Cats may have 9 lives, but here’s one with 6 senses. 2-year old Oscar lives in an old folks home, and seems to have an uncanny knowledge of when someone is about to snuff it.  He’s been seen curling up to patients who died shortly after no less than 25 times, which is quite the strike rate. Be it biochemistry or clairvoyance, Oscar knows something the doctors dont. So if you live at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre and he comes to purr and rub up against your leg, it may well be time to say your goodbyes.

Do you have smooth arms? A good resistance to pain? An affiliation for jellyfish? Do you live in Oslo and have a few hours to spare? If so, the University of Oslo wants to hear from you. They were hoping to hold trials today for a new type of jellyfish resistant sun-cream, and at last report had only signed up 5 people for their tests so will probably be in need of more volunteers. You will get stung on both arms, one of which will be covered with the new cream. One arm will hurt like hell, the other arm should ward off the sting. That’s the theory anyway. Personally, I can think of better ways to spend a Thursday afternoon. I got stung by a bluebottle jellyfish once, and it was not a pleasant experience. A much better thing to do with a bluebottle (rather than letting it sting you) is to wait for it to beach itself then drive over it. Sounds like bubblewrap. But if you DO want to be stung, Oslo is the place to go. (PHOTO: RANDOMART)

(PHOTO: HANNAH BOETTCHER)
This is just a quick note to say that our site was broken from Sunday to Monday and we know and we’re sorry and we tried our best to fix it but something gummed up the works good and it took a while to fix but it shouldn’t really happen that badly from now on cause we’ve gone over how things went amiss and flagged it to the parties that were partially responsible and they were really nice and owned up to their mistakes and assured us that it shouldn’t happen again and we believe them because we’re very partial to them and it’s not just because they have an adorable name and logo.

That’s all. 

I just love a good diet soda. Oh a delicious Fresca. Dreamy dreamy Diet Coke. Mmmmmm, I love aspartame (especially since it doesn’t cause cancer, okay,? because I am not a force-fed rat, okay? and the FDA says so.).

But cancer aside, diet soda can also make you fat and give you diabetes and heart disease. Kind of sort of.

A study published today of 1600 people from around Boston has found that people who drink at least one soda a day - regular or diet didn’t matter - had an increased risk of obesity, high blood pressure and the precursors of diabetes (a trio also known as metabolic syndrome). And while previous studies have tied diet soda drinkers to obesity, this study was particularly shocking because there was practically no difference between sugar and fake-sugar soda. I mean weird.

The soda industry is obviously rejecting the study outright. Of course they did. But whatever.

The real fun will be in figuring out why this relationship exists - in similar strength - for both diet and regular soda. Theories include: soda drinkers in general are lazy, layabout calorie hounds. Sweet drinks at dinner don’t fill you up as much. The caramel flavoring in soda can cause inflammation. A conspiracy by diet soft drink makers that add “fat grow” to their drinks thus capturing devoted lifetime purchasers of their goods as they try and loose the weight actually gained because of the drinks!!!! (okay, that was just me).

My bet is that people who regularly consume diet soda are just more likely to have bad eating and exercise habits that eventually line the trail to metabolic syndrome. It’s not rocket science and it’s not exactly the fault of the beverage itself.

Which is why I - who have just had a delicious lunch with many fresh vegetables, lean protein and a banana for dessert, I who rode my bide 9 kilometers to work - can enjoy my Fresca in peace. Right?

I’m a bit behind the times with this one (treehugger beat me to it), but I’ve just discovered Blackle - a search engine page. It looks like Google gone goth - it’s all in shades of black and grey. But it still looks like Google and searches like Google. So why turn Google dark? Well, to save energy of course.

The idea for the site came out of an article called ‘Would a black Google save energy’, where the authors argue that white pages use more energy to load than black pages do . The difference for each individual user is minimal, but multiply that difference between the vast army of googlers round the world and the difference becomes significant.

Despite its name and the fact that it uses Google’s searching paradigm to find pages, Blackle is apparently nothing to do with Google, but was developed in Australia. From a cursory glance, it doesn’t seem to be exactly the same. Even though it turns up the same results in a search for inklingmagazine blog, Google found over 333,000 pages whereas Blackle has only identified 23,200. But condsidering I rarely click beyond the front few pages of Google searches anyway it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Slightly disappointingly, if I personally start using Blackle I’ll be making an even smaller contribution, as I already have an LCD display. These types of monitor already use less energy (explanation of that here). If I really want my computer to use less energy, I need to set my screensaver to blank screen and turn off the monitor when I’m not using it. But if by using Blackle as my homepage I’m being reminded to pursue these energy saving measures then the site is doing A Good Thing. Plus it makes a nice change, so why not.

I saw on the news last night about the NYC steam pipe explosion, and was greeted by more news this morning of the same. Except this time they took a moment to tell me that there was a fair amount of asbestos in the dusty debris, but none in the actual air. And also not to worry about any health problems (they being the city’s Office of Emergency Management).

I have two thoughts, neither particularly brilliant, but see my coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.
1) OF COURSE there was asbestos. Everybody and their donkey used to use asbestos to insulate and fire retard building materials. It was good. And then it was bad. And now it’s in limbo.
2) The health track record of those involved in 9/11 is less than heartening. I mean we had the World Trade Center cough, and now, we’re bracing for a terrifying glut of cancer.

The moral of the story is: cities and buildings are full of gosh darn disgusting stuff that was never meant to be pulverized and aerosolized and breathed into our delicate little lungs.

A couple years ago the 14 year old Rajesh Kumar from the town of Rampur started spouting english to huge effect, according to the Indian superstitious news wires and IBNLive.com:

The boy talks gibberish with a few words of science thrown in here and there. And the people in his village Rampur claim that “Rajesh Kumar is explaining scientific formulas and concepts,” although he has never studied science or has been overseas.

Watch the video of his garble here. Anyways, it turns out that he’s nothing near a reincarnation of some American egghead. Doubts surfaced when his many grammatical errors came to light (which, if you watch the video is a generous way of describing his blathering) and he appeared incapable of understanding the language himself.

After Zee News grilled the poor teen for five hours (no one devotes the airtime to live interrogations anymore - clearly a very effective means of cutting through the bull) he finally confessed. “It was a Hollywood movie, Total Recall, and the constant exposure to Western culture that gave him a cursory knowledge of English,” Zee News triumphantly reported. And yes, the irony of that movie title is not lost on me. Here’s the 411:

In 2005 on the eve of 26th January, Rajesh was insulted by his teacher when he failed to read out a speech in English. The incident left a scar on his mind, and a humiliated Rajesh vowed revenge. He took up this challenge, and set out on a spree of watching English movies and listening to English songs.

Anne and I share our office with some fabulously lovely persons (and two cats). Yesterday, two of said awesome dudes consumed one square of an energy bar they got free at a street market. Said chocolately-like bar is called Red Rush. It’s active ingredients are caffeine (160mg for the bar, about one really big cup of coffee); taurine (a normal metabolite of amino acid cysteine that helps with detox processing in the liver); D-Glucoronolactone (again a normal metabolite of glucose) and guarana (a South American, coffee-like bean that manufacturers use to pack in LOADS of caffeine, in an unregulated way. Anyways).

The combo of caffeine, D-gluc and taurine is found in many energy drinks and some studies have found it to increase athletic performance. For an overview of the three, check this page from the European Commission. Highlights of the report include: “There is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of taurine present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes several-fold higher than that usually obtained from the rest of the diet.” AND “While there is no indication from the available data that there is any risk to health from consumption of high amounts of glucuronolactone, there is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of glucuronolactone present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes as much as two orders of magnitude greater than that obtained from the rest of the diet.”

But I digress. Knowing my interest in all things medical, these two boys came over to my desk to report on their experience with the bar (actually in hindsight, they were probably high and you know how high people are). I should note that both boys had at least one, if not two cups of of coffee today, which likely compounded the effects of eating the bar.  Within five minutes, they both felt hot flashes and an increase in heart rate. They said their eyes were glassy, irritated and they had reduced depth perception (”...it’s like you and the brick wall are in the same plane...."). One mentioned it was a feeling similar to a medication he’d taken that mimicked psychosis - at least in the visual field “...I feel like I could jump that far right now...”.  Both were sweating on the upper lip and forearm. They both promptly left and went for a bike ride. 

We humans like to think we’re extremely important and responsible. We wring our hands in guilt over driving animals to extinction, feeling that it’s only with our intervention that said animals can ever make a comeback, and survive in this tricky and challenging world. How will they manage without our interference? How will they cope? Just fine apparently. The endangered desert pupfish has been pushed to the brink of dying out by habitat destruction, and is facing an uncertain future. However, it seems that some of these fish have beaten the odds, and found themselves a shiny new habitat - man-made ponds, designed to study the steady pollution of an inland body of water called the Salton Sea. The ponds are designed to study the effect of the pollution in this pond on the local seabirds, but are now acting as a sanctuary for the fish. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that the only way the fish could have got into the pond is by swimming along a 1.5 mile long pipe. Resourceful little creatures, we should really give them more credit! 

Appearing in the most recent issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute is a study finding insufficient evidence to allow food manufacturers to label their tomato-containing products as Cancer Fighters.

I find myself pleased and then generally disquieted about the whole affair.

First of all we’ve been told for years now that lycopene - the molecule that gives tomatoes their red color - can fight cancer. The original, and still best studied cancer is prostate. Various studies tracking dietary habits have found that men who eat more tomato products have lower rates of prostate cancer - the relationship holds for foods like pizza and lasagna and spaghetti as lycopene is a fat-soluble antioxidant, so eating it with a small amount of fat is good.

Of course there have also beens studies that find a very limited effect, such as this one (though it did find significant protection for men with a family history of prostate cancer who ate fatty-tomato foods). And then there was the super-fun realization that lycopene on its own doesn’t seem to have any cancer-fighting ability, at least in rats.  You need the whole tomato.

But see here’s where it gets interesting. In 2004 the FDA received applications (from people like Heinz) for a qualified health claim.  When evaluating food claims that go on labels, the FDA doesn’t count dietary survey or observational studies. To count, it must be a controlled trial where researchers manipulate diet (ie this group eats 5 tomatoes a day, that group 3 and that group 0), or they don’t think it’s strong enough evidence.

And because no one has really done this work, they can’t recommend that food companies be allowed to label their pizza, ketchup or pasta sauce with NOW FIGHTS CANCER!!!!!! NOW FIGHTS EVEN MORE CANCER! STOP USING SUNSCREEN, JUST SLATHER ON KETCHUP!

Which, to be honest, is good. Especially in the case of dubiously health foods like pizza or lasagna, where sure! they have tomatoes! but they also have lots of shitty cheese, sugar, preservatives and refined carbohydrates, but now they are HEALTH FOOD. Sort of like Oreos with ZERO TRANS FATS!  Adding a simple health claim for a very non-simple food/health relationship is could, in theory, promote worse overall food decisions because it removes the brain from the equation.

And let’s be honest. Who hasn’t said - I will eat these very healthy and delicious potato chips because they are made with OLIVE OIL, OKAY?

But then again, I can’t really kick up my heals at this one, either. Because a) I hate that companies even ask for this kind of over-simplifying, research-distorting slogan crap, because my guess is that eventually there WILL be enough evidence for them to go through with it because b) tomatoes really DO seem to help ward away cancer. And the FDA rejection is just another kind of mixed message. And why don’t observational studies count for anything when they make headline news (hence public information) all the time? And is anyone really stupid enough to think that their Pizza Hut Meat Lovers Deep Dish is good for you?