Don't Panic

Happy Towel Day, folks.

Yes indeed, today is the anniversary of the publication of the HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy novel. And people all around the world are apparently carrying their towels, the single most useful item an intergalactic traveller can carry.

So here is something that might be handy: 42 ways to use a towel.

Spit on this.

Oh. My. God.

Look at this!!!!

Apparently cobras can track movements and predict where to spit their venom (with absolute and deadly accuracy)... all within 200 milliseconds. They are truly amazing. As soon as I saw this my jaw dropped - just... incredible.

Nothing to do with mammoth sexual deviancy this time.

New Scientist are forever printing questions like "Does God Eat Wasps" and suchlike in their Last Word column, and subsequently reprinting these questions in rather successful books. One was titled "Why Don't Penguins Feet Freeze?" I've not got s copy of this book myself, but I daresay at some point some wag said "probably the same reason that woolly mammoths managed to stay alive in freezing temperatures." Well, I don't know about penguins, might be something to do with minimal blood flow in the feet at a guess. However, we can answer the question about mammoths now.

It turns out they had antifreeze in their blood. Blimey. Reminds me a little of a quote about Jim Morrison I saw recently. Based on video footage of that crazy so-and-so where he was slurring incoherently someone commented "what's the matter with him, was he on drugs or something?" The in-no-way-funny reply to this was: "I think they found some blood in his alcohol."

Ho ho!

Smells like... what, exactly?

This is very interesting, albeit a few years old.

Ever taste metallic water? Ever open a can of beer and go, "hmm, it's a bit, well, tinny"? And ever grasped an iron bar, only to smell the iron on your hand a few moments later?

No you haven't.

It turns out that metals have no taste or smell, which is rather contrary to what we believe. It turns out that what we percieve as a metallic flavour is actually a chemical reaction of impurities within the metal with compounds in the skin and tongue. One of the more common compounds is 1-octen-3-one, a rather smelly substance. How's about that?

Gonna Have To Face It...

Time for a rant.

Now, I know addiction is a sad thing, I know that it's very tough to break any habit, especially when the means for your addiction is so readily available. Think smoking, drinking, gambling, even food (more on that later). The accessibility of these makes it so easy to feed a habit it's quite scary to think how difficult it might be to break the cycle.

Then there are the excuses: I'm fat because of my genes, I smoke because of my nerves, I need a drink to relax, etc, etc. I have heard these excuses recycled time and time again and when I see someone wheeled into my place of work with a whole bunch of tubes up the nose and so many cannulae they could be at an acupuncturists I can't help but think "if you'd laid off the fags / pies / special brew / crack and smack party bags then this would never have happened and you would not be in such pain from whatever it is you've got."

So when I saw this article from the BBC my heart sank. It actually popped up a couple of years ago when the same researchers found a so-called "smoking gene": a polymorphism that appears to correlate with increased tobacco consumption (and increased lung cancer risk - now how about that?). The polymorphism (well, three of them to be precise) encodes the nicotinic receptor that is usually activated by acetylcholine - part of the parasympathetic nervous system. But enough of that stuff.

The implication that arises from this is what really worries me: are smokers likely to use this as yet another excuse to not give up?

The mechanisms behind addiction are pretty well defined: you take a stimulus, the result of which is a good feeling: caused by dopamine and endorphin release via something called the CART peptide (Cocaine-amphetamine-related-transcript, which according to the paper I've linked to also may be related to schizophrenia). The more you take of the substance, the fewer dopamine receptors are available to be activated: they downregulate. Hence you need to take more and more, just to get the dopamine hit...

Where the food thing comes in, ah yes: basically eating produces the same dopamine release. Makes sense, the brain rewards you for eating, for surviving. Well done, you. This leads me to wonder: while this smoking gene apparently predisposes people specifically to smoke, when they give up are they more likely to become overweight / obese through the dopamine thing or is this a nicotinic receptor-specific thing? From past experience I can truthfully say I put on weight when I gave up smoking but then I also gave up playing rugby around the same sort of time: lack of exercise and overeating, d'oh! Who knows? Anyway, I honestly think one addiction leads to another, but anyone who specifically says "oh, I have an addictive personality" needs to be shot. EVERYONE has an addictive personality, it's just that some people are more in control of it than others. Stop making bloody excuses.

Anyway, as if the likes of ASH, the NHS and WHO didn't have enough on their hands already.

Do me a flavour

Some genius has been writing about High Fructose Corn Syrup. I don't know who he is but he seems like a bright guy.

Really, really beautiful!

Big ups to those folks at CERN. Having cranked up the system to start producing 7TeV collisions they've announced the detection of a B+ particle, or Beautiful Particle. Apparently it stayed in existence for only about 15 thousandths of a nanosecond however before decaying so one wouldn't even have had time to blink before it was gone.

Just to give an idea of how hard this particle is to spot, it took around 10 million proton-proton collisions to generate a detectable emission. That's some going.

If you thought this was a great demonstration of how humanity is advancing then be aware that the beasts are starting to catch us up; last week an article showing crows using no less than three tools to get to some food hit the news. That's more than my next door neighbours who only use one: a phone to contact the pizza delivery company.
It may be harsh to describe them as dinosaurs but it makes me laugh.

Happy Birthday, Hubble

Well, it's been up there twenty years, now. And in all that time, the Hubble Telescope has been doing some incredible things. There's that Deep Field view for starters, wonderful work there. Some cracking pics of the Eagle Nebula which stayed on my desktop for a good two years. And then quite recently this rather stunning image of the Butterfly Nebula.

Breathtaking.

I know that these aren't true images, I know they've been enhanced and artificially coloured but I don't care, it's still a marvellous piece of human engineering. One can only imagine how good the James Webb telescope is going to be!

Common sense prevails

Hurrah for Simon Singh!

Having won his appeal (at great expense, it must be said) against the Chiropractic Association surely the UK's "supreme court" must now turn its attention to the libel laws and overturn them? For a respected scientist such as Singh to be gagged for trying to point out quackery in the first place surely highlights the ridiculousness of the legal system.
Hopefully Justice Eady will rethink things as well, otherwise... well...

They could do a lot worse than appoint Judge Nutmeg!

Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice...
See how fast the bastard turns...

Ha ha ha

A crusty old Marine Sergeant Major found himself at a gala event hosted by a local liberal arts college. There was no shortage of extremely young idealistic liberal ladies in attendance, one of whom approached the Sergeant Major for conversation.

"Excuse me, Sergeant Major, but you seem to be a very serious man.. Is something bothering you?"

"Negative, ma'am. Just serious by nature."

The young lady looked at his awards and decorations and said, "It looks like you have seen a lot of action."

"Yes, ma'am, a lot of action."

The young lady, tiring of trying to start up a conversation, said, "You know, you should lighten up a little. Relax and enjoy yourself."

The Sergeant Major just stared at her in his serious manner. Finally the young lady said, "You know, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but when was the last time you had sex?"

"1955, ma'am."

"Well, there you are. No wonder you're so serious. You really need to chill out and relax! I mean, no sex since 1955! Come with me."

She took his hand and led him to a private room where she proceeded to "relax" him several times.

Afterwards, panting for breath, she leaned against his grizzled bare chest and said, "Wow, you sure didn't forget much since 1955."

The Sergeant Major said in his serious voice, after glancing at his watch, "I hope not; it's only 2130 now."

Oh yeah, this was the football thing I was referring to.

That is all.

Healthcare

Just a quick one before I sign off. Those rather splendid chaps over at MediaLens raise an interesting observation about all this Healthcare stuff. I must admit I was rather taken in by all the pro-Obama frenzy, thinking "finally, the USA is starting to wake up to all this!" However, the article goes on to wonder whether this is actually a far more right-wing policy than the Republicans could ever come up with, pandering to the needs of the Big Pharma mob and suchlike: not bad for a Liberal.

Anyway, read it and make your own mind up.

Oh, the horror!

Well, it seems a man who is quite good at kicking a ball has been injured, and so a nation grinds to a collective halt. What is it with our football / soccer obsession? Absolutely ridiculous.

While I'm on the subject (kind of) there was a fun debate on Reddit some months ago explaining football and the differing views on the name between Americans and Brits. Football for example involves a foot and a ball, whereas the American football involves a hand and an egg: Handegg.

What amused me most was cricket: Stickballstickglove or something like that. Nobody ever really got to grips with what cricket actually is. The answer of course is simple: God's Chosen Game, at least according to Dr Grace.

Anyway, on a more important note, 7TeV collisions have taken place somewhere under Switzerland and we're all still alive, which is nice.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Well... duh!

This was published yesterday. Just in case you have a "too long, didn't read" moment, here's the story in a nutshell.

Rats were fed normal diet, but some were given sugar (sucrose) in the drinking water, some given high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in their water. The HFCS group became obese, the sucrose group remained pretty much the same.

HFCS is used extensively in a lot of foods, mainly processed stuff, because it is very cheap to manufacture. A bit like hydrogenated vegetable fats, it creeps into the daily diet of a lot of people, from those who need a microwave meal because it's quick and easy, to those who stuff their faces with crap from McDonalds.

What most people fail to realise is that although the calorific content of the two sugar types is virtually identical, HFCS bypasses the satiety response completely. Ordinarily, sucrose (one molecule of glucose joined up to one of fructose) triggers a negative feedback response: the body senses the high-energy source and eventually does a Mr Creosote ("**** off, I'm full.") This is caused by the metabolism of glucose to glucose-1-phosphate and then to glucose-6 phosphate as part of the glycolysis pathway down to pyruvate.

Fructose misses out this step and joins the pathway further down - the same endpoint, but a different entry point. However, all the metabolic sensors for glycolysis are based at the glucose-6-phosphate step. What this means is that food containing glucose makes the brain and body realise that it's had enough to eat but fructose doesn't.

People who eat this processed junk basically don't realise that they've already eaten enough calories, and as such about an hour after stuffing their faces with a Big Mac they fancy a nice tasty snack. Probably Doritos or some other rubbish. Why? Because they don't actually feel full.

So: one of the many problems with fast food. The trouble is that it's so cheap: so many calories for so little money. Unfortunately buying food that doesn't contain HFCS and other such junk costs more, hence the problems with obesity in the Western world, and until the food lobbyists are rapped on the knuckles this problem is going to continue, much to the detriment of world health.

Which brings me on to a final point: congrats to Obama for getting the USA healthcare bill pushed through, but the wankers that voted against it do have a point: the USA cannot afford the increased cost to the nation simply because the big businesses are still pushing bad diets down the necks of the taxpayers. The fatter they get, the bigger the burden on the tax bill. Obama was right to get the bill pushed through, but needs to tackle the tobacco and food lobbies before any real benefit will ever be seen.

Ta-Dah!

I've finally finished my book. Which is why I've not been posting on here.

The trouble is, now I'm going through the editing phase, and it's even more knackering than the actual writing. I've done the first three chapters so they're ready to send off to whoever , I need to rewrite the synopsis, yada yada yada...

The problem now is my ever so short attention span: I've already started on another book. Not a science-y one though, that will come later. The new one is all about Constantine the Great, nothing to do with Keanu Reeves thankfully.

whoa dude, totally awesome

In the meantime, far too many really interesting things have happened between then and now to mention, so I'll just leave this here, seeing as it follows on from my last post in a way. Pretty cool, huh?