Weird Science

Yes, that's right folks, the end of the world is near, but at least we won't look silly wearing our N95 respirator masks.  No.  Thanks to Flu Fashion Respirators, we can now avoid swine flu and other plagues while looking like ... bandits from cheesy western movies! Or ... better yet ... hippie bandits!  And we can even get designer swine flu respirator masks for the family dog (never mind that dogs can't get the swine flu -- we wouldn't want them to feel left out). What could possibly go better with an over-hyped pandemic threat than fashion accessories?  This press release speaks for…

Researchers have grown a "Living Doll" that looks like some strange mix between Gumbi and a gingerbread man but is actually made of living cancer cells (see above).  According to the New Scientist, the technique used to grow the Gumbi Gingerbread Man "could allow drugs to be tested on more complex tissue structures," but they're pretty vague on how it might do that.  It has to do with the fact that the Cultured Gumbi Gingerbread Man is actually a complex 3-D structure made of multiple cell types, which means it's more similar to a human organ than individual cultured cells are (though it's…

Yesterday, one of my dogs got into a stash of chocolate (sigh), which had me up at 2am doing the dreaded hydrogen peroxide trick, since chocolate is toxic to dogs. When I complained about my night a friend sent me this link (!!) saying, Just be glad your dog didn't eat a kitchen knife (which is always something to be glad about).  The x-ray image in that story (left) reminded me that it was high time I posted this rom the Culture Dish archives:  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've always had a thing for animal x-rays. I had a…

I'm speaking at the ScienceOnline09 Conference in Durham, NC, today so I have little time to post, but I wanted to throw up this fun thing from the Boston Globe to keep everyone occupied while I'm away: "DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn't it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it's easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works." Try for yourself here.  I particularly like the rubber hand trick. […

Here's some good solid (and useful) science for you: Researchers in Liverpool have announced that "being pelted by a raw egg may result in eye injury." How they know: They studied the medical records of 18,651 patients who'd gone to an eye unit over the course of 14 months. Thirteen turned out to be egg attack victims. As the BBC reported: "The researchers warn that egg hurling, sometimes used as a form of protest or prank, is far from harmless. They point out, in the Emergency Medical Journal, that an egg has the same dimensions as a squash ball but carries even more weight when lobbed.…

I came across a Russian blog purporting to have photo evidence of an abandoned Soviet-era neuroscience lab outside Moscow, left in a real hurry for unknown reasons. I thought it might be a hoax or exaggeration, but after looking at the photos posted to the blog, even if it wasn't exactly true, the photos were amazing bits of neuro nostalgia. Many more pictures, go take a look. From Brusnichka.

In the movie The Princess Bride, the hero Wesley is attacked by fearsome Rodents Of Unusual Size (ROUS) in the fire swamp. Turns out, ROUS really exist! Example of a Princess-Bride-era ROUS Confirmed ROUS! A new species of rat, the size of a large cat, was confirmed during a scientific expedition earlier this year to the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea, in a remote region where people have rarely explored. The expedition was reported in National Geographic and yielded other new species of flora and fauna (like a tiny possum). "The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical…

As an admitted Sephora junkie, I've come across a lot of caffeine-laced cremes for sale that I thought were a rather ridiculous waste of money. A few examples are: - Bliss Fat Girl Slim and LoveHandler - Lancome High Resolution Eye Creme - Zirh Aftershave Creme - Ren Leg Gel But does infusing caffeine into the skin relay any real beauty benefits? A new study by Brazilian researchers, published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, suggest it might actually slim thighs. (Continued below the fold....) 99 women were asked to used a 7% caffeine creme twice a day for 30 days, and thigh and hip…

An unfortunate, but amazing case: a 25-year-old schizophrenic man shoved a 14.5-cm-long ballpoint pen through his eye socket, all the way to his cerebellum (in the rear of the brain). Hospital staff found him lying in a pool of blood, and the man told doctors he 'had torn his eyes because it tickled and that 10 years earlier he had shot himself in one eye with an airgun rifle.' His doctors were puzzled: the man slipped quickly into a coma, but there was no sign of serious trauma to the area other than a small hematoma. A CT scan (above) provided more baffling information, which the doctors…

When I threw a going-away party for my friend Lisa on Friday, I made some of that jiggly party staple: jello shots! Little did I realize that some awesome (and bored) sciency-types have a website dedicated to a series of experiments to determine how much vodka can be added to jello shots before they lose their gelainous cohesion. The way that I made mine is "the normal way," where you add 1 cup boiling water to the Jello packet, stir for 2 minutes until the mix is completely dissolved, and then add 1 cup vodka (instead of water). This yields jello shots which are not overwhelmingly…

Popular legend tells us that during the process of mummification, the ancient Egyptians removed the vital organs, including the brain, and placed some of them in jars. The earliest known mummies date to around 3300 BC in Egypt. During the removal of the brain, the bone behind the nose (the cribiform plate) would be broken with a long metal tool. The embalmer would dice the brain into small pieces so it could be pulled out through the nasal passage. They would then refill the skull half-way with either sawdust or a plant-based resin (see below for half-filled skull). Check out this cool…

In a really astounding discovery, it was confirmed that a 2001 birth by a female Hammerhead shark was achieved in the complete absence of males, in a process called parthenogenesis. While at first it was believed that the female shark mated before being captured, and stored the sperm for three years (ew), testing on the resulting offspring showed that their DNA only matched the mother and showed no evidence of a father. This phenomenon, while seen in some other vertebrates like birds and amphibians, has never been demonstrated in such a major vertebrate line as sharks. Mammals are now the…

In the vein of weird stimulants added to weird products, I have a new one to throw out: caffienated soap! Lots of people don't like coffee (not me, I love love love it), but still want that delectably artificial pick-me-up in the morning. What are they to do?? Caffeine soap to the rescue! The soap, called Shower Shock, supplies the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee per wash, with the stimulant absorbed naturally through the skin, manufacturers say. "Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew? Are you one of those groggy early morning types that just needs…

SETI used to do it, too. That is, have a volunteer program to chip in your CPU's processing power to help solve some problem (in SETI's case, look for ET). Now your idle Sony PS3 can be put to a similar use, but a bit more earthly. The recent launch of a software update for Sony's Internet-enabled PlayStation 3 (PS3) games console has seen more than 50,000 owners sign up to take part in a medical-research project called Folding@home. The success has now led to discussions to make dozens of other such 'distributed computing' projects PS3-friendly. Such projects are designed to create a virtual…

Yeah, remote controlled birds.......crazy cool...... Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported on Tuesday. Scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University of Science and Technology said their electrodes could command them to fly right or left or up or down, Xinhua news agency said. "The implants stimulate different areas of the pigeon's brain, according to signals sent by the scientists via computer and force the bird to comply with their…

NASA loves to use weird science to make useful stuff.....even proteins found in the inner ear, in the hair cells to be exact. The protein is called prestin, which is the motor protein on hair cells, which may also find a new use powering space suits. If prestin is combined with electricity-producing microbes (geobacter) in a suit, NASA hopes it will result in the physical motion of the astronaut (and even gusts of wind) being converted into energy. Cool! Outer hair cells can contract and expand in response to sound, which results in an amplification of auditory stimulus. Prestin changes the…

Earlier PZ Myers disputed the claim that the recently-notorious 4-legged duck was the product of "genetic changes" as reported by the media. Taking a look at the morphology of the poor bird's extra legs, it much more likely that the duck suffers from a phenomenon known as "parasitic limb" or "parasitic twin" in humans. For example, this child was born in Detroit with an extra leg, which was actually the remnant of a twin who never properly separated during development (below). A parasitic twin results from the same general process which results in normal identical (monozygotic) twins: the…

A research project commissioned by Bausch and Lomb, and headed by Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, tried to reduce the "beer goggles effect" down to an equation. No college student is unfamiliar with beer-goggling: that regrettable effect that alcohol and dark rooms have on our ability to judge attractiveness. In fact, a poll (also by B&L) showed that 68% of people had regretted giving their phone number to someone to whom they later realized was not attractive. Is there really a simple equation that explains it all? (continued below the fold…

Talk about a cool party trick. Notice how he lovingly refers to the roach as "she."

Long nights, sitting at the microscope, slide after slide.......don't you just wish you had a beer? Slurp slurp. Ahhhh, thats better. Wait, I wonder what *beer* would look like under the microscope! Let's try it! I think thats what someone at Florida State thought when they decided to start this project, Molecular Expressions: The Beershots Photo Gallery, which has digital images of bunches of famous beers from around the world. Chinese beer Tsingtao: Pilsner Urquel: Guinness: Heineken: You can buy prints, posters, and even a book. No money? There's a free screen saver. And if beer ain't…