So the other day I was in one of those horrifying specialty pet shops searching for a gift for some new dog owners.

You know them… The little boutique ones that sell terrier cardigans for $60 alongside home made dog cookies whimsically shaped like cats. I LOVE dogs. Really truly deeply love them. But there’s something off kilter about these stores. They smell like beef jerky sitting in the sun for weeks and I swear the people that work there inhale helium behind the counter just to keep their baby-talk-to-dog voice just so.

But hanging on the wall of dog toys, between the pink mint flavored bone shaped chew toys and the reindeer dog costumes WAS THE COOLEST THING EVER.

It was a chew toy SHAPED LIKE A STRAND OF DNA!!! Pull on it and you can see those gorgeous base pairs hydrogen bonded like rungs of a ladder but in it’s natural state the helical strands (AKA the phosphate deoxyribose backbones) coil just like Shirley Temple’s ringlets.

It came in a mini dog version and a big dog version. And I wanted both of them BADLY and I don’t even have a dog. So instead I’m urging all you friends of science geek dog owners to snap these up in an effort to make the world a more joyful place all filled with DNA chew toys.

You can buy them online at DNAStuff.com for $13.95. Or brave some cutesy tootsy pooch boutique store in person.

It’s been a while since I’ve longingly gazed at Nasa eyecandy. So perhaps that’s why these gorgeous photos of Mars took my breath away - or rather, slowed it down to a meditation-induced crawl. You don’t always know what you’re looking at but it sure is striking. And the captions give you some clues.

All together there are 45 images, the cream of the Mars expeditions’ crop. They are all worth your time.

The geography is akin to reading Tolkien where the names are all exotic but the feel for the place is palpable.

There’s the rainbow “Hebes Chasma region at the northwestern end of Valles Marinaris” (pictured above). There’s Mars’ south pole all covered in frozen carbon dioxide that’s referred to as the “swiss cheese terrain” for its mazes and pock marks. And then there’s the Chasma Boreale in the north pole where bands of dust and ice accumulate up year after year to look like the contour lines on a topographic map.

Otherworldly and gorgeous. Ideal for taking you away from your work and far out of the office for a spell.

Link: Mars as Art. Go!

I had been meaning to watch Michael Moore’s Sicko ever since it came out, but never managed to drag my butt to the theatre/Blockbuster and get the job done. Thank the Lord for 10 hour flights and personal film selections. The movie was exactly as I predicted - overly dramatic, sad, frustrating, prone to exaggeration, but essentially true (ish). And what a horrible truth it is. I’ve lived in the US, Canada and Britain and made thorough use of health care in each country. His depictions of Canadian and the UK health care were laughable in their optimism and flattery, but were in general true to my experience, at least.  I am sick. I go. I get better. It’s nearly free. The stories of US insurance companies and the people who work..well...I am sure they are skewed, but they were incredibly chilling.

So let me express a weeny bit of cynicism over the recent announcement by the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans for extending coverage to uninsured Americans and making it harder to deny or revoke coverage. I mean come on. It seems apparent that the insurance companies want to try and reform themselves - with their own rules - before a new president comes in and does it for them. And let me express some added concern that the NYTimes piece on the issue doesn’t offer an opinion on the plan from any health care reform researchers or activists. Errrr.

But on a similar note...YAY California! For moving along with their health care plan. Four years ago, when I was running around Santa Cruz plucking VOTE ARNIE signs from people lawns and stashing them in my trunk, I would have never believed he could be such a force for something as Democraty as health care. 

(PHOTO: LANCE PALMER)

It’s a universal truth, like gravity. Make a ground beef patty. Cook it. And it shrinks. No matter how you swing it, what you peel off the grill will be smaller than what you slapped on it.

Turns out this very trait can be used to tell whether a burger is sufficiently cooked or not - something the fast food industry has problems with every so often (see “Beef with Burger” subhead on this list of ”The 10 Most Nauseating Stories About Bad Fast Food Meals” on CourtTv.com). The industry standard for sussing out whether all the E. Coli in your beef is fried is to temperature probe it. But this gets gross pretty fast. Imagine: probe an undone burger and then reprobe a done one and you’ve just managed to transfer a batch of germs from one to the other. Ew.

So instead, New Jersey teens Naomi Collip, Caroline Lang, and Rebecca Ehrhardt came up with the “burger cam,” which placed first at their regional Siemen’s science fair and fourth at the national one. The camera is perched above the cooking area and measures burger shrinkage, an indicator of burger done-ness and E. coli deadness.

Simply put: “We found in testing that shrinkage occurs with burger temperature so when a burger is shrunk to a certain area, it has cooked safely,” 15-year-old Rebecca Ehrhardt told abc news.

What an impressive trio. You go girls. You take universal laws of nature such as burger shrinkage and apply them to save lives. 

GIMME YOUR LUNCH MONEY

Browsing through the animal behaviour literature today, I stumbled upon a review of kleptoparasitism in birds - in essence, stealing other people’s food. And while you might think that it’s the big tough bully birds who steal food, the authors actually found that stealers tended to have larger brains, though not larger bodies, than their mugging victims. Fun times. 

Remember a while back when all Anne could think about was that stupid hummer parked on her street and how totally horrendous it was? Well now instead of slashing his tires, she can just slip a handy instructions packed through his mail slot, showing him how to turn his gas guzzler in to a 60 mpg eco-friendly vehicle. Nice. I mean he just has to rip out the current combustion system and install an electric engine/biodiesel burning jet turbine. Yar har. 

And if he fails, she can always stuff some eco-balls up his tail pipe. Axel Foley would be so proud.

(PHOTO: Anna Brett)
It’s a terrible fact of human biology: we love babies. Take, for example, the fact that our brains light up in the happy happy centers when we see a baby face. I mean it’s like totally pre-programmed. Why do you think we like and help baby-faced people? And adore humongous-eyed cartoon characters?

So we all love to look at babies and babyish stuff. Wicked. But what about the ingrained, autonomic response to hearing a baby scream its little purple head off? When I hear a kid start to wail it’s like someone has given an intravenous shot of psychotic angriness. I go nuts. I can’t concentrate, can’t hear anything other than the insufferable squeals (of delight, pain or anything really) emanating from the tot.

And no where is this reaction stronger than on some form of public transportation. Having endured nine hours of air travel with one blond squawker followed by 45 minutes of subway travel with another, I am pretty much done for. I mean drug them, hide them in the bathroom, stuff them in the overhead bins, I don’t care, just keep it away. Or at least have the courtesy to bring it over and let me have look and maybe a snuggle. Or I guess I could finally learn to frickin’ meditate already. Yeah.  Or I could just buy some earplugs. 

For once, someone has taken the idea of “mapping the brain” literally.

Take a side picture of the brain and morph it into cartography.  Finally, finagle all the names to match and be all in-joke and cheeky. And litter the islands of New Zealand around it to throw everyone off scent.

Just think about it. It’s the best exercise in surreal escapism.

If we went on a sunny two week vacation to Brainland we could kayak in those neuro-anatomical furrows called sulcis (sulcus is the singular) that demarcate the separate lobes of the brain. We could go for a long hike along that ridge on the cerebral cortex called the gyrus. As for me? I’m dying to go on a sailing trip past Axon Turning Point, into Retinal Inlet and camp for a day and a night on Neuron Island, spending my day collecting shells and little vesicles of neurotransmitters before they’re released to the sea.

Stroke of genius courtesy of UNIT SEVEN. On their website you can download Brainland wallpaper for free. Or buy large super high-resolution printed copies of it to put on your wall to longingly gaze at.

(via NOTCOT)

I know I’m meant to talk about how nature is awe inspiring and majestic, but sometimes it is just too cute for words. The news was particularly dry today, containing serious stories about a couple of high profile fraud cases, speculation about who’ll the next England football manager, and the Led Zeppelin comeback concert. So this story about the long-eared jerboa being captured on camera was a sight for sore eyes.

These tiny rodents are pretty skilled at keeping out of the way of marauding humans, so they’ve never actually been filmed before. The conservationists from the venerable Zoological Society of London hope the footage they’ve obtained should help us to learn how to protect the little creatures, as they are currently endangered enough to earn a place on the IUCN Red List. The jerboa are also number 81 on the ZSL’s Edge List of 100 most endangered species, sharing space with the long-footed poteroo, the amazonian manatee and many others.

From a more selfish perspective, the footage is a delightful way to pass a few minutes on a rainy Monday night. Possessed of unfeasibly large ears and an impracticably long tail with a black tuft on the end, the jerboa hop around the Gobi dessert like minature kangaroos, digging in the sand and trying to get by. There are 3 clips on the BBC News article (which is where I got the above picture from), and for those of you geographically excluded from watching, ZSL have posted some of their footage on YouTube.

Enjoy.

When I was little, my mother hardly ever bought us sugar cereals. Sure we used to get them on camping trips - sometimes - because of those handy little mini value packs, but if I ever really wanted a hit I had to swindle a bowl of Count Chocula or Trix from my friends.

Now as you all know, I get the Canadian Food Inspection Agency email alerts for undeclared allergies, toxins etc found in Canadian food. Anyways. Today there was an alert about a happy sugar cereal: Kellogg’s Holiday Froot Loops (why the bad spelling of fruit? why? does bad spelling just appeal more to children?).

It seems that our poor Kellogg’s has accidentally added some milk proteins to the cereal and omitted including this fact in their ingredient list. Which is somewhat ironic (and I admit made me laugh) because I’d say about 99% of people eating Froot Loops will add milk to their cereal anyways.

Now I realize, as an allergy sufferer myself, that this really isn’t a laughing matter. People could get very sick, even go into anaphylactic shock from eating a tainted Loop. But for me at least, it would be sort of like getting an alert that read: WARNING. UNDECLARED ALMONDS HAZELNUTS AND WALNUTS IN SKIPPY PEANUT BUTTER. Funny for me (as I am allergic to all of them), but it would send my brother (who is not allergic to peanuts, but allergic to the other tree nuts) to the hospital within minutes (not least because he eats peanut butter by the jar full).

So, er, what’s the moral of the story? Sign up for the CFIA Hazard Alerts or FDA notifications or whatever your country has to offer. Guaranteed to be life-saving or purely entertaining! Straight to your inbox!