Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning:
Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation. I did this very simply: in the free image editor GIMP, I selected the parts of the photo that were starling (omitting the human hand and the background), and using the Hue-Saturation tool I wound the saturation up to 100%. Then I did the same thing again. Here is the result, with no other editing at all:
What an extraordinary riot of colour, in a bird that we mostly think of as “basically black with dots.”
And here is the result of saturating the colours — this time through three cycles.
So my question is this: can other starlings see all this colour? In their own closed starling-centric world, are they fabulously colourful? Is this something close to what is perceptually apparent to animals whose eyes are attuned to different wavelengths from ours?that
I whipped up these doodles with a handwritten list of characteristics during office hours recently, and then realized that this should be a tutorial post.
Most of the stuff listed in the image is pretty self-explanatory, but I want to expand a bit on the textures. Nerves are bundles of axons, bound together in sheets of connective tissue. As you follow nerves outward, from the central nervous system toward the axon targets or receptive nerve endings, they will branch and branch, again and again, down to the level of individual axons. So although the axons themselves are too small to see in a gross dissection, the collected bundles of axons inside each nerve often give nerves a striated texture.
In contrast, arteries are hollow muscular tubes that carry blood, and they look like hollow muscular tubes. A weird and IMHO under-appreciated fact is that arteries can’t be nourished directly by the blood that they carry; their walls are too thick. So they have tiny vessels in and on their walls, called vasa vasorum, or “vessels of the vessels”. The vasa vasorum are hair-fine when they are visible at all, and they squiggle just like macro-scale arteries, so texturally arteries often look vaguely hairy, with fine reddish threads winding across their surfaces.
In practice, though, the directness of the course — or lack thereof — and branching pattern is usually enough to make the call. Basically, nerves do not have time for your crap. They are hell-bent on getting where they are going with a minimum of farting around. In contrast, arteries never travel in straight lines if they can avoid it. They’re always throwing in a saucy swoop or curve, for no other reason than because it looked fun.
Why haven’t I talked about veins? By rights I should, since arteries usually travel with veins, and complete neurovascular bundles — each consisting of a nerve, an artery, and a vein — are common in vertebrate bodies. But in my experience students are almost never confused about the difference between arteries and veins. But for the sake of completeness, veins tend to be dark-colored in embalmed bodies, because they don’t completely empty of blood, and they are visibly thin-walled and floppy. Because veins are thin-walled, if they do empty out they can also flatten out, and look wider than the neighboring arteries. On the other hand, it’s not unusual to see a bifurcated vein, with one branch running on either side of the corresponding artery.
A couple of caveats about all of the above:
I made the infographic specifically for med students working with embalmed tissue. The colors in particular may be different in fresh tissue, and in my experience less vibrant and therefore harder to tell apart. The other factors are much less affected by the embalming process.
Most of these differences break down to some extent in very small vessels and nerves. If you can track them back to larger, more proximal parent vessels or nerves, it’s easier to tell, but sometimes you run across a tiny little thread and can’t tell if it’s a tube or a wire — in which case, good luck.
My Oct. 13 National Fossil Day public lecture, “Lost Giants of the Jurassic”, for the Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey is now up on their YouTube channel. First 48 minutes are talk, last 36 minutes are Q&A with audience, moderated by Dr. Julia McHugh. New stuff from the 2021 field season — about which I’ll have more to say in the future — starts at about the 37-minute mark. Hit the 44-minute mark (and this and this) to find out what to do with all of the unwanted bird necks that will be floating around at the upcoming holidays.
Finally, big thanks to Brian Engh for finding our brachiosaur and for letting me use so much of his art, to John Foster, Kaelen Kay, Tom Howells, Jessie Atterholt, Thierra Nalley, and Colton Snyder for such a fun field season this year, and to Julia McHugh for giving me the opportunity to yap about one of my favorite dinosaurs!
The last time we saw the sauropod femur that Paige Wiren discovered sticking out of a riverbank, it had been moved into the prep lab at the Moab Museum, with the idea that it would eventually go on exhibit as a touch specimen for the public to enjoy and be inspired by. That has come to pass.
I was in Moab last month with Drs. Jessie Atterholt and Thierra Nalley and we stopped in the Moab Museum to digitize some vertebrae from SUSA 515, an unusual specimen of Camarasaurus that I’ve blogged about before, and will definitely blog about again. While we were there, we got to see and touch the Wiren femur. The museum folks told us that femur has been the first dinosaur bone that a lot of schoolkids and tourists have seen up close, or gotten to touch. As a former dinosaur-obsessed kid who never stopped being excited about touching real dinosaur bones–and as one of the lucky folks that got to rescue this particular fossil from erosion or poaching–that pleases me deeply.
So, obviously, you should go see this thing. And the rest of the museum–as you can see from the photos above, the whole place has been renovated, and there are lots of interesting fossils from central and eastern Utah on display, not to mention loads of historical artifacts, all nicely presented in a clean, open, well-lit space that invites exploration. Go have fun!
Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)?
How is this possible? One part of the answer is that the value of a published paper to the commnity is higher still: were it not so, no-one would be paying. But that can’t be the whole reason.
In an efficient market, competing providers of a good will each try to undercut each other until the prices they charge approach the cost. If, for example, Elsevier and Springer-Nature were competing in a healthy free market, they would each be charging prices around one third of what they are charging now, for fear of being outcompeted by their lower-priced competitor. (Half of those price-cuts would be absorbed just by decreasing the huge profit margins; the rest would have to come from streamlining business processes, in particular things like the costs of maintaining paywalls and the means of passing through them.)
So why doesn’t the Invisible Hand operate on scholarly publishers? Because they are not really in competition. Subscriptions are not substitutable goods because each published article is unique. If I need to read an article in an Elsevier journal then it’s no good my buying a lower-priced Springer-Nature subscription instead: it won’t give me access to the article I need.
(This is one of the reasons why the APC-based model — despite its very real drawbacks — is better than the subscription model: because the editorial-and-publication services offered by Elsevier and Springer-Nature are substitutable. If one offers the service for $3000 and the other for $2000, I can go to the better-value provider. And if some other publisher offers it for $1000 or $500, I can go there instead.)
The last few years have seen huge and welcome strides towards establishing open access as the dominant mode of publication for scholarly works, and currently output is split more or less 50/50 between paywalled and open. We can expect OA to dominate increasingly in future years. In many respects, the battle for OA is won: we’ve not got to VE Day yet, but the D-Day Landings have been accomplished.
Yet big-publisher APCs still sit in the $3000–$5000 range instead of converging on $500-$1000. Why?
But it feels like something stranger is happening here. It’s almost as though the whole darned market is a luxury segment. The average APC funded by the Wellcome Trust in 2018/19 was £2,410 — currently about $3,300. Which is almost exactly the average article cost of $3,333 that we calculated earlier. What’s happening is that the big publishers have landed on APCs at rates that preserve the previous level of income. That is understandable on their part, but what I want to know is why are we still paying them? Why are all Wellcome’s grantees not walking away from Elsevier and Springer-Nature, and publishing in much cheaper alternatives?
Why, in other words, are market forces not operating here?
I can think of three reasons why researchers prefer to spend $3000 instead of $1000:
It could be that they are genuinely getting a three-times-better service from the big publishers. I mention this purely for completeness, as no evidence supports the hypothesis. There seems to be absolutely no correlation between price and quality of service.
Researchers are coasting on sheer inertia, continuing to submit to the journals they used to submit to back in the bad old days of subscriptions. I am not entirely without sympathy for this: there is comfort in familiarity, and convenience in knowing a journal’s flavour, expectations and editorial board. But are those things worth a 200% markup?
Researchers are buying prestige — or at least what they perceive as prestige. (In reality, I am not convinced that papers in non-exceptional Elsevier or Springer-Nature journals are at all thought of as more prestigous than those in cheaper but better born-OA journals. But for this to happen, it only needs people to think the old journals are more prestigious, it doesn’t need them to be right.)
But underlying all these reasons to go to a more expensive publishers is one very important reason not to bother going to a cheaper publisher: researchers are spending other people’s money. No wonder they don’t care about the extra few thousand pounds.
How can funders fix this, and get APCs down to levels that approximate publishing cost? I see at least three possibilities.
First, they could stop paying APCs for their grantees. Instead, they could add a fixed sum onto all grants they make — $1,500, say — and leave it up to the researchers whether to spend more on a legacy publisher (supplementing the $1,500 from other sources of their own) or to spend less on a cheaper born-OA publisher and redistribute the excess elsewhere.
Second, funders could simply publish the papes themselves. To be fair several big funders are doing this now, so we have Wellcome Open Research, Gates Open Research, etc. But doesn’t it seem a bit silly to silo research according to what body awarded the grant that funded it? And what about authors who don’t have a grant from one of these bodies, or indeed any grant at all?
That’s why I think the third solution is best. I would like to see funders stop paying APCs and stop building their own publishing solutions, and instead collaborate to build and maintain a global publishing solution that all researchers could use irrespective of grant-recipient status. I have much to say on what such a solution should look like, but that is for another time.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week