Ho there science fans, and welcome to another addition of this semi-regular science thing we do here on a fairly large number of potential Fridays.

In it, I attempt to illuminate the week’s most interesting science stories, and provide you with my own pithy, trenchant, and even coherent commentary on the story in hopes of seeming smart.

We have a fairly bumptious crop of interesting science tidbits for you today, so I am looking forward to telling you all about them once I remember where I put them.

You will have to forgive me, I unwisely took a melatonin at 4pm and I am feeling a little sandbagged at the moment. I apologize for any increase in incoherence, but duck phalange disco at the booty bar.

First story : it is my usual practice in these silly little missives to save the most cortex-popping or sensational stories for the end of the article, but this one has been burning a hole in my browser since I came across it today, so I am going to take care of it right away.

I can’t seem to lay a hand on the entry right now, but I am pretty sure I have told you fine folks about the quest to pierce Lake Vostok before.

Lake Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica. That means it is an actual fresh-water lake, but it is located under 2 miles of Antarctic ice.

The idea of getting to examine such a large yet isolated ecosystem has been taunting scientists for decades, and recently, a Russian team decided they were going to use the deep drilling techniques that Russia has perfected to get down there and find out just what is going on down there.

I have been following the story avidly, as I am fascinated by the utterly marvelous mystery of it all. An enormous lake, the size of Lake Ontario but with three times the volume, trapped under the Antarctic ice sheet for millennia, left to develop all on its own, cut off from the rest of the biosphere… who knows what strange turns life might have taken in all that time alone?

In many ways, it is like landing on an alien planet.

But it also kind of sounds like the start of an X-Files episode, doesn’t it? Or my favorite horror movie of all time, John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Hey Vostok guys… if a guy in a helicopter is chasing a dog, SHOOT THAT FUCKING DOG!

Anyhow, the newsbit I just had to share is this : we have lost all contact with the Vostok team.

And now the X-Files portion of my brain is going absolutely apeshit. This is exactly how an episode of X-Files where Mulder and Scully have to go investigate something in the Antarctic (why them? Why not. ) would start.

And of course, it would then turn out that the drilling unleashed some horrible scary evil life form from the Jurassic era that killed all the crew in horrible and mysterious ways and Mulder and Scully will find the bodies one by one and Scully will do a couple of autopsies and they will figure out that if this thing made it back to the mainland, it could destroy all life on Earth, and just barely be able to stop it before the end credits, but not before it’s revealed that the person backing the mission to Lake Vostok from the shadows was…. CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN!

Um, let’s move on before I freak myself out.

I know, we will cover the wacky and weird world of completely insane scientific papers.

There is currently this completely insane (and I mean that literally, as in shows signs of schizophrenia) scientific paper floating about called the Theory of Everything that is causing quite a stir not because it is clearly batshit insane, but because it got published in the fairly sober and prestigious and peer-reviewed scientific journal Life.

So somehow, this wackadoodle paper about how all things are alive and how everything is something called a “gyre” (never defined) and stuffed with over 800 citations… somehow THAT got past an editorial baord of 23 fellow scientists to gain the imprimatur of respectability that being published in a peer reviewed journal means in the world of science.

What a scandal! People have already fallen on their swords and resigned over this. More heads may well roll before it’s all over. And of course, people are wondering… is the author of paper, a previously sane and sober scientist named Erik Andrulis, genuinely this crazy, or is this all part of a marvelously effective hoax to reveal just how flawed the peer review system of science is?

I hope it’s the latter. It’s amusing as a scandal, but it’s more fun as an elaborate sting. That would make it the scientific equivalent of an artist painting a really terrible but very trendy painting and then convincing professional art critics it is brilliant.

Finally, here’s a fun story about zapping animals in the balls for science.

Now relax. They are just being zapped with ultrasound. It sounds painless to me. In fact, it is possible that some of the animals, specifically the monkeys, were rather enjoying it.

“The monkeys didn’t seem to mind the treatment a bit, but we were having a rough time of it. Thirty minutes of treatment three times a week is a lot of monkey testicular massage. We felt pretty silly, and it didn’t help when the techs would come around and wonder what kind of research we were doing. We were relieved when we finally saw an effect.”

I bet there was a lot of scientists thinking “I went to graduate school for this?” while rubbing monkey balls on this one.

The idea is that in the future, it might be possible for male contraception to be nothing more than a zap to the balls now and then.

Of course, they will have to market such a thing very, very carefully in order to keep from inducing the “male testicular trauma response” universal to all men.

I suggest using the word PAINLESS an awful lot.

Seeya next week, science fans!