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!