I’ve always disliked Pringles. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve eaten many, many, many of them in my life, but they’ve always just tasted so weird, overprocessed, unnatural and icky...nothing like an ACTUAL potato chip.

Turns out that their manufacturer - Proctor and Gamble - agrees with me. And so do judges of European High Courts. From the BBC webstory:

“...the manufacturer had insisted that their best-selling product was not similar to potato crisps because of their “mouth melt” taste, “uniform colour” and “regular shape” which “is not found in nature”. It also argued that potato crisps - unlike Pringles - did not contain non-potato flours, and were not packaged in tubes. Pringles are more like a cake or a biscuit, it claimed, because they are manufactured from dough. “

I rest my case. The resulting legal decision means that Pringles will not be taxed the 17.5% VAT, saving both P&G and customers some change. “To be subject to VAT, a product “must be wholly, or substantially wholly, made from the potato"," according to the Chief Justice.

To sum up...Pringles have essentially niggled out of a tax that was *meant* to make shitty snack food more expensive than actual wholesome food food by way of being so terrifyingly over processed that you can’t call them made from potato.

Ta da! I love lawyers!

Behold the beauty of Garden City Kansas...that’s right. The town made famous by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is now displayed in beautiful satellite imagery above. It’s just one of many many images at this post from Environmental Graffiti, which is like the UK’s Treehugger and v. cool.

(a lake in Guinea)

I nearly spat out my coffee when I read this headline: Korean Researchers to Clone Sept. 11 Rescue Dog.

But it’s true. And it gets SOOO much stranger.

First off, the dog in question, a 15 year old ailing German shepherd named Trakr, is winner of BioArts International’s Golden Clone Giveaway contest. Here’s a video of Trakr’s story which explains why he’s the winner: it vacillates between being TOTALLY surreal and TOTALLY weepy (just wait until the end; I dare you not to get a bit misty).

The contest is run under the umbrella of BioArt’s ”Best Friends Again” program. Yes that’s right, as in let’s be best friends again after you, my dearly beloved dog, pass away.

You see, BioArts, a bioengineering company in California, held a competition to find the world’s most “clone-worthy” dog. The winner, whomever the lucky hound be, got to be cloned for free. And that lucky winner happened to be Trakr, who made himself a hero locating the last human survivor under 10 meters of debris at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11.

(The whole Trakr story is WAY more endearing than just that. Turns out Trakr was a retired police dog from the Halifax Regional Police force when his handler Constable Jamie Symington decided to call in “sick” so that he and Trakr could venture down to NYC to save some lives. You can see photos of the hero hound (and his mildly hunky handler)here.)

Well Trakr already escaped death once: Jamie saved him from the police dept.’s policy to euthanise its retired canines. Sadly (and by sadly I mean heart-crushingly weepy) today Trakr can no longer use his hind legs due to “a degenerative neurological disorder that is linked to exposure to toxic smoke at the site” reports Chosunilbo, the Korean newspaper.

Within the next month, BioArts will send a sample of Trakr’s somatic cell genes to Dr. Hwang Woo-suk’s lab so that the previously disgraced Korean scientist can clone the diseased dog. Trakr the puppy will be due in November. If it’s a go, then it appears that the dog’s genes and doc’s rep will both get reprieve. 

Apparently.

This is especially confusing given the carcinogenic qualities of other red dyes in food (do you remember all the schoolyard urban legends surrounding the color of ketchup chips? They chilled my eight year old bones).

But red yeast rice, that lends peking duck its appetizing burnished color, dramatically cuts the risk of heart disease and cancer in patients according to a recent study in the American Journal of Cardiology. In fact the red yeast even outdoes statins at the job.

Crazy talk. I know. 

Except that red yeast rice has been used by the Chinese for over a thousand years as a herbal medicine and spice. If a country has the smarts to invent noodles, don’t you think they can figure out when a flame colored yeast keeps illness at bay? I do. 

We Brits are always being told that our ancient shores are not exactly a destination of choice. The climate aint great and everything is expensive. Our latest visitors (apart from Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal - anyone else watching Wimbledon?) are a group of lost and lonely loggerhead turtles. Record numbers of them in fact. They’ve been landing here and dying here, all apart from two who’ve just been nursed back to health and released back into the sea. Dink and James have just been flown to Gran Canaria and sent on their merry way, after spending 6 months in turtle rehab in the South West of England. When they arrived, they were both worse for wear, suffering from pneumonia, dehydration and hypothermia. It’s thought they accidentally got too close to the British Isles and our chilly waters, became lethargic and ill and drifted in to the coast. So sad! But unlike the rest, they survived, they’re all better now, and back in the wild. Blue Reef Aquarium curator Matt Slater has been nursing the turtles back to health and was watching when they left. “Hopefully, we won’t be seeing you again. Have many, many years of swimming in the ocean,” he is said to have called out when they swam away. And I know I’m not meant to say this about wild animals, but the pictures of the turtles are incredibly cute and the videos even cuter…

Cowabunga.

(PHOTO: INTHE80S)

You know all those fuzzy headlines about different animal species pairing up? You SO know what I’m talking about. Like baby hippo and tortoise become fast friends, Hurricane Katrina orphan puppy best buds with baby tiger… that kind of pukey cute stuff.

Well, I’ve just come across what may be the most bizarre, intimate and gross animal pairing yet: the chicken and the gecko.

Some poor Aussie doctor was cooking himself some eggs when lo and behold there was a dead little GECKO INSIDE THE EGG. Yeah. Ew. And as if to read our minds and in a feeble attempt to allay them “health authorities say the discovery is nothing to be alarmed about” according to ,a href=http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/05/16/2246597.htm>ABC News.

Like any good confused and fascinated citizen he took some pics and made his egg into a headline.

Now I know you’re asking yourself HOW HOW does this happen. Well, the dominant theory at Australia’s Egg Corporation is that the GECKO CLIMBED UP THE CHICKEN’S CLOACA. The question remains: why???? 

Last week, a celebrity came to my work place. No, I’m not talking about Chris Martin from Coldplay, Im talking about Ivuna. Not quite so musical or entertaining, but vastly more valuable and significant, Ivuna is a meteorite recently purchased by the Natural History Museum. Like any self-respecting celeb, Ivuna was accompanied by a minder at all times, Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite curator at the Museum. Dr Smith carried Ivuna around in a high-tech briefcase wrapped in a piece of tinfoil like a baked potato, and handled the valuable solidified-mud-pie-from-space with green gloves at all times. Although it doesn’t look like much, it’s very valuable, because it could hold secrets about the early days of our universe. It will hopefully go on view in a new meteorite gallery at the NHM, where everyone will be able to go and have a good look. Welcome to London, Ivuna.

(Photo borrowed from the Natural History Museum)

I’ve just been looking at some photos, of the actual moment when ovulation takes place. And I’m feeling slightly disturbed I have to say. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of the miracle of life, and being able to see things with a weeny camera that you wouldn’t be able to see with your eyes is rather cool. But I don’t think I need to see this, it’s slightly revolting. The follicle in the photo is miniscule and the egg is the size of a full stop, but blown up like this it looks a bit creepy. In general, I try not to think too much about this sort of stuff, I’m content just to let it get on with things without me having to see. What does anyone else think?

PS Please forgive the slightly obvious photo off eggs by Ale Paiva, I didn’t want to pilfer the actual photo from it’s original source in New Scientist. 

(PHOTO: SOOPAHTOE)

Unless you do all of your surfing by clicking on shortcuts and links, odds are at some point you’ll have typed in a URL. Sometimes these are stuffed to the gills with backslashes, these weird things ~, and often plenty of ? and & and a whole slew of numbers. Nightmarish to remember. But even if they’re reasonably straightforward it’s easy to make a mistake. Usually, such a mistake takes you to an error page, but sometimes, you hit on something nifty. I was trying to check my gmail the other day and by accident I typed http://www.gmai.com, which took me to GMA Industries Inc., a small scientific research company in Annapolis, MD. Once I was at their site I clicked around a bit, and discovered that they are also responsible for a site called pseudoscents.com, which they define thus:

As the developer of the worlds first non-energetic explosive pseudoscents, we design and develop scent products and services to industries related to defense, homeland security, fragrances, and the enhancement of the environment.

This is much more interesting than the misprint of hotmail. Typing in hotnail.com took me to a different page every time I clicked it - first a page about rheumatoid arthritis, then one called Blemish-be-gone, so it’s clearly an advertising site. It’s a great idea, if a bit more prosaic and markety.

I often feel like I’m going in circles on the web, clicking on the same old sites day after day. It was kind of nice to see something new, and sort of sciency too. 

Sooo when I was in New York my dear friend Kurt was kind enough to make a concerted effort to see me - which was no small feat considering that he was headed into moving apts, manning a World Malaria Awareness Day info booth in the city, presenting a talk to esteemed peers, and conducting his never-ending stream of lab work at his graduate post in the Department of Medical Parasitology at NYU that promises to save us from disease.

Needless to say, no matter how many scrumptious desserts we stuffed down his gullet, and how many meals we coerced him into joining, he couldn’t shed his guilt about frolicking around the city with us when he should have been at the lab getting blisters from all his pipetting.

At one point he cracked: I have to go, he pleaded. I have lab guilt, he admitted. And then muttered something about being an ex-catholic.

And so inspired was I by this admission that I decided to make a T-shirt for him to that effect that I’m now selling at The Inkstand.

But I have to clarify: lab guilt is in no way the exclusive property of ex-catholics. From what I can tell, it applies to any person who has experiments to operate and science to see to. And to be fair, us un-lab-bound people who cherish and love our scientist friends, should be more sympathetic to their plight. So, if you see someone wearing this t-shirt, gently approach them to gage their interest in joining you at the pub, but whatever you do DO NOT pressure them if they decline. It is your job as their supportive friend to understand their quandary and slowly back away leaving them to their martyrdom. How else will the best science get done in this world?

Men’s “I’ve Got Lab Guilt” Tee. $22
Women’s Lab Guilt American Apparel Tee $22