Recent Posts
Loud Noises, Big Plans
Return To Blog Listing
Stop by for my take on the news item of the day, including health, science, environmental, and condiment-related topics.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'science'
Your Love of Crabs Will Kill Us All
Congratulations, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Your research into blue crabs is going to poison the environment and kill us all. Sorry, what I meant to say was that UAB has made an exciting new discovery about a potential food source, and I'm ...
Hey, Doctors! Time to Feng Shui it Up!
So, the Mayo Clinic conducted a study to see how patients were affected by the rooms where they met with their doctors. (Not the exam rooms where they run all the tests on you, the rooms where you actually sit and talk with your doctor about what's w...
Chicks Are Inscrutable
And that's not just my opinion. It's backed up by science. Outside observers are better at reading the intentions of men than they are at figuring out what women are thinking.Indiana University conducted a study where observers watched clips from spe...
Born Leaders (Gossips/Flirts/Wallflowers, etc.)
According to studies, your role in (and the size of) your social network is a function of your genetic code. Whether you're the central hub in a network of interconnected acquaintances or an outlier with a few friends who don't know each other, your ...
Science Fiction? Media Hype? Both?
The University of Maryland got me all excited the way they were casually throwing around words like teleportation, but it's not as cool as you'd think. For one thing, it's only occurring one atom at a time, which isn't very useful for Star Trek style...
Silent Killers: Now with More Silence!
That's right, flying robot killers from the future are going to be more silent than ever before! That's robots who fly and kill people, not flying people who kill robots, by the way.Georgia Tech is working on making our unmanned aerial drones quieter...
They Won't Have To Hunt Us
So, we're using robots to help stroke victims regain their mobility. It makes sense. I wouldn't want to spend my day watching someone do boring, repetitive motions to rebuild their muscle strength. In fact, it's so boring and repetitive that the stro...
Is Your Pig Farm Too Gassy?
No, that's not a euphemism. Do you know what happens in pig finishing barns? I'm pretty sure you don't want to know. And I like bacon too much to ever find out. Still, I guess that they're pretty stinky places. A lot of time and effort has gone into ...
I Can't Believe It's Not Bone Marrow!
Well, actually it is bone marrow. It's just bone marrow that's created artifically, and not meant to be implanted into the human body. Still, it cranks out red and white blood cells just like the real thing, and that's Kind Of A Big Deal.If, like me,...
When is Earth not an Earth?
When it's a super-Earth. Don't get me wrong, the planet we live on is pretty super, but Ohio State University thinks that it's not the only type of planet that could support life. I'm not sure if it's "thinking outside the box" or wishful thinking. A...
Are Potatoes the New Brain Food?
They may not make you smart, but they will keep you from getting stupid... er. Your cognitive skills like attention, long- and short-term memory, spatial memory, and visual attention will all take a hit if you eliminate carbohydrates from your diet. ...
Slap Wraps as an Evolutionary Imperative
See also: acid-wash jeans, beanie babies, and those goddamn Wii Fits that are cropping up everywhere I look. They're all fads, but now Science offers the reason behind our societal obsession (and later abandonment) of the Latest Big Thing: we evolved...
Man was TOTALLY meant to play god.
Especially if he's a man from Belgium. Men from Ireland, not so much. And by "play god," I mean work with nanotechnology. Wait, what? Yeah, apparently if you're trying to work with objects on an atomic level, you're playing god (which isn't that outr...
Kick Unhappy Friends to the Curb
Also, the people at the center of social networks are happier.UC San Diego and Harvard Medical School are publishing research in the British Medical Journal discussing happiness spreading through social networks. No, they're not involving sites like ...
Anthropologists Check Out Ladybutts
At least, that's how they do it in Utah. Seriously. do you spend a lot of time worrying about a lady's waist-to-hip ratio? Because anthropologists in Utah do. But they're a little hung up on reality versus fantasy.First, they state that men prefer a ...
Plastics Are Just Straight Crazy
So the University of Wisconsin-Madison has issued a press release about plastics that isn't saying much. It's saying a lot of stuff I already knew--rah rah, plastics are great, plastics are in everything, plastics have some weird properties--but noth...
Vibrating Keeps You Slim (WARNING: May Contain Gratuitous Use of the Word "Bone")
Oh, the things they do to mice, in those science labs of theirs. Recent studies have shown that exposing mice to "high frequency and low magnitude mechanical signals" (read: vibrations) can keep them from developing fat, and also helps to regulate th...
You Could Do It In Your Sleep
Well, you could learn it while awake, and then sleep to be sure you formed strong memories about it. I'm a fan of sleep. I think it cures a lot of problems. That's why I'm not surprised by the University of Chicago's report that sleep can help you le...
What Bacteria and your Crazy Aunt Have in Common
They both love to knit, but you can actually see the hideous and useless (uselessly hideous? hideously useless?) sweaters that your aunt makes, while bacteria can weave things that are as useful as they are invisible to the naked eye. Did you know th...
You May Already Be Asleep
And not even know it. Your brain might just be waiting for one more segment to fall asleep before it shuts you down completely. Seriously.Have you ever wondered why you can't remember the exact moment that you go to sleep? That always seemed weird to...
What's REALLY Hiding in all that Dirt?
I don't know. Do you? Should either of us care?The Soil Science Society of America thinks we should care, and want to know why we aren't doing our part to learn about dirt. They've gone so far as to investigate why there is a declining number of soil...
One Step Closer to Cyborgs
Not that mimetic polymer alloy or whatever that the shape changing T-1000s were made of, but we're getting there. We've now developed organic microscopic wires that assemble themselves in water. They're called organic because they're derived from car...
Rock Dots
They're a big deal. No, really. A set of dots, or small impressions made in a rock, are apparently the earliest animal footprints ever found in the fossil record. Two parallel rows of small dots found in the rocks date back 570 million years, and sug...
And Beaten with a Rooping Iron
Let's talk about Worm Grunting, because it's completely awesome. You go into the woods, drive a stake into the ground, and then beat it with a rooping iron, which drives worms all around up to the surface. That, my friends, is worm grunting, and you ...
Snoring Children are Stupid Children
So sayeth the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. According to them, 2 out of every 3 children who snore have some kind of cognitive defecit. I want to know if they're looking at the chicken, or its egg.The study sounds like it was a rea...
Bad Behavior Is in the Genes; Jeans Not Entirely Free From Blame
So it turns out that criminals (that is to say, real criminals, not just bears with attitude problems) seek each other out socially. Yes, we already knew they all hang out together in college, but it looks like it starts even younger.Florida State Un...
Water Pirates from Outer Space: One Step Closer to Reality
The University of Alabama in Huntsville envisions a future where microwave ray guns harvest water from the moon and possibly Mars. The idea is to collect water in those locations so that our space missions don't have to bring their own water with the...
100 Years of Mixed Blessings
Nitrogen has been a pretty powerful tool, increasing crop yields on one hand and killing marine life on the other. But most of its impact wouldn't have been felt if it weren't for a 100-year-old process, the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammon...
Raising the Stakes for Graduate Students
Have you ever screwed something up so badly that you've wasted over a century worth of work? I hope not, but if you have, I hope that you stay the hell away from Auburn University (formerly the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama). They've...
5,000 Year-Old Unknown Substance
Twilight-Zone style twist ending: It's just glass! Glass is weird. My high-school chemistry teacher said it was just a super-slow-moving liquid. That explains why really old glass windows look all distorted, because the glass has been pulled downward...
