Oh, yeah. Just what we all need

More geriatric mommies. As if we didn't have enough trouble with the middle-aged mommies who can't keep up with their brats, now they're trying to make it possible for women to remain baby factories well into their dotage.

Scientists find "fossil sneeze": octopus w/ink & suckers

No bones, no hard tissue, octopi are not the likeliest candidates for fossilization, and yet, some scientists from Berlin claim they have found the complete rock-hard remains of one. Complete. With ink and suckers. My initial response was, "Am I to be one of those suckers?" But they seem to have persuaded others in their field that their discovery is legit.

What most surprised Fuchs and his colleagues Giacomo Bracchi and Robert Weis was how similar the specimens are to modern octopus. "These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species," Fuchs said.

So, what does one call an octopus that has gone beyond ossification, how does one label a cephalopod of stone? Fossipus? Octopossil? Cephalopossil? Rock of Inkjets?

Any way you look at this, it's cool as Cthulhu.

In other news: Science proves the Obvious

It's what you mother told you when you first tried on that skimpy thing: a bikini will stop a man from thinking of an attractive woman as a human being, and turns her, in his mind, into an object.

It's normal, it's natural, and it's not something they expect women would do when confronted with pictures of Chippendale's men. Women look at men, the say, as potential partners in wealth and power, or, at a baser level, as means to an end. But men look at shapely women and stop thinking beyond "Ooooh, shiny," and they mentally begin to grope.

Or, as paragraph 3 puts it, men are

more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person action verbs such as "I push, I grasp, I handle," said lead researcher Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University.

and (graf 5)

these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds,"

But, as I was reading this aloud to my sainted mother, this was the part, right near the beginning, which got her snickering:

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

She wondered about "tool use."

Mom has a very dirty mind. Guess which side of the family I most resemble?

Science now supports Carrie Nation

Remember that stuff about a glass of red wine every day prolonging your life?

Fugeddaboudit.

Or, at least, think about other options.

According to recent studies, while the alcohol in a glass of wine may thin the blood and introduce good cholesterol into your system, it also brings with it the risk of many different forms of cancer. And, the more you drink, the greater the risk.

First they came for butter-users, and I didn't speak out, because I was lactose intolerant. Then they came for red-wine-drinkers, and I didn't speak up, because sulfites and I were not friends.... When they come for dark chocolate, who will be left to speak?


HT: DiT, at AoSHQ

Allergies linked to lower risk of brain cancer

Well, I feel better now. According to the article posted at ScienceDaily:

Atopic diseases, which include asthma, eczema, hay fever, and other allergies, have been linked to a lower risk of glioma, a type of brain cancer that affects glial cells. This association has not been seen with meningioma, a tumor that develops in the membrane that covers the brain.

Now, will somebody hand me my Benadryl, please?

Friday Catblog: science class -- types of energy

Mr Grr has become a solar cell. He demonstrates

Potential energy.

Peanut does the same.


Maus notices there is not much sun at her window, so she stores little, and goes from

Potential

to
Kinetic energy. (Please note she is attacking a Crookes radiometer, which, like a cat, also converts solar energy to power. And they both spin nicely when they're set right.)

Looking for alternative sources of fur? Be sure to visit Modulator's Friday Ark #159, and, on Sunday evening, stop by the COTC, to be hosted this week by StrangeRanger.

Starvation, overwork may make you live longer

Starvation and overwork will certainly make you feel like you're living forever.

But now, thanks to the success of Cuba's economy during the penultimate final* decade of the previous century, we can see that poverty really does make people live longer.

At least, that's what one study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Cienfuegos, Cuba and Loyola University says.

I particularly liked this passage:

"Population-wide approaches designed to reduce caloric intake and increase physical activity, without affecting nutritional sufficiency, might be best suited for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and diabetes."

No word yet on what the numbers were for suicides, for childbirth complications -- or, for that matter, precisely how many Cubans skewed the numbers by opting out of this study, via transport to Miami.

But we do have the beginnings of a plan:

"Future steps towards prevention of cardiovascular disease and diabetes should focus on long-term population-wide interventions by encouraging physical activity and the reduction of caloric intake," explained Franco, who is also affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Welch Center for Prevention and Epidemiology.

Yeah. I'm looking forward to somebody telling me I have to get moving more than I already do. I think my use of a cane might actually have an impact on him.


Update: It might be fun to get the folks from this study together with these guys. Will low birth weight trump starvation and overwork?

* my math skills were always pretty embarrassingly bad.

Inventor of Benadryl dies at 91

George Rieveschl, the man who most changed my life without ever having been in the unfortunate position of having to meet me, has died at the age of 91. May he rest in eternal piece, in full knowledge that he saved a life or two (or a million), and improved the quality of life for the rest of us who live amid pollen, dust, and dander.

Rieveschl was the chemical engineer responsible for inventing
beta-dimethylaminoethylbenzhydryl ether hydrochloride -- better known by the brand name he gave it: Benadryl. This invention is what makes it possible for me to eat most foods, to drink most beverages, and then to share my moldy, dusty, fusty old house with three cats and buzillions of books and all those tubes of paints and bottles of inks.

According to the NYT obit, Rieveschl started his life intending to be a commercial artist, but found he could not make a career of it. There's a lot of that going around. I'm grateful he got himself into chemistry. His accomplishments are nothing to sneeze at.


HT: Patterico

Potato chip flavoring makes great costruction material

According to this Science Daily article, the stuff used to add "zip" to salt-&-vinegar-flavored potato chips -- sodium acetate -- makes a really good environmentally-friendly concrete sealant.

Now, imagine how that's reacting to the walls of your intestines.

Personally, I prefer my tater chips to be just plain potato-y, salty and only a little bit greasy. I especially like these two brands of classic chips. If I want vinegar flavor on 'em, I'll go fetch the bottle of vinegar, myself. Not that they need embellishment.

Multitasking ability may be inherited

So, if I read a book while listening to the radio and watching tv and talking on the phone, and I can comprehend everything and play it all back for you the next day, it's because my mom can bake bread and do laundry and balance the checkbook and chart a cross-stitch pattern while talking to the neighbor about what her thesis paper covered.

Is that how it goes? Hearing and comprehension while performing other tasks is linked to a genetic development.

O, ye of little faith, who were convinced I could not do what I said I could do, because you could not... you should have chosen your parents more carefully!

tee hee.

Fish are more advanced than politicians

A recent study from James Cook University in Oz indicates that fish use punishment and the threat of it to keep their schoolmates and others from "queue-jumping."

Would that the jackasses in D.C. could understand the idea of making people wait their proper turn to ascend in rank from resident to immigrant to citizen...

Scientific study proves the obvious (again)

A review of a 60-year study shows that men worry more than women do about penile size. Men, it seems, measure themselves against other men according to that li'l ol' pocket ruler. Women just like a man who's good-looking, confident, and considerate in bed, regardless of -- and sometimes because of (who in her right mind wants bruised kidneys and other internal damage?)-- smaller endowments.

I'm betting that, if they've done a similar study of women, they'll have found greater worry than in men, over bra size. The men won't complain about size much (if at all)... as long as they get to play with them thangs.

And I suspect there's a strong concern, in dogs, over the size and fullness of their supper dishes.

Kevin Costner's home world found

Astronomers Detect Shadow Of Water World In Front Of Nearby Star

Let's hope it's not as lame as the movie was.

Shocker: too much TV may interfere academically

Who could have seen this one coming? A 20-year study in upstate New York shows that excessive television viewing by school-aged children may result in academic failure -- they are markedly less likely to attend college than those who don't watch so much crap on the idiot box.

The 20-year study involving nearly 700 families in upstate New York, US, found that those watching more than three hours of TV a day were twice as likely not continue their education past high school. The researchers say their study is the first to show that attention problems linked to TV viewing could be the cause of academic failure, since they controlled for learning difficulties and behavioural problems at the start of the study.

So, sitting still and staring at a box of shiny little lights for hour after hour turns you into the next Homer Simpson.

But other experts say the link is unclear: teens with learning disorders might simply be more likely to watch many hours of TV because they find activities such as reading textbooks too challenging.

Then again, it may be that the parents who think it's fine to let their kids watch three hours or more per night on that infernal machine are also the sorts who put zero emphasis on education, and it rubs off on the kids. Parents, after all, seem to have a considerable amount of influence on how kids think (or don't think). (Hi, Mom! I blame society.)

Or, there's that possibility that the electronic signals from the device may be directly transmitting messages into your brain from aliens (or from the CIA), turning you into just another Truther...

Neat answer to "psychic" challenge

My brugly other e-mailed me this link, comparing photography to psychic readings:

How do you prove photography to a blind man?

That was the question I was asked: how would you prove to a blind man, that photography exists?

I knew what he was getting at. We had been discussing psychics. He was a firm believer in psychic powers, had had psychic experiences, and regularly visited a psychic. His point was, since I had not experienced psychic powers, I would never be able to believe in what he “knew” to be true. You could never prove to a blind man that photography exists, and likewise no one would ever be able to demonstrate to me that psychic powers were real.

It took me about ten seconds to think of a way to show he was wrong. This is what I said. Give the blind man a camera, a tripod and a remote shutter release. (Ideally the camera is a Polaroid, or a digital with an instant picture facility.) Everyone leaves the room but the blind man. He takes a picture of himself, and holds up a number of fingers (1 to 5) at random. The sighted person comes back into the room, looks at the picture and says “you were holding up X fingers”. If he gets the right number, and continues to do so every time this experiment is performed, the blind man will eventually conclude that photography is real. Technically, he will conclude the hypothesis that “a camera can record a visual image”, might be true.

He gives details for extending the test, then comparing it to the "success" rate of psychics, worldwide. Please, read the whole thing -- and don't skip the comments.


For most of my life I've wanted to believe in psychic powers, supernatural occurrences, and the like. It would be really cool if we could use The Force to shape our universe for good or evil. So far, though, I've yet to be overwhelmed by evidence. So I'm an agnostic, a skeptic. I'd like to believe... and I'd like to win the lottery, too.

If and when the paranormal world can be proven via something akin to photography -- a genuinely scientific approach, that is -- perhaps I can see fit to let down my guard and believe, even if only a little. But then, there were those fairy photographs... and the book... I may be doubting for a very, very, very long time.

Gratuitous postcard: primate kin

Ace at AoSHQ has the news that Chimpanzees are tools who hunt. No, wait. Chimpanzees use tools to hunt. They poke at others, using pointed sticks. I've read in the past that they occasionally murder others of their own species and tribe.

So they're not so different from us.

But I do have one question for the scientists... would an ape make a human doll, that TALKS?

Younger siblings cause brain tumors!

(This news -- timed just two days before my seester's birthday!)

I knew my younger sisters were giving me headaches... This article says it all. The kids who have many siblings born after them are likelier to have certain types of brain tumors than those with none or one. The same can not be said of the younger siblings, so it seems that being an older sibling has a serious down side (other than being held up as the bad example).

So my headaches are all because my parents sibled repeatedly after I was born!

Dang, it's a good thing we daisies love each other -- and our mum. This could be a real problem in some families.


Okay, I'll admit it. I only have two younger siblings, and I'm a bigger headache to them than they are to me. Also, I've never been diagnosed with brain tumors. An imbalance or two, yes. Tumor... nah.

Gratuitous postcard: Greatest threat to the earth

According to the latest reports, these beasts are farting their way to global destruction.


I know I'm afraid of them. They have me thoroughly cowed.

Shuttle lights up night -- in a good way!

The Discovery left ground this evening on its way to the space station. It's pretty darned awesome, even in photographs. It would have been cool to feel the rumble all around while it lit up the sky. I wish I'd been there to see it in person.

Must be the child of the '60s coming out in me.

I wonder if there will be a time (after I win the lottery. Uh huh, ya betcha), when I'll be able to book a flight out there?

Scientists may be able to cure some blindness

According to an article at New Scientist, Cell transplant may restore lost sight.

The problem is, the researchers say it may require fetal stem cells to do it.

Under those circumstances, much as I love my watercolors, I think I'd have to pass.