Eggs, potato chips, sweet beverages, and plain old water are among the things science suggests consuming to best beat a hangover, according to Adam Martin in The Atlantic Wire. Matrin quotes a George Mason University researcher’s “terrifying little gem about where that hangover headache comes from”:

The body’s organs will attempt to replenish their own water, usually by stealing water from the brain, which causes it to decrease in size and pull on the membranes which connect it to the skull, which in turn results in a headache.

If true: yikes.

Like the philosopher Bertrand Russell doubting the existence of the table he’s sitting at, scientific research continues to demonstrate that “the world we perceive is not an identical copy of the physical world,” whatever the latter may actually be. Writes Travis Riddle in Scientific American last month:

Hills appear steeper when we are wearing heavy backpacks, objects appear closer when we desire them, and, as shown here, the world appears larger when we are in a smaller body. Although the world does not actually physically change in these ways, our mind seems to be constructed in such a way that allows a surprising degree of flexibility in perceiving the physical nature of the world.

(link via @GammaCounter)

Here’s a National Geographic photo by Mark Thiessen of scientists in South Carolina drawing blood from horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs! About 20 percent of each crab’s blood is drawn from its equivalent of a heart. (The blood is blue due to copper in the liquid’s oxygen-carrying protein, hemocyanin—it’s like the iron-based hemoglobin in humans.) Then the scientists give each crab a big cookie and return it the sea.¹

Biomedical companies use the crab blood to screen for fatal bacteria in the human bloodstream, including E. coli and Salmonella.

So sensitive is the test derived from the proteins that it can detect amounts as slight as one part per trillion. That’s like one grain of sugar in an Olympic-size pool, says John Dubczak of test producer Charles River, Endosafe.

(link via kateoplis)

Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published research this week in Science on how search engines are altering our memory.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

(link via disinformation)

First we hear that fish use tools. Now we hear that birds use grammar. That’s right: birds are more eloquent than the majority of Americans.

(link via Language Log)

A diver has snapped what might be the first photo of a fish using a tool in the wild—a foot-long blackspot tuskfish opening a clam by hitting it against a rock.

July 11, 2011 Update: There is debate among nerds over whether a stationary rock constitutes a tool in this case. It does. If a biped, such as a nerd, were to open a coconut with a large, heavy, flat object such as his forehead or a paving stone, you would call that object a “tool.” It needn’t be a sharpened flint or a corkscrew. It’s a general object being used for a specific, self-benefiting purpose. Let’s not handicap our underwater vertebrae brethern for having no limbs with which to wield Craftsman-like objects.

(link via @GammaCounter; photo via Coral Reefs/Scott Gardner via Wired)

The lead paragraph of Steven Shapin’s London Review of Books review of Ian Miller’s A Modern History of the Stomach:

Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal — his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself — but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted. Human digestion had become visible.

Fascinating!

(link via 3quarksdaily)

Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch are lead funders of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project launched by physics professor Richard Muller to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming. Last week, Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing that the project’s initial assesment, based on examining 32 millon of 1.6 billion bits of climate data, jibes with that consensus. Whoops!

Internet lore has it that the seed for the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind germinated when artist Pierre Bismuth posed a what-if scenario to director Michel Gondry: “You get a card in the mail that says: someone you know has just erased you from their memory.”

Zapping a memory? The stuff of movies! And it was, until the summer of 2007, when some scientists reported they’d done just that. Yadin Dudai and Reut Shema of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, with Todd Sacktor, a neuroscientist at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, irreversibly erased a specific long-term memory (the association of a sweet scent with illness) in the brains of lab rats. To force forgetfulness, they fiddled with a protein, found also in human brains, that drives memory.

Before this, one may have thought of memories in the brain like coins in a safe. But as Ed Young reports in Discover, the last decade of research on the brain and memory shows the process is not at all static. “[I]t takes active and unrelenting effort to keep our memories intact,” he writes. “Even long-term memories are constantly on the verge of being erased.”

(screencap from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind via oyemiamor’s Flickr page)

Nuclear testing in the ’50s and ’60s made it possible to pinpoint someone’s age to within 18 months. All that’s needed is a tooth.

Radiocarbon (carbon-14) exists naturally everywhere in the world but levels spiked dramatically, then spread evenly throughout the atmosphere, after above-ground nuclear testing ramped up in 1955. The radiocarbon gets locked into human teeth when the enamel forms at age 12¹. At that point, a tooth can be analyzed with mass spectrometry and its radiocarbon levels matched up with annual records of atmospheric radiocarbon levels. It’s much more accurate than determining age via skeletal remains or tooth wear, which is only accurate in adults to within five to 10 years.

(info via two footnotes for the Wikipedia entry on carbon-14)

¹ This means the technique doesn’t work for people born before 1943. (1955 - 12 = 1943.) [back]

Recently, I was boiling water in my kitchen and thinking about Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. I was imagining that he, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist, could puzzle out a way to improve the speed and efficacy of an action as superficially simple as bringing water to a boil.

I’ve been reading a lot about Myhrvold via the press for his vanity project, a six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook entitled Modernist Cuisine, which he self-published this month. What I find most interesting about him appeared in a sidebar to the article on him in the March issue of Wired: he and his lab staff found ways to prepare food with scientific and medical equipment.

For example, they used an ultrasonic bath, more commonly used to clean lab equipment or jewelry, to brew tea. They also used ultrasound, in concert with other nontraditional techniques, to make “the perfect French fry.” (See the first six paragraphs of the Wired article for details on that.) They extracted weird ingredients—such as pea butter, the small amount of fat in peas—using a centrifuge. They concentrated flavor without heat by using a freeze-dryer, developing ingredients such as prawn powder. And they used an autoclave, typically used to sterilize medical equipment, to make stock and soups.

Science!

(photo via the Modernist Cuisine press kit)

Mathmaticians at the University of Limerick in Ireland theorize that replacing that little plastic dingus you find in cans of certain dark beers (such as Guinness [shown above] and Boddingtons) with a little paper dingus will result in beer with a better head when poured.

Ah, beer science. More, please.

(link via the Atlantic Wire; photo via Flickr user slworking2)

Dr. Anthony Atala, a regenerative medicine specialist at Wake Forest University, has developed experimental techniques to “print” human organs, layer by layer, using human cells as the “ink.”

At the TEDMED 2009 conference, he noted that printing a two-chamber heart takes about 40 minutes and another four to six hours for the muscle cells to contract. He said he was also able to print miniature versions of kidneys that could produce urine. And during a TED2011 talk yesterday, Atala reportedly printed a kidney onstage with a 3D printer.

It’s heady stuff: sci-fi approaching reality. It makes me think of that scene from The Fifth Element in which the skeleton/musculature of Milla Jovovich is, like, laser-printed in a lab, layer by layer, from the cells in a lump of organic material.

(lead via John Hodgman, who Tweeted: “Now at #TED a doctor just literally printed out a human kidney. I hope we are all going to get one in our gift bag.”)

I’ve been allergic to peanuts since I was a kid so I’m reading with interest Jerome Groopman’s medical dispatch in the current New Yorker (unfortunately only available in abstract form online) about the source of food allergies—and why they’re increasing in the U.S.

I’m fascinated by scientific mysteries like this. People have a genetic predisposition to food allergies but no one’s identified the specific genes. There’s no biological explanation for food allergies to exist—from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense for a hunter-gatherer to be allergic to nuts, seeds or fish. Yet recently, food allergies have been rising sharply. Peanut allergies alone have doubled in the past 10 years. Why? Probably our environment and diet, writes Groopman.

Scientists now believe early exposure to problematic foods may help prevent allergies down the road, a theory that runs counter to common practice. As for the rise in allergies, scientists are investigating the possibility that germ-free environments may make children susceptible to allergies. There are also some geography and diet-based theories. Vitamin D, its production in humans promoted by sunshine, may reduce development of allergies; doctors in cold areas of the U.S. write three to four times as many epinephrine prescriptions for food allergies than doctors in warm areas. And eating more animal fat (and less beta-carotene, found in fresh fruits and vegetables) may contribute to inflammatory responses in the body.

It’s an engrossing article; if you have a food allergy, grab a copy of The New Yorker and read it.

In their 1966 book, Intelligent Life in the Universe, astronomers/astrophysicists I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan wrote:

Imagine the universe is an unbaked raisin cake. (Worse analogies have been made.) Each raisin represents a galaxy. The cake is placed in an oven and, after a while, it rises. The volume of the cake has increased—that is, the “universe” has expanded—but, in addition, there has been an increase in the distance from any raisin to any other raisin. If we were to stand on a raisin and view the other raisins, it would appear that all the other raisins were receding from us....

I recently read Janet Maslin’s review of physicist Brian Greene’s new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, and noticed that he, too, makes a universe-as-food analogy:

Think of the universe as a gigantic block of Swiss cheese, with the cheesy parts being regions where the inflaton [sic] field’s value is high and the holes being regions where it’s low. That is, the holes are regions, like ours, that have transitioned out of the superfast expansion and, in the process, converted the inflaton field’s energy into a bath of particles, which over time may coalesce into galaxies, stars, and planets. In this language, we’ve found that the cosmic cheese acquires more and more holes because quantum processes knock the inflaton’s value downward at a random assortment of locations. At the same time, the cheesy parts stretch ever larger because they’re subject to inflationary expansion driven by the high inflaton field value they harbor. Taken together, the two processes yield an ever-expanding block of cosmic cheese riddled with an ever-growing number of holes.

Of course, I’ve removed these excerpts from their contexts and each author has a different point to prove. But in both cases, science-nerds are clearly attempting to dumb-down complicated concepts for the average reader, who understands things like food and stuff.

For clarity and entertainment value, I give the edge to Sagan, with his Spam-like repetition of “raisin” (even better: imagining him speaking it in his turtlenecked Cosmos voice), his great “worse analogies” semi-apology, plus the idea that I’m standing on a raisin, viewing other raisins, while I’m inside a cake.

Yet I must tip my hat to Greene’s great phrases “cheesy parts” and “cosmic cheese,” which despite confusing overlap with the whole moon-is-made-of-cheese idea, sound like phrases from Wallace and Gromit’s adventures in Nick Park’s short, A Grand Day Out.

Some college student in Canada wore the same jeans for more than a year, then had them tested for bacteria:

The results showed high counts of five different kinds of bacteria in the denim, but nothing that posed a health hazard.

Human Ecology professor Rachel McQueen said the highest recordings of bacteria were found in the crotch of the jeans at 10,000 units per square centimetre, with lower readings in the back and front of the pants.

But the colonies were normal skin bacteria and did not include dangerous E. coli.

Pro tip from the student: if your jeans get stinky after a few months and you don’t want to wash them, thow ’em in the freezer.

(link via Fark)

Most rings bore me. This one does not. It’s grown in a lab from the couple’s own bone cells. A diamond may be forever but nothing says “I love you” more sincerely than teeth extracted for decorative purposes.

The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.

They then dissolve the bone mineral and extract the bone cells to go into the lab.

These are fed with nutrients and grown on a “scaffold” material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.

(link via 19o1 via bioart via a BBC News article from December 2006)

Nasser Peyghambarian, an optical scientist at the University of Arizona, has been developing holographic projections that move in real time—projections a person could circle and view at a variety of angles, just as he or she could circle a real object and view it at a variety of angles.

He and his colleagues have reached the point where they can record and display these 3D images on a 17" inch screen that refreshes every two seconds. As such, the images are small and crude, but so is Peyghambarian’s direct inspiration: the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” hologram from Star Wars.

He says:

From day one, I thought about the hologram of Princess Leia and whether it can be brought out of science fiction.

We have shown that creating a dynamic hologram of the size and resolution of Princess Leia is a reality.

(Nature link via Mashable via Coudal Partners)

A study that promoted a connection between autism and vaccines has been found to be an outright lie. From New York magazine today (and, like, 1,000 other sources that covered the same news):

One of the most famous flawed studies ever conducted, Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted 1998 paper that linked vaccines to autism has been found to be not a scientific error, but a deliberate lie. BMJ, a British medical journal, has just published its investigation of the matter and concluded that Dr. Wakefield purposely falsified his data. They report that he was contracted by lawyers determined to sue the vaccine manufacturers, regardless of scientific truth.

British authorities revoked Wakefield’s medical license back in May 2010, but the effects of his study persist on both sides of the Atlantic: Vaccination rates have hit record lows here in America, and measles rates have skyrocketed accordingly. It remains to be seen whether these new revelations about the Wakefield study will have any effect, or if they’ll be drowned out by the Jenny McCarthys of the world and their continuing campaign against childhood vaccination.

On a related note, I see that certainty in manmade climate change has risen from 90% via a U.N. panel in 2007 to 97% in a National Academy of Sciences survey from last June.

Scanning the comments for the New York and USA Today articles I linked to above gives me a headache. Average Internet-Article Commenter, please know that I recognize your right to doubt reasonably undoubtable things as long as you recognize mine to call you a fucking cretin.

With millions of years worth of plant and animal remains (and lots of other stuff) lying around, has the Earth gotten heavier or bulkier? Not appreciably, say Bill and Rich Sones in their “Strange But True” column from today’s Plain Dealer:

[T]he Earth is pretty much a closed system. Some interplanetary cosmic dust and rocky meteorites do enter, but light gases like helium and hydrogen escape from the atmosphere for a mass-reducing effect. But these are miniscule compared to the Earth’s 13 septillion pounds. Yet as organisms die and are born, a vast recycling of elements occurs, says geologist Tony Foyle of Penn State University-Erie. “Calcium in my left tooth may have spent time inside a volcano in the western Pacific, or in a coral reef in a tropical sea many millions of years ago. Carbon dioxide I exhale today may, within a few thousand years, end up in the shell of a limpet (not yet born) on the rocky shores of Ireland,” he says.

We know now, from brain science, that seeing is not a direct register of what meets our eyes but a fast mental construction that squares sensations with memory and desire: what we believe and wish reality to be.

Peter Schjeldahl, from “The Flip Side,” an article on the Ghent Altarpiece, from The New Yorker, November 29, 2010

Smithsonian magazine details the top-ten daily consequences of having evolved.

In short: our unpredictable cells, hiccups, backaches, ill-supported intestines, choking, a lack of body hair, useless goosebumps, extra-large brains (which I suppose also goes in the “benefits of having evolved” column), obesity and a bunch of miscellaneous vestigial stuff.

(link via 3quarksdaily)

Which carrier—FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service—is the most gentle with your packages? The USPS, according to a really nerdy experiment conducted by Popular Mechanics.

(link via TAPPED, the group blog of The American Prospect)

I wouldn’t label myself an introvert, necessarily, but I liked this article on introverts by Laurie Helgoe in Psychology Today. An excerpt:

According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test administered to two randomized national samples, introverts make up 50 percent of the U.S. population. The MBTI definition of introversion—a preference for solitude, reflection, internal exploration of ideas vs. active engagement and pursuit of rewards in the external/social world—correlates closely with the Big Five description. But the results still surprise; if every other person is an introvert, why doesn’t the cultural tone reflect that?

It’s not just that we overestimate the numbers of extraverts in our midst because they’re more salient. The bias of individuals is reinforced in the media, which emphasize the visual, the talkative, and the sound bite—immediacy over reflection.

How about that? If you combine the world’s countries with the 50 states (as if each state was its own country), New York, Wyoming, Ohio and the U.S. rank among the top-15 most successful. The Human Development Index, compiled by The Economist, gives “a snapshot of a country’s success by combining three important indicators: health, education and wealth.”

(link via what i learned today)

I enjoyed this Times article on the human brain, simply explained by Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, whose beard appears capable of comfortably housing a family of wrens. His tempting lead:

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly.

Jonah Lehrer of Wired suggests that we may enjoy a homemade dinner more than a less healthy heat-and-serve meal because of the effort we invest in producing it.

Golf balls take at least a century to decompose and release a lot of heavy metals as they do, according to researchers at the Danish Golf Union. Three-hundred million balls are lost or discarded in the U.S. each year, thousands line the bottom of Loch Ness and the ones Alan Shepard hit on the moon back in ’71 (his six-iron drove ’em more than a mile) have likely degraded due to extreme temperatures.

Tim Wu, an author and a professor at Columbia Law School, asks a good question in a Paris Review Daily post this morning: are we cyborgs?

“We don’t actually have wires sticking out of our heads,” I say, “but if you have an iPhone in your pocket and a laptop on your bag you’re pretty close. You’ve already delegated your memory to Google and Wikipedia; Facebook is there to remind you who your friends are.”

Wu makes these points to a group of undergraduates from Oakland University in Michigan who “seem to accept the idea that we are already more machine than man without much resistance[.]”

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the word cyborg in 1960, soon after the creation of NASA, with a vision of a helper-organism that would free astronauts to explore. In the September issue of Astronautics that year, they explained:

The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.

If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.

This original meaning of cyborg has been inverted, and it illustrates a tired point—instead of using technology to free our attention and imagination, we trust our minds and memories to it. We may even favor it over our innate abilities to explore, communicate and remember. It’s part of us, though we remain less cinematic than man-machines like the Borg or the Terminator.

It reminds me that author William Gibson coined the word cyberspace (which shares a root with the word cyborg) to mean a “consensual hallucination” of data. Recently, the Pentagon added its own definition: “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

So, sure, we’re cyborgs, or at least we’re becoming them. Whether that’s a good thing, we’ll see.

December 9, 2010 Update: Jeremy Hsu wrote a nice article for LiveScience on the cyborgs that walk among us.

From a review of Jane Brox’s book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light:

...due to electric light pollution, “two-thirds of all Americans and half of all Europeans can no longer see the Milky Way, our own galaxy, in the nighttime sky.” According to [Brox,] the sight of it has become so unfamiliar to people that during the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, “emergency organizations [...] received hundreds of phone calls from people wondering whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of a ‘silver cloud’ (the Milky Way) had caused the quake.”

Photo taken behind my grandparents’ farmhouse, Delphos, Ohio, March 30, 2002, 9:42 p.m., 15-second shutter speed.

I.
What kind of bug was Gregor Samsa, the guy who wakes up one morning and finds himself turned into...what, exactly?

It depends on how one translates author Franz Kafka’s German. I learned it as either “monstrous insect,” which is vague (Mothra? An angry ladybug?) or “giant cockroach,” which was quaint until I moved to New York City (the Midwest has a low cockroach population).

Vladimir Nabokov, in a talk collected in “Lectures on Literature,” thought Gregor was a beetle that looked like this:

He explains:

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown.

....

In the original German text, the old charwoman calls him Mistkafer, a “dung beetle.” It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle.”

Not everyone agrees with this insect-assessment, Nabokov himself admitted.

II.
In my apartment’s kitchen, I’ve been having a slight issue with cockroaches. I have been committing acts of insecticide with Raid Max roach spray, which comes in a dark blue aerosol can, the subtitle of which is Mata Cucarachas. Once dispensed, it smells sweetly toxic, like lawn fertilizer, and as it settles, it smells of kerosene. I keep my kitchen clean, so it’s a mystery where these bugs are coming from. (Although, as noted above, I do live in New York City.) I seal all shelf-stable food in glass jars, Ziploc bags or plastic containers. I empty my trash and recyclable bins and bags often. I’ve kept the floors swept free of crumbs. I wash my dishes and don’t let them languish in the sink.

At work, in the sixth-floor kitchenette, people leave dishes in the sink even though there’s a small dishwasher right there that the kind folks from Office Services run every evening. Long ago, Office Services taped up a sign above the sink. It reads:

Please be courteous to your coworkers.

Place all dishes to be washed in the dishwasher.

Also, do not take kitchen utensils that don’t belong to you.¹

The sign was ignored. Today, someone taped up a sign, which I suspect was not sanctioned by Office Services, right next to the other sign. I appreciate the grammatical errors and the black-and-white cockroach photos included for illustration and emphasis:

Maybe I will name the cockroaches in my kitchen “Gregor.” Better yet, I will name them “Vladimir.”

III.
There’s a featured section on corn in the September issue of Food & Wine magazine, which I got in the mail yesterday. Most field corn in the U.S.—37 percent of the nearly 86.5 million acres planted (in 2009)—is grown to feed livestock. And the raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the world’s farmland and generates 20 percent of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to this Observer article from last week, which also proposes a solution to the “meat crisis”—eating insects.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at a university in the Netherlands and author of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper on the subejct, lays out what he sees as the advantages:

“The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.”

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can’t be dismissed as a crank. “Most of the world already eats insects,” he points out.² “It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don’t know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable.”³

Yes, insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and farming them produces far less greenhouse gas, methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia than livestock. But what red-blooded American would eat insects, except on a dare? We’d sooner eat our dogs.

I thought this especially after I glanced at insect sushi. One of the varieties mentioned in the original Telegraph article notes that the Argentine Cockroach recipe (“Cut open shell, scoop out meat and fry with butter. Replace in shell to serve on top of salad.”) “has no smell at all, but the texture of tender fish.”

Why should eating bugs be any weirder than eating fish, or a cow for that matter? Maybe because bugs are seen mostly as a nuisance, as noted above. (See also: mosquitos, midges, gnats, wasps and hornets, bedbugs, houseflies, lice, ticks, fruit flies, those parasitic worms that enter humans via their eyeball, etc.) I have never heard of a cow infestation, although clearly that’d be equal parts amusing and disgusting. I’m going to forgo eating bugs and stick with eating less meat.

¹ Yes, I work with some assholes. [back]
² Willingly, that is. 80 percent of the world’s nations, even. [back]
³ One of several reasons I don’t eat shrimp anymore. This is one of the others. [back]

I’m fascinated by the things science knows but doesn’t know why.

Take the study covered in this article from today’s New York Times about girls developing breasts as early as age 7 or 8. It recalls a rabble-rousing paper published in Pediatrics in 1997 that found signs of puberty in girls of that age were far more common than reported.

We’re told in the second graf about the “concern and heated debate” over whether girls are reaching puberty earlier (the headline writer [“First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls”] thinks they are) and why.

We’re told further down that we don't even know if there’s “an ideal age when girls should reach puberty” and, if there is, no one knows it.

And there appears to be a racial component to the newest study—news that the white study participants (possibly overweight ones, if I’m reading between the lines correctly) “clearly” are entering puberty earlier than expected—other studies have found that “black and Hispanic girls mature earlier than whites” but again—you guessed it—“[n]o one knows why.”

In fact, ignoring instances of the word “can” used instead of “does” or “is,” the author worked well to not repeat her weasel words and phrases (which, don't get me wrong, are necessary here). I count one each of “are thought,” “suspect,” “unproved,” “cautioned,” “probably,” “might,” “was possible” and “somewhat,” two counts each of “suggest” and “no one knows” and three instances of “may be/have.”

What do we know for sure about the age of puberty? It initially dropped because people ate better and we got some control over infectious disease. Why may it be dropping still? Who knows.

Yes, as children, we all thought that giraffes had long necks so they could eat the most tender leaves from the tops of trees with ease. But, as with many things, the truth may have more to do with power and sex.

Giraffes do eat from tall plants, but not often. During the dry season, when competition for food should be fiercest and eating from the top down should be an advantage, they eat from low shrubs. Female giraffes spend most of their time feeding with their necks horizontal. And both sexes feed faster and more often with their necks bent.

Also, if giraffe necks evolved for feeding, why haven’t their legs evolved to be longer instead? (Physiologically speaking, top-heavy things don’t make a lot of sense.)

Instead, scientists have suggested that “increased neck length has a sexually selected origin.”

Males fight for dominance and access to females in a unique way: by clubbing opponents with well-armored heads on long necks. Injury and death during intrasexual combat is not uncommon, and larger-necked males are dominant and gain the greatest access to estrous females. Males’ necks and skulls are not only larger and more armored than those of females’ (which do not fight), but they also continue growing with age.

There you have it. Bear in mind that this could be a more exciting way to teach children about natural selection and “the birds and the bees” than resorting to birds or bees or Mendel’s peas.

Regular exercise doesn’t appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting in cars, at desks and on the couch.

Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise.

(photo via the NYPL Digital Gallery)

A MIT lab has developed fibers that can detect and produce sound. Applications could include clothing that captures speech or, via acoustic imaging, monitors bodily functions such as blood flow.

“You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says [Noémie] Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” — an alternating current whose period is very regular — “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”