction of parts from a complex structure until, finally, the structure collapses.  For others, it refers to the appearance of instability due to nonuniformity. Nor is it clear where this meme was born. The earliest references to the Jenga Effect that I can find are this March 2005 blog post about script writing and the July 2005 Science article about ecology. Did these give rise to all subsequent Jenga Effect memes, or did those pop into existence independently?

According to Dawkins and others, memes spread like viruses from brain to brain, rapidly evolving and adapting to each new cultural context in which they find themselves. A fit meme can sometimes increase the fitness of its host. For example: washing your hands before meals. We take this concept for granted because it has become so deeply ingrained in so many cultures. But someone, somewhere in the distant past, must have been the first person to wash her hands before a meal. Of course, it may have been independently “invented” many times. (Though to call this an “invention” is probably giving humans too much credit; it may have been an accidental by-product of another set of ritualized behaviors that then took a life of its own.) Other memes are great at spreading but do their hosts no good.

But the trouble with the concept of memes, according to critics, is that it doesn’t generate testable hypotheses. In contrast to genetics, they argue, there can’t be a real science of memetics. Unlike genes, memes can’t be isolated, objectively defined, or quantitatively compared. But in the Age of Google, perhaps memetics will become a scientific field in its own right.

This week, I’ll be trying out the analytic tools available on the Internet to reconstruct the natural history of the Jenga Effect meme. (Of course, doing so will change the very thing I’m studying.)

Alexis Gambis is an unusual guy. Just last year, he was a cell biologist, finishing his PhD at Rockefeller University in the Steller lab. He’s half-French, half-Venezuelan, grew up in  a French artist colony and went to college in the US. His mother is a filmmaker and his father is a famous painter. When I met Alexis, he was fund-raising for his newly created film festival while running the last of his experiments in the lab. (The weird connection: His lab bench is right down the hall from Rockefeller postdoc Nilay Yapici, with whom I launched the very first “Dance Your PhD” contest in Vienna, Austria.)



Here’s my Q&A with Alexis, edited for bloggy brevity:

Q: How goes the festival?

Gambis: Very good but crazy. We’re at a different venue every night, so it’s like a traveling science film circus. Yesterday we had an amazing screening for kids. One of the films was about Leonardo trying to create a flying apparatus. We had Eric Kandel (Nobel, 2000) on Friday come and speak about his film In Search of Memory. We’re almost halfway through the festival now.

Q: Are you getting good audience numbers?

Gambis: We’re 10 times bigger than last year. And the amount of people showing up to these events has been amazing. We’ve been sold out every night. But the big events are still coming up. We’re screening the world premiere of Quantum Quest. It’s a film told from the point of view of a photon. It was directed by Harry Kloor, the Star Trek writer. It has the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, William Shatner, James Earl Jones… And we have a mockumentary about global warming on the closing night. It looks like we could have as many as 2500 viewers by the end.

Q: I know you have to go teach in 10 minutes. What’s the class?

Gambis: Yeah, I’m now in film school at NYU, but meanwhile I’ve become adjunct faculty to help pay for it. I teach an intro science class called “Molecules of Life” to undergrads. It also keeps my feet wet in the sciences, which I love. The kids are great, although it’s weird that they’re not much younger than I am.

Q: How old are you now?

Gambis: I’m 28.

Q: So what has it been like to transform from scientist to film impresario?

Gambis: It’s been a rollercoaster. Just last year I was looking at fruit flies under the microscope, and now I have acting classes and I’m shooting films! The conversion from scientist to artist has been a little surreal. I moved from upper east side to Brooklyn. I got a new haircut.  I have cinematography classes. But it’s all interrelated. Science and art are part of the same thing for me.

Q: What film are you shooting?

Gambis: The working title is DISPOSABLE. It’s about a girl who uses a robot to get her sensual fix. It will be done by Christmas.

Q: Looks like art was destiny for you.

Gambis: Yeah, I tried to rebel against my background by going into science! I love biology. But I couldn’t fight it. I’m ecstatic.

(Editor’s note:  In the spirit of full disclosure, the Imagine Science Film Festival was funded in part by a grant from Science/AAAS as noted here on the AAAS blog.)

Monday. Jason Ku, origami ninja, wakes up, folds a brown piece of paper into a bowl of cereal and a yellow one into a glass of orange juice. Fortified, he finishes the fold. He rejoins Erik, who folds a black piece of paper into a high-end camera – complete with (foldable) tripod – and takes a picture.

The final product:

Total folding time: 4 hours.

Total time from initial meeting to final image: 36 hours.

Sheets of paper: 1.

Use the crease pattern to make one yourself!

CONTEST. Think your genome origami is better than this one? Send me a picture of this fold or another (erez strudel erez.com) and win the coveted title of GENOME ORIGAMI MASTER-SENSEI.

Aftermath: Did it work? Well, we got the cover – but for a 3D Peano curve that Leonid Mirny and I created and rendered using PyMol. We were like, totally surprised. In a good – but potentially life threatening – way.

So why have I not yet been slain with origami shuriken? Well, the origami genome project has made it to Popular Science and Technology Review. A reprieve, at least for now.

So everyone wins – and I live to fold another day.

This is the first post in a two-part series. The conclusion to this story can be found here.

The Mission: Design cover art for our paper on genome folding in this week’s Science.

The Collaborators:

Genome Folder Erez Lieberman-Aiden (not shown), and Paper Folders Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, Brian Chan, and Jason Ku (pictured above doing his best Munch impression).

The day:

2PM. Foldstorming. Everyone is happy, but no one has any idea what to do. I don’t even know enough relevant origami words to make sense on a consistent basis. Jason is amazing: he seems to be able to fold anything almost immediately using only a square sheet of paper. But Brian doesn’t think that the folds are ‘Origami’ enough. I’ve clearly stumbled on some kind of major rift in the philosophy of origami. Can the team hold together despite such vast creative differences?…

4PM. Jason has an idea. He wants to ‘pleat’ a Peano curve (the type of fractal that seems to describe the genome) into a single flat piece of paper. Brian thinks this is sufficiently ‘Origami’. Philosophical rapprochement! The construction of the crease pattern begins.

5PM. Darn it, a typo. We spent a long time trying to print part of chromosome 14 out onto a ‘big’ piece of paper (called ‘elephant hide’ by origami people; I asked the obvious question, and no, it isn’t). We discover that it takes three computer scientist-hours to print out 2 big pieces of paper; if we had only 1.5 computer scientists, we wouldn’t have had time to make a backup. Either way, a typo is not what we want to find. But actually I’m joking – it’s a SNP. Onward.

6PM. It’s going to be a long night. Japanese paper folding and Sushi seem well suited for one another.

7PM. Origamists with Lazer Beams. The fractal crease pattern for folding a fractal curve using a non-fractal (for the most part) piece of paper is very intricate. Thank goodness for laser beams, which the Demaines use to pre-crease the paper and make it much easier and faster to fold. No, this isn’t the Pentagon: it’s the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT, and yes, they have computer-guided high speed laser beams.

8PM. It begins. One piece of paper. Miles to fold before he sleeps.

8:30 PM. Jason folds. He’s enthusiastic. Thank goodness for that – b/c this takes a really long time!

9 PM. Brian folds. Can Jason power through?

10PM. Jason is making progress. Still only a quarter way there.

12PM. Time to go to sleep. The fold is half-done, but everyone is tired.

Coming up this afternoon: The completed fold! + How to do it yourself at home! + Do we get the cover? Check out the conclusion to this story!

[Note: We're talking about the Green Porno short films on the Sundance Channel, not the environmentally friendly  sex toys.]

The results suggested that scientists do like Green Porno, a lot. But the sample size was small. We need more data. We need YOU.

Rossellini claims that Green Porno can help biological conservation by inspiring “a sense of wonder” for nature.  But do you think it can have a real impact?

Please elaborate on your answer by leaving a comment below!

UPDATE 9/30/09: Now you can share your opinion about Green Porno! Take the poll here.

Part 1: What is Green Porno?

Part 2: Costumes and Credits

A full-length, HD version of the video is also available here.

Enjoyed the video? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!