Anyone who hasn’t discovered the wonder and amazingness that is CBC Radio3 should sit up and take notice. They play new, interesting and alterna music and have wicked podcasts and are just generally fabulous. And only online and digital. Is just so nouveau, you know?

They also play some, er, weird stuff. Canadians, you know what I mean. For example, take this AMAZINGLY dorky song about the planet Venus from Jerry Jerry and the Sons of the Rhythm Orchestra, sent to us by Inkycircus gal, Simone. We here at the circus are, of course, big fans of science related musical offerings (nerdcore hip hop, bestest science pop songs and old school science educational songs) and this song certainly doesn’t disappoint....."it rains all day, rains all day, rains all day concentrated sulphuric acid.”

I will buy this beautiful original John James Audubon pelican from his Birds of America 1927 book. For $96,000. Of course if inflation continues in the way it’s going now, that will be $9.6 million by the time I can afford it. 

For all that we complain about gimmicky, stupid, science teaching tools (oh I haven’t, well I have in my head), I need to admit that I love what University of California, Santa Cruz statistician Herbie Lee has done with a chocolate chip cookie. By plotting the random distribution of chips throughout the cookie (which requires eating it..to see all the ones in the middle), he successfully demonstrated a Poisson distribution to his students. The PD is a distribution used to model the occurrence of events over time.

I mean do you all remember your stats class? I do. First term was Thursdays from 6-9pm. Oi. At half time break I used to get a latte so strong that my hand would sometime shake when I returned to class. I mean statistics are incredibly useful, an absolute must for those in most sciences and, I admit, I still use these skills nearly daily. But MAN OH MAN was it boring to learn. I think a cookie might have helped.

Man oh man, if only they’d had this video when I was taking Cell and Molecular Bio in 1999 - it might have injected a wee bit of life into our 3 hour Thursday evening lectures (Anne and I resorted to pen wars to keep ourselves occupied).

Anyways. Please please watch the above. It’s like a ray of nerdy sunshine to the tune of a gospel choir, provided to us by Bio-Rad, who make PCR machines (I mean SHIT man, that is the best ad for lab equipment I have ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of them).

My favorite line: “It’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do...” Of course the chorus is pretty amazing too: “PCR when you need to detect mutation. PCR when you need to recombine. PCR when you need to find out who the daddy is.PCR when you need to solve a crime.”

Kary Mullis would be so very, very proud.

(Thanks Tom)

After all of Anne’s posts on cleaning your computer and spilling coffee on your computer, you might think that we are a bunch of clumsy destroyers. Indeed, we are. Anne loves to spill things on herself and anything in her vicinity****. I like to wash people’s electronic goods. Yes, that is right. I washed my boyfriend’s iPod, which was snuggled inside the front pocket of his red hoodie. Nice. I think this is payback for when he washed AND DRIED my favorite black silk sweater. Anyways.

The pod emerged from the Bosch completely dead. Boyfriend attempted to dry it slowly underneath some infrared heat lamps above our stove shelfs. Nothing. He set a timer to check on the sucker every couple of minutes. Nothing. Indeed it had been more than 4 hours since the incident, and we were on our way to buy a new one at an UNofficial Apple Store (we are to get an OFFICIAL Apple store soon - they are hiring on the Apple Jobs site for a Pacific Center-based store), when the boyfriend checked it and it was alive. A little steamy under the screen, but in perfect working order. Not to mention very very clean.

But it seems that his is not a miraculous story. According to this 2005 post from the UK tech site, The Register, iPod Nanos are pretty good at surviving the spin cycle. This is likely owing to their hardy flash memory (as opposed to the hard drive used in previous iPod Minis) and a really tight seal around the battery.

Indeed if you look up “washed iPod” on Google, you’ll get a ton of similar survival stories. It seems that waiting patiently until it is fully dried is the real key here and not trying to plug it in wet to your computer or power source. In any case, it’s alll kind of ironic given the flack that Apple gets for building such disposable small goods.

***Did I mention that Anne once dropped her Nokia phone in a vat of boiling curry at the Notting Hill Carnival in London? It survived for quite a few months afterwards and only smelled a little funny.

THEIR SONGS SAVED LIVES… NO REALLY!

We all knew science and song go together like a horse and carriage (Related: ”Math, for children. And adults who want to laugh at James Blunt making fun of himself” October 19, 2007 and ”Some great science ear candy” August 01, 2007. Not to mention Kate Fink’s fabulous list of the Top Ten Science Songs for petri dish slaves)

But this story takes that relationship to a whole new level of awesomeness.

EMI is the parent company of The Beatles’ two record labels, Capitol Records and Apple Records. And it had its fingers in several pies at the time (they gave the BBC its first television transmitter), one of which included R&D in medical imaging technology. So they took the heaps and heaps of money they made off of the sales of some 200 million Beatles singles and used it to fund Sir Godfrey Hounsfield’s work on his CT scanner prototype at EMI Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, England. As a result he spent four years tinkering on it. Lo and behold the first EMI-Scanner was installed in a hospital in Wimbledon, England in 1972.

EMI initially estimated that the global demand for their machine, which used series of x-rays to generate a 3D image of the soft tissues inside one’s body, would peak at 25. Since then the technology has burgeoned and CT scans are a staple tool for medical practitioners.

Which begs the question. What are the best Beatles’ lyrics to hijack and tell this tale? Anna’s vote is for “Help!”:

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,
Now I find I’ve *imaged* my mind and opened up the doors.

Me? I think “Please Mister Postman” works well:

Doctor Godfrey look and see
If you got time in your scanner for me
I been waiting such a long time
Since I heard of that tumor of mine

You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - so still
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - soooo stilllll
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - soooo still
You gotta check it and see, one more time for me…

Some very talented peeps over at the Coastal Ocean Observing Center at the University of New Hampshire have put together a remarkably thorough and clever spoof of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” all about trolling for plankton and other fun things oceanographers do. It’s called ”Cruise Cruise Baby.”

All the footage and inspiration comes from a series of 12 hour monthly research cruises conducted around the Gulf of Maine over the past several years.

It makes for GREAT Friday afternoon doldrum watching. Here are some of research associate Chris Manning‘s inspired lyrics:

“To the extreme the damn boat is rolling
Put it in gear let’s go plankton trolling…
....

Motion sickness problems?
Yo we’ll solve them.
Throw up your snacks
Let the ocean dissolve them

cruise cruise baby - doo dodododooodododo
cruise cruise baby - doo dodododooodododo”

Here are the full lyrics.

And here’s me signing off wishing everyone a great weekend with a quote from my new favorite mid-nineties science rap spoof: “Word to your photons.”

(Thanks Judy and Isla!)

SHATNER MAKES AN APROPOS CAMEO APPEARANCE AS THE FATHER OF JASON ALEXANDER IN THE MUSIC VIDEO “ONLINE.” HERE HE IS MAKING BUSTY “FRIENDS” ONLINE AND JUST ABOUT TO GET BUSTED.

Brad Paisley is this ridiculously upright handsome country star. His latest single (which is the first of his music videos that you can buy online) is creatively titled “Online.”

Watch it at this link.

“I work down at the Pizza Pit
And I drive an old Hyundai
I still live with my mom and dad
I’m 5 foot 3 and overweight
I’m a scifi fanatic
A mild asthmatic
And I’ve never been to second base
But there’s whole ‘nother me
That you need to see
Go checkout MySpace”

That’s the first verse and it gets better. The chorus goes “I’m so much cooler online. So much cooler online”

Jason Alexander from Seinfeld plays the main pizza delivery marching band member dork who lives at home with his parents. And get William Shatner plays his dad. The best part, as my friend Anne Mullin (girl genius behind Vancouver’s Cafe Scientifique) pointed out, is where Shatner gets told off for not being able to sing. If you don’t understand the humour behind this you’re missing out bigtime - so go remedy it asap by sampling his crooning skillz on the “Spaced Out” album. 

Admission: I’m a huge fan of the movie Sahara. I went to see it with my dearest friend Tania when she visited me in New York in 2005. We went thinking we could heckle the hell out of it and get a good dose of eye candy (Matthew McConaughey who plays the lead swashbuckler Dirk Pitt is saturnine beyond compare). But we wound up loving it instead. Steve Zahn, who plays Dirk’s sidekick is winning and Rainn Wilson (who you may know as Dwight in The Office) graces this rollicking action-adventure flick with his unique rendition of a nerd that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

So where’s the biology behind this? Other than it’s tie-in to the recent news that men choose good looks in women - the only explanation for why McConaughey’s character in the movie was drawn to the wooden Penelope Cruz.

Well about one third of the way through the film, Dirk pauses in front of a vendor alongside the Niger river and picks up two clam shells that face each other like angel clams. And in a manner that I can only equate with what David Attenborough would have sounded like if he was raised in the south and half his age, Pitt says:

Sometimes I think about Petracola Fularatormus, the angel wing clam. This river is the only place on the earth they are found. Underwater they glow in the dark. Now the amazing thing is that modern science cannot explain why.

I’ve always wanted to learn more about this phenomena but always forget to look it up. Not this time. A quick google search reveals that there are several problems with this portion of the script according to MovieMistakes.com:

Three problems: First, Petricola Pholadiformis, are actually called “False angel wing” and are found many places in the world in fresh water (but seldom in the Niger River). Second, what’s known as the ”Angel wing” shell (no “false” in its name) has Cyrtopleura Costata, as its scientific name. Cyrtopleura Costata, ("Angel wing") is found in salt water. Third, Dirk also said they “glow in the dark”; some varieties of Cyrtopleura Costata, shells will glow if exposed to ultraviolet light but none glow from their own internal source. Petricola Pholadiformis, shells don’t glow at all.

To which I say boo. And if the producers of Sahara ever decide to make a sorely desired sequel, may I suggest that they hire the services of fact checkers. Hell, I’d even do it. 

LILY ALLEN WEARS INSANE NASA IN COMMON’S LATEST MUSIC VIDEO “DRIVIN’ ME WILD”

Sooooo remember how Anna had that article deconstructing that lethal NASA love triangle? You know where Lisa Marie Nowak wound up driving 900 miles in diapers down to Orlando Florida to try and kill of the apple of her crush’s eye.

To make a long story short she was busted (with an embarrassing and intriguing list of supplies: see article). But obviously her story resonated with the greater world because many moons later lo and behold, the rap artist Common comes out with a hit song “Drivin’ Me Wild” featuring the doe eyed Lily Allen that alludes to Nowak’s krazy stint.

Not only does the song refer to Nowak’s madness ("All thinkin’ she number one where she was just a jumpoff. Doin’ all she can for a man and a baby. Drivin’ herself crazy like the astronaut lady") but in the music video itself at the “crazy astronaut lady“‘s mention the camera zooms out of Common’s limo to find a full fledged NASA astronaut standing on the roof of his car gesturing “why me?” with Michelin man arms. It’s funny. And touching. If anything Common sounds like he’s empathizing with Nowak. “I guess we all been through it where we try too much,” he raps to us wearing his “ROBOT IS THE FUTURE” t-shirt, pressed pants, and ornate and dapper facial hair formation. And you know what, maybe, maybe he’s right.

Anyways, it’s kinda catchy. And worth a listen. And the image of a NASA astronaut flipping back her face shield to reveal Lily Allen in redundant aviators singing the chorus ("It’s this thing now, that’s drivin’ me wild. I gotta see what’s up before it gets me down") is entirely delightful and absurd.

Credit goes to S/FJ for flagging this hit to my sheltered self at his BEST OF 2007 site.