Today the above URL is active (it forwards to SingAboutScience.org/ring/) and houses a decent starter collection of ringtone files. But the challenge of helping people use these files remains significant. I just added a ringtone to my phone, and the process was far more convoluted than I had imagined.

It began with the disposal of my existing phone. My Samsung M320 lacked a microSD slot for a microSD card, so I upgraded to a LG Remarq and bought a USB data cable (for transferring files from my computer) and a microSD card (for storing those files for use by the phone).

Copying files from the computer to the microSD card was straightforward, but designating one as a ringtone (or “ringer,” in Sprint lingo) seemed impossible. I clicked through my phone’s many menus and submenus, but none of them seemed to let me select a file from the microSD card as the default ringtone.

A few Google searches led to a comment thread on the LG Remarq where user VJBPKH1 explained what I had to do: (1) move the ringtone file into the Sounds folder of the microSD card; (2) send a text message to myself, including the ringtone file as an attachment; (3) receive the message, click on the attachment, and save it as a ringtone.

My first attempt at this failed because my ringtone file exceeded 300 KB and I wasn’t allowed to attach it, but a message with a smaller attachment was successful, and before long my LG Remarq was proclaiming, “We are born to do science!” in response to incoming calls.

I hope that the acquisition of free science- and math-themed ringtones can be easier and cheaper for others, and I will add tips to SingAboutScience.org/ring/ as I collect them.

A team of American and European researchers report that they have discovered an eye that could represent the first step in this evolution [of the human eye]. They have found, in effect, a swimming eyeball.

“This is in no way the ancestor of the human eye, but it’s the first time we have had a model of it,”said Yale Passamaneck, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii. He and his colleagues report the discovery in the online journal EvoDevo.

For a reminder of how fully evolved human eyes work, we turn to the Bill Nye archives — in specific, a parody of “Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors.

• The Waltz of the Ribosomes indeed is a waltz. This is to underscore that the genetic code is based on triplets, i.e., each set of three bases encodes one amino acid.

• At 1:42 into Twinkle, Twinkle, T₂*, we encounter the line “Something pulls those spins apart,” during which a unison vocal splits into multiple parts. A beautiful representation of spinning nuclei losing their coherence, I think.

• Ken Whiteley’s song Big Wheel – Little Wheel discusses large and small gears, focusing on the fact that meshing gears of different sizes spin at different rates. His delivery of the refrain illustrates this quite nicely. It sounds like this: “… And the big [pause] wheel [pause] slow – ly turns … and the littlewheelturnsaround!”

• Monty Harper’s new Songs From the Science Frontier CD contains a song I particularly like called Wind Energy. The full chain of events captured in the song is as follows: “This is the book I’m reading in the light from the lamp I lit with electricity flowing from the generator running on the rotor spinning in the wind blowing in beneath the air rising up through the warmth of the sun shining down on Earth.” But he builds up to this chain in a pleasing way that highlights how the parts are connected. First he sings, “This is the sun shining down on earth.” Then he expands that to, “This is the warmth of the sun shining down on earth,” which is then amended to become, “This is the air rising up through the warmth of the sun shining down on earth,” and so on, one step at a time, until the sequence is complete, by which time you know it pretty darn well.

If you have other favorite examples of music that reinforces the lyrics, please leave a comment!

Writing about and through illness can change lives and enrich health care. This is the murky realm of narrative medicine, the hybrid offspring of medicine and literature. In this lunchtime seminar we will practice close reading of examples of narrative medicine from authors ranging from Chekhov, Alcott and Whitman, to Ehrenreich and Gawande. Through a series of guided writing prompts we will write pieces of our lives in the context of illness and health care.

Writing about health care isn’t quite the same as singing about science, but … close enough, right? I decided to check it out.

The theme of the day was ambivalence. Before discussing “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, we were asked to make a list of ten things about which we felt ambivalent, then write about one of them. I quickly completed my list, covering every major aspect of my life. Now, which one should I complain about in detail? I chose the topic of grant proposals and soon found myself recopying the lyrics of Ten Percent Chance, a song I had composed while in the throes of preparing three proposals simultaneously:

I haven’t written lately;
Been busy in the lab.
You know I’ve had some setbacks,
But I’m taking another stab.

I know this new proposal
May catch you a bit off-guard,
But I’ve smartened up, and I’m willing to work hard….

I’ve got a ten percent chance with you,
But there’s a nine-in-ten chance we’re through.
And there’s nothing left to do for now but wait.
You have turned me down before,
But I’ve come back wanting more,
Because Specific Aims 1 through 4 are really great!

It felt like cheating to regurgitate previously written words, but I was pleased that I could remember them. I guess you could say I was ambivalent.

So what insights emerged from this mass of data?

It turns out that Ursus americanus hibernates in a manner unlike that of the dozens of other hibernating mammals. The biologists saw that the animals’ heart rate dropped precipitously, they breathed just two or three times a minute and their metabolism slowed to a trickle as the animals slowly burned the fat they spent all summer accumulating.

None of that was unexpected.

And yet, unlike other hibernators such as squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and skunks, the bears maintained a high body temperature throughout five months of inactivity.

Further, when the bears emerged in mid-April, the researchers got another surprise. Like a fuzzy-headed human waking from a Sunday snooze, the bears stayed groggy, with their metabolic rate remaining at about half that of summer levels for two to three weeks.

Finding a song to pair with these pulse-quickening results was not easy. While Sara Jordan’s “Hibernation,” Billy B’s “Migrate, Hibernate, Adapt,” and Dr. Chordate’s “Survival of the Fattest” all include relevant lyrics, none of these recordings are freely available online. So that leaves us with an elementary-school treatment of hibernation set to the tune of “London Bridge.”

As the father of a four-year-old, I find that the cuteness of the kids helps compensate for the lack of scientific details.

Given our lack of experience in using WordPress, as well as the tediousness of manually copying 70+ previous entries to a new site, the new blog may not be entirely error-free. Please leave a comment if you notice anything that should be fixed!

The team, led by geographer Hiroya Yamano of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, analyzed maps of corals from four time periods starting in the 1930s. They found that of nine common coral species, four had expanded northward, and two went as far as temperate waters. The study confirms what marine biologists and fishermen have speculated for years.

For some background information on choral reefs, we go to a live performance in which Billy B is supported by a coral group, er, choral group, of schoolchildren. If this song doesn’t teach you the word “zooxanthellae,” I don’t know what will!