The other day I was at the pub with my friend and she mentioned that her dad got her a pocket rohypnol drug test kit. Cute. (kind of like this one here)

And this got us to musing about where Rohypnol came from to begin with. My vote was military. I mean, who else is keen to make people all pliant and erase their memories? Helloooo Darpa how are you doing? Obviously!

My friend however, thought it was the medical industry. This conjured up images of black market organ trafficking and eeeevil surgeons rubbing their latex gloved paws together in glee at all the kidneys they could harvest with drugged-out consent. Turns out she was right.

Rohypnol is its trademark name. Roofie its street name. But its real name is flunitrazepam and it was developed by Roche in the 1970s “for the management of insomnia and induction of anaesthesia” according to their website.

Here’s where it gets interesting. First, it’s not approved by the FDA and is an illegal drug in the US but it’s available by private prescription in the UK - mostly for colonoscopies. Norway and Sweden withdrew Rohypnol but then later reintroduced it under a different guise: Flunipam and flunitrazepam respectively. And I didn’t know this but Kurt Cobain OD’d on a cocktail of flunitrazepam and champagne weeks before his death. Still, I wouldn’t stock up on those stocking stuffer quite yet. The Association of Chief Police Officers reported that none of the 120 cases from November 2004 to October 2005 were linked to rohypnol. 

A famous urban legend used to float around the science wing of my highschool: that one of the physics teachers had challenged his class in the mid 80s to come up with the most offensive bumper sticker slogan imaginable.

The winner was "Nuke the Whales for Jesus."

It just worked on so many levels. Jesus, check. Nuclear weapons, check. Save the whales, check.

But anyway. I can’t help but think about whale nuking every time one of the Navy sonar and whale-beaching stories comes up. This time it’s a report from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) suggesting, once again, that mid-frequency sonar does indeed kill whales. Either by directly damaging tissues or scaring them into surfacing too quickly, which leads to the deadly bends.

There’s about to be a big sonar test off Australia and the Navy has promised to try and be as cautious as possible, scouting for whales and using lower decibels. But of course, they say, we need this technology to detect and fend off enemy submarines...possibly nuclear submarines...who might be attacking Americans because of religious zealotry.

So it’s just like I said: Nuke the whales for Jesus.

‘Restoring’ priceless works of art has never been an easy task. While it might have seemed like a good idea back in the 1960s to cover the porous marble of Michelangelo’s David (and plenty of other valuable frescoes) in an acrylic polymer called paraloid, now it just seems downright insane. But how do you get the toxic coating off once you’ve plastered it on? Not with a nail brush that’s for sure. So step up the face mask.

A team from the University of Florence have discovered a way to make oil and water mix, by using a sugar-like molecule to emulsify them. Like a nanoparticle salad dressing without the vinegar. Or mustard. Anyway, the artwork is draped in thin Japanese paper and then the ‘dressing’ is poured on. This poultice is left on for a couple of hours and hey presto, no more paraloid. This technique only works where the slap happy sixties restorers plastered their paraloid, it’s no help where other damage has been done in the name of restoration. But for David and his compatriots, it’s good news indeed.

Via ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: NZRIC)

An economic and feasibility study from the Vatican has found that solar panels are a good thing and should be applied to roof tops at the Catholic HQ in Rome. The first will be on a rarely used auditorium due to be updated next year.

Reasons cited include protected natural resources and saving the environment, because a ruined environment makes "the lives of poor people on Earth especially unbearable."

How true.

The poorest people in the world ARE going to be the ones hardest hit by climate change and higher energy prices. Like Africans.

Do you know what ELSE makes the lives of Africans especially unbearable? The AIDS epidemic. Do you know what helps stop the spread of HIV? Condoms.

And though we’ve heard rumors that Pope Benedict is considering endorsing the use of condoms to fight AIDS in hard-hit regions such as African, we’ve still seen no change. He continued to toe the party line in his recent visit to Brazil, a country that has aggressively fought its AIDS problem with lots and lots of free condoms.

So here’s the thing: if the Vatican can pull it’s backwards collective brain into the 21st century, fighting climate change and environmental justice with some of the newest technology available, why can’t it recognize the changing landscape of health and morality to help Africa? I mean seriously.

Then again, as Brazil has shown (especially with its recent funding of cheap contraceptives) you can be a Catholic county and ignore the Vatican all you like. Sweet.

This delectable specimen to your left is all that remains of a 2,100 year old melon found buried in Moriyama, a town outside of Tokyo. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a dry news story (“Archaeologists have excavated in Shiga Prefecture what they believe are the oldest remains of a melon ever found”) but people, think about it: this melon precedes Jesus even. And there’s still some flesh left!!

Radio carbon dating suggests the remains of this melon are 2,100 years old, the oldest around. This blows the previous contender, a whippersnapper of a Chinese melon that dates back to 1,600 ad, right out of the water.

Then again, that’s nothing compared to four millenia old noodle remains. Or the 17 million year old hoard of nuts some prehistoric hamster lost track of. 

For an exhaustive, random, and delightful look at other ancient food stuffs go check out the The FOOD Museum Online whose companion site The Potato Museum (the world’s largest collection and first museum on the subject) is pretty cool too. There you’ll find the potato-dedicated blog Potatoheads Talking that covers a myriad of spud topics including a WWII hand grenade that was almost mistaken for a potato by a farmer in Italy. 

COULD SPEAKING PAPER FIGURE OUT A WAY TO MAKE MONEY LITERALLY TALK? (PHOTO: MANJIDES)

A team from Mid Sweden University have produced a prototype billboard embedded with conductive inks and printed speakers, so that when you touch it it plays audio at you. The article in BBC News says that the inventors think it could be useful in product packaging - and I do see the temptation. However, I don’t really need my yoghurt to tell me how many grammes of fat it has or exactly how tasty it is. That would cause quite the cacophony in supermarkets.

Seems to me that this would be more useful for blind people, as a high-tech version of braille. But there’d presumably have to be some way of listening privately though (a printed headphone jack perhaps), otherwise you could reach the end of your intellectual magazine only to find it suddenly starts shouting out all the adverts for sex phone lines that are printed at the back. Very embarrassing.

A little bit of magic for a drizzly Monday morning (unless of course it’s sunny everywhere but Britain...) comes to you courtesy of NASA.com and features a phenomenon called the equivalence principle. Back in the 16th century, Galileo Galilei rolled spheres made of different materials down a long slope, and showed that even though the spheres were very different, they reached the bottom of the slope at the same time. He concluded that gravity accelerates all objects equally regardless of their masses or the materials from which they are made. This 36 year old video shows astronaut David Scott, demonstrating just that, by standing on the moon and dropping a heavy geological hammer and a light falcon feather. Both items hit the ground at the same time, reinforcing Galileo’s theory.

The experiment shown in the above video isn’t necessarily the most accurate scientific demonstration (nor is it brilliant quality, unsurprisingly), but it was the first such demonstration to be done on the moon, and it’s very eye-catching. Even though you know the outcome, it’s just impossible to make your brain accept that the hammer and the feather will fall at the same rate. And yet they do.

THE STUDY ISN’T ABOUT ATLAS MOTHS BUT I COULDN’T RESIST THE PIC. (PHOTO: TRIJNE)

In the good ole natural selection race, he who adapts best survives. Take for example a butterfly’s fancy wing spots that are meant to look like scary eyes. It’s a clever tactic. Moths have evolved a similarly cunning method of evading capture and certain death, which was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Some moths make noises and some don’t, but doctoral student Jesse Barber from Wake Forest University has noticed that there is more of a motive than mere musicality to the moth’s sounds. Bats eat moths, and prefer the taste of some to others. This study used three types of moth, two nice-tasting, and one nasty-tasting, and offered them to bats. The unappetizing moths made noises as they flew, and the bats soon learned that noise=yuk. So when offered a selection of more delicious moths the bats avoided the noisy ones and scoffed the silent ones. The tasty, noisy moths live to flutter another day, and descent with modification marches on. Go Darwin.

We depend on the Sun for life, but it an unpredictable master. Every now and again it flings out bundles of joy known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), which can do an awful lot of damage when they slam into our vulnerable little planet. The CMEs can produce magnetic storms that could have the power to knock our gadget-heavy lifestyle back into the dark ages. Most of the CMEs aren’t anything like that powerful, in fact they happen reasonably often and usually don’t do that damage. But they can do some damage, including messing with our satellites and electrical transmission lines. Which is why it’s interesting news that a team at SOHO (The Solar and Heloispheric Observatory) have discovered that the really big ones are preceded by radio ‘screams’ from the Sun. Here’s how it works:

Strong CME shocks accelerate electrons in the solar wind, which in turn produce the radio signal. The same strong shock must also accelerate atomic nuclei in the solar wind, which produce the radiation storm.

The radio signal moves at the speed of light, but the particles lag behind. So we can ‘hear’ the scream and know that the CME isn’t far behind. The article from the European Space Agency explains how the early warning system could be helpful (and has a nice clear explanation of the phenomenon) - if astronauts are showboating around on the outside of spacecrafts they could be told to get inside rightaway to be protected from the extra radiation. Handy indeed. But seeing as how the Sun is quite big and we are quite small, if a big ejection is on the way it’s not like we can say ‘Umbrellas up! CME a-coming’ just yet…

ETAC)

I CAN DEFINITELY SEE THE FAMILY RESEMBLANCE… (PHOTO:NATASHAW)

I was on a trip in South America once, and was trying to spell my name to a ticket agent to buy a bus ticket. The poor woman got a bit confused in the hustle and bustle, and got my name wrong, writing down "Katie Jaws" on my ticket. Turns out she was prescient, because I am related to sharks. Well, according to ABC News Australia we all are actually.

Long ago in the ancient mists of time (450 million years ago to be exact), we shared a relative with our toothy friends. The elephant shark has some genes that are nearly identical to ours, meaning we have more in common with it than we do with other species closer to us on the evolutionary tree. We also have genes in common with mice and dogs, but that’s not so suprising since we’re all mammals. But we do have at least two things in common with sharks, so it does make sense these traits or characteristics would be expressed in our genes. For one, a shark’s immune system is similar to ours, as sharks have all four types of white blood cells that humans have. The other thing we have in common with sharks is sex. Fish that should be closer to us on the evolutionary tree abstain from sex, preferring to keep fertilisation tidily outside the body. Sharks don’t do this, and in case you hadn’t noticed, neither do we.