Photo: flickr/thebittenword.com

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In his book, “The Pluto Files,” celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson showcases his collection of hate mail from third graders who were disappointed at Pluto’s reclassification in 2006 to a dwarf planet. The little Pluto fans demanded the immediate reinstatement of their beloved chunk of rock back into the official roster of the solar system’s planets.

The letters start as far back as 2000, when Tyson, as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, omitted Pluto from a new solar system exhibit because he didn’t consider it a planet.

Seven-year-old Will Gamot immediately noticed the missing exhibit and shot the director a letter with a helpful illustration (see below). Gamot wrote: “You are missing planet Pluto. Please make a model of it. This is what it looks like. It is a planet.”

In 2006, The International Astronomical Union endorsed Tyson’s position and yanked Pluto’s title as the solar system’s ninth planet. Scientists had realized that the distant Kuiper belt where Pluto resides probably has dozens of large icy objects, some of which may rival Pluto in size; rather than adding more and more planets to our list, researchers opted to create the dwarf planet category. This prompted howls of protest from other kids.

In her letter to Tyson, Madeline Trost of Plantation, Florida worried: “Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist.” She then demands a response from Tyson. “Please write back,” she implores. “But not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.”

You can browse through an entire sideshow of what the kids had to say here; but here’s a sampling of their irritation at the whole affair.

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Image: The Pluto Files

The Nobel committee’s decision last year to award the Peace Prize to the freshly elected President Obama was considered by many to be an unusual choice, but the committee could top itself this year. The list of potential winners contains 237 nominees, including human rights activists like Russian Svetlana Gannushkina and Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, but also our very own Internet.

The effort to get the net nominated was spearheaded by the Italian edition of Wired magazine. The editors propose that apart from being a place for people to nurture their vanity and satisfy their need to look at kittens in costumes, the Internet is also a forum for peaceful dialogue and communication. Thus, they say, it plays a valuable role in building peace.

Riccardo Luna, editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Wired magazine said:

“The internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy….What happened in Iran after the latest election, and the role the web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the internet can become a weapon of global hope.”

So far, the Internet has found a bunch of early backers, including the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and designer Giorgio Armani. You can support the net’s nomination by signing an online petition at Internet for Peace. The results will be announced on October 8th and the winner will walk away with 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). Which brings us to our next question–who picks up the award if the net wins? And who gets to pocket the cash? And most importantly, who gets to blab the acceptance speech?

While we work those out, here’s the video for the Internet for Peace campaign.

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“Umbilical discharge in adult is rare and is usually induced by foreign material, most commonly hair. Rarely, it may be due to embryonal anomalies. We are reporting an unusual case of umbilical discharge in adult secondary to an impacted lint ball… A 55-year-old obese woman presented with a 4-month history of hemorrhagic discharge from the umbilicus. Deep from the base of the umbilicus, a 0.8 cm gray-tan mass was removed that on microscopic examination revealed a lint ball.  Conclusion: An impacted lint ball may be a rare cause of umbilical discharge in adult.”

Bonus quote from the full text of the paper:

“A 55-year-old obese white American woman of European descent presented with a 4-month history of slightly hemorrhagic discharge from her umbilicus. There was no history of fever, abdominal pain or any other systemic disease. Physical examination revealed a deep umbilicus with a barely visible opening. There was no redness, edema, or crusting of the periumbilical skin. The deeper aspect of the umbilicus was exposed by using a spatula. A dark, rounded polypoid mass was noted. The clinical impression was that of fibro-epithelial polyp or some other tumor. An attempt was made to remove the mass by excising the base; however, the mass easily came out of the umbilical cavity implying that either it was necrotic or it was not firmly attached to the umbilical tissue at the base. The gray-tan 0.8 cm size round mass on cut section revealed white fibrous appearance. On microscopic examination, it was composed of lint material with typical morphology of refractile bean-shaped and elongated colorless structures, red spindle-shaped keratin material, granular red debris, rare hair fragments and polymorphonuclear leukocytes (Figure 1Figure 1.). Under polarized light, the lint particles showed brilliant blue-green birefringence (Figure 2Figure 2.). A diagnosis of ‘lint ball’ omphalitis was made.”

Photo: flickr/brenbot

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The pitcher plant is the world’s largest meat-eating plant; in low altitudes it feeds on ants, small insects, and possibly even small rodents. The plant entices its prey with tasty nectar, and when the animals lose balance and drop into the fluid-filled pitcher, they’re drowned and ingested.

But in Borneo’s higher altitudes, there aren’t enough gullible and clumsy insects to keep the plant alive. So, evolutionary forces pressured the plant to tweak its design a bit to entice the tree shrew to pay it a visit and poop into it.

The BBC describes the unique toilet-shaped plant:

N. rapah pitchers have huge orifices, but they also grow large concave lids held at an angle of about 90 degrees away from the orifice. The inside of these lids are covered with glands that exude huge amounts of nectar. Most importantly, the distance from the front of the pitcher’s mouth to the glands corresponds exactly to the head to body length of mountain tree shrews.

The shrew perches on the plant to lick nectar from the “lid” and on most occasions it poops into the conveniently positioned toilet bowl to mark its territory. Scientists have yet to determine if the nectar has some sort of laxative qualities to it.

The feces collect at the bottom of the plant and when it rains, the nutrients get flushed into the plant, where the nitrogen and phosphorous in the poo get absorbed as plant food. This toilet bowl system is so effective that the plant satisfies almost all its nutritional needs from the shrew feces.

Jonathan Moran, one of the scientists who studied the relationship between the plant and the shrew, suggests that both parties evolved to sustain each other through a process called “mutualism.” For the shrew, the pitcher plant’s nectar is a rich source of sugar in the mountains; for the plant, the shrew’s feces is food.

You can listen to Moran explain the unique relationship in a radio program, CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” here. And here’s a video of the tree shrew plopping into the pitcher plant for a quick snack.

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Image: Chi’en Lee

So tomorrow (that’s Friday) at 5 pm, DISCOVER’s own Web editor extraordinaire, Amos Zeeberg, will moderate a panel discussion titled, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games.”

Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future?

The panelists:

Lucy Bradshaw, with the video game giant Electronic Arts, worked as an executive producer for blockbuster games like Spore and The Sims 2. Spore was a favorite with science geeks, since the game characters evolve from microorganisms to complex animals before building societies and taking to space.

Tiffany Barnes, a professor of computer science, builds video games that teach introductory computer science. She’s interested in “harnessing the inherent motivation in video games” for more constructive purposes–like getting students to do their homework.

Neuroscience prof James Bower will explain why he started Whyville, a massively popular virtual world for kids. The educational site reportedly has a player base of more than 5 million users, who learn about everything from science to business to geography.

Anne Collins McLaughlin investigates how video games (including World of Warcraft and Wii Boom Box) can improve elder cognition at the Gains Through Gaming Lab.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by for insights on whether gaming can save the world!

Secondly, if you stayed up late enough to catch the end of “The Colbert Report,” you saw Sean Carroll—who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance—talking time, the multiverse, and his new book From Eternity to Here. Besides surviving the cauldron that is talking to Colbert while still hitting some key scientific points, Carroll also accidentally thinks up a great title for an album:

Check out Carroll’s cover story for the March issue of DISCOVER, “The Real Rules for Time Travelers.”

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1.) Optimising the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel.

2.) Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behaviour.

3.) Swearing as a response to pain.

4.) Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children.

5.) The “booty call”: a compromise between men’s and women’s ideal mating strategies.

6.) Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats.

7.) Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time.

8.) More information than you ever wanted: does Facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy?

9.) Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?

10.) The nature of navel fluff.

Photo: flickr/kerryvaughan

Treehugger reports:

The pond scum in question is microcystin-LR (MC-LR), which makes water unsafe for drinking, swimming and fishing in many parts of the world. Upon ingestion it can cause serious liver damage, with some studies indicating a connection to causing liver and colorectal cancers.

To counter this harmful algae, lead scientist Pascal Drake inserted genes into the tobacco plants to produce an antibody to the algae. The antibody was produced in the tobacco plant’s leaves and secreted from its roots into the growth medium. When the toxin from the algae was added to the medium, the antibody immediately latched on to it.

Discovery News reports:

“Binding to the pollutant might reduce its bioavailability,” Drake said. “It might make it less dangerous and less likely to be taken up by animals and humans.”

The scientists say this is the first example of a transgenic plant making an antibody that can fight an environmental toxin. But they note that for this research to be useful in the field, they would have to genetically tweak aquatic plants instead of tobacco plants.

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Image: Flickr/Christian Haugen

“Lyrics for Bob Dylan’s songs between 1962 and 2001 (close to 100,000 words) were scored with the help of the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 2006). Means for Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery are reported for 22 Blocks characterizing this time span. Significant but weak differences across Blocks were found for all three measures at the level of individual words. Emotional fluctuations in words included in Bob Dylan’s lyrics accompanied events and phases in his life, although they were not entirely dictated by these events. Dylan used more highly Imaged and more Active words at times when his work was critically acclaimed. More Passive word choices characterized times of prolonged stress, and more Pleasant choices times of experimentation. Dylan’s three popularity peaks were used to divide the singer’s career into three stages (rhetor, poet, sage) which differed in terms of pronouns used.”

Thanks to Heather for today’s ROFL!

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