#this is less down the speculation end but I loved the intertwining metaphors in the entire 'hunter' thing throughout

[muninnhuginn]

Post s2e9 confirmations and speculations as of this ep, starting with confirmations and moving on to thoughts/speculations.

Before I start, just going to link my speculations as of a couple of episodes ago here because they're surprisingly either still relevant or have been confirmed either way. Of these, the main pieces still outstanding are Liu Min's phone and the serial murders.

Fountain boy low-key confirmed to be Liu Min's younger brother (Liu Xiao, apparently?). He knew Tianchen would soon be given the opportunity to "hunt" and lo, there is Liu Min (who even vaguely recognised Tianchen which makes sense if he's an acquaintance of his brother's). His own surname is Liu and obviously that's a pretty common name, but the fact he had someone driving him around means he's pretty rich and, well, son of a games company CEO seems pretty rich indeed. Apply law of conservation of detail and this one is now locked in at 95%. Fountain boy = Liu Xiao = "hunter" = hat guy (the last I'm a bit less certain of, but again, conservation of detail and there aren't many episodes left).

I'd been wondering about the weird focus the neighbour got in terms of his gaming so him being someone Liu Min wanted taken care of made that entire side of things click for me. Liu Min was terminally online and so was the neighbour. Tianchen must've thought it karma that he had this opportunity.

Third story: Tianchen as red eyes, going further and further as Tianxi is forced to watch until he goes too far even for her - at which point she broke free and tried to appeal to Lu Guang (but why him?). (All that said, Tianchen claims he killed both their parents, but we didn't actually see it properly in any of the flashbacks which could just be because they're being careful with the censors but I'm still side-eyeing it until we see exactly what happened. After all, there was no knife in the picture when we left the scene.) Tianxi's story I'm presuming is simply an animated version of what Tianxi is showing Qiao Ling to tell her story.

Speaking of, Tianxi "broke free" in her school uniform and that was also how she was found. Does that place the hoodie scenes in the hospital as before she fled? Because rewatching a bit of ep 4 and it seemed that QJ was talking to Tianchen-as-Tianxi then (could be wrong, 'Tianxi' never spoke that we heard in this scene but it being actual Tianxi rather than Tianchen raises so many more questions) which would imply she was missing after the hospital and that's when they implemented the disguising plan. Thinking about the "sorry" scenes in the third story and wondering if Chen Bin was the final straw for Tianxi.

First/second story: The Romeo and Juliet backstage they're at was indeed as I saw a few people speculating a production featuring Qian Jin's wife and her co-star. Tianchen "I killed them both" @ Qian Jin: wow he just like me fr. (But nah this definitely raises more questions about the murder of his wife). (Also, just to note that I'm putting the different perspective of QJ meeting LTX and LTC down to the unreliable nature of Xiao Li relaying info initially rather than alternate timelines. Can't rule it out, of course (and the blood on Tianxi in only one of the tellings has me even more hesitant), but unreliable narrator seems an easier fit at this stage. We also know QJ doctored the case files and if LTC outright told him "I killed them both" then that sure didn't make it to the files.)

Qian Jin's motives now back up in the air. Initially it seemed as though he wanted the powers so he could bring his wife back, but with the revelation that he had reason to believe she was cheating (and pregnant with the person she was cheating on him with) the idea he would want her back seems... a lot less likely. Also, his break from morals is placed a lot earlier than it seemed from the outside. Those in the police thought he was outstanding etc etc until his wife died, but he was gone long before that. Ultimately, in both cases with alleged cheating it doesn't matter if the person themselves was cheating because they didn't deserve to be killed for it, but it is fascinating that we're presented with these two similar scenarios from two entirely different perspectives. Li Tianchen and Tianxi as victims of domestic abuse by the person who believes they're being cheated on whilst Qian Jin is the role of the husband who believes he's being cheated on. (The way the pregnancy reveal is played - QJ not seeing his wife often because he was always at work, her startling when caught on the phone - it does seem like he takes the pregnancy as confirmation that she was cheating as the pregnancy couldn't have been with him. She's already dead at that point though.)

With the current timeline we have, I don't know whether QJ engineered the initial killing of his wife (and the fact the culprit escaped legal justice actually kinda makes me think that he didn't), but I do think he used Tianchen after the fact to set up the suicide and suicide note of the killer

The serial killings. We originally believed there were eight in total, starting with Emma. However, this episode shifts the timeline somewhat. Liu Min says thank you for dealing with "that woman", but he still seems to have use of his legs so presumably "that woman" isn't Emma and this is taking place beforehand. Which would imply there are a number of extra victims the police haven't uncovered. (The alternative is that this flashback was in a timeline before the Emma stuff went so wrong and Liu Min still had use of his legs? I'm really hoping it's not this because it'd break my brain a bit) This also somewhat explains how the police were unable to tie motives together for the serial killings if it was a killing-for-hire type scenario, though I do still somewhat believe there's some underlying logic that QJ either bought into himself or was able to make Tianchen buy into in order to believe the victims weren't "innocent"

[makingscipub]

Threads, worms and science communication

I thought I had written my last post about epigenetics. But then came along some ‘worms’ and I had to write another one.

I have written about worms once before on the Making Science Public blog, in the context of science communication. And this blog post too will reflect on worms in the context of science communication, but in a slightly different context.

In 2014, when I wrote my first worm post, twitter was eight years old but still evolving. Now we live in a twitterverse where science communicators can use ‘threads’, launched at the end of 2017, to knit together tweets into a science story. Some of the best science communication now happens in ‘threads’. And this is what happened on this occasion.

So what am I talking about? On 6 June a research group working in Tel Aviv around Oded Rechavi published an article in Cell entitled “Neuronal Small RNAs Control Behavior Transgenerationally”. The gist of the article was this, as summarised in the abstract: “In Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes, parental responses can transmit heritable small RNAs that regulate gene expression transgenerationally. In this study, we show that a neuronal process can impact the next generations.”

So the hero of the study is C. elegans, the worm of wonder I had talked about in my previous blog, but not in the context of epigenetics. What has this to do with epigenetics?

Worms and epigenetics

Epigenetics is a new field in genetics and genomics, which came to prominence around the year 2000 and about which I have written since 2013. It is still finding its feet and it is still struggling with definitions and concepts. One of the most contested notions is that of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’. This phenomenon has been observed in plants, worms and some rodents, but there is, as yet, no clear evidence that it exists in mammals/humans.

In an important article summarising some myths surrounding epigenetics, Edith Heard, a renowned epigenetics researcher, pointed out: “Since the human genome was sequenced, the term ‘epigenetics’ is increasingly being associated with the hope that we are more than just the sum of our genes. Might what we eat, the air we breathe, or even the emotions we feel influence not only our genes but those of descendants?” This is at the core of speculations surrounding epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

The worm study that caught my eye has to be seen in this context. It was announced under headlines such as “Worm parents pass on behaviours epigenetically to offspring”.

Even one of the most sceptical observers of research into transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, Kevin Mitchell, tweeted: “Some real transgenerational epigenetics… (in worms)”.

He also retweeted a ‘thread’ by the group leader, Oded Rechavi, which was a masterpiece of science communication, both verbal and visual – indeed, threading them both creatively together. We’ll come to that in a minute.

Epigenetic worms in the media

How was the study reported in the ‘mainstream media’? I had a quick look and found only four articles, all published in Israeli news outlets. I tracked down a few more on Google News. Here are some of the headlines in the print media: “Israeli study: Nervous system can transmit messages to future generations”; “Israel study says neurons, not just DNA, can affect progeny’s fate”; “Researchers say nervous system passes info to kids”; “Worms help Israeli scientists rewrite basics of genetics”.

Two things struck me: first the use of anthropomorphic terms like ‘kids’, a type of language that can create the wrong expectations, and the claim that this study overthrows basic genetics. This claim came also up in an online article on Breaking Israel News entitled “Small worms help Israeli researchers disprove basic dogma of modern biology”. This article was, I believe, the press release for the Cell study and contains a great artistic illustration of worms. It was picked up by eurekalert, where Rechavi is quoted as saying “It’s important to stress that we don’t know yet whether any of this translates to humans”.

In the past, some epigeneticists and philosophers of science have made claims about epigenetics overthrowing basic biology, claims that were greeted mainly with scepticism by other scientists.

Three other online articles reported on the study, one published in The Scientist and dryly entitled: “Worm parents pass on behaviors epigenetically to offspring”; one in Psychology Today seeing it as ‘disruptive’ to biology and neuroscience, and one in the Big Think linking it to ‘reincarnation’ (tongue in cheek)! There may be more. But let’s get to the thread.

Twitter threads

According to Twitter, “[a] thread on Twitter is a series of connected Tweets from one person. With a thread you can provide additional context, an update, or an extended point by connecting multiple Tweets together.”

Here is a random example of a ‘thread’ – there are longer and more extravagant ones out there. This one is about Mayan hieroglyphics, which I loved (it’s linked to a fantastic podcast). You can click on it and see how it goes…

Knitting a science story using words and images

So, what about this worm thread then, which got 423 retweets and 1,156 likes? Rechavi posted it in the afternoon of 6 June, just after his lab’s article came out in Cell. It starts with a bit of a firework of emojis, hashtags, and hyperlinks.

The hashtag uses a well-established epigenetic metaphor. The accompanying image (called ‘a summary model’ in the thread) provides an overview of the ‘flow’ of signals/memory, I suppose, between neurons, germline and behaviour.

The second tweet congratulates all the team members and especially the artist who created the illustration for the press release Beata Edyta Mierzwa and reproduces the sci-art image. See here. I think the image represents a tree of life/arteries of life populated by worms with little epigenetic ‘tags’ or post-it notes attached to them… but I might be wrong.

The third tweet writes about long-standing speculations about inheritance and is illustrated by a photo of a Greek statue representing a thinker. It ends by stressing: “But transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is still extremely controversial, especially in mammals”.

The fourth tweet goes into this controversy in a bit more detail, saying: “The reason it’s controversial is that there’s no good mechanism that can explain it. It was hypothesized a long time ago (19th century) that the germline is isolated from the soma, and that somatic responses (including neuronal responses) cannot become heritable”. The work presented in the thread puts forward a candidate mechanism.

This tweet is illustrated with a photo of the front cover of August Weismann’s seminal book The Germplasm – a theory of heredity (published in 1893). This tweet relates to what some news articles reported, such as one in the Big Think that stated: “Rechavi believes this research pushes back against biological dogma (the ‘Weissmann Barrier’) claiming that heritable information is segregated from somatic influences.” This seems to be much less cautious than the tweet, probably because it’s based on the ‘press release’.

As there are 17 tweets in this thread, I won’t summarise each one of them. Let’s just say each tweet is a combination of text and image. It uses images of many types and genres, such a diagrams, various plots and scatter grams, cartoons, microscopy images, photos, and so on..

However, I want to point out one more tweet, not for its image but for its text, as it engages in anthropomorphic language (also used in some headlines) which might confuse people and make them think that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has also been demonstrated in humans:

“MORE interestingly, if rde-4 great-grandchildren are derived from heterozygous great-grandparents that expressed rde-4 only in neurons, their chemotaxis behavior is much improved. The ancestors’ neurons control the behavior of the great-grandchildren”

Reception

The response to the thread was overwhelmingly positive with lots of tweets expressing congratulations. One tweet posted a compiled thread on something called ‘threader’, which you can read here. And there is an ‘unroll’ here on a thread reader.

You can also read the compiled text of the tweets on Reddit. There are only a few comments related to that text, but three of them are interesting. One continues the anthropomorphising of the worms and creates a great metaphor: “Grandpa worm sent a zip file of worm behavior instructions to grandbaby worm”.

Two others jump into a controversy surrounding transgenerational epigenetic inheritance that been reverberating through popular science for a while: “Lamarckism wasn’t as wrong as we thought.” While somebody else says (in a longer comment): “I definitely don’t want to dismiss this but I dont know if I’d call this ‘heritable’ in the same way DNA is heritable.” Discuss!

A new type of science communication

The worm study has provided me with a great opportunity to learn about threads and to alert readers of the Making Science Public blog to the fact that there are now new ways of making science public, using the old art of intertwining words and images (see also GIFs), texts and illustrations, art and science.

There is no yet a lot of research out there examining the use of twitter threads for science communication. I found one SciCommthreads hashtag on threads, but that’s about it. There must be more!

On a different but related note: I am looking forward to a new little project with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan-Miguel Valdez examining the power of images in the construction of popular notions of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

Image: Wikimedia Commons: C. elegans, stained

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