PHOTO: Alice Rosen

Okay, it’s clear that scents contribute to our experience of flavor—that’s the reason strong-smelling food is the only kind you can taste when you’re stuffed up—but can flavor contribute to our experience of smell? How weird would that be?

Weird enough to be true, I guess. Brandeis neuroscientists recently had rats sniff and eat a particular kind of food while their taste cortex was knocked out (I love that researchers can just knock shit out like that. I’d like them to knock out my procrastination cortex). Then they reactivated the taste cortex and gave the rats the same food to sniff--but this time the animals didn’t recognize it, and were less likely to eat it. So the scientists knocked out the taste cortex again, and the rats went for the food. In other words, the taste and olfactory systems each seem to contribute a piece of sensory information that is combined in the brain to produce a unique...um...food stamp.

My favorite part of this study is that it relies heavily on rats wanting to sniff each other’s breath--the mechanism the scientists used to introduce the food odors. Seems rats, unlike people, love the whiffs of old lunch their peers produce.

(PHOTO: Dr. Kevin McCracken)

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises. That’s how Carl Zimmer opens this post from his Discover magazine blog The Loom. It only gets better from there. And there’s video.

(COLLAGE:elio m. and M. Sethi)

What will make people respond to a holiday card—even if they’ve never heard of the person who sent it?

I’ve just come across two different studies, conducted twenty years apart, in which researchers sent Christmas cards to people they’d never met, then waited to see what they’d do. To make things more interesting, the scientists made some cards look as if they’d come from senders of high status. (In case you were wondering, they accomplished this via the time-tested method of inserting “Dr.” into the sender’s name.)

In both studies, a significant number of people actually responded by sending cards, letters, or photos back, often with a personal note saying how much they missed their old acquaintance. (A relatively small number of the respondents did admit, rather embarrassedly, that they had no idea who the sender was.)

Also in both studies, cards from senders of higher status were far more likely to receive a card in return.

Here’s the published response that I found the most poignant.

Dr. ____, It was good to hear from you again. I was diagnosed with asthma in 1985 by Dr. _____ who has a medical clinic with his Dad, ________M.D. On November 7, 1983, I had a bad asrhma attack at 5:00 am. I went to the V.A. Hospital. They changed my inhalers and medicine and then they took me off both. We sold the house in January in three days. I’m doing A.O.K. Please visit sometime. Thanks for the card, good luck and God bless- Jim

And here are the papers. 

(PHOTO:Wikimedia Commons)

This article, written in 1969, is one of the most fascinating anthropological papers I’ve ever read. In it, Canadian ethnographer Richard Borshay Lee describes a very strange Christmas Day he spent with the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the late 1960s.

Wanting to thank his subjects for their helpful cooperation with him over the past year of study, Lee decided to gift the tribe with a magnificent ox, to be slaughtered on Christmas Day. Though not Christians, the !Kung had heard of Christmas through British missionaries, and held a celebration around that season. The festivities were mostly filled with local traditions like trance dancing—and cooking and eating an ox.

The animal Lee bought, he writes, “was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof.”

Yet when the iKung saw the beast, they all—to a man—expressed immediate shock and dismay that Lee had purchased such a poor specimen; they complained that it was skin and bones, asserted that it would hardly be worth eating or dancing over at all, and even said the lack of meat to go around might cause fighting amidst the crowd on Christmas!

Utterly baffled, Lee waited and watched on the day of the big feast as the animal was cut open. As he’d known, it was beautiful: fatty and full of meat. What was going on?

Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back, “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

There’s an elegant and totally surprising explanation for Lee’s bizarre Kalahari Christmas, one that reveals the !Kung’s marvelously pragmatic approach to gifts and may hold a lesson for ostentatious gift-givers in more familiar societies. I’ll leave you to read it.

(PHOTO: The Field Museum of Chicago)

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I volunteer at the bird lab in the Field Museum of Chicago, making bird study skins once a week. It’s essentially a (very) simplified form of taxidermy, and sometime I’ll tell you more about it, maybe. In the meantime, I wanted to share this fabulous video of the museum’s bug room, which is housed in the bird lab and is one of the star attractions of any behind-the-scenes tour of the Field. The bug room contains glass tanks full of Dermestid beetles, also known as flesh-eating beetles, also known as the coolest thing since sliced bread. They help to clean, more cheaply and efficiently than chemicals, bird and mammal skeletons. Check it out!

Edited to add a clearer link to the video.

PHOTO: Dolphin stomach infested with parasites, by Jeremy Sternberg

Delusional parasitosis is a rare and uncomfortable condition in which people come to be convinced—quite falsely—that they have been infested by parasites. There’s no single cause of delusional parasitosis; sometimes it arises as a manifestation of some underlying psychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia, but in other cases it emerges in otherwise seemingly healthy, rational people.

I’ve just come across a fascinating case study of eight patients with DP in Singapore, notable because it contains detailed descriptions of the beliefs and behaviors inspired by the condition. One 65-year-old housewife complained of “threadlike worms dropping from pigeon droppings, then becoming insects which fly off from her hair.” She said she heard the noises made by the insects as they bit her, a sound like “tuck, tuck, tuck.” She poured kerosene on her head to try to kill them. A 60-year-old fruit seller saw “small, black, thorny parasites with 8 legs crawling in his skin,” which he believed had been caused by black magic directed at him by another seller in the market where he worked. This man was so tormented by his condition that he tried to hang himself three times.

You can read the entire article here.

(One final note: Many doctors contend delusional parasitosis is behind the strange symptoms reported by people who believe they have a controversial disorder known as Morgellons Disease. So far Morgellons has not been widely accepted as a real diagnosis in the medical community, but so many patients have complained about their terrible suffering, which purportedly includes the discovery of bizarre and unidentifiable fibers lodged beneath their skin, that the CDC recently launched an epidemiological study of it.)

My limited bloggings seem to all fall under the same category: ‘nuff said. I mean really, what more do you need to know? Oh, that they made a snowflake-shaped pie to allow them to make a gigantic pie but also maintain the traditional filling:crust ratio? That I want these people to be my new best friends? That I really really really want to be invited over for dinner (where they will hopefully make a nut-free fractal pie?). Yeah. 

PHOTO:Virgin Galactic

You’ve probably already heard that the world’s first commercial space flight is here—or will be in a couple of years. If you’re planning on being one of the first tourists in space, you might want to take a gander at this fascinating list of ceremonies that Russian cosmonauts are said to engage in before every spaceflight.

Weird and Wonderful Highlights:

• Everyone watches the 1969 Russian romantic action comedy White Sun of the Desert the night before the launch. As far as I can tell, it’s like an old-fashioned Western set in the Caucasus, with harems. And singing.

• Everyone sips champagne and signs their names on their hotel room doors as they leave for the launch site. As they walk out of the hotel, a song by the Russian band “The Earthlings” is played. It’s called “A Green-Grassed Lawn,” it contains the immortal words “But still we hear space music of romance!” and you can listen to it here!

• The buses that take the cosmonauts to the space shuttle have upside-down horseshoes hung on them for good luck. For even more good luck, when they reach the end of their journey, everyone gets out and pees on the bus wheels! Russian cosmonauts are awesome.

If the Virgin Galactic team in charge of herding tourists onto the SpaceShipTwo is smart enough to steal some of these superstitions for their flights out, I’ll let you know. 

The venerable but still, apparently, quite sprightly Royal Society of London—the world’s oldest scientific academy—has just started to release a number of brilliant interactive widgets to celebrate its 350th anniversary. These images are from its photo gallery Moments of Seeing Further, “striking images (that) represent the original moments of discovery of scientists who were able to ‘see further’ to change the world around them.”

They’ve also put together an interactive timeline in which you can read the original manuscripts and see accompanying images for 60 trailblazing scientific papers, including these gems:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)
• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)
• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)
• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)
• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)
• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)
• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

It’s a bonanza for anyone interested in science and history, which pretty much defines us here at Inkling. Wonderful news indeed. Happy Birthday, RS, you old fart.

PHOTO:Miles Tsang

This tragic, yet somehow life-affirming, story comes to us via the inimitable Improbable Research, creators of the Ig Nobel Prizes. You should all subscribe to their newsletter and site feeds post haste.

This report describes the difficulty in evaluating a patient with multiple traumas because he was covered with paint poured from a truck in a car accident...A 29-year-old male patient was admitted to the emergency department following the collision of his car with a paint-carrying truck. His head, face, neck and hands were covered with a cyan-blue oil paint, and bloody “paint mud” covered all frontal and occipital areas of the scalp.

CONCLUSION: Removal of the paint from the skin and the eyes was a prerequisite for the evaluation of the underlying structures. It is difficult to find a cleansing material that can be used effectively and safely in different parts of the body.

You can read the full paper here.