Guess who has been watching Black Panther : The Animated Series lately?

Anyhoo, heya science fans, and welcome to another edition of the Friday Science Whatever, where I rustle up some of the most brain buzzingly cool science stories for you every week and serve them drunk and on fire!

So let’s jump right in, shall we?

First up, we have an interesting experiment : making veggies sweeter in order to make kids more willing to eat them.

No fancy science involved, the scientists just sprayed the veggies with a light mist of sugar and lo and behold, the lunchtime kiddie crowd was more willing to eat them.

I am fine with this. After all, the idea is to get the nutrition into the kids and if a little extra sugar does that, fine. It’s not like sugar on the outside destroys the nutrients on the inside.

However, in my experience, kids hate vegetables because their parents force them to eat them. I realize there is nothing a school can do to about that, but it is something for parents to think about.

Don’t turn this into a whole “test of wills” between you and your child. You might win a battle or two, but you lose the war.

Then again, we might not need the sugar at all if we could use the miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, to make everything taste sweet.

The miracle fruit gets its name from its one truly miraculous property : it contains a protein that binds to the sour receptors on your tongue and makes them register as sweet, meaning that everything you taste after eating one of these innocuous looking little berries will taste sweet as candy.

The article focuses on a fellow who has little tasting parties revolving around the fruit. People pay him $15 to eat a berry and then try different foods and see how much different they taste now.

Sounds like $15 well spent to me. Seems like a reasonable fee for a truly unique and pleasant sensory experience. And I am glad this little miracle is available on the open market now, although at $2.50 a berry, nobody will be buying them by the bushel any time soon.

Still, I would happily pay that for an hour or so of flavour filled fun. Being diabetic, I do not get much sweetness in my life.

It would be lovely to be able to get it guilt free!

Leaving flavour country for the salty deep, we find that dolphins call each other by name.

Wait, let’s back up a bit. Dolphins have names! And not just the demeaning ones we give them. Wild dolphins have a unique set of whistles and clicks that is their name! Wow, that’s cool.

What’s more, they use them like we would. When a wild dolphin is separated from its pals, it calls out their names just like we would!

That is so much the cooler. It shows that not only do dolphins have more advanced verbal skills than previously thought, but that they must have a sense of individuality.

If they were simple animals with no sense of who they are, names would be useless to them. You have to have a concept of yourself before you can know what you name is.

And you have to recognize the individuality of others before using their names makes sense. A less intelligent or social animal would only have the concept “other dolphin”, plus gender at mating times.

But clearly, dolphins understand that each of them is unique, that there is Frank and Dorothy and Tyrel and Timone, not just “other dolphin”.

That blows my mind.

Next up, we have a real world saving device : the micro-algae lamp.

This amazing device uses algae to power itself and, this is the truly amazing part, absorbs an entire ton of CO₂ per year.

Here is the vid :

That is exactly the sort of thing I have been imagining for our future for some time now. We need to build up as much CO₂-hungry infrastructure as possible, and use the exact same powers of scale that got us into this global climate change problem in order to solve it.

Admittedly, I had not imagined it would be in such a simple and elegant form. I was picturing something more like enormous terraced gardens producing said micro-algae. And that still might be needed.

But this lamp really seems like the first step in the right direction. We are powerful enough, as a species, to ruin the planet for ourselves.

Via smart solutions like a carbon devouring lamp, we might just fix it.

And who knows, with selective breeding and genetic engineering, we might be able to make strains that take even more carbon out of the air, and bring us back to a stable level we can live with.

Righteous cool, dude.

Finally, we have the rather extraordinary prospect of temporary tattoos giving you telepathy.

Telekinesis too. Well, of a sort.

The idea is that, as part of the cheap sensing revolution we are now enjoying, in the future a simple temporary tattoo embedded with sensors could, if applied to the head, let you control devices via your brain waves, or, if applied to the throat, allow you to control devices and even communicate with others via the previously discarded technology of subvocalization.

See, when we think about saying something, many of the same muscles tense in our throats as if we were saying it, and so it is at least theoretically possible to translate that muscle respond into words and voila, you can speak by just thinking about it.

Hook said speech into, say, text messaging, and you can text with a friend without lifting a finger.

And that is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of telepathy. Experienced subvocalizers might very well be able to “type” much faster that way, making it not just less effort but faster as well.

And all because of a little tattoo on your throat.

The future is one cool country, and I can’t wait to get there!

Seeya next week, folks!

It is a heck of a day to be a science writer, even one as lazy and unfunded as I am. I will, of course, be getting to the really big news about space objects and Russia eventually, but I am afraid I will have to do some other stories first.

After all, this is the Friday Science Whatever, not the Friday Holy Shit That Was Awesome Did You See That Thank God For The Internet Whatever.

So in addition to the cosmic event, we will talk about the new era in skyscrapers and introduce you to a rather cool little science toy for when you feel the need to understand your place in the scheme of things.

Spoiler alert : it’s not big.

First off, let’s talk about the rise of the super tall, or supertall, skyscraper.

Basically, supertall skyscrapers start where the previous era of skyscrapers left off. The official definition of supertall is any building taller than 300 meters, or around 1000 feet.

That means that a lot of the really big buildings of the past qualify, like the Empire State Building (381 meters or 1250 feet) and the CN Tower (553 meters, or 1815 feet).

But that is just the jumping off point for supertall architecture. Already, the world has the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is 2717 feet tall, or 830 meters. Yowza.

Clearly the limitations of the previous era have been superseded, and the sky, perhaps literally, is now the limit. We are clearly on track for a kilometer high building, and after that, who knows?

Maybe a full mile, or around 1600 meters, will be possible in our lifetimes.

And as in the previous era of skyscrapers, all that is necessary for us to see that day is the engineering and architectural knowledge to design it and a ready supply of narcissistic rich people who want to spend their money on something that will carry their name into the future.

Like this Khalifa guy. I assume.

But if you really want to see all of these great human monuments of glass and steel put into perspective, nothing beats this fun and humbling gizmo call The Scale Of The Universe.

It is a lot like an interactive version of the classic 1977 scientific mindfuck Powers of Ten (if you haven’t seen it, DO SO NOW, you will not regret it), and what it lacks in production values, it more than makes up for in both depth and richness.

It covers an enormous spectrum of sizes and objects, and does it all through a simple “zoom in/out” interface that even a child could use.

Want to know more about something? Just click it! And up comes more information about it, written in an engagingly informal (but still informative) style.

It is truly fun to play around with, and really gives you a sense of the scale of the universe and how small we little naked beach apes are in the grand scheme of things, and indeed, how small this little world of ours truly is compared to the Cosmos.

OK, now that we have covered the Carl Sagan territory, let’s talk about the big awesome scary cool terrifying awe-inspiring thing that all the Internet and most of the lamestream media are covering with breathless anticipation : that poop cruise off the shore of Alabama.

Just kidding, folks. Those people are safe at home with a rather unique set of slides to force the neighbors to watch now.

No, the big news is about some kind of meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere and exploding into tiny pieces over the Chelyabinsk area of Russia.

It has injured at least 1200 people, mostly because of the intense shock wave it created when it exploded, which shattered windows throughout the area.

And my heart goes out to those 1200 people and I hope none of them were seriously hurt.

Because this story is just so freaking awesome that I am about to completely lose my shit over it, and I would feel a little guilty if I was going nuts over something that was someone’s horrible tragedy.

But you know what the best part of this is? Because of this glorious era of both ubiquitous video recording capacity in everyone’s pockets AND the strange but necessary habit of Russians putting dashboard cameras in their cars, there are TONS of video of this mind blowing event on the Internet.

I mean, check this shit out, my hombres :

Holy CRAP that is amazing. It’s so cinematic that part of you wants to think it is fake. But there are thousands of injured people who will attest that it is very real.

Not to mention all those broken windows. Great time to be a glazier in Chelyabinsk, huh?

The big time sky show forced mass evacuations and has caused millions of dollars of property damage.

One weird thing : this happened at the same time as a rather large asteroid passed frighteningly close to Earth, but all the world’s space agencies insist that the two events are unrelated.

What are the odds of that? Sometimes coincidence is far stranger than anything we could make up. If a writer like me wrote a story in which both those things happened and yet were unrelated, people would rightly mock it as implausible.

But that’s the difference between reality and fiction. Reality doesn’t have to be plausible.

Here’s a sampler of fireball and effect clips :

But for the full effect, you have to have the sound.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because this is some AWESOME LOUDNESS.

But if you really want to feel it in your guts just like you were actually there, this is the best video clip I have come across.

So yes. LOUDNESS WARNING.

Unsurprisingly, this event has raised interest in just what, exactly, we could do if an asteroid much bigger than this piddling little thing (too small for us to detect before it went boom, I mean) was heading for us with a nasty gleam in its eye.

And so far the answer is…. very little. YET.

If that is not a good argument for space research, I don’t know what is.

Seeya next week folks!

Hey there folks! A darn good Friday to you all, and welcome to another week’s nag of science goodies thanks to the candy factory that is the Friday Science Whatever.

Got four big creamy scoops of science ice cream for all you hungry science fans today, including 17 million digits of amazing, good news for us Drake Equation fans, an animal with an amazing superpower, and the darkness that lurks within the hearts, or rather brains, of evil people.

All that, plus of course the toppings of my own special sauce of observations and commentary, and the whipped cream of… um… stuff… and we are in for a heck of science sundae!

So let’s dig in!

First off, we have this impressive achievement : Doctor Richard Cooper of the University of Central Missouri has discovered a record-breaking 17 million digit prime number.

Technically, it was his computer that did it, but for obvious reasons, the hunt for very large prime numbers was taken over by computers many decades ago.

I mean, I guess you could figure it out by hand, but for heaven’s sake why?

The number is : 2^57,885,161-1. If you want a full printout of it instead, be warned that a text file containing just the number is 22.5 MB long, so you had better make sure you have enough paper and ink for a long, long haul.

But honestly, save yourself the trouble. I am sure some enterprising person will stick it in a book and put it on Amazon real soon now and you will be able to just buy it and stick it on your shelf next to your billion digits of pi book.

It’s pretty neat just as an achievement in number crunching, but it turns out that very high primes might also have a practical use :

RSA security, used widely in computer data encryption, is based on the fact that its easy to multiply two prime numbers (components) together to produce a larger number (composite) but extremely time consuming and difficult to take the composite and figure out the two components that created it.

I sort of understand that!

Next up, great news for us Drake’s Equation and/or exoplanet fans : new research indicates that there might be as many as 4.5 billion Earth-like planets within 13 light-years of Earth.

Admittedly, in terrestrial terms, 13 light years (or 7.64204976 x 10¹³ miles) is a mighty long way. I mean, you think going down to the 7-11 for a bag of chips is a long way, but that is peanuts compared to 13 light years.

But in astronomical terms, 13 light years is practically next door. Sure, we won’t be going there any time soon, but it is still thrilling to imagine that there might be another Earth type planet so relatively close to us.

To me, the point of all this marvelous exoplanet calculation and exploration is to find a place in the sky upon which to fix our dreams. Out of all this excitement, I hope we find one truly amazingly good candidate for life outside our solar system.

And then, for generations to come, we will have a place to dream of visiting.

And to me, dreams are what space travel is all about.

Our next story is a lot closer to Earth : it turns out that foxes may have a special magnetic sense that lets them hunt more accurately.

Red foxes, to be specific. You know, these guys :

Show there using their other mutant superpower, being darn adorable, to secure food, shelter, and hugs.

The idea is that foxes use a sense of the earth’s magnetic field as a kind of rangefinder, kind of like the sights on a gun, to more accurately judge exactly how far away an unseen prey creature is, and thus improve how successfully their judge their hunting pounces.

You know, when they are doing this.

They figured this out because they noticed that red foxes greatly prefer to hunt pointing a certain direction relative to magnetic north, and that when they start from that position, those adorable pounces are a lot more likely to end up in a snack for the fox instead of just a muzzle full of snow.

It is pretty amazing of nature to provide the fox such an unusual and useful sense. Being of a science fiction mindset, it makes me imagine some race that evolved from foxes being super accurate snipers, at least on their home planet.

Finally, we have, as always, a story from the realm of brain science. FSW hearts brain science bigtime.

German scientist Doctor Gerhard Roth claims to have found the exact neurological root of sociopathic evil, and what do you know, it’s a dark space in the brain.

He says that he can look at the brain scans of young people and predict which ones are felons with a 66 percent accuracy, which sounds impressive, but seeing as there are only two possibilities, “felon” and “not felon”, it’s actually only 16 percent better than chance.

As you can see, I am extremely skeptical of this theory. In fact, you can put me down as about as skeptical as it is possible to be without lapsing into compulsive dismissal.

So I am not saying that I know that evil = dark patch in brain is wrong, but I am extremely dubious. It is far too simplistic an answer, and historically, these theories have always failed under further scrutiny.

My prediction, therefore, and that is all that this is, is that once others scrutinize Doctor Roth’s results, they will find all kinds of exceptions to his theory that he has conveniently ignored, enough so that his theory is essentially useless.

I am not saying that it is impossible that we will find that certain kinds of criminals have a very specific brain defect. Empathy and compassion are probably at least somewhat localized in the brain, so a theory like Doctor Roth’s might have some merit.

But I am betting it will turn out to be far more complicated than that.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Normally, my inherent sense of timing keeps me from tipping off my thesis in the title of the article, but this time, it seemed appropriate. And we will get to the subject of sensitivity versus choice in a moment, but first, a few threads of background before we weave a fuller tapestry.

Sensitivity (of the emotional sort, the kind we are talking about when someone says “That person is so sensitive!), has been an issue for me my entire life.

I have always been the sensitive sort. I feel things deeply, I have a high degree of empathy, I react strongly to the emotional tone of a situation. I worry about people I care about. I love children and animals. I am, in the modern way, a sensitive guy.

And for a long time, when I think about how sensitive I am, despite occasionally wishing I could dial it back a bit when I am very upset about something nobody else would even care about, I have always come back to the conclusion that while sometimes being so sensitive brings me great pain, I choose to remain this way because that sensitivity is a vital part of me, and I value the good it brings me in terms of understanding, sympathy, insight, and moral grounding too much to imagine letting it go.

To lose this kind of sensitivity once you have had it would be like losing a sense, and few people would pluck out their eyes simply to avoid seeing things they do not like.

But that brings us to the central question : am I truly choosing to remain sensitive? Is it a choice at all? Have I truly been nobly defending my sensitivity from the temptations of callousness, jadedness, elitism, disdain, and disgust all these years? Or have I simply put a brave face on the inevitable?

Would I remain as sensitive as I am no matter what? Maybe it is truly a fundamental part of my psyche, and no more disposable than my intellectualism or love of reading. When something runs that deep, you can express it or suppress it, but it will always be there. So is this really a choice?

And if it is, truly, a choice, what are the ethical implications of that choice? Does being so sensitive make me a better person? It certainly seems that way, given what I see of the actions of the callous and malicious. But it could be argued that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and that it is my extraordinarily out of control emotional sensitivity that has led to my depression, isolation, social anxiety, and other mental health issues.

So surely there is some sort of limit to how much sensitivity can be considered a good thing. Keen senses can be a boon, but not if it turns you into a resident of the House of Usher.

And a fine sense of touch might make you a good safecracker, but if you are going to do some work in the garden, you are going to put some heavy gloves on precisely to protect those sensitive hands.

So it is clear to me that too much emotional sensitivity can be not just bad, but crippling. I can see that I would be a better person, both in terms of my own well-being and my ability to contribute and help others with theirs, if I was not quite so sensitive.

Or at least if I learned to somehow manage my sensitivity, instead of having it seemingly dialed to the max all the time.

So we wend our way back to the central question : am I somehow choosing to be as sensitive as I am? Could I choose to be a little less sensitive, just enough of a reduction to put it in the “reasonable and useful” category instead of the “crippling and debilitating” one?

It is a tricky question to contemplate about oneself because one’s degree of emotional sensitivity is such an integral part of one’s mentation that it is very difficult to imagine being any other way.

Yet no reasonable and moderate person like myself can maintain an absolutist position like “more sensitivity is always better”. Clearly it is not. So how does a person like me find the balanced and reasonable point at which it is morally acceptable to, well, stop caring?

Sense of self comes into play here. Excessive sensitivity plus poor sense of self equals great difficulty in establishing boundaries between what pertains to the self and what is other people’s business. The allure of concentrating on others as a distraction from one’s own tired and battered self also plays a prominent role here.

It is so much easier to worry about others! But then one can’t very well claim not to know why one’s own problems keep getting worse.

Nevertheless, clearly a strong sense of self is a necessary bulwark against the tempest tossed storms of sensitivity. Clear lines between “what is my emotions” and “what (I imagine) is other people’s emotions” have to be drawn and maintained. Only then can you say “this is not my stuff, it’s someone else’s” and keep the strong emotions (or what you think they are)of others from overwhelming you.

Questioning the veracity of your perceptions is also another good first step. When the lines between imagination, perception, empathy, and inner life are blurred by poor sense of self, the inner world can become an endless echo chamber, amplifying and distorting our sense of what is truly going out beyond all recognition. Do those people really hate you, or is that just your own self-loathing reflecting back at you? Do you truly not know why you suddenly feel like crying, or are you just afraid to face it?

Try asking people what they really think. It won’t be easy, and will take courage, but you may find that the answers surprise you in a delightful way.

You may find, in fact, that people like you a lot more than you thought they did, and all those emotions that beat you down come from you, not that cold cruel world out there.

More on this later.

And just like that, it’s Friday again. That week just seemed to blink by, didn’t it? Why, it seems like only yesterday that it was Thursday.

Hmm, maybe that isn’t so mysterious after all.

Welcome back to the Friday Science Whatever, a weekly roundup of all the coolest science stories culled from the vast reaches of the entire Popular Science twitter feed, with occasional exceptions.

What can I say, Pop Sci is such a rich mine of science goodies that I rarely feel the need to go looking elsewhere for this little weekly effort of mine.

This week, we have an alternate theory of the sexual revolution, making cute little birds go psycho, doctors who are like Bill Clinton, and tricking your brain.

First off, we have that dear old friend of mine, the sexual revolution. (So much nicer than all the other revolutions. Way less stabbing.)

The received wisdom on the sexual revolution is that it started with the advent of The Pill (of all the pills in the world, only one gets to be called The Pill), that is, the women’s birth control pill that let a woman have sex whenever she liked without risking pregnancy.

Sounds reasonable. But according to a study written by Emory University economist Andrew Francis, if you crunch the numbers, the sexual revolution really began with rise of penicillin as a cure for syphilis.

This also sounds plausible, but I am not buying it. I am sure that removing the risk of one of the worst diseases known to humanity helped the sexual revolution along. But the real barriers to greater sexual exploration are social and psychological. Physical health risks are usually the last things on people’s minds when their libido is revving hot.

Only worries about social status or being “weird” are enough to contain the libido.

I would also like to point out that the sexual revolution really began (as did so much of modernity) with the suffragettes. They advocated for a free and uninhibited sexuality for women back before women were even considered people. And this freedom from “Eve’s guilt” liberated men as well. They no longer had to feel that their natural male sexual desires made them despoilers of virginal purity and that they were supposed to “do their dirty business” while the women they loved lied back and thought of England.

So honestly, the sexual revolution started before World War I. Take that!

Next up : sparrows. Cute little twittering birds… or psychotic murderers?

Some researchers wanted to check out sparrow aggression, so they took a taxidermied male sparrow and rigged it up so that it could lift a wing in what is apparently a very rude sparrow gesture.

And the live male sparrows in the area freaked the fuck out. They got so mad, in fact, that the experiment had to be halted after one of the enraged male sparrows ripped the dummy sparrow’s head off.

And they seemed so cute when they would huddle around the neighbor’s chimney with their feather fluffed all up, making them look like little fat balls of feathers.

But this is what happens when you experiment with aggression. The combination of a “rude gesture” to prompt aggression with neither enough threat to make another male back down nor the ability to signal submission and end the conflict that way, that robot sparrow was doomed.

Aggression can only be stopped by threat or placation. Without either of those, it just inflames further and further till the other males are completely psychotic with rage.

For a human example, see how right wing types react to Barack Obama. (I will let you figure out what his threat signal is. But here’s a hint : it’s really racist!)

And speaking of liberals who made their opponents go psycho and try to behead them : How is your doctor like Bill Clinton? Because according to one study, he feels your pain.

Through a clever ruse, they convinced some doctors that a placebo treatment really worked, and then got them to administer it while in a FSW fave, an fMRI machine.

This showed that the doctors, especially the ones who self-rated themselves as high on empathy, really did feel pain that almost perfectly mirrored the pain that they imagined their patients (who were really actors) were feeling, and experienced reward and relief when they imagined they were relieving said pain.

This pleases me to hear, and not just because it forms an intersection between two fascinations of mine, brain science and empathy.

I think that understanding our capacity to feel the pain of others as our own is a very important goal in terms of bringing the truth of our nature as a social species into the realm of science and learning.

Plus, it is nice to know some doctors, at least, really do care.

Finally, tricking your brain in neat ways.

Cool video. I did not learn anything amazingly new, but it is still great to run through the usual optical illusions in the new (ish) context of the rapid-processing part of our brain that does all the routine stuff, and the slower, smarter, and more deliberate part of the brain that handles all the higher level conscious decisions and which likes to think it is in charge.

I see this as directly analogous to a typical human hierarchy, with the leader who, at least in theory, makes all the important decisions, and their staff, who make routine decisions on their own but who defer decisions upwards if they become too complex or involved.

The leader likes to think they are in charge, and in the long time broad view, they are. They decide where the organization goes and what it does. They are driving the bus.

But from another point of view, their decisions are few and far between, and the sheer number of decisions made by “underlings” without bothering the leader can make it seem like they are the ones really in control. They are not technically driving the bus, but they control it nevertheless.

And so it is with our two brains.

Seeya next week, folks!

2013, ick. And is it just me, or does it feel like it’s been way more than a month since Christmas? And yet here it is, the 25th of January, exactly one month since Xmas 2012. Calendars don’t lie.

Subjective sense of date aside, welcome, science fans, to the latest slice of that big beautiful cake of knowledge known, to its closest and most intimate fans, as the Friday Science Whatever.

(Every else has to call it Mister Science Whatever, Esquire. )

This week, we have an update on a cosmic mystery, two cute and fuzzy animal related questions (along with their answers, of course), and another amazing update on a favorite topic.

First off, let’s talk giant mysterious gamma ray events.

I have written about this one before, I think, but still, let’s refresh.

Scientists have found solid evidence that way back in 775 AD, a massive gamma ray burst as strong as 10,000 Hiroshima bombs hit the Earth… and nobody noticed.

Seriously. Of the 350 million people on Earth when this hit, nobody noticed a gosh darn thing, and there were a lot of people paying really close attention to the sky by then and keeping meticulous records, so if something big had gone down, you would think they would have made note of it.

Especially because as far as we knew until recently, the only events that cause gamma bursts like that are particularly big solar flares (which would have caused a massive increase in aurora activity all over the world and someone would have noticed), or a nearby star exploding (which would have caused a super bright new star to appear in the sky, also noteworthy).

The update is that a team of German scientists have come up with a third theory : a short duration gamma event caused by the collision of two neutron stars.

This would still have caused a nova stellae to appear in the sky, but only for a day, which would explain why nobody noticed.

Pretty weak sauce, if you ask me. But then again, I am fond of this mystery, so I might be biased.

Next up, we have our cute and fuzzy animal related questions.

First off, why do we want to squeeze cute things?

Or, more formally, why is it that we have an almost aggressive reaction to “cute” stimuli?

Here’s the science :

Researchers found 109 people to look at pictures of animals — cute, funny and “neutral” photos of fluffy, fluffy puppies. The lucky participants then rated how they felt about the pictures: whether they agreed with the statement like “I just can’t handle it!” (or perhaps “It’s so fluffy I want to die!” whether they made them want to squeeze something or whether they were suddenly seized with the impulse to say something like “grr!” The cuter the animal, the more aggressive the response.
The study’s researchers, led by Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, dubs the phenomenon “cute aggression.”

Oy. First off, it is not aggression. It is not like seeing something cute makes us want to slug somebody or set a car on fire or something. It is merely a reaction to a high level of positive stimuli, and like the article says, that can lead to a seemingly paradoxical reaction of painful enjoyment.

This is not exactly fresh news. We have all laughed so hard it hurts, or experienced painful anticipation of a positive event, or loved someone or something so much it was a little scary.

Our “cuteness” response system is very powerful. It has to be, because it is what propels us to care for our young during the longest birth-to-adulthood phase in the animal kingdom.

I am sure this whole “cute aggression” theory makes for a fun and media-friendly paper, but to my scientific mind, it is nothing but… fluff.

Cute and fuzzy animal question two is a little gross, but it is something that we all have probably wondered at least once in our lives : can people eat cat food?

Not that you would want to do so, of course. Every cat food I have ever been exposed to has smelled absolutely horrible, whether wet or dry, so this is not me asking. I am not looking to try it.

But still, as a theoretical issue, if you had to do it (I picture this involving Joe Rogan somehow), would it kill you?

And the answer is “nope”. You can eat cat food without it harming you. It has some ingredients that we humans do not normally eat, notably ash, but our bodies can handle that kind of thing without a problem.

So a healthy person can eat cat food and it will not harm them. However, it should be noted that you also will not get much in the way of nutrition out of it either. Cat nutrition and human nutrition are very different, and so what is good for you cat is more or less just garbage for your body.

So sure, you could eat cat food. But why on Earth would you?

Finally, an update from one of our favorite branches of medical science here at FSW : tissue engineering!

The problem with making human tissue in a Petri dish is that a Petri dish is only 2D. You have exactly one cellular layer to work with, and that is just now how human tissue works.

Some researchers from Rice university have solved that problem, and what is more, they did it in the coolest way possible that does not involve lasers : magnetic levitation.

This gives them a whopping four cellular layers to work with, and this allows researchers to create lung tissue that is a lot more like the real thing, allowing them to better model how real long tissue would response to toxins or drugs.

And who knows? Maybe some day, this will allow them to culture lung tissue so well, it can be used to patch up the damage done by horrible diseases like cystic fibrosis or lung cancer, and give people the ability to breath on their own again.

Three cheers for science, huh?

See you next week, knowledge fans!

There is a question that every person of above-average intelligence (we will call such people “intellectuals” for the purpose of this article) has to resolve for themselves, and it is deceptively simple but its implications run deep into the very bedrock of an intellectual’s psyche.

And the question is this : Are they stupid, or are you smart?

Because it can’t be both. The most natural thing for any human being confronted with actions that seem inane, pointless, or downright stupid is to conclude that the person doing said actions is stupid.

From that, it is clear why a person of above average intelligence might easily fall into the trap of thinking the average person is stupid. Compared to you, they are.

But stupid can reasonably be said to mean “below average intelligence” and therefore it is, by definition, impossible for the average person to be stupid. The average person cannot be below average. That is as silly as the old Lake Woebegone “..and all the children are above average” joke.

Still, the narrow minded intellectuals who are bound by an excessively egocentric point of view continue to conclude that the average person is of below average intelligence, and much bitterness, elitism, rage, misanthropy, and waste of human potential results.

And yet, if being dumber than you means that someone is stupid and therefore below average intelligence, that must mean you are of average intelligence, right?

But ask your average (ha!) intellectual if they think they are of average intelligence, and you will mostly likely get a very indignant denial. They are definitely smart, not average. How dare you even ask?

So again : which is it? Is it that they are average and you are smart (above average), or is it that they are stupid and you are average?

It logically cannot be both.

And this is important, because it is the bitterness and anger towards stupidity (and those “stupid” average people) which results from this unresolved issue that causes many a worthy intellectual to give up on humanity and the humanist endeavor, and thus, the cause of improving human life loses the full effect of their contribution.

It is fortunate that modern human societies tend to organize themselves so that an individual’s contribution eventually gets distributed to all of humanity anyhow. And human nature dictates that even the crankiest and most curmudgeonly misanthrope is still going to want approval and recognition at least from the peers they have allowed into their monkeysphere.

Still, it is a sad thing for this human race when the best and brightest fall into the pitfall of misanthropy (the opposite of humanism, and for the record, you can’t be both a humanist and a misanthrope. You have to pick there, too.) So how to we prevent it?

That is a tricky question. Clearly, someone needs to reach above-average children in their formative stages, before the habits of misanthropy have become too entrenched in their identities, and put them on a better path both for them and for humanity.

After all, misanthropy not only makes a person bitter and angry, it makes it very hard for them to connect to those other human beings for whom they have such contempt, and all of modern behavioral science indicates that the strongest indicator for happiness is connection with others. The more positive connections with have with others, the happier we are.

Compared to connection, other things like wealth, status, and success are weak indicators indeed.

So for humanist reasons, people need to be rescued from the understandable but extremely unfortunate path of elitism, bitterness, and misanthropy, and redirected to the path of egalitarianism, warm human connection, and true philanthropy – love of humanity.

The first and most pressing step towards preventing the best and brightest from falling by the wayside is to take all the steps necessary to prevent bullying. The fact that the academically gifted are often tortured and assaulted by their peers is a profound injustice and something we would clearly not tolerate an adults, and yet for generations it was accepted as normal by our educational system and allowed to continue without interference.

And it is not difficult how to see that, as a reaction to the torture, a child might develop an impenetrable emotional shield of elitism to protect themselves from the attacks on their ego. There is nothing wrong with me. They are just jealous of my superiority. I am better than them. Etc.

So the fight against bullying will be the first step in assuring that budding intellectuals have far less reason to feel that the world is against them, and they must therefore be against it.

But there also needs to be an effort to get a certain sort of message to these children that lays out the basic facts for them, and guides them towards their proper role in society.

The message might be as follows :

You are correct to believe yourself part of an elite. Your intelligence makes you more powerful than others in a way that is truly frightening to them, and there will always be those who fear this power and thus fear, and perhaps even hate, you for it.

But superior power does not make for superior moral authority. You are not a better person than others merely because you are more powerful than they are, no matter what. Our reptile brains want us to equate power with superiority, but we are human beings and we know better.

In a just society, power is always exactly equal to responsibility. Your greater power (and do not dismiss it, it is potent) give you a greater responsibility to use that power to help others.

You have the potential to change the world and do more good than any average person could hope to achieve. That same potential could also be used to do far more harm.

Like the super powered beings in comic books, it is up to you to decide whether you want to use your powers for good or for evil.

Obviously, I would have to word it a little differently.

Been brooding on the issue of externalizing emotions today.

It is clear that, for mental health as well as physical, there needs to be a healthy amount of expression of emotions. It is my feeling that for human beings, every emotion is a signal, something we developed in order to transmit information to the rest of our primate group, and as such, like all communicative urges, remains with us until expressed and received.

This is easy to define in a simple primate society like a troupe of monkeys. One monkey sees a predator and screams in fear, alerting the rest of the troupe of the danger and summoning their aid.

The monkey did not have to think “Oh, a predator. I better make the predator alert noise!”. It just did what came naturally, expressed the emotion it was feeling at the time, and that was sufficient.

Now imagine said monkey sees the predator but knows there is no other monkeys near it to hear its scream. It might well hold on to that scream as it raced back towards its troupe and only seriously start screaming when it was sure some other monkeys would hear.

Again, no need for the monkey to think this out rationally. It only needed the instinct to make sure it was heard for this system to work. The monkey will not feel right until some other monkeys hear its scream. They might well scream themselves, again their natural emotional response, but also confirming that they have received the emotional information and will act accordingly.

Soon, the predator might find itself confronted with two dozen screaming angry monkeys, and decide to look for easier prey elsewhere.

Now, of course, we human beings are far more complicated than monkeys… but we are still the naked beach ape, social primates to the core, and we have the same instincts and the same needs and desires.

We just have vastly more complex ways of pursuing them.

So I think we human beings have this same desire to express emotions to other humans. Who, exactly, we desire as recipient of our emotion is not clear. One answer would be “anybody at all”, and it is true that we will get some emotional satisfaction from having anyone at all receive the emotional message.

But I think a case could be made that most emotions that are caused by other human beings have those human beings as their intended recipient, positive or negative.

And if you are wondering whether this truly applies to human beings, you only need to observe children to see how a child will injure themselves and their eyes will fill with tears, but they won’t actually start crying until their mother can see it.

Why? Because the external expression of the emotion is meant to signal distress to the child’s mother in order to elicit a nurturing and comforting response.

This is, incidentally, the importance of a mother “kissing it better”.

And this distinction between feeling the emotion and expressing it, externalizing it, is key. But more on that in a minute.

So human beings feel and express emotions. But not always, and the reason for that is sentience.

With sentience came the ability to think about our situation, to calculate our options, to choose amongst them, and thus, frees us from the narrowness of simply doing what emotion and instinct tells us all the time. We can pause, reflect, and choose.

This is, in fact, what allows us to have free will. But it also means that we suppress some or all of our emotions in given situations. This suppression is vital to our sentience, but it means that we inevitably accumulate a backlog of these unexpressed emotional signals, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of them except by expressing them.

So these emotions are trapped awaiting expression, and the longer we live, the more we have. To a certain extent, we can remove the energy from these trapped emotions via secondary means. We can get catharsis via art, for one thing, and thus cheat the system a little by releasing the emotion because a similar emotion has been triggered in us and the repressed emotions come out at the same time.

Taking it to the next level, you can express the emotions via creating art yourself. In doing such, the artist translates the emotional message into art for others to receive, and hopefully understand the message and maybe even derive catharsis themselves.

That applies to the solitary arts alone, of course. A performer translates the emotional message as well, but for an immediate audience.

One question that intrigues me is what, exactly, is the biochemical reality of emotional release. What changes in us when we successfully express an emotion? Is some tiny electrical potential released somewhere in the synaptic jungle of our brains? Is there a coil of compounded neurotransmitters somewhere in your brain that contains your unexpressed feelings about your mother? Where, exactly, in my body would I find all I want to say to my father?

And if we could figure out how and where repressed emotions are stored, could we come up with a catharsis chemical that releases all unexpressed emotions in a might flood of emotional release?

And would that be a good thing? It might well drive a person insane. Or turn them into some sort of saint or holy person, someone who walks the Earth unburdened and seems to us mere mortals like an angel because they carry so little of the weight of the world on their shoulders.

And what if we could remove the repressed emotion entirely? My guess is, we would also have to remove the entry in our emotional index for the memory, otherwise we would be filled with a terrible feeling of something being missing, of having forgotten something terribly important.

Hmm. You know, there might be a pretty interesting science fiction story in all this.

Check ya later.

Hey there hi there ho there, science fans! Here it is, Friday during a picturesque winter sunset, and that means it must be time for me to once more tip the vessel of science and pour out it multifarious bounty into our eager and willing minds, and thus, be enlightened and entertained.

This week, we have the oldest rock in the world, the best birth control ever, a knock it out of the park home run from Canadian medical science, and something that is “multi-omniphobic”, whatever that means.

All this, and my crisply ironed and cozy commentary as well.

You people are so lucky.

For starters, let’s take a look at the oldest rock in the world.

How old is old? 4.4 billion years, that’s how old. This tiny zircon was found inside another rock, and when it was tested, it was found to have formed 4.4 billion years ago.

You astute mavens out there will have already noted that the Earth itself is only 4.5 billion years old, meaning this teeny tiny rocklet was formed within 150 million years of the formation of the Earth.

Mind blown. Kapow. Never thought we would find anything from that period, because back then, this mudball of ours was just a big sphere of molten, raging goo.

But wait, there’s more. When the scientists took a further look at this Rock of Ages, they realized that it had crystallized in a way that only happens when a zircon forms in the presence of liquid water.

So apparently, there was liquid water on Earth when the Earth was only 150 to 300 million years old!

This changes a lot. For once thing, where there is water, there is at least a chance for life, and this could seriously change our idea of how long life on Earth has had to come about.

And that, in turn, improves the likely of finding life elsewhere in the universe via our favorite equation and friend of the column, Drake’s Equation!

Ta da! Isn’t science cool?

Next up, we have the best birth control in the world, and it’s for men.

It is a simple in-office kind of procedure that takes only fifteen minutes, and is incredibly cheap and simple. I won’t describe it to you because ouch, but it’s a few simple chemicals injected into a man’s vas deferens and bingo, sperm can get through (otherwise it would just cause a blocks, and yikes) but the nature of the chemicals means the sperm get all ripped up by a micro-electric charge (nothing you will feel in a million years, boys, uncross your legs) and hence are useless for fertilization.

And the procedure lasts at least ten years, and is easily reversible should you decide you want to start making some babies.

However awesome that is (answer : fairly), it still faces the same problem as all internal male birth control methods and that is the problem of trust.

A woman must trust that the horny young man she is considering having sex with is telling the truth when he says he has had the operation, and horny young men lie all the damned time. And so she would be better off just getting him to wear a condom “just in case”, and if he is going to have to wear a rubber anyhow, why get the operation at all?

However, this seems like an excellent option for voluntarily limiting family size within married or committed couples. It is cheaper and less invasive than tubal ligation and what’s more, it’s reversible, so if you change your mind about kids later, no problem.

And to be honest, guys, volunteering to be the one who goes under the knife to keep unwanted babies from happening is the least you can do, considering how much of the reproductive burden she carries.

Now up to bat : kickass Canadian medical science in the form of a possible vaccine for Alzheimer’s.

This story is particularly meaningful for me because a) it’s Canadians on the threshold of a major medical miracle and b) I fear Alzheimer’s terribly, even though there is no family history of it.

And it is more than a vaccine. It could also be a treatment. Basically, the injection would stimulate the body to produce more of a substance called MPL that eliminates the nasty amyloid beta molecules that are the real culprits in Alzheimer’s.

Those nasties are immune to the microgilial defenses that normally patrol our nervous systems, and so they accumulate in the brain in something called “senile plaques”.

But check this shit out :

In mice with Alzheimer’s symptoms, weekly injections of MPL over a twelve-week period eliminated up to 80% of senile plaques. In addition, tests measuring the mice’s ability to learn new tasks showed significant improvement in cognitive function over the same period.

And not only that, this marvelous MPL stuff can also be incorporated into a vaccine that would teach the body’s immune system to take out amyloid beta itself.

A cure and a treatment for a previously implacable and horrible disease?

GO TEAM CANADA!

Finally, let’s get into this superomniphobic business :

The idea is that these folks have come up with a fabric that repels all liquids, period. As the video shows, this stuff does not just keep the liquid out, it violently ejects it like an angry bouncer.

And that could have tons of uses, like the video shows.

But seriously. SUPER omniphobic? Omniphobic already means “afraid of everything” (I knew we were in trouble when water-resistant stuff was called ‘hydrophobic’), and there is no way to intensify an absolute like “everything”. It’s like saying someone is “extra dead” or “super pregnant”.

And besides, it’s an inanimate object. It’s not afraid of anything. So really, science, stop macking on already established language from psychiatry and getting your grubby physics hands all over it.

Still, looks like pretty cool stuff, n’est-ce pas?

That’s it for this week’s FSW, folks. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed thinking about large amounts of money while writing it.

Ugh. That is the first time I have had to type the year 2013. Such an ugly year.

Anyhow, hey there hi there ho there, science fans! Time for another installment of everyone’s favorite science bulletin, the Friday Science Whatever, and time for us to all bask in the glorious glow that is Dame Science and her paramour, Lord Reason, and see what interesting babies they have had this week.

Sad, really, that the children are all born out of wedlock, but ever since Lord Reason started hanging out with asshole skeptics and Ayn Rand devotees, marriage between him and Dame Science has been off the table.

She might be a little stiff necked and conservative sometimes, but Dame Science is not THAT bad.

For our first item, check out this interesting view of our place in the universe :

Love the music. Anyhow, I quite like the animation of what you get when you add our solar system’s motion around the Galactic Core into consideration. It really makes you think about just exactly where we are going at any moment.

In fact, I have pondered that question ever since I was a kid having his mind blown by science class. We all know that we are never truly standing still. We know that the Earth spins on its axis, so we are all rotating with it. And we all know the Earth goes around the Sun, and so we have that momentum as well.

But things get especially crazy when you try to factor in the Solar System’s movement around the Galactic Core (which the makers of that video did), let alone the fact that our galaxy is moving incredibly fast relative to other galaxies, and the whole kit and kaboodle is moving relative to the location (so to speak) of the Big Bang… well, just exactly which way are going, man?

I don’t think it is possible to add all those vectors together in a meaningful way.

As for this bullshit about life being a vortex or the solar system being a vortex and all that, I would not pay too much attention to it, except as an object lesson in what happens when you mix a little science with a lot of magical thinking in order to get something that is really cool to think about when you are stoned. That stuff has no place in science or scientific thinking.

Our next bit is not strictly about science, but it is science-adjacent and I am quite intrigued by it, so you are going to hear about it.

It is all about a drug called Mediator and the scandal surrounding the deaths of 500 people from heart valve damage linked to the drug in Europe.

It makes for a great case to illustrate just what a bind modern drug companies are in. If they come up with the next phenomenal wonder drug, they can reap quite enormous profits from it. But the investment in R&D is substantial due to potential side effects (if you are going to mess with people’s bodies, you better be damned sure the benefit outweighs the harm), and even if they do their best to predict all the side effects of their latest super pill, the pill’s very success means that it gets used on millions of people, and previously undetectable side effects emerge due to large sample size.

But the really interesting thing is that the French are investigating the 90 year old founder and CEO of the drug company that makes Mediator for manslaughter.

I thought that only happened in episodes of Quincy or Law and Order. Investigating and maybe prosecuting a CEO for the effects of their leadership?

Way to go, France!

That said, a case like this presents a thorny Utilitarian dilemma. Sure, the drug killed 500 people (at least), but how many did it save? Is it possible for a drug like that to actually be a net positive?

It is probably beyond our moral understanding to figure such things out. Utilitarianism tends to have its biggest problem with dealing with the issue of the sanctity of human life, something which we culturally assign an effectively infinite value.

And Utilitarianism, being comparative, does not handle infinity easily.

Lastly, we have this fascinating bit of news from the Mars500 project.

To quickly recap : the Mars500 Project was an experiment where an international crew was subjected to the same conditions as those that would face astronauts on a 17 month journey to Mars and back.

Well, the first scientific papers from the experiment have been released, and no surprise, the subjects became very lazy and sedentary during their long confinement.

Even though they had activities like video games to do, and could control their light exposure, the trip was nevertheless very boring, and the result was that the “astronauts” slept a lot more (but poorly), and moved as little as possible.

I find this particularly interesting because I am assuming that these were all active, dynamic young people before the experiment, and not, say, fat depressives like me.

Oh, and the really cool thing : the subjects perked up and started moving more and doing more in the last twenty days of the experiment, even though there was no more to do than before.

Just having the anticipation of release perked them up. The scientists say that the subjects entered a state remarkably like hibernation.

Presumably, all animals have an “energy conservation” mode, where they go into torpor when there is nothing to do and save up their energy for when it is time to move again.

All this sounds real familiar to me. I am not technically locked in a test chamber away from the Sun all the time, but my mental illness makes it very nearly so. And what do you know, I am extremely lazy and sleepy and sedentary.

And when I am awake, what do I do? Play video games!

I am beginning to think that this experiment may have implications beyond the question of space flight.

Maybe some of us are astronauts without even knowing it.