My old colleague at New Scientist - a man who actually proposed to his now wife using a troupe of trained golden retrievers - has found another use for this handy band of canines: teaching physics.

It’s amazing how the distinction between an electron shell and cloud comes alive through blurry puppy fur!

Watch and enjoy. Next I would like them to explain the quadratic formula.

An MBA student and his professor recently completed a study of 300,542 randomly chosen Twitter users, because this is what business students do. What did they find?

1) 55% of Twitter users are female.

2) Men and women tweet at the same rate. Which is to say, almost not at all. The study authors calculated the median number of lifetime tweets per user as one. One! This, they say, means most Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. Lazy arses.

3) Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

4) The average male Twitterer is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (and 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman). The average female Twitterer is also more eager to see what the guys are up to: she’s 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. 

Quote: These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Aw. That’s sad. Maybe you deserve a little love, guys.

Inkling doesn’t have an official Twitter account yet, though it’s in the works. This news fills us with both trepidation—how can we compete with all these seemingly scintillating male Twits?—and hope: Just make more than one 140-character Zen statement about science in two months, and it’ll be like we’ve published a career’s worth of books. Sweet.

Photographer Andrew Zuckerman is hoping to replicate the 2007 success of his book Creature with his new book Bird. In both, he shoots wild creatures in a studio setting, against brilliant white backdrops and with what feels like a stunning intimacy. Speaking to Wired in 2007, Zuckerman explained a little about how he does these shoots:

All subjects required their own special planning and customized approach based on their size or behavior. When capturing fish and birds I occasionally used a device that would allow the animal’s movement to trigger the exposure; this was through a custom-built delay system connecting a laser beam to a strobe light — which, when crossed, signaled the exposure. These images were made with little to no ambient light: The digital back would be exposing darkness until the animal hit its mark.

For more, check out the official site for Bird. 

PHOTO:Listen, Missy!

Maybe Claire Bennet wasn’t just trying to test out her powers when she hurled herself off all those high objects. Maybe she was doing science. A series of four articles published in the latest issue of the Journal of Athletic Training delve deeper into the intricacies of injuries-sustained-while-cheerleading than I would have imagined possible. Among the findings of the 1-year research project involving 9022 astonishingly limber high school and college-aged women? The majority of cheerleading-related injuries are caused by stunts.

In other words, friends, please note for future reference that tumbling, jumping, clapping, doing splits, and dancing aren’t as dangerous as being thrown through the air by someone who then attempts to catch you again.

The study also contained the shocking revelation that the most catastrophic fall-related injuries were sustained while cheerleaders were performing on harder surfaces like grass or wood floors, rather than cushier surfaces like spring floors (which are a little like spring mattresses but less sleep-inducing) and foam floors with thick padding. And finally? The higher the fall height, the greater the risk of injury. Color me surprised!

Seriously, though. Cheerleaders, be safe out there. A report that came out last year says the menace is very real. More of you get majorly traumatized, rendered disabled, or even killed (!) by cheerleading than by any other sport. And not everyone has magical healing powers.

IMAGE: Vincent Leemans and Marie-France Destain

I was just doing a Google Scholar search for “cheese” (because why not?) and came across an article published in the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Food Engineering which describes a new method—why yes, previous research on this topic has been done—of identifying unwanted objects accidentally buried in cheese. I wasn’t aware that cheese often came with unwanted objects buried in it, but the writers of the article contend this is a major problem in the food industry, so maybe I’ve just been lucky.

You can read the abstract of the paper here, but I’ll sum up. The scientists stuck the inner plastic core of a ballpoint pen through the crust and about halfway into a block of Belgian cheese, which in case you are interested (I was), they describe as the following: “an enzyme coagulated, surface ripened, semi-soft cheese of Trappist type."*

Then they blasted the cheese with a high-frequency sound, checked how loud it was when it came out the other side, and measured the echo, if any, that came back to the original sensor. Comparing these results with those produced by a block of cheese lacking in foreign bodies, they were able to conclude that the ultrasonic device was, in fact, a relatively robust means of detecting the pen core. I know! How awesome is that?

Also awesome: the list of concerns the researchers expressed with this method of internal defect-detection, which include “the high attenuation of the signal due to the cheese texture (and especially the crust),” and the fact that “the raw signal was dependant on the temperature and on the maturity of the cheese.” Tell me food engineers don’t have the best jobs in the world.

*You will be glad to note that the ultrasonic cheese testers confirmed this classification by consulting a scholarly work entitled Cheese Rheology and Texture.

PHOTO:

This morning, since it was unseasonably warm and beautiful in Chicago, I sipped a cup of coffee by Lake Michigan. While I was there, I enjoyed the company of a pleasant-seeming ladybird that decided to join me. Imagine my surprise when, sighing gently over the pretty creature, I decided to read a little about it this evening and came across the following horrifying headline from the British newspaper the Daily Mail: Vile-smelling foreign ladybirds set to invade homes this winter!

Turns out that the ladybird species Harmonia axyridis, native to East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and China, was introduced into Britain and the United States in the early 20th century as a useful agricultural pest-killer, and has been wreaking havoc ever since. During the fall and winter, the tiny (and very cute, at least judging by the one that crawled onto my leg this morning) creatures swarm in huge numbers and invade homes in the UK and certain regions in North America. The ladybirds are just trying to get away from the cold, but apparently people whose homes they fly into don’t find that just cause for the visitations. The worst part, it seems, is that when alarmed they give off a substance scientists delightfully call “reflex blood,” which not only stinks to high heaven, but causes allergic reactions in some people when inhaled. Phew. I guess it’s not surprising the Mail calls them “mini-beasts.”

I’ve never heard of or seen a ladybird invasion, myself. Have you? If so, do tell. I’m fascinated.

Photo: Proto Magazine

The marvelously well-researched and always provocative medical news magazine Proto, for which I occasionally write, has an intriguing story in this fall’s issue. Called “Between the Lines,” it’s a piece about how the online patient community Inspire.com is among a few such medically-oriented social networking sites that is beginning to use sophisticated natural language processing techniques borrowed from computer science to mine posts for clinically relevant information linking particular medications with symptoms and side-effects. Here’s a snippet from the article:

A query for mentions of the multiple sclerosis drug Avonex, for example, would parse a post by one user who writes, “i felt worse on avonex than my ms made me feel. while on avonex my psoriasis got VERY VERY bad/worse.” Another post reads, “I have been losing my hair…. I am going to switch from AVONEX to COPAXONE…to see if it is the AVONEX that is causing my hair issues.” After the program sorts through the text, Simetric employees review the results, double-checking the computer’s interpretations and dealing with tricky cases. The software may, for example, have trouble with the apparent contradiction of “wicked good” or pass over phrases it hasn’t been programmed to recognize.

The technique is a terrific mash-up of the emerging powers of the social networking phenomenon with the emerging powers of natural language processing, and it’s a really beautiful illustration of what’s possible when you find ways to analyze and quantify information that people naturally want to share with each other. I love it.

Heard on one of the questions in this week’s Not My Job segment of Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me!:” a reference to an animated film made by Walt Disney in the 1940s to educate young girls about the salient phenomenon of female puberty, and sponsored by (who else?) Kotex. Peter Sagal: “What’s interesting is the title. The Story of Menstruation—it’s like How it Was Invented!”

Found tonight, and shared with you: the very film in question, all oddly moody blue backdrops, calm female voice-over, and cutesy animations. It’s the least I can do. I really wouldn’t want to be alone in having the bizarre pleasure of hearing and seeing illustrated such words of wisdom as:

“Try not to throw yourself off schedule by getting overtired, emotionally upset, or catching cold.”

“But don’t let it get you down. After all, no matter how you feel, you have to live with people. You have to live with yourself, too. And once you stop feeling sorry for yourself and take those days in your stride, you’ll find it easier to keep smiling and even tempered.”

If you stick around long enough, you’ll get to the counsel in this post’s title, somewhat more gently put.

Just one question, Disney. If you were brave enough to take on what, nearly seventy years ago, was even more sensitive a subject than it is today, sensible enough to actually illustrate it with images of the uterus and fallopian tubes, and scientific enough to take viewers through the hormonal pathway first triggered by the pituitary gland, why then did you totally wuss out and transform menstrual blood into the color of milk? Honestly. There’s a scene where it looks like a alien-head shaped cow is being milked.

P.S. The scene in the screen grab you see above goes along with a bit about how all women, being different, have different menstrual schedules and periods that last for differing amounts of time. Why this message is accompanied by a group of chicks standing around staring at a Scottish Terrier, one of whom appears to be wearing a crown, I can only imagine. Hypotheses are welcome.

I woke up disoriented this morning, firstly because I’d forgotten about the fall shift back in our clocks, and secondly because it took several minutes of concerted thinking and sleepy Internet research before I managed to regain, at least for this year, what is always a slippery understanding of the rationale behind Daylight Saving Time and how it affects my life—as opposed to the lives of long-ago American farmers. (Oh, sorry, is my disdain showing?)

Anyway, I decided to find out if any interesting scientific research had been conducted into the horrible-terrible-no good-very bad results of DST, and found the usual papers about how the transitions disorient people’s chronobiological rhythms and thereby lead to traffic accidents and bad days at the stock market (or maybe not). I also found an interesting study on time changes and heart health by two Swedish researchers.

This time last year—precisely two days before the end of DST in their country—Rickard Ljung and Imre Janszky published a paper explaining what they’d discovered by examining Swedish hospital records for the twenty year period spanning 1987-2006. On the first three weekdays after the springtime shift in clocks, they said, the number of cases of acute myocardial infarction (commonly known as heart attack) at hospitals around the country was significantly higher than it was on the same days two weeks before and two weeks afterwards.

With the fall shift, the effect was reversed, and slightly briefer: Significantly fewer patients than usual showed up with heart attacks on the first weekday afterward. The researchers postulate that the minor sleep deprivation associated with moving clocks forward has an adverse effect on cardiovascular health, while the hour’s extra sleep you get when the clocks move backward has a protective effect.

I still think it’s dumb that we do this DST thing at all, but it’s good to know the three gigantic cups of coffee I had today are less likely to stop my heart this Monday than most others.

Over the past couple of months, NASA has been busy releasing a new series of stunning photographs produced by the Hubble telescope. The photos are test images that were taken in order to see how the telescope is doing after the complete makeover and repair it received in May 2009. The verdict: It’s doing AWESOME. See?

On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to be among 300 people who gathered in the Art Institute of Chicago’s (swanky) Fullerton Hall to hear astronaut John Grunsfeld speak about his role in those repairs. For instance, he and his fellow spacewalkers Mike Massimino and Drew Feustel removed several electrical circuits from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and replaced them with new ones, put in a new Fine Guidance Sensor (an instrument the size of a baby grand that helps Hubble point its nose in the right direction), and installed new insulation on the telescope’s external surface to protect it from crazy space temperatures—ranging from -200 degrees Fahrenheit to +200 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m posting this particular image because it’s one Grunsfeld showed in his talk, and it illustrates a really neat astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, he explained, two galaxies that are close enough together start to literally tug on each other’s hearts, exchanging gases and other matter in a beautiful, slow-motion collision. Eventually, this causes the galaxies to merge and form a single nucleus. If you look closely, you can see this process happening in the image above, which shows five galaxies known collectively as Stephan’s Quintet. The middle two galaxies are involved in a merger. There are two bright spots of light very close to each other, and two fainter tails swirling off to the top and the bottom. Inside those tails, huge numbers of new stars are being born:one of the neat side-effects of galactic mergers.

Oh! And the best part? At least for me, because I hadn’t heard about this before? Grunsfeld also explained that Earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be involved in the same kind of dance with the Andromeda Galaxy. If and when we do collide with Andromeda, things could get pretty weird. Both the Earth and the Sun are likely to get spun out into the boondocks of the new, bigger galaxy, where—if anyone is still there to see it—the night sky would burn a hundred times brighter with the light of all those extra stars. Don’t worry, though. We’ve still got a couple of billion years to prepare for it.

If you weren’t there on Wednesday in Chicago (and really, what are the odds you were?), you might enjoy this video of the first spacewalk on the 2009 repair mission.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Inkling really likes stories about space.