And the winners are...

If I wasn't already homesick for the City of Lights, this just did me in: last weekend, Paris hosted the latest international pole dance competition, Pole Theater Paris. And with the shotty internet connections which are endemic to Aarhus, I could hardly even stream more than a performance or two. Thank goodness for youtube.

If you aren't in the loop, the pole community has yet to come to a uniform consensus on how to categorize and judge their competitors, but they're working on it. Poleranking, which aims to bring together the international pole community, offers these categories: Pro and Semi-Pro, based on skill level, and in addition to an overall winner in each category, there are prizes for art, drama, comedy, and classique. This leaves space to acknowledge some very different performance styles, from those who perform vertical ballet/gymnastics to those who tell a story through their costume, music, and choreography, to those who adhere to pole's origins in the strip clubs ("pole classique"). Pole studios don't generally specialize in any one of these categories, leaving each athlete to develop his or her own style. You may even find, as I have, that one studio is home to several instructors with very different performance styles.

I'm excited to give a couple shout-outs to some of the winners from last weekend. First of all, Louise, who frequents my studio here in Aarhus, BPoleFit, took the Pro Category Pole Art award with this performance.

And secondly, one of my very first instructors from back in Paris won Semi-Pro Pole Classique with this beautifully racy performance.

It doesn't take long to notice this performance is more stereotypical "pole dance." Frankly, that doesn't make it any less of an accomplishment or an art. Deciding it isn't your style (or mine) shouldn't open the floodgates to moral judgment. This performance is an integral part, the heart even, of the larger pole community that exists today. A lot of controversy has built up over #notastripper, a popular tag polers like to use when sharing their photos and videos. This sentiment is problematic as it furthers the stigmatization of sex workers and denies the very origins of the sport itself. It's important to recognize, and certainly not ostracize, the women who helped found this sport. I'm not going to take too much time to hash out this topic, but if you're curious, feel free to check out what the Daily Dot has to say on the topic. 

1 month, 1 backpack, 4 countries: go!

Contrary to the exciting title, I'm saddened to admit that I don't have any new travel adventures to share this month. The spring round of postdoctoral fellowship proposals, aka trying to convince people that my fantastic research proposal will cure all diseases and save the world, has been keeping me way too busy. Instead, I figure I'll use this time at home to add my two cents to the world of backpacker blogging.

About a year ago, I found myself equipped with a roundtrip to Bangkok and no clue as to how I'd ever fit a month of supplies in just one backpack. For that matter, how did some people pack for much longer than that?? It turns out, the blogosphere is ripe with answers to that very question.

What advice worked best for me? Nearly a year later, there's no doubt in my mind of my #1 most important item: a comfy and durable pair of Teva sandals. These were worth every penny. From wandering down the streets and through the temple complexes of Bangkok to hiking through the jungles of Vietnam, these guys never let me down. And they even let you show off your pedicure, should you find yourself caving for their oh-so-cheap prices.

The Teva Kayenta sandal. Girly enough for a night on the town, tough enough for a hike through the jungle.

And for the rest of my top-ten pack list tips...

2. Pack light on the clothing, and clothing that's light (though at least one shirt with sleeves and a pair of pants that covers the knees). You don't need so many outfits, as you can hand wash things in hostel sinks or just pay around $1 per pound for laundry services. And if anything tears, new clothing is so very cheap. It's incredibly hot in March and April in this part of the world, so you don't want anything heavy or clingy. However, you'll need at least one outfit that covers your shoulders and knees in order to get in to certain Buddhist temples.

3. Don't bother with books. You can download things on a smartphone or buy the ubiquitous photocopied bestsellers anywhere. This is an easy way to cut down on luggage weight.

4. Buy an ultralight microfiber towel. These guys dry so fast, roll up tight, and feel feather-light. An excellent traveler's investment.

5. Get a waterproof bag. Especially if you plan to travel around New Year's in mid-April, which is celebrated in SouthEast Asia with massive city-wide waterfights. No mercy is shown. But barring that, you still never know when you'll want to take a camera or a smartphone on a kayak trip, or when the weather may turn.

6. Consider purchasing a tablet, a bluetooth keyboard, a travel-proof case if you don't already own these. Writing home is so much easier with a full keyboard and a proper screen, but you don't want to lug a laptop around all month.

7. Bring bug spray. Just make it a part of your morning and evening routine, like brushing your teeth. You won't regret it. Cinq sur Cinq tropic worked well for me. I went with a skin spray and a clothing spray, and never got too badly bitten.

8. Sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen. Enough said.

9. Stock up on any medications and get your vaccinations in advance. I was lucky not to need my stomach and gastrointestinal pills, but it was a comfort to know they were there. Taking a monster-sized malaria pill every morning might not be the best way to start your day, but it sets you up to enjoy the rest of it out and about.

10. Take one cozy sweatshirt and comfy pair of pants. You never know when a sudden cold snap may descend upon you, and you'll be very unhappy if you only have tank tops and tees to layer.

Who'd have thought that northern Vietnam would be a full 15-20 degrees Celsius (around 30 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than southern Vietnam? Thank goodness for my sweatshirt and waterproof jacket!

Don't stress too much, and certainly do not overpack. You can always buy things along your travels that you may have forgotten or didn't realize you'd need.


Finally, for anyone who really wants to dive into the nitty-gritty of it, here is my final pack list in all its glory:

Clothing

2 regular bras, 1 sports bra

10 pairs of panties

2 pairs of regular socks

Harem pants

5 t-shirts, 3 tank tops (non-strappy)

2 dresses

Fast drying shirt for hike

Fast drying pants for hike

3 pairs of hiking socks

Pair of shorts for campsite

Bathing suit

Sweatshirt

Shoes

Hiking boots

Flip flops for showers

Walking sandals

Toiletries

Toothbrush

Toothpaste

Floss

Soap (body, face)

Moisturizer

Razor

Antiperspirant

Shampoo

Conditioner

Panty liners

Band-aids

Hair ties

Minimal jewelry (1 of each item)

Nail file and clippers

Tweezers

Chapstick with sun protection

Birth control

Acne medicine and cream

Basic make-up (eyeliner, mascara, 1 lipstick, 1 eyeshadow)

Travel Gear

Microfiber towel

Sunscreen

Bug spray (skin, clothes)

Antacid/antidiarrheal

Headache medicine

Anti-malarial medicine

Small purse for day outings

Backpack

Travel pillow (inflatable)

Umbrella

Sunglasses

Light-weight foldable cloth poncho

Electronics

iPad, charger, SD card reader

Camera, charger, upload cable

Phone and charger

Headphones

USB key

International all-in-one adapter

Waterproof bag for electronics

Trapped

So much for New Year's resolutions: Not even a full month into my commitment to post every week and I'm already falling behind! But this is a blog about being a scientist with a serious case of travel lust (and a pole habit), and sometimes being a scientist means spending your weekends trapped inside furiously (not at all half-heartedly ;) ) reading and writing. 

With hardly a moment spent just relaxing, there was little hope for generating new content for this blog. What I lack in the written word, I'll compensate this week with some photography whose inspiration readily crawled across me while planted on the couch with a laptop. As the subjects of my "work" will readily attest, there are much better things to do with a keyboard than a scientific funding proposal.

A cat is never on the right side of a door.

A table (Lunchtime)

A good stretch

A study in feline sophistication

It's tough work being a cat

You're welcome.

Pole dance: a brief history

Let's face it: calling yourself a pole dancer still raises a few eyebrows today. But with pole athletes competing in national and international competitions, and studios popping up across the globe, it's clearly moved beyond the confines of the strip club. So how did pole expand from the red light district to the fitness studio?

Pole fun :)

Pole dancing has a colorful history which long predates its presence in gentlemen's clubs. Historically, traditional gymnastic-like performances on a pole were performed in both China and India since at least the 12th century, though in both cases this was a men's sport. The Chinese art looked more or less like today's cirque du soleil (performed on sticky poles), and the Indian art, mallakhamb, (performed on wooden poles) was originally developed as cross-training for wrestlers to develop speed, stamina, and agility. Mallakhamb was revived in the 19th century, and youtube offers a wealth of examples, like this one.

It should come as no surprise that cultures across Europe and Africa have also incorporated poles, as phallic symbols, into various fertility dances, perhaps the best-known of which is the maypole dance.

Most sources agree that modern western pole dance began around the turn of the twentieth century. One source traces its origins to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, in which Egyptian women performed a sensual, hip-gyrating dance called the "hoochie cooch." This style of performance was soon incorporated into traveling circuses as a regular sideshow act by the 1920s, performed around the pole that held up the side tent, which soon became a prop. From there, pole dancing was incorporated into the burlesque scene in the 1950s. A woman by the name of Belle Jangles performed the first recorded pole dance in a strip joint in Oregon called the Mugwump in 1968, but it wasn't until the 1980s that pole hit the strip club scene in full force across the US and Canada.

Just about every source I came across seemed to agree that the turning point in pole came in 1994, when Fawnia Deitrich opened the world's first exotic dance school in Canada, focusing on pole dance and fitness. From here, things snowballed. Pole studios began opening and classes were soon offered across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Two decades later, you can read up on this history in official-sounding websites like United Pole Artists and the International Pole Dance Fitness Association. General news sources like mic.com even report on it. There is even a new movement led by KT Coates as an Olympic sport. Personally, I think this video from the International Pole Sports Federation does the best job summing up pole as I know and love it.

News from lab

There's some good news coming from lab. For my January science update, I'm happy to fill you in on the big publication that just came from my boss Keisuke. On January 6, the journal Neuron published his latest findings in an article entitled "Congenital Nystagmus Gene FRMD7 Is Necessary for Establishing a Neuronal Circuit Asymmetry for Direction Selectivity." Quite a mouthful. So let's break this down.

"Congenital Nystagmus Gene FRMD7 Is Necessary for Establishing a Neuronal Circuit Asymmetry for Direction Selectivity"

1. What is congenital nystagmus?
This is an inherited visual disease which occurs in approximately 1 in 1500 individuals. The symptoms of the disease include a lack of optokinetic reflex, the reflex which allows to focus on objects in a moving field, and spontaneous involuntary horizontal eye oscillations. This video does a great job illustrating the condition.

Patients with this condition have severely impaired vision and can have serious social challenges stemming from the aesthetics of the condition. The severity of congenital nystagmus varies from patient to patient, and we don't quite understand why. More importantly, we don't know what causes it, and certainly not how to treat it. (*There is one technique for eliminating the spontaneous eye movements which involves cutting and re-attaching the eye muscles, and even so, we don't know why this works.)

"Congenital Nystagmus Gene FRMD7 Is Necessary for Establishing a Neuronal Circuit Asymmetry for Direction Selectivity"

2. What is FRMD7?
FRMD7 is a gene expressed in limited areas around the body, most especially in certain retinal neurons. It interacts with a membrane-associated protein, and it is especially important during development, but its activity isn't really understood. Several genetic studies have quite clearly linked mutations in this somewhat mysterious FRMD7 gene to congenital nystagmus in humans. How these mutations were causing this condition were totally unknown, until now.

"Congenital Nystagmus Gene FRMD7 Is Necessary for Establishing a Neuronal Circuit Asymmetry for Direction Selectivity"

3. What is neuronal circuit asymmetry? And why does it matter for direction selectivity?
First, let's take a look at something called direction selectivity. This refers to the ability of certain neurons in the retina to respond selectively to the movement of objects in a certain cardinal direction: up, down, left, or right. This ability of different neurons to respond to motion in one of the four directions is what allows us to detect moving objects. These neurons develop their direction selectivity after the brain tissue has significantly developed. In mice, it happens after birth, just a few days before they open their eyes. In humans, we assume that the development is similar, though we don't know for sure.

The direction selectivity is established through "circuit asymmetry," the formation of asymmetric circuit connectivity between starburst cells and their downstream signaling partners, the direction-selective (ganglion) cells. The starburst cells are a set of cells which respond more strongly when the light signal begins at their cell body and then moves out into their dendrites. (For instance, if an image signal moves from left to right across this cell, it won't elicit much of a signal from the dendrites on the left of the cell body, but it'll elicit a big signal from the dendrites to the right of body, which it passes after passing the cell body.)

A generic picture of a starburst cell which I grabbed from Psychology Today. The big spot in the center is the cell body, from which all the dendrites emanate.

These starburst cells form stronger connections with the direction-selective cells whose directional preference aligns with the preferences of the starburst cell's dendrites. We don't really know how the starburst cells know how to pick and choose the cells whose preferences align with their dendrites, but we know that they unevenly pair-up with direction-selective cells, at least in healthy individuals...

And here comes Keisuke's contribution: his original work, which just got published in Neuron, shows that mice with a mutated FRMD7 have problems with their direction-selective circuits. Specifically, their up and down direction-selective cells are just fine, but the left and right ones, the ones you'd need to focus on a horizontally-moving object and to keep your eyes from spontaneously oscillating, are all but non-existent in mice with this mutation. And remember, we know that humans with this mutation have congenital nystagmus: they can't focus on objects in a horizontally-moving scene, and their eyes oscillate horizontally. It looks like, in this case, the mouse is probably a pretty good animal model for this life-altering human disease. Through studying this mouse, we think we have the first major breakthrough in understanding this hitherto mysterious human disease.

If our extrapolations from mice to humans are correct, as they seem likely to be, then we now understand that humans with congenital nystagmus are lacking horizontal direction-selective circuits in their retina. This is a major step in understanding the neuronal circuits underlying this disease, an important step towards being able to develop a medical treatment. And more broadly, this is an important step in linking genetic mutations to problems in neuronal circuits. As Keisuke is quoted as saying in a popular science summary of his publication, "To my knowledge this is the first time that we can link a disease to a defect in neurocomputation."

I hope this was clear, and that it gives you a good idea of what that lab and I are working on.

It will be exciting to see where our investigations into the circuitry defects of congenital nystagmus will go over the next few years. Stay tuned!

A new year, a new look

Happy new year from snowy Aarhus!

After a couple of weeks back stateside, exchanging presents, testing apple cider mimosas, and camping out with cousins,

Family Christmas 2015 (including the family trip to the Franklin Institute)

having survived a bus trip up to frosty Toronto to catch up with friends and family,

Toronto, until we meet again

and even squeezing in a day-trip through the Big Apple,

There's nothing quite like Rockefeller Center and the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue at Christmastime.

I've dived back into the Scandinavian winter, which is finally more wintery this side of the new year.

Mars couldn't quite decide if today's snowflakes needed chasing or were fierce enemies to run from.

And in keeping with the fresh starts that come along with the new year, I'm going to be striving for something new when it comes to this blog. For now I'm thinking of rotating weekly updates on my four favorite themes: science, pole dance, Aarhus, and travel. I'm not sure yet just how I'll spin it, but keep an eye out.

Our first Christmas in Aarhus

As Christmas seasons are wont to do, this year's in Aarhus flew by. Being our first in Denmark, it was filled with cultural discoveries, from the charming to the somewhat disappointing. To lay it out there, the Danes aren't big on lavish holiday displays. Unlike New York or Paris, Aarhus doesn't light up for the holidays. Beyond a few major shopping streets and the mall, the streets were as dark as ever, which is saying something given the amount of daylight this far north at this time of year.

It felt like I scoured the entire city to find this much outward expression of holiday cheer. Showy is one word you can't put on the Danes.

The Christmas markets also weren't something to write home about. If it hadn't been for the mulled wine, "gløgg," which the Danes have really mastered, I'd have been hard-pressed to find much to tempt me past the first couple of disappointments. France spoiled me, in more ways than one. But then again, there were the æbleskriver, the puffy bite-sized pancake balls that the Danes dip in powdered sugar and jam around the holidays. I guess there were a couple things to keep me coming back.

The Christmas markets aren't all they're cracked up to be in Aarhus.

Luckily, you can forget about the Christmas markets over a gløgg and some æbleskriver.

All this is hardly to say that the Danes don't do Christmas. Far from it. The entire month leading up to the holiday is filled with Christmas parties for offices, departments, clubs, teams, and friends. These epic all-night parties (which is saying something, since the sun sets before 4pm and doesn't rise until nearly 9am) are called the Julefrokost, or Christmas lunch, though I still haven't figured out why they call an evening event a lunch. Perhaps it's just typical Danish modesty, as calling it a dinner might sound haughty. Who knows? Regardless, the julefrokost does include a large sit-down meal loaded with all sorts of typical Danish foods: liver paté, lots of red cabbage, "sweet potatoes" (literally potatoes coated in caramelized sugar), duck, and the classic Christmas rice pudding with whipped cream, almond slivers, and cherry compote, the risalamand. Lurking in the depths of the risalamand is a whole almond, whose discoverer is rewarded with prizes like sweets or small gifts. The trouble with trying to slip in a whole almond in a dish packed with almond slivers is that finding the fugitive isn't always so easy. Mix in a few shots of schnapps and the whole almond can go down all too easily, leaving everyone's stomachs packed with the rice pudding— it absolutely had to be searched— and the prize unclaimed, as happened with us this year. (A subsequent dance-off seemed the only logical way to resolve the issue of who should take home the prize.)

Mmm, risalamand. (Prize not included.)

One of my favorite touches of a Danish Christmas is their advent calendar. It's got to be one of the most simple yet charming interpretations I've seen so far. Very fitting for the Danes in their constant quest for hygge, or cozy charm.

Nearly done counting down the days!

And with all that, it's time for me to call it a night. From the Billund airport, where I await my absurdly early Christmas Eve flight home, I'd like to wish you a very merry Christmas.