(PHOTO: CARL ZIMMER from his photostream SCIENCE TATTOOS)

I am a self-confessed girl nerd, and I do love my science. If I wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve and show that love to the world, I might opt for some nice elemental earrings, perhaps, or a natty pair of periodic table socks. So in terms of committment to the cause, that makes me small fry compared to this lot. This bunch of high-pain-threshold artistic and dedicated tattoo-lovers are flying the flag for scientists all over the world, by tattooing their own bodies with scientific designs. These range from the relatively subtle and easily covered up glucose molecule belonging to Professor David Anderson, via the properly impressive periodic-table-on-arm, past the odd diazepam molecule and classic equation or two, all the way to the downright scary sperm thing. Evolutionary biology rules ok, but that’s just weird! There’s also a funky microscope, a Necker cube, a Darwin fish, a pi, a phi, an Einstein and more. It’s well worth a peruse I promise you.

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. 

For some reason, London this week is in the grip of a tube strike. The tube people seem to go on strike every now and again - they officially probably have some big grievance about something. I secretly suspect they just want to have a duvet day and catch up on their Sky+. Anyway, the strike meant that traffic was an absolute monster this morning, and will be tomorrow and the next day. Being on two wheels certainly helped, but being on no wheels would have been even better. Just imagine the envious stares I’d get commuting on a hovercraft like the Jetsons. Bring it on.

THE FIRST PHOTO ON THE WEB - FROM CERNETTES.COM

Remember Les Horribles Cernettes from back at the start of August?  They were a girl band based at Cern back in the early 90’s, who’s claim to fame was being the first band to have a web presence. A few weeks after Anne was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 live, the band’s songwriter Sylvano Di Gennaro was interviewed on the same programme, and took the tale on a few steps further.

While they were indeed the first band to have a website, they have an even better feather in their cap. The picture of them posted on their websites cernettes.com was the first picture ever posted on the web ever full stop.  Says Sylvano: “Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. And the rest, as they say, is history.

(PHOTO: Walter Groesel)
Check out this story about a study on the predicted and then actual emotional distress suffered from relationship break-up published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The authors conclude that people are far more scared of the heart ache, and estimate it will be cataclysmic, but after following 69 people for about a year, they found that the break up was never as bad as they expected. Nice.

Only caveat being: these were UNIVERSITY FRESHMEN. Are you kidding? I mean seriously. Of course they think it’s going to be horrible - they are melodramatic teenagers living without parents and in close quarters to the opposite sex and mucho beer for the first time in their lives. And of course they aren’t really that upset because they probably started seeing someone else in like 12 minutes.

Undergrads are the bread and butter of psych research, and most times that’s okay. But come on. You want to generalize about relationship behavior from people who think making out at a kegger on a puke-stained sofa is the start of something beautiful?

So I just read this story about how the Egyptian environment minister is accusing some Belgian diplomats of driving through a UNESCO protected desert in their 4x4s and damaging some 40 million year old whale fossils. The location, called Valley of the Whales (har) is supposedly marked with Do Not Enter signs or something.

What smells:
1) Diplomats are always power-hungry criminals who abuse their immunity for pleasure and personal gain...I mean don’t you ever watch CSI: Miami?
2) Everyone agrees it happened in July and yet the Egyptians are only saying stuff now.
3) In my exhaustive 10 minute Internet search, I couldn’t find anything about restricted access to the area.
4) The Belgians say they stayed “on the road” the whole time. Yar. Road? In the desert? If the couldn’t see the markings saying keep out, I am sure they could have “missed” the markings of the road.
5) I mean really, the Dips were probably struggling with high blood pressure from chocolate withdrawal, so can we really trust anything they say?

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. 

None of us use washboards anymore. But its namesake dirt road is around in spades. And it causes hiccup-like speech in those trapped inside the trucks barreling down it. Every now and again, road crews scrape the road flat. But lo and behold, the bumps rise again like little ocean swells.

In my personal experience, the best way to mitigate washboard’s grating effect on the belly and vision is to simply drive faster. That way you tires pretty much skim the crests of washboard. Granted this increases the risk of skidding or fishtailing but that’s half the fun. Turns out this is all very ironic because a group of physicists recently concluded that the only way of stopping washboard from rising out of dirt roads is to drive slow. And by slow they mean like 5 miles per hour slow. To figure this out they created a computer model of the grains of dirt on a road to study how the ripples form. According to Science News, which reported their findings:

Any bed of dirt or sand, even a very smooth one, has minuscule irregularities that slightly jog a rolling wheel. Each time the wheel hits a bump, the computer simulation showed, it pushes the dirt forward a bit, enlarging the irregularity. Then, as the wheel passes over the top of the bump, the force of its descent pushes dirt forward into the next bump. Repeat these actions a hundred or more times and the familiar pattern of ridges appears.

So basically, I think the take home message is “suck it up.” Because let’s face it, no one’s going to drive 5mph on a dirt road. And if there’s no permanent way of keeping them at bay, I think they’re he-he-e-e-re t-o-o-o sta-a-a-a-a-y-y-y-y.

If you describe yourself as big-boned, everyone knows that what you really mean is that you’re a bit on the squishy side. But blaming your weight on dem bones might actually be more accurate than you think. As well as providing you with long legs, a solid skull, and lofty cheekbones, your bones also play a part in regulating your blood sugar.

Your bones are in a constant state of flux, with cells being built and broken down all the time. Cells called osteoblasts build bone where it is needed, and cells called osteoclasts destroy it where it is deemed no longer necessary. The osteoblasts produce a protein called osteocalcin, which not only turns out to regulate the cells that produce insulin in the pancreas, but also sends signals to fat cells, causing them to release a hormone called adiponectin that makes the body more sensitive to this insulin. Osteocalcin is produced in the bones, but acts on other cells far away in the body, so the researchers who discovered all this have concluded that bones are part of the endocrine system. Feeding fat mice traces of osteocalcin caused their blood sugar to drop and their insulin production to speed up, so this could have implications for treating both obesity and diabetes. It’ll work, I can feel it in my bones.

Via The Economist.

PHOTO: KALILO

(PHOTO: BARRY KIDD)
M’kay. So I am really hungry, waiting to go out for a farewell dinner at my favorite local burger joint with my parents (am going to the UK for a month). It’s called the Red Onion and MAN is it good. The fries and dip are killer, the burgers solid, the hot chicken salad dreamy and the chocolate mousse pie to die for - did I mention that I was hungry?

Okay, off topic. So er, sometimes I like to do a news search of random words...like banana or help! or gaping hole...just to see what comes up. Today I did a search of the BBC news website for “hungry”. The first hit (other than two sporty ones) was a story about how T. rex was actually this humongous beast that couldn’t possibly have run fast at all. The hit probably came from this subhead: “Agile prey would have had no trouble keeping clear of a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex, a study confirms.”

Anyways, the main author is John Hutchinson, a biomechanic at the Royal Veterinary School in Hatfield, who works on computer models of motion, body size and body posture of animals, mostly dinos. He wrote a big deal Nature paper in 2002, modeling T. rex like a giant chicken, showing that it probably couldn’t run, only walk, and at just 5 m/sec.

I actually went up to visit him in the fall of 2004 to write a story about the ostrich biomechanics program they have there. Yes, ostriches on treadmills. I couldn’t resist. They pecked on my tape recorder, herded around me with an alarming curiosity, stared at me with those enormous, black shiny eyes. But they were nice. Even the one named Satan.

So there you go. Search something weird, find something fun.

Can you tell I’m hungry?