9/11/2023 0 Comments Rodent utopia![]() John Calhoun looked like the action-movie star Charles Bronson. Because he also knew just how quickly mouse heaven can deteriorate into mouse hell. And by this point, he knew not to expect a happy ending. Officially, Calhoun called this setup the “Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice.” Unofficially, it was mouse heaven.īut the thing is, this wasn’t the first rodent heaven that Calhoun built. A mouse could live to ripe old age there, and never worry about a thing. He also kept away all predators, and screened the mice to eliminate all disease. Plenty of food and water a perfect climate reams of paper to make cozy nests. In short, Calhoun’s colony was a mouse utopia-a giant pen with everything a mouse could ever desire. Now, what sort of experiment could justify such thundering rhetoric? A colony of mice. Calhoun titled his most famous paper “Death Squared.” And in it, he quotes from the fiery Book of Revelations and invokes the dreaded Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Most scientific papers are bland-even bloodless. CreditsĪudio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Transcript These topsy-turvy science tales, some of which have never made it into history books, are surprisingly powerful and insightful. The Disappearing Spoon tells little-known stories from our scientific past-from the shocking way the smallpox vaccine was transported around the world to why we don’t have a birth control pill for men. The Science History Institute has teamed up with New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean to bring a second history of science podcast to our listeners. Visualizing gzipped compressed text files – DNA.today on Beyond Docker? Binder 2.John Calhoun’s colony was a mouse utopia-a giant pen with everything a mouse could ever desire: plenty of food and water, a perfect climate, and reams of paper to make cozy nests. But the thing is, this wasn’t the first rodent heaven that Calhoun built.PCA as Metro-Maps & Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components – DNA.today on – free tabular data formats converter.csvkit command-line spreadsheet can convert and compute multiple Excel files – Biochemistry Computational Research Facility (BCRF) – UW–Madison on in2csv: the Excel killer is part of csvkit the command-line spreadsheet.1freehosting alternatives and similar software alternativeto net – cellhow on : finding alternate software.Jupytext: 2-way reformat of Jupyter notebooks.A question-answering system for PDF files.Data visualisation using R, for researchers who don’t use R.OpenAI Plays Hide and Seek…and Breaks The Game.Paradise couldn’t even last half a decade.Īnd so it goes… Are there lessons humans should learn?Ī 38min YouTube video describes the experiment: It’s unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973. (These individuals were forever changed-when Calhoun’s colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn’t remember how to do anything.) In May of 1970, just under 2 years into the study, the last baby was born, and the population entered a swan dive of perpetual senescence. Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. They also took their stress out on their babies, kicking them out of the nest too early, or even losing them during moves. Meanwhile, overextended mouse moms and dads began moving nests constantly to avoid their unsavory neighbors. Washed-up males gathered in the center of the Universe, near the food, where they fretted, languished, and attacked each other. Spinster females retreated to high-up nesting boxes, where they lived alone, far from the family neighborhoods. As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn’t find mates, or places in the social order-the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. Such rapid growth put too much pressure on the mouse way of life. The article describes the end of the Utopia in dire terms: The first 8 white mice installed July 9, 1968, multiplied to 620 by August next year, 1969.
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