Biology in popular culture – neuroscience & movies

January 10, 2020October 31, 2021 MinaLeave a comment

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new post! Yes, I’ve decided to try and write more often, and this time I will do a bit of self-promotion. As you may, or may not, know, I love watching movies – I think they are great past-time and I find them relaxing. Lately, I have had some troubles concentrating for more than an hour, but for now I would like to think that’s because I wasn’t choosing good movies to begin with. What does that have anything to do with neuroscience?

gyruslogo

Well, apart from writing this blog, I also write and edit for Gyrus Journal. Gyrus is student journal of neuroscience, where we write review articles about different topics: basic neuroscience, neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry. I have written some articles, and if you stumble across them, don’t judge me too hard – they are meant to teach us how to search databases, cite, and write in English, since our mother-tongue is Croatian. I feel very fortunate to be a part of this journal, since it helped me a lot in understanding of many scientific terms in English language, primary language of science; it also helped me to learn how to communicate with my authors, as well as how to dissect a topic I’m supposed to write/edit about. Of course, we also have reviewers, wonderful professors and scientists from University of Zagreb, who do the last editing before publication. (I would just like to say that we didn’t have reviewers from the very beginning, hence why some of the earlier articles perhaps lack in quality.) Lately, we have been struggling a bit with latest editions, but started to publish articles online – you can access them all on the link above. You can also follow us on Facebook page as well as Twitter!

A cover photo of Gyrus Journal

In Gyrus Journal, you will also find shorter articles and movie&book reviews, where title of this post finally comes in play! So far, I have written five movie reviews, with three still waiting to be published. For my first one, I picked the obvious choice: Memento (2000) by Christopher Nolan. Apart from being one of my favourite movies in general, I think it truthfully portrays anterograde amnesia.

In addition to portraying Leonard’s fragile mental state that makes us question not only his current objectives, but also whether his recollections of past are reliable, or simply figments of his imagination and almost fatalistic wishes, Memento is different in comparison with other films of similar genre, simply because it truthfully portrays the slow agony of losing the principal neurobiological process – a human memory.

You can access the full text here: Gyrus11-Memento

The second review I did was about movie that might not seem so obvious, but was quite intriguing: Side Effects (2013) starring Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones. This movie also has a crime aspects but it deals with the psychiatric illness, for which we don’t know, until the very end, if it’s real or faked.

You can access the full text here: Gyrus12-Side-effects

Although dealing with semi-real thesis, the question still remains how the movie influenced real world cases. Did it help with recognizing the ones feigning the illness, or just put extra strain on the patients dealing with the illness that is already under deep historical stigma? Regardless of being the rather entertaining thriller, we are left wondering whether the movie deepened the negative view of the various psychiatric illnesses in the general public.

Three, still unpublished, reviews are:

100 Minutes of Glory (in Croatian) – a biopic about famous Croatian painter Slava Raškaj, who was born deaf, suffered from depression, and lived her last days in Psychiatric hospital “Vrapče”. In Croatian, title of the movie is also a wordplay on Croatian word “slava”, her name; it’s literal translation to English is “glory”
A Different Brain – famed documentary by Loius Theroux; it follows four patients who suffered through some sort of traumatic brain injury and consequences it brings
Still Alice – movie that earned Julianne Moore an Academy Award for Best Actress, Still Alice is a touching but often times difficult story about a woman with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease

What about you? Do you like watching movies – which ones are your favourite? If you watched any of these, please tell me what you think! I would love to discuss movies with you & I’m really interested what you watch in your free time 🙂

RTŠB 2019 – biospeleology field trip – PART 2

December 11, 2019December 11, 2019 MinaLeave a comment

I hope you liked part 1 of my biospeleology field trip in Slovenia, because here is part 2! Here I write about other days & share the rest of my experiences.

Day 5

The day started with making some spreadsheets and entering coordinates for various water springs. After that, we visited the Rivčja jama again, but unfortunately we found no Proteus (or anything else for that matter) in our traps. However, we found a very narrow entrance to the other part of the cave, aaaaand I got stuck. Like properly can’t-move-in-any-direction stuck. Most of you who never visited a cave probably wonder what kind of feeling that was. I don’t have a straight answer for that, since it’s more a range of emotions being experienced all at once; I wouldn’t describe it neither as panic nor fear, although parts of that were present. It was more a desperation that I’m not strong enough to wiggle out, mixed with frustration and adrenaline rush. I didn’t feel claustrophobia, but that feeling might sometimes be present as well. In the end, I managed to drag myself up that hole, and enter another part of the cave. Tjaša went even further, to my amazement, but I stayed back with Ester & Eva and collected as many pieces of another fox skeleton I could. This was was almost hole, but I only took few limb bones, skull, jaw bones, and vertebrate. *expect a video about it soon
After this ordeal, we went back to swimming in beautiful Krka and went back to school for quasi picnic (a barbecue on the school meadow).

Day 6

Day six was day off; Bruno, Paula, and me went to Ljubljana and visited huge mall complex. Why? Because they have Whoop!, a trampoline park. In our defense, we were not the only adults there. After an hour, we went on our merry way to Burger King, and then a bit of shopping around. The most important thing I bought were hiking shoes. Paula helped me choose a pair (she specializes in orientation running, so knows a great deal about it), and they are pretty neat. But why Emina, why didn’t you already have ones? Well… That’s a long story, but I never had to walk this much before, and didn’t have to constantly change from my boots to rubber ones. So yes, before buying this pair, made for walking around in the forest, I wore my black combat shoes, with metal caps. One boot weighs almost 1 kg, so you can imagine how easy I suddenly walked everywhere. Just a note, specialized shoes exist for a reason.

wasp-spider — Wasp spider, Argiope bruennichi, in the grass

Day 7

On this particular day, I was on duty. I already wrote what that means, and it was exactly like that – preparing breakfast and making lunch&dinner. Nothing interesting happened, after my group returned we talked a little bit where they went, some determination of specimens happened, and we also had another lecture, about climate strike.

It me

If you look closely, you can se Colembola sp.

Day 8

This day was special because we were joined by Teo. I think he was Ester’s mentor for her Master’s thesis, but I’m not sure. In any case, Teo is an achieved biospeleologist and obviously knows a lot. First cave we visited, Jama pod Gradom, was nice, but I honestly don’t remember much, apart from the fact that we were walking around for kilometer or two, before realizing we parked in front of it. The second one, Blatna jama v Šici, was, to me, quite a difficult one. We spent more than 2 hours inside, climbed up, and down, and up and down, we crawled, and had to use the before-installed rope in order to pass some sections (not with equipment, just good old hold-the-rope and walk really closely to the rock). Well, the fact these were old lead to the unfortunate fact that Bruno fell in the water, after part of the rope tore. I wish I caught it on the video, but, by then, my camera was already completely out. We did caught quite a lot of Proteus, and I honestly didn’t realize how big they can sometimes be. *I have to check, but if the footage is salvageable, you can expect some kind of video
In the evening, I did some more determination with Anja & Tjaša.

spuder — Did you know spiders can also live in the caves?

Day 9

First cave (Vodna jama pod Zijalom) was flooded, so we were hanging out in the front, trying to catch some more Niphargus (them) or taking videos (me). Then, we went back to Velika jama pod Trebnjem, the first one we visited and where we laid traps for infamous Leptodirus. Unfortunately, we found nothing, every trap was empty. Of course, we went back, and then some of us went looking for bats with bat group. This catch-mark-release activity has taken place a bit further from the school, near the small pond. The pond which also connected to a cave system, but had no entrance big enough for us to go in. So, two wild-life cameras were put up, as the word from the village was that at night, Proteus came out to play, um feed? Swim? Enjoy the moonlight? I’m still not sure, but next day I was told that they were captured on video. All-together, 23 bats were caught, with 10 different species being noted, which is a lot. Like huge, because when we first started, the bat group was optimistic with the estimate of “maybe 10 bats, and maybe 3 species”. I didn’t handle any bat, because 1. I don’t know how and 2. I have a perfectly rational fear of rabies.

Niphargus sp under the microscope

Tick in the tube

Day 10

No caves today! I switched, and spent the day with amphibian group. And since it was the last day, we mostly chilled. We did try to visit one pond, but it turned out it doesn’t exist. The second one was actually really close to the cave I visited previously (Pekel pri Kopanju), and there we found quite a lot of frogs (all stages) and salamanders. Honestly, they looked really cute too! Afterwards, we went to Krka for quite a long time (*and quite a nice footage!). For dinner we actually had a whole dinner&party, but I had to miss that one due to migraine.

Salamanders everywhere!

A blue beauty

Last day was un-adventurous, we packed, ate a lot at McDonalds, and finally arrived home. And I’m looking forward to going again.
I would like to say a big thank you to Ester, Tjaša, Anja, Eva, Teo, and Živa, as well as our organizers.

RTŠB 2019 – biospeleology field trip – PART 1

December 8, 2019December 8, 2019 Mina1 Comment

Finally, I write about this astonishing field trip which has taken part from 17th to 27th July this year in Ivančna Gorica, a small town south of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Me and Bruno were part of biospeleology group, and my friend Paula, who was the only other participant from Croatia, was a part of reptile group. Paula has a nice Instagram page about biology as well.
This camp, organized by student’s biology group from Ljubljana is very popular with students from the ex-YU countries, and this year there were also colleagues from France. Also, being a biology student is not a must, we had humanities student as well.

How does the camp work?

First, you have to apply; you can choose between three groups (my choices: biospeleology, reptiles, botany) and with the application you pay the 93€ fee that includes breakfast and dinner every day and driving around during the camp. When there, we sleep in our sleeping bag in the gym of the nearby school. Breakfast is every day 7-8.30am, and dinner was usually 4pm+. There was also one rest day (during which us three went to Ljubljana) and one day when couple of us were on duty – we were cleaning and cooking for that day.
One group usually consisted of 5 members, and every day we went out to field, trying to find caves or catch some cave dwelling insect.

We travelled, you guessed it, by train. I have already mentioned 9€ one-way-ticket from Zagreb to Ljubljana, and then we went to Ivančna Gorica, that ticket was around 3€. The way back was almost the same, with the difference we went by bus to Ljubljana, since there were no trains at that part of the day.

How was my experience?

Honestly, I would really like to go again next year, but honestly I don’t know how I made it. I was not in a shape I should have been, I had migraines, I got stuck, I had very suspicious bruises and I strongly disliked walking around under sun.

How many caves I visited?

Number of caves: 9
Total number of cave visits: 11
Number of water springs visited: 4
I also spent one evening with bat group & one day with amphibians group.

ich — Me, before first cave visit, unaware what was waiting for me

A short summary of my days in Slovenia

Day 1

We met other members of the group: Ester, group leader, Tjaša and Eva. Anja was also part of our group, but she joined us couple of days later. Apart from going to the field, every evening we were supposed to try and determine our specimens we collected in caves, label them, and fill out special documents about our visit (who, when, why, where, what was collected and how).
We also prepared live traps for small insects. The traps we made consisted of putting tuna fish with gorgonzola in small tubes and closing them off with cotton pads. The insect we were trying to catch was Leptodirus hochenwartii, member of Coleoptera, the only beetle that lives in the caves. This species is endemic to Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian caves. For other creatures we had prepared small tubes filled with 70% ethanol which we held in the pockets of our overalls, together with pincers.

live-trap — One live trap, buried in the ground – it also needs to be covered with a big rock.

Day 2

Frist cave we visited was Velka jama nad Trebnjem. The way up to the cave was steep and exhausting; it was very hot & moist in the forest. However, I took my camera with me, and took many pictures. I was surprised how many invertebrates live there, since Croatian caves I visited were almost completely empty. However, these animals are not usually found in the caves, here they are living kind of opportunistically, since the cave was also filled with garbage. We set up the traps for Leptodirus, and went back. We had a small lunch next to our car, and then went to the cave number two, called Rojska jama 2. We had GPS coordinates, but Ester was sure they are wrong (they were), so we asked a local villager for help. He kindly led us to the cave entrance, where we suited up, and in we went. The cave was quite interesting, we spent an hour or so inside. After we returned, mr. villager welcomed us back with home-baked strudels and soda. It was honestly, very nice. We also visited two water springs, and went back to the school. After dinner, Ester taught us how to fill out the papers I mentioned, and we tried to the best of our ability, determine all the specimens. The most important we had to discern were small freshwater crabs called Niphargus and Gammarus. The main difference is that Gammarus have eyes, and we really wanted to collect the other one.

skakavac — Caves were usually full of these grasshoppers, and they were scary huge!

Day 3

During day three, we visited one cave, Pekel pri Kopanju. We did find some cool animals, like Colembolas, but our trip was short, since main channel was full of tree branches and garbage. We tried visited the cave number two, but soon realized that we would need a 40m rope to climb down, so we gave up on that. We also visited two water springs, and headed back earlier, since one of the mentors had a lecture about global warming. After that, back to determination. We found some Niphargus (yay!), Gammarus (fine), and rat-tailed maggots. What are those, you wonder? Those are the larvae of certain species of hoverflies. What are hoverflies, you wonder? Those are flies that pretend to be wasps.

Day 4

This day was tough for me, we walked 5-6km on the trails and through the woods, but we also visited three caves! First two (Dolnja vodena jama & Antokov skedenj) were close one to another and extremely spacious inside. I roamed around with my action cam (results were so-so, not enough light) and Bruno and me found a bunch of Niphargus in one puddle. I also saw some fox bones, and Ester was kind enough to fetch them for me! The third cave (Rivčja jama) was the one we visited three times all together and was really interesting. The walk towards it is around 1km on the forest trail, next to beautiful river Krka. The entrance to the cave is enormous – I would use the phrase “you need to be blind not to see it”, but that’s incorrect – even from the trail you can feel temperature drop and the specific smell of cave air.And this cave had bats. Bunch of bats (Myotis myotis), and they were loud, much louder than people would expect. We climbed up, on mountains of their poop, in order to take pictures, and the temperature soared at least 10 degrees there. Afterwards, we went through a narrow passage (here I took neat footage) and tried to catch some Proteus anguinus, the olm (I wrote about them here!). These traps were different, since they live in the water. We also tried to lure them with pet cookies (can’t remember if it was cat or dog food, sorry!).
After all this, we went swimming in Krka, water was around 15 degrees, but it was so nice and relaxing. The river is truly beautiful, and I would like for everyone to experience this kind of nature at least once in their life.

ich — The only not-blurry photo of me in the cave

End of part 1

I hope you liked this not-so-short overview of my time in this summer camp, part two will be up soon. Please tell me what you liked the most and about what would you like me to write more! I would like to thank all of you who read this, thank you for time and attention!

Another Vienna adventure!

December 4, 2019December 3, 2019 MinaLeave a comment

Hi everyone, if you follow me on Twitter and/or Instagram, you have probably already seen my pictures from Vienna this last weekend. However, I would like to share a bit more, and write about it too!

At Saturday at 3.30 in the morning, my sister & me boarded the bus in Varaždin, and started our one-day adventure. Our destination? Vienna, capital of Austria! With the trip we booked through Galileo Travel came scenic sightseeing of the city, and a visit to Schönnbrun castle, but we skipped that and with U4 headed directly to city centre, Schwedenplatz more correctly. After short breakfast in McDonald’s (I know, I know), we headed to Natural History Museum. On the way there, we took some typical tourist pictures, in front of Stephan’s Cathedral, at Hofburg… And then we finally reached NHM.

Me in front of Stephen’s Cathedral

Me next to big cave mineral 😉

I’ve visited the museum two times before, but my enthusiasm was still through the roof. Firstly, the museum is huge. Permanent exhibition spans two floors and numerous specimens. Roughly divided, first floor is mineralogy and second floor is dedicated to zoology. I took some pictures, which I will share with you, but I didn’t take my camera; everything is taken with my Huawei mobile phone.

Student’s entrance fee is only 7€ (~8$), and taking photographs is allowed. The whole museum is, honestly, overwhelming. I have never before seen so many specimens at once place. My sister, who visited it for the first time, often commented that a building itself could be a museum, due to it’s rich, ornate walls. First floor is, like I already mentioned, full of minerals. I don’t have much interest for them, but I made me think about how old our planet is, and what makes it. Also, one of the rooms is completely dedicated to jewellery, both modern and historic.

The floor dedicated to zoology was full of models and real specimens of animals around us, as well as evolutionary artifacts. As is common, first rooms were dedicated to invertebrates, building it’s way up to vertebrate groups. I was particulary amazed by the size of dinosaur bones – no matter how many times I see it on the TV, or visit this museum, I stand in awe in front of them.

Unfortunately, due to morning sun, I wasn’t able to capture nice photographs of invertebrate collections, but trust me when I say those are so beautiful. Everything is o neat and organized that, since then, I’ve been toying with idea of collecting my own specimens. There are also rooms dedicated to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds… Those are usually held in special containers or stuffed. There are also many skeletons on display on the walls. With dinosaurs, there were also animatronic models, which both excited and frightened children in the museum.

There is also a separate room dedicated to evolution of human. I already posted that interesting picture where an app transformed me into an early human, but in this part of the museum, you can see many different skulls belonging to Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo habilis… I consider this part of the exhibition very important, especially in today’s time, when so much misinformation is present on the Internet.
Another important historic specimen is Venus of Willendorf figurine, which is dated to 30 000 years BC.

What would you like to see, if you could go to Natural History Museum in Vienna? Would you like me to write about something in more details?
Please let me know in the comments 🙂

Biology in popular culture – HEAVY METAL

November 28, 2019November 28, 2019 MinaLeave a comment

Many of you might not know this, but I was (and still am) a big fan of metal music. I included word “heavy” in the title, but I actually prefer doom, melodic death, death, some black metal and also gothic/love metal. What does this have to do with biology? Well, many bands use animal imagery in their music videos or album art, with some of them being really interesting.
Of course, there are many that are obvious (Powerwolf, anyone?), and some animals are used more than others (crows, snakes). However, I wanted to see which animals dominate the heavy metal world, and which bands, that are usually not connected to such artwork, would use it.

Now, I would very much like to include these album covers in this post, but they are copyrighted and I’m not 100% sure I can do that, so if you’re not already familiar with the covers, I would kindly ask you to use a search engine, or links I’ll provide to each cover.

Paradise Lost

A doom/gothic/synth-pop band from the United Kingdom, Paradise Lost often uses biological motifs in their album art (Medusa, 2017; Tragic Illusion 25, 2013; Tragic Idol, 2012), but I would like to focus on the art that dominates the picture – in this case, we have Symbol of Life (released in 2002), its single Erased, and Believe in Nothing (2001).

Link to the official Paradise Lost web-page.

Symbol of Life and Erased are, at least to me, very interesting album covers. Yes, the animal in question is a snake, but it’s an x-ray of a snake. Now, I don’t know which species, or even a family, but I’m pretty sure it’s a snake. I don’t know how these photos were made, but are really special and distinct. For a better view, you can visit this blog. Erased is done in a very similar way, only with different coloring scheme. The animal theme is also presen in the music video for the single – there are scenes of a cougar and something that I believe is Thompson gazelle (I might be wrong on this one). I don’t know in which ecosystem could these two ever meet, outside of Paradise Lost video.

A gazelle — Nick Holmes in his apparent natural state

(Photo by Tobias Adam on Unsplash)

Believe in Nothing cover is simply straightforward: it’s a picture of bees. To be more precise, it’s a picture of a honey queen bee surrounded with bee workers. I will go out on the limb and say the species is probably Apis mellifera, Western honey bee.

Katatonia

Another one of my favourites, Katatonia and their dark melodies have adopted a bird from the Corvus genus as a motif that often appears on their album artworks (Dead End Kings, 2012; Tonight’s Decision, 1999). They were also the main focus of one of the earliest Katatonia’s albums, Brave Murder Day (1996), and latest, The Fall of Hearts (2016). Just by looking at these, I honestly can’t tell if it’s a crow, raven, or something in-between, but it does compliment Katatonia’s music perfectly.

A crow — Insert random lyric about crows, ravens, or E. A. Poe

(Photo by Sergio Ibanez on Unsplash)

Opeth

To me, Opeth always had interesting, dark album covers, but two caught my attention – art for their debut album Orchid (1995) and Sorceress (2016). For Orchid, the artwork is, you guess it, orchids; apparently the pink flowers on the cover were ordered from the Netherlands.
Sorceress is a different story – it shows a peacock with blood dripping out of his beak. This might seem odd, since most people, including me, always picture birds as eating seeds, but peafowls (name that includes male and female individuals, and three species) are actually omnivores, and their diet can include insects and even small reptiles.

Satyricon

Satyricon is a black metal band, with different sounds, and with that, different artwork. Some animal species, however, still remain!
On the cover of Nemesis Divina (1996) is a bird of prey, which one, I honestly can say. It could be a falcon, or a hawk, I have to admit that my bird knowledge is weak. Volcano (2002) album cover is kind of simplistic – in the main view, we have a head of a snake. At first, it looked to me like a python, but I actually believe it’s a boa, Boa constrictor even. For their 7th album, The Age of Nero (2008) they went back to their raptor roots and choose… Some kind of eagle?

Brown and black snake on a tree branch; black bacground. — Metal’s next top model

(Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)

Gojira

Gojira is a death/progressive metal band famous for often including environmental themes in their songs. Their album From Mars to Sirius (2005) is completely dedicated to these issues, and as such, has a very nice album art, with the drawing of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) being a centerpiece.

Slipknot

A heavy metal from Iowa, Slipknot chose a goat for the cover of the 2001 album titles Iowa. These kind of imagery is usually used by black metal bands (see honourable mentions, also Baphomet), but in this case, I think it works nicely.

(Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash)

Honourable mentions

Bathory – Bathory (1984) – goat
Behemoth – Zos Kia Cultus (2002) – baphomet
Dimmu Borgir – Stormblåst (1996) – goat
Immortal – All Shall Fall (2009) – ravens?
Mayhem – Grand Declaration of War (2000) – dove

Nile – In Their Darkened Shrines (2002) – snake

Rammstein – Herzeleid (1995) – flower (chrysanthemums?)

Bring Me the Horizon – Count Your Blessings (2006) – jellyfish, shark, fish

The Rasmus – Hide from the Sun (2005) – butterfly