It’s amazing how the distinction between an electron shell and cloud comes alive through blurry puppy fur!

Watch and enjoy. Next I would like them to explain the quadratic formula.

1) 55% of Twitter users are female.

2) Men and women tweet at the same rate. Which is to say, almost not at all. The study authors calculated the median number of lifetime tweets per user as one. One! This, they say, means most Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. Lazy arses.

3) Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

4) The average male Twitterer is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (and 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman). The average female Twitterer is also more eager to see what the guys are up to: she’s 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. 

Quote: These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Aw. That’s sad. Maybe you deserve a little love, guys.

Inkling doesn’t have an official Twitter account yet, though it’s in the works. This news fills us with both trepidation—how can we compete with all these seemingly scintillating male Twits?—and hope: Just make more than one 140-character Zen statement about science in two months, and it’ll be like we’ve published a career’s worth of books. Sweet.

Photographer Andrew Zuckerman is hoping to replicate the 2007 success of his book Creature with his new book Bird. In both, he shoots wild creatures in a studio setting, against brilliant white backdrops and with what feels like a stunning intimacy. Speaking to Wired in 2007, Zuckerman explained a little about how he does these shoots:

All subjects required their own special planning and customized approach based on their size or behavior. When capturing fish and birds I occasionally used a device that would allow the animal’s movement to trigger the exposure; this was through a custom-built delay system connecting a laser beam to a strobe light — which, when crossed, signaled the exposure. These images were made with little to no ambient light: The digital back would be exposing darkness until the animal hit its mark.

For more, check out the official site for Bird. 

Maybe Claire Bennet wasn’t just trying to test out her powers when she hurled herself off all those high objects. Maybe she was doing science. A series of four articles published in the latest issue of the Journal of Athletic Training delve deeper into the intricacies of injuries-sustained-while-cheerleading than I would have imagined possible. Among the findings of the 1-year research project involving 9022 astonishingly limber high school and college-aged women? The majority of cheerleading-related injuries are caused by stunts.

In other words, friends, please note for future reference that tumbling, jumping, clapping, doing splits, and dancing aren’t as dangerous as being thrown through the air by someone who then attempts to catch you again.

The study also contained the shocking revelation that the most catastrophic fall-related injuries were sustained while cheerleaders were performing on harder surfaces like grass or wood floors, rather than cushier surfaces like spring floors (which are a little like spring mattresses but less sleep-inducing) and foam floors with thick padding. And finally? The higher the fall height, the greater the risk of injury. Color me surprised!

Seriously, though. Cheerleaders, be safe out there. A report that came out last year says the menace is very real. More of you get majorly traumatized, rendered disabled, or even killed (!) by cheerleading than by any other sport. And not everyone has magical healing powers.

I was just doing a Google Scholar search for “cheese” (because why not?) and came across an article published in the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Food Engineering which describes a new method—why yes, previous research on this topic has been done—of identifying unwanted objects accidentally buried in cheese. I wasn’t aware that cheese often came with unwanted objects buried in it, but the writers of the article contend this is a major problem in the food industry, so maybe I’ve just been lucky.

You can read the abstract of the paper here, but I’ll sum up. The scientists stuck the inner plastic core of a ballpoint pen through the crust and about halfway into a block of Belgian cheese, which in case you are interested (I was), they describe as the following: “an enzyme coagulated, surface ripened, semi-soft cheese of Trappist type."*

Then they blasted the cheese with a high-frequency sound, checked how loud it was when it came out the other side, and measured the echo, if any, that came back to the original sensor. Comparing these results with those produced by a block of cheese lacking in foreign bodies, they were able to conclude that the ultrasonic device was, in fact, a relatively robust means of detecting the pen core. I know! How awesome is that?

Also awesome: the list of concerns the researchers expressed with this method of internal defect-detection, which include “the high attenuation of the signal due to the cheese texture (and especially the crust),” and the fact that “the raw signal was dependant on the temperature and on the maturity of the cheese.” Tell me food engineers don’t have the best jobs in the world.

*You will be glad to note that the ultrasonic cheese testers confirmed this classification by consulting a scholarly work entitled Cheese Rheology and Texture.

This morning, since it was unseasonably warm and beautiful in Chicago, I sipped a cup of coffee by Lake Michigan. While I was there, I enjoyed the company of a pleasant-seeming ladybird that decided to join me. Imagine my surprise when, sighing gently over the pretty creature, I decided to read a little about it this evening and came across the following horrifying headline from the British newspaper the Daily Mail: Vile-smelling foreign ladybirds set to invade homes this winter!

Turns out that the ladybird species Harmonia axyridis, native to East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and China, was introduced into Britain and the United States in the early 20th century as a useful agricultural pest-killer, and has been wreaking havoc ever since. During the fall and winter, the tiny (and very cute, at least judging by the one that crawled onto my leg this morning) creatures swarm in huge numbers and invade homes in the UK and certain regions in North America. The ladybirds are just trying to get away from the cold, but apparently people whose homes they fly into don’t find that just cause for the visitations. The worst part, it seems, is that when alarmed they give off a substance scientists delightfully call “reflex blood,” which not only stinks to high heaven, but causes allergic reactions in some people when inhaled. Phew. I guess it’s not surprising the Mail calls them “mini-beasts.”

I’ve never heard of or seen a ladybird invasion, myself. Have you? If so, do tell. I’m fascinated.

The marvelously well-researched and always provocative medical news magazine Proto, for which I occasionally write, has an intriguing story in this fall’s issue. Called “Between the Lines,” it’s a piece about how the online patient community Inspire.com is among a few such medically-oriented social networking sites that is beginning to use sophisticated natural language processing techniques borrowed from computer science to mine posts for clinically relevant information linking particular medications with symptoms and side-effects. Here’s a snippet from the article:

A query for mentions of the multiple sclerosis drug Avonex, for example, would parse a post by one user who writes, “i felt worse on avonex than my ms made me feel. while on avonex my psoriasis got VERY VERY bad/worse.” Another post reads, “I have been losing my hair…. I am going to switch from AVONEX to COPAXONE…to see if it is the AVONEX that is causing my hair issues.” After the program sorts through the text, Simetric employees review the results, double-checking the computer’s interpretations and dealing with tricky cases. The software may, for example, have trouble with the apparent contradiction of “wicked good” or pass over phrases it hasn’t been programmed to recognize.

The technique is a terrific mash-up of the emerging powers of the social networking phenomenon with the emerging powers of natural language processing, and it’s a really beautiful illustration of what’s possible when you find ways to analyze and quantify information that people naturally want to share with each other. I love it.

Heard on one of the questions in this week’s Not My Job segment of Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me!:” a reference to an animated film made by Walt Disney in the 1940s to educate young girls about the salient phenomenon of female puberty, and sponsored by (who else?) Kotex. Peter Sagal: “What’s interesting is the title. The Story of Menstruation—it’s like How it Was Invented!”

Found tonight, and shared with you: the very film in question, all oddly moody blue backdrops, calm female voice-over, and cutesy animations. It’s the least I can do. I really wouldn’t want to be alone in having the bizarre pleasure of hearing and seeing illustrated such words of wisdom as:

“Try not to throw yourself off schedule by getting overtired, emotionally upset, or catching cold.”

“But don’t let it get you down. After all, no matter how you feel, you have to live with people. You have to live with yourself, too. And once you stop feeling sorry for yourself and take those days in your stride, you’ll find it easier to keep smiling and even tempered.”

If you stick around long enough, you’ll get to the counsel in this post’s title, somewhat more gently put.

Just one question, Disney. If you were brave enough to take on what, nearly seventy years ago, was even more sensitive a subject than it is today, sensible enough to actually illustrate it with images of the uterus and fallopian tubes, and scientific enough to take viewers through the hormonal pathway first triggered by the pituitary gland, why then did you totally wuss out and transform menstrual blood into the color of milk? Honestly. There’s a scene where it looks like a alien-head shaped cow is being milked.

P.S. The scene in the screen grab you see above goes along with a bit about how all women, being different, have different menstrual schedules and periods that last for differing amounts of time. Why this message is accompanied by a group of chicks standing around staring at a Scottish Terrier, one of whom appears to be wearing a crown, I can only imagine. Hypotheses are welcome.

Anyway, I decided to find out if any interesting scientific research had been conducted into the horrible-terrible-no good-very bad results of DST, and found the usual papers about how the transitions disorient people’s chronobiological rhythms and thereby lead to traffic accidents and bad days at the stock market (or maybe not). I also found an interesting study on time changes and heart health by two Swedish researchers.

This time last year—precisely two days before the end of DST in their country—Rickard Ljung and Imre Janszky published a paper explaining what they’d discovered by examining Swedish hospital records for the twenty year period spanning 1987-2006. On the first three weekdays after the springtime shift in clocks, they said, the number of cases of acute myocardial infarction (commonly known as heart attack) at hospitals around the country was significantly higher than it was on the same days two weeks before and two weeks afterwards.

With the fall shift, the effect was reversed, and slightly briefer: Significantly fewer patients than usual showed up with heart attacks on the first weekday afterward. The researchers postulate that the minor sleep deprivation associated with moving clocks forward has an adverse effect on cardiovascular health, while the hour’s extra sleep you get when the clocks move backward has a protective effect.

I still think it’s dumb that we do this DST thing at all, but it’s good to know the three gigantic cups of coffee I had today are less likely to stop my heart this Monday than most others.

On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to be among 300 people who gathered in the Art Institute of Chicago’s (swanky) Fullerton Hall to hear astronaut John Grunsfeld speak about his role in those repairs. For instance, he and his fellow spacewalkers Mike Massimino and Drew Feustel removed several electrical circuits from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and replaced them with new ones, put in a new Fine Guidance Sensor (an instrument the size of a baby grand that helps Hubble point its nose in the right direction), and installed new insulation on the telescope’s external surface to protect it from crazy space temperatures—ranging from -200 degrees Fahrenheit to +200 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m posting this particular image because it’s one Grunsfeld showed in his talk, and it illustrates a really neat astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, he explained, two galaxies that are close enough together start to literally tug on each other’s hearts, exchanging gases and other matter in a beautiful, slow-motion collision. Eventually, this causes the galaxies to merge and form a single nucleus. If you look closely, you can see this process happening in the image above, which shows five galaxies known collectively as Stephan’s Quintet. The middle two galaxies are involved in a merger. There are two bright spots of light very close to each other, and two fainter tails swirling off to the top and the bottom. Inside those tails, huge numbers of new stars are being born:one of the neat side-effects of galactic mergers.

Oh! And the best part? At least for me, because I hadn’t heard about this before? Grunsfeld also explained that Earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be involved in the same kind of dance with the Andromeda Galaxy. If and when we do collide with Andromeda, things could get pretty weird. Both the Earth and the Sun are likely to get spun out into the boondocks of the new, bigger galaxy, where—if anyone is still there to see it—the night sky would burn a hundred times brighter with the light of all those extra stars. Don’t worry, though. We’ve still got a couple of billion years to prepare for it.

If you weren’t there on Wednesday in Chicago (and really, what are the odds you were?), you might enjoy this video of the first spacewalk on the 2009 repair mission.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Inkling really likes stories about space.

(a lake in Guinea)

I nearly spat out my coffee when I read this headline: Korean Researchers to Clone Sept. 11 Rescue Dog.

But it’s true. And it gets SOOO much stranger.

First off, the dog in question, a 15 year old ailing German shepherd named Trakr, is winner of BioArts International’s Golden Clone Giveaway contest. Here’s a video of Trakr’s story which explains why he’s the winner: it vacillates between being TOTALLY surreal and TOTALLY weepy (just wait until the end; I dare you not to get a bit misty).

The contest is run under the umbrella of BioArt’s ”Best Friends Again” program. Yes that’s right, as in let’s be best friends again after you, my dearly beloved dog, pass away.

You see, BioArts, a bioengineering company in California, held a competition to find the world’s most “clone-worthy” dog. The winner, whomever the lucky hound be, got to be cloned for free. And that lucky winner happened to be Trakr, who made himself a hero locating the last human survivor under 10 meters of debris at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11.

(The whole Trakr story is WAY more endearing than just that. Turns out Trakr was a retired police dog from the Halifax Regional Police force when his handler Constable Jamie Symington decided to call in “sick” so that he and Trakr could venture down to NYC to save some lives. You can see photos of the hero hound (and his mildly hunky handler)here.)

Well Trakr already escaped death once: Jamie saved him from the police dept.’s policy to euthanise its retired canines. Sadly (and by sadly I mean heart-crushingly weepy) today Trakr can no longer use his hind legs due to “a degenerative neurological disorder that is linked to exposure to toxic smoke at the site” reports Chosunilbo, the Korean newspaper.

Within the next month, BioArts will send a sample of Trakr’s somatic cell genes to Dr. Hwang Woo-suk’s lab so that the previously disgraced Korean scientist can clone the diseased dog. Trakr the puppy will be due in November. If it’s a go, then it appears that the dog’s genes and doc’s rep will both get reprieve. 

This is especially confusing given the carcinogenic qualities of other red dyes in food (do you remember all the schoolyard urban legends surrounding the color of ketchup chips? They chilled my eight year old bones).

But red yeast rice, that lends peking duck its appetizing burnished color, dramatically cuts the risk of heart disease and cancer in patients according to a recent study in the American Journal of Cardiology. In fact the red yeast even outdoes statins at the job.

Crazy talk. I know. 

Except that red yeast rice has been used by the Chinese for over a thousand years as a herbal medicine and spice. If a country has the smarts to invent noodles, don’t you think they can figure out when a flame colored yeast keeps illness at bay? I do. 

Well, I’ve just come across what may be the most bizarre, intimate and gross animal pairing yet: the chicken and the gecko.

Some poor Aussie doctor was cooking himself some eggs when lo and behold there was a dead little GECKO INSIDE THE EGG. Yeah. Ew. And as if to read our minds and in a feeble attempt to allay them “health authorities say the discovery is nothing to be alarmed about” according to ,a href=http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/05/16/2246597.htm>ABC News.

Like any good confused and fascinated citizen he took some pics and made his egg into a headline.

Now I know you’re asking yourself HOW HOW does this happen. Well, the dominant theory at Australia’s Egg Corporation is that the GECKO CLIMBED UP THE CHICKEN’S CLOACA. The question remains: why???? 

Needless to say, no matter how many scrumptious desserts we stuffed down his gullet, and how many meals we coerced him into joining, he couldn’t shed his guilt about frolicking around the city with us when he should have been at the lab getting blisters from all his pipetting.

At one point he cracked: I have to go, he pleaded. I have lab guilt, he admitted. And then muttered something about being an ex-catholic.

And so inspired was I by this admission that I decided to make a T-shirt for him to that effect that I’m now selling at The Inkstand.

But I have to clarify: lab guilt is in no way the exclusive property of ex-catholics. From what I can tell, it applies to any person who has experiments to operate and science to see to. And to be fair, us un-lab-bound people who cherish and love our scientist friends, should be more sympathetic to their plight. So, if you see someone wearing this t-shirt, gently approach them to gage their interest in joining you at the pub, but whatever you do DO NOT pressure them if they decline. It is your job as their supportive friend to understand their quandary and slowly back away leaving them to their martyrdom. How else will the best science get done in this world?

Men’s “I’ve Got Lab Guilt” Tee. $22
Women’s Lab Guilt American Apparel Tee $22

As I’ve wandered around New York city lately a couple things have struck me as being relevant to the self-aware science geek. Here’s the first. More to come.

For one, I went to New York magazine‘s shopping pages to see what pretty things were for sale and where. There I came across a Design*Sponge‘s take on the purdiest things to take home. And lo and behold item number 105 out of 126 on her Shop-A-Matic list was a “Science series decanter” on sale at Clio in Soho for a whopping $334 (actually that’s for the small one. The large one is $485). Now this is great because it means that science is trendy but it’s also stupid because only a fashion slave douchebag would buy this item for a small fortune when you can get the real deal for $7.95 from Edmund Scientific’s. That one’s 1000ml so it should fit a bottle of wine just fine. But if you want an even larger one to hold your wine in a slightly prettier fashion get the 2000ml one from 4Physics.com for $18.30.

Can you tell I’m hungry?

Anyways. If any of those restaurants she visits are parts of national chains, she will soon (Saturday) have the opportunity to check the calorie count of all her foods conveniently in the store before ordering/purchasing. For New York, ever the health maverick - what with it’s Big City smoking ban and trans fat ban - is trying to force all restaurants with at least 15 chains nationwide to display calorie counts on menus. The restaurants aren’t liking it and there’s been some legal rigmarole over when the requirement is going into action but some stores have started doing it anyways - like Starbucks.

So yes, you can finally see exactly how many calories you save by trying the gummy low fat muffin compared to its oil-infested neighbor.

The question remains whether it will change people’s eating habits and, erm, actually combat obesity as argued by the lawyers upholding the regulation against challenges from the New York Restaurant Association.

Personally, I’d like to see this kind of calorie-labeling trend take off.......and push restaurants into offering slightly healthier options and, MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, smaller portion sizes. Many obesity researchers and eating psychology experiments suggest that our obesity crisis is owes much gratitude to the inflation of standard meal sizes.

This is something that restaurants could easily tackle. For example, the Starbucks Oat Fudge bar (so delicious...have you had one?) weighs in at 440 calories. But half of one would suffice beautifully. I mean, I kind of feel ill eating a whole one (this does not stop me - curse of fat gene). One could offer a similar treatment to those cookies and scones and loaf slices that are approximately the size of my head.

It’s a great business model: they could offer half the amount of food, but drop the price by just 20% and display an attractively low calorie count. Nice. I think we’re on to something here.....

Now INN designs has introduced some Periodic Rings that up the ante. By several thousands of dollars. But what else do you expect from a solid silver, gold or platinum ring? If you’re serious about pledging your allegiance to chemistry, perhaps this is the way to do it.

They kind of resemble men’s signet rings. So I’m thinking you get three in one: a clever periodic table reference, an artistically sculpted hunk of precious metal, and something to press into hot wax to seal those scrolls you use to invite people over for some weekend wine and cheese. Oh and also: Forget the plebeian brass knuckles; these pricey suckers will definitely leave a dent in your molester’s eye socket.

VIA Notcot

Well the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. And it’s attempting to flatten on Ms. Chloe Marshall, a plus-size model from England, reigning Miss Surrey (a county just south of London).

Ms. Marshall is 5’10 and 176 pounds (or so the US papers say), giving her a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25.3. The “normal” range is 18 - 25. She’s not exactly obese - in fact she would have to be 210 pounds to be technically obese. Chloe is spoutin’ lots of curvy girl power and frankly, she’s pretty hot, so more power to her.

But one Ms. Monica Grenfell, a dietitian and columnist for the UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, thinks that Chloe is a v. bad role model. If you don’t care to read the whole article then I’ll give you some choice snippets:

“It would send an appalling - and very dangerous - message to other young women that it’s OK to be fat.... Chloe is a stark reminder that obesity is now virtually normal in our society - and we should all be hanging our heads in shame.....She is an ambassador not for the beautiful larger lady as she’d have us believe but a poster girl for diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and all the other devastating and potentially fatal health problems that are caused or exacerbated by obesity. “

Now I must return to the fact that Chloe ain’t obese. Whether she’ll end up obese in later life is another question (the girl is only 17), but it is certainly not a forgone conclusion. Ms. Grenfell says that Chole’s BMI is 26.03 (she obviously has slightly different information about her weight). Whatever. While BMI certainly isn’t the be all end all measure of health, at 25.3 or 26.03 it’s clear that Chloe is very slightly overweight (by 2 to 7 pounds based on a normal upper limit of 24.9).

Of course Ms. Grenfell, the DIETITIAN says that Chloe should have a BMI of 20 - or about 140 pounds. This is unabashedly wrong. I’d expect a profession to know that. Of course this is the woman who wrote “5 Days to a Flatter Stomach.” And, more recently, “Crash Diet: Lose 7 Pounds in 7 Days.”

Oh blah. Blah blah. We can’t win, can we? You’re either glorifying skinniness, or fatness AND FOR GOD’S SAKE LET’S THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN. The simple fact is that Chloe is a weeee bit overweight and many models are a weee bit underweight. When we start praising “curves” on a 250 pound 5’4” woman (BMI 42.9) or the “elegance” of some 5’11” chick who only weighs 95 pounds (BMI 13.2) then we should get worried.

APOE - or apolipoprotein E - is a normal compound that transports cholesterol around the blood and seems also to be responsible for depositing plaques in the brains of AD patients. Fun.

My grandmother AD it, so it’s not exactly shocking that I carry the risk factor. What’s left to be determined is whether there is anything we can do about it. AD is linked to high blood pressure, cholesterol, high fat diet, diabetes, head injuries, lack of exercise, low education level and mental activity (the use it or lose it angle).

So here’s the extra funny part. I also have two copies of the “risk” allele for the fat gene FTO - discovered last April by a team of UK researchers as they were exploring massive cohorts of diabetics. FTO is widely lauded as the first widespread fat gene - all the other ones were random freaky mutation that only appeared in a couple of people.  16% of people in the research cohorts had two copies of the fat gene, weighing an average of 3 kilos more with a 67% increased risk of being obese. The effects were seen starting from just seven years old (ironically, when I started to pudge out. It’s hilarious to be able to see yourself so directly in research studies).

To sum up: I have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (normal for women is about 17% lifetime risk - mine is 29%) and two copies of a gene that make it harder for me to avoid the AD risk factors - obesity, diabetes etc. Fun! So fun! Thanks Mom and Dad!

That’s my news. I have to go not eat now.

Do you see the beautiful circle of caffeinated life going on here? Do you?!? 

It’s kind of like Project Runway for chefs - each episode they have to do two very difficult cooking challenges - limited time, budget, weird ingredients etc - and have them judged by some of the best chefs in the world. One of the challenges in Season 3 was to take classic American food, including as meatloaf, chicken a la king, cabbage rolls, lasagna, mac and cheese, tuna casserole, frank and beans, and make them LOWER CHOLESTEROL. Not lower fat or saturated fat or calories, but lower CHOLESTEROL.

This irketh me. Mostly because it’s wrongity wrong wrong. Let me explain.

For years and years doctors had noted that people with high total cholesterol had more heart attacks. This lead to the logical conclusion that by EATING less DIETARY cholesterol one could drop your BLOOD cholesterol. Remember when everything said “cholesterol free” and our dads were told to stay WELL clear of high cholesterol foods such as eggs?

Well it turns out that was all kind of wrong. Because EATING cholesterol seems to have little impact on the ratio of good:bad cholesterol (high density lipoprotein: low density lipoprotein), which is actually a much stronger indicator of heart disease risk than total cholesterol. Indeed, many nutrition scientists argue that it is eating the trans and saturated fats (not cholesterol) that bumps up blood cholesterol and skews the ratio to the bad. Check out the summary of the situation at this 2000 paper published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Did I mention that was a 2000 paper...eight years ago? This is not new science and frankly I was kind of appalled that the Top Chef dudes haven’t figured that out. I realize their job is NOT to make healthy food, but fuck-off tasty food, but come on. The balance of evidence today is pointing to the fact that a diet high in artificial fats, saturated fats and traditional vegetable oils (canola and corn) and low in olive oil, fish (the omega-3 etc) is really driving heart disease risk. And SOMEBODY on the production team should have figured this out.

I probably wouldn’t have been so cheesed had not the judges singled out one dude for using lobster in his dish. Per 100 gram serving, lobster has 90 calories and 0.9 grams of total fat total...but it has 95 mg of cholesterol (about half an egg’s worth). For comparison, 100 grams of skinless, boneless chicken breast has 110 calories and 1.24 grams of fat....but just 58 mg of cholesterol. We’re theoretically supposed to limit consumption to 300 mg per day.

So by the CHOLESTEROL method, lobster is a sin indeed. But if - as science can now tell us - that EATING cholesterol in food, doesn’t functionally RAISE cholesterol in the blood, then I say the lobster is actually the healthier food. Fewer calories, saturated fat and more uber-health omega-3s (yes, yes there is the PRICE problem, but that’s another blog post, isn’t it?)

The public has surely been jerked around by the evolving science of dietary fats: what’s good, what’s bad and how much should we eat of ‘em. Helping people to understand these changes is IMPERATIVE. A show like Top Chef - with it’s superstars (Oh Padma the beautiful) and high entertainment value - is a prime opportunity to teach these very facts. I am INCREDIBLY disappointed that they just added to the confusion.

But I still love the show. That Padma, I tell you.

A recent analysis of your population suggests that, unless there are fewer deaths from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements, you and your buddies are never going to recover. Collisions killed 24 of the 67 right wales reported dead (that’s reported only) between 1970 and 2007. Scientists argue over how to fix the problem. Avoid certain areas, re-route shipping channels, just plain slow down...all of these may help. Except the slowing down; a 90,000 ton ship doesn’t have to move that fast to be lethal.

But slowing down DOES make it easier to avoid the whales. If anyone is looking or LISTENING that is. And now they can.

Scientists at Cornell’s Ornithology Lab (yes, that means birds, but who cares) are piloting a project whereby buoys floating around the waters off Massachusetts (and especially in the shipping lanes) detect the sounds of right whales, triangulate their location and then broadcast it to ship captains. It’s called the Right Whale Listening Network and you can enjoy their terrifying interactive graphics and pretty pictures.

Of course the ship captains still have to CARE about the info when they get it, but if some regulatory intermediary is FORCING them to watch and then FINING them millions of dollars if they don’t comply, it might work. Happy Momma Right Whale.

(PS. Right whales are called right whales cause they float to the surface when dead, making them easier to harvest..hence the “right” whale to go after. Huh)

Here’s the subhead: “Sea and reptile motifs are big for the home this spring, but a popular show on Charles Darwin gives them extra resonance. Danny Sinopoli examines the Victorian naturalist as modern-day style maker”

And sure enough Danny dearest goes on to mention that there are some really nice silver lizard napkin rings, turtle-shaped boxes with removable shell lids and crocodile picture frames out this season. Weighty desk clocks, tripod floor lamps and wood and leather campaign chairs round out the look.

I quote: “the look and trappings of Darwin’s world are all the rage this spring.” In part this trend is inspired by the traveling exhibition ”Darwin: The Evolution Revolution“ that blessed the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago with its presence before moving to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum where it will continue until August 4th.

Frankly, snot has been on my mind in that cloying way that makes me suspect it might literally be spreading through my brain.

So now that I’m coming out of the cold (I’ve moved into the dry cough to the wet cough to the annoying-everybody-in-the-office cough) I’ve become slightly philosophical about my snotty state. What happened??

Well according to the CDC when your nose and sinus get infected with germs your nose makes clear mucus in an attempt (feeble in my case) to wash away said germs. This mucus is clear. After a couple days (this would have landed me on precious Good Friday - the first long weekend of the Canadian year) your body’s immune cells fight back. Apparently this battle changes the mucus to a white or yellow color - I have no idea why. This is what the CDC writes next: “As the bacteria that live in the nose grow back, they may also be found in the mucus, which changes the mucus to a greenish color.” Which begs the question, if they’re normal happy nose bacteria then why isn’t my snot always green. Say what?

So lucky for me Dr. Rod Moser has the answer in this post from WebMD: “After sitting in a congested nasal passage all night, mucous becomes stagnant....just like a green pond.” Eeenteresting, if not absolutely foul to think about. But Dr. Moser does go on to drill home the message that green snot ‘snot bad news. And just because it’s green doesn’t mean you need to bully your Doctor into prescribing you or your child antibiotics.

Still, where does the color green come from? Well. It comes from the color wheel. A New Scientist article explains that two of the common types of human nasal bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas pyocyanea take on a a golden yellow and blue hue respectively. Mix them together and let them fester in a congested nasal passage and what do you get? Grotty green snot.  It’s practically art. And if that isn’t a truly enlightened view of your head cold, well I’ll just go jump in a lake. 

Morris also made a film called “Gates of Heaven” about the pet cemetery business. It’s pretty odd. Or shall we say, the people who feel passionately about pet cemeteries are pretty odd. Of course this brings up the question, what DO you do with your pet after they die. There are the obvious choices: burial in either the backyard, illegally in the favorite park, in a proper pet cemetery or scattered as ashes wherever you choose.

Alternatively (and I do mean alternatively) you could:

Have them stuffed. Nothing says eternal love like a taxidermied tabby cat perched upon the mantle

Have them stuffed and ROBOTICIZED. If a life-life expression isn’t lively enough for you, add some animatronics to your stuff pet. Have them sit on their favorite kitchen chair and paw at your arm for dinner....the options are endless.

Or...or....USE THEIR FUR TO KNIT A SWEATER. The closest thing to snuggling up to Fido? Of course if you have a small cat, this might only make a hat or single mitten. Start collecting stray hairs now.

Here’s a silver bullet - if you’re in Computer science that is. SCIgen randomly generates an entire computer science research paper (complete with graphs and figures) at the click of a button. All you have to do is fill in the five author fields.

For example, the trio behind inky circus came up a paper titled On the Visualization of Hierarchical Databases.

Here’s the abstract. Can I just say, who knew we had it in us?

In recent years, much research has been devoted to the visualization of XML; however, few have deployed the investigation of spreadsheets. Given the current status of classical archetypes, end-users daringly desire the refinement of the partition table. We construct a heuristic for autonomous information, which we call Emu. Such a claim is usually an extensive mission but fell in line with our expectations.

As you can see the results are pretty spiffy - which explains how three randomly generated papers made their way to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in Orlando in 2005. The 13 minute movie about the hoax, Near Science, can be viewed here. 

A multitude of clinical trials have tested probiotics for both the prevention and treatment of allergies. This review from January 2008 from The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that, yes, probiotics do indeed help prevent allergies, but not actually treat them. Fair enough.

It’s possible that breastfed babies get more probiotics from their mother’s milk, which might explain why breastfed babies are less likely to develop allergies. Another theory on the breast-allergy relationship is that eating food proteins (peanut, pollen, egg, dairy) via breast milk (ie mother eats it and it is transmitted to baby through breast milk) might actually help the baby become tolerant as opposed to allergic to the protein (Here is a neat little study from Nature Medicine on mice that showed just that).

Of course the studies here can be a bit conflicting. The most recent suggest that breastfeeding for 4 to 6 months decreases risk of allergies and asthma, but continuing after that seems to increase risk. Weirdly.

Now another prong to the “Breast Is Best” movement is emerging: the added probiotics from breastfeeding might help babies regulate their weights. A follow up of 49 babies from a large Finnish study that was originally testing the probiotics-allergy connection has revealed that those who had higher levels of Bifidobacteria (good and found in many yogurts) and lower levels of Staphylococcus aureus (bad) were less likely to be overweight at 7 years old. Which kind of fits with the observation that allergies and obesity are linked...any may even provide the mechanism that everyone is searching for…

Now you might get all fusty and dig up this paper, which found little connection between childhood obesity and adult obesity (only significantly predicted adult fatness after age 13..), but all told, the story that is emerging on the potential importance of healthy gut bacteria, even from a very early age, is enough to make you wanna feed your child with and then bathe them in raw milk (errr, sort of).

But it’s true. They really do, according to a recent study out of the Minnesota Stroke Initiative that found that cat-less souls had a 40 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease.

Here’s what the lead researcher, who owns a cat, had to say in Twincities.com: “There may be an effect even on blood pressure but we haven’t looked at that. It could clearly have a beneficial effect that we don’t completely understand at this point.”

The study didn’t find such a protective effect in dog owners, but I don’t know. Dogs keep me pretty happy too. 

They also play some, er, weird stuff. Canadians, you know what I mean. For example, take this AMAZINGLY dorky song about the planet Venus from Jerry Jerry and the Sons of the Rhythm Orchestra, sent to us by Inkycircus gal, Simone. We here at the circus are, of course, big fans of science related musical offerings (nerdcore hip hop, bestest science pop songs and old school science educational songs) and this song certainly doesn’t disappoint....."it rains all day, rains all day, rains all day concentrated sulphuric acid.”