Human sperm steer with second harmonics of the flagellar beat | Hacker News Reader

Human sperm steer with second harmonics of the flagellar beat

nature.com

140 pointsIce_cream_suit32 comments

That is an incredibly difficult title to parse if you are from a certain background. I spent about a minute trying to imagine how someone might have made a human/cow chimera, and what that might have to do with harmonics.

In my defense, I had read the following article about rat/human chimeras earlier today:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/4867891/scientists-give-rats-c...

Because articles from The Sun generally make me grind my teeth, I quickly hunted down the study they reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23995685

Human sperm use second harmonics of the flagellar beat to steer

A sentence where you begin parsing one way, find it it impossible to complete, and have to backtrack substantially (so that the intended meaning changes drastically) is called a garden path sentence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

My favorite is "The old man the boat" :)

Great read! The see also links have a lot of other peculiar sentences that I've come across frequently but never considered they were constructed deliberately nor that there were actual terms describing the oddities.

Ha, it's like a branch misprediction but for language, very cool

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

Trying to imagine time flies, here. Generally, I hate flies. I imagine that time flies bite something. But what?

banana? ;)

Something out of Lovecraft, I think.

TIL, thanks.

The wiki page was posted on HN earlier this year, here's the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10613213

What's the alternative parsing? I'm not a native speaker, so I'm probably missing something, but it seemed pretty natural to read to me.

‘steer’ being a term used for castrated cattle

What makes it more awkward is that the article "the" is used in one place, but is omitted in another.

I read it as 'human sperm beer' at first glance, and was getting to how it had harmonics from the wiggly tails or something when i realized that mercifully, that is not what it says.

So could someone theoretically produce music that if played very loudly during coitus would also act as a contraceptive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PVal8Fy7CM

You're joking but I think some people might think you are serious.

This is an old NOVA episode about intelligent design but it has a nice explanation of the bacterial flagellum.

It starts at around 1:07:00 in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HZzGXnYL5I

Who's gonna invent an ultrasonic contraceptive?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/407106

it's been known since at least 1977.

https://m.timesofindia.com/home/science/Ultrasound-waves-as-...

there's another company that confirms it works, yet denounces it for sake of supporting another contraceptive method they have produced that uses radiation.

https://www.parsemus.org/projects/ultrasound/

If you're interested in the scripts (python!) and movies (xyz files for molecular representation) they used for analysis: https://zenodo.org/record/884626#.WgV1XFz81R4

Nice that they provide open data:

"Data availability High-speed video recordings, extracted data, and analysis supporting the findings of this study are available in “zenodo” with the identifier doi: 10.5281/zenodo.884626."

We have an early leader for the IgNobel prize.

(even though quite fascinating)

Not really, there are potential applications: Higher beat frequency components exist in other flagellated cells; therefore, this steering mechanism might be widespread and could inspire the design of synthetic microswimmers.

Not really, IgNobel doesn't mean it has to be useless:

> The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. (https://www.improbable.com/ig/)

This is why homeopaths and ghost hunters don't sweep every year. It's not an award to shame the recipient, it's to highlight unusual or befuddling, but legitimate, scientific research.

Indeed. Just for example, the levitating frog experiment is a very clear example of just that.

Yet VW won for:

CHEMISTRY PRIZE [GERMANY] — Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. REFERENCE: "EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations", U.S. Environmental Protection Agency news release, September 18, 2015.

I know what all of those words mean, but not in this combination. Props to whoever wrote the title, I'm clicking/reading.

Let's start a band...that title could describe a new musical genre, one with the hip lyrics set to the flagellar beat.

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