In another lifetime, when Anne and Katie and I were trying to get together funding to start a print science magazine for women in the UK, we all met Olivia Judson. Actually, I had met her the year earlier by way of her book Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which my father had given me for Christmas. It’s a hilarious book written as a collection of advice columns wherein Dr. Tatiana helps out various hapless folks in the animal kingdom who have odd sex habits our accoutrements. At the time I was a researcher in an evolutionary biology lab at the University of Toronto and spending much too much of my day looking up 1970s articles on male frog chest spines (to aid in holding their mates, er, firmly, while copulating) or the frequency of female sea lions being crushed to death by males trying to mount them as they fled for the sea. Needless to say I loved the book.

When we met her in real live person in London, where she is a researcher at Imperial College, she was filming the TV version of the book. It was weird, a little unsettling (there is something whimsical in TALKING about giant corkscrew animal penises, but rather less in SEEING them) but she looked fabulous, had a great screen presence and it was still a lot of fun. She now has a column at the New York Times, deservedly so, where she gets to remind us about all sorts of lovely things evolutionary in nature...like the potential size of a T. rex penis. In all of her posts, sex-related or not, she manages to sneak in so much delicious basic biology. And you’re sure you’re not learning anything, because it’s just too much fun, but you are. I think the US government - with its truly DIRE science literacy rankings - should hire her to be the National Science Teacher. Because who wouldn’t want to listen to her?

I can tell you for certain that the males of our species certainly do. For when I took a casual glance through some of the recent comments, I tabulated that about 90% of them (with sex identifiable names) were dudes. Sure commenting isn’t the best way to gauge the sex bias of her readership, but still. I mean here is a fabulous woman writing about fun, accessible topics in biology and still...where’s the ladies, ladies?

(And I think this might call for the creation of a new category..like “Women whose eggs we would like to use in IVF if ours turn out to be defunct.” Or something.)

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 this morning as I started wading through my morning cache of emails. It was Woman’s Hour and one segment on the show covered the history, style and etiquette of mourning clothes in Victorian England. And let me just say that it made me sit straight up with horror. The unfairness, the uncomfortable heavy black-craped oppression of it all! FOR TWO AND HALF YEARS. No jewelry for the first year, outfits that weighed a near metric tonne (or thereabouts), and black veils in public, whose harsh dyes often led to vicious eye and skin diseases. I mean check this quote from the April 17th edition of Harpers Bazar from 1886:

“This fashion is very much objected to by doctors, who think many diseases of the eye come by this means, and advise for common use thin nuns’ veiling instead of crape, which sheds its pernicious dye into the sensitive nostrils, producing catarrhal disease as well as blindness and cataract of the eye. It is a thousand pities that fashion dictates the crape veil, but so it is. It is the very banner of woe, and no one has the courage to go without it. We can only suggest to mourners wearing it that they should pin a small veil of black tulle over the eyes and nose, and throw back the heavy crape as often as possible, for health’s sake.”

Whereas dudes just had to wear a black ribbon around their hats for three months. What a load of stiffened black pants.

Now I don’t usually find myself outraged by sexism; concerned, annoyed and worried, yes, but outraged not so much. I mean I even laughed a black little comic laugh when I learned that women in the UK used to be burned at the stake for killing their husbands.  You see the crime they were convicted of was not murder but petty treason - generally a crime where a subordinate wrongs their superior. Men who murdered their wives were merely convicted of murder and hung. MUCH nicer and far less emphasis on the fact that killing your spouse is A CRIME AGAINST THE COUNTRY, it’s just a normal, civil sort of matter (or course men convicted of treason were hung, drawn and quartered, so maybe I shouldn’t complain so very much).

When I think syphilis, I think about lots of oversexed aristocrats driven to madness in their silk and lace. But sadly, it’s not so. In fact a new report shows that the venereal disease has been rising in the US for the last 7 years, mostly among gay men, but also among black women.

This is ungood. Especially because the disease can be diagnosed quickly and cheaply with a simple blood test and treated with antibiotics, though resistant strains are appearing and spreading.

We certainly don’t need another Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to tell us this is unhealthy. It’s also particularly ungood because syphilis increases vulnerability to HIV infection by 2 to 5 times. Baaaad. Untreated syphilis can also seriously harm or kill a developing fetus. Baaaaaad.

So next time you find yourself on the doctor’s table, why not just make sure you don’t have it. And practice safe sex, especially if you are teenager. Urg.

The pygmy hippo is doing fine. Not fine exactly as their numbers and their habitat are dwindling faster than you can say Jack Robinson, but much finer than we thought. The Zoological Society of London went to civil-war-torn Liberia to see just how badly the little hippos were doing, and found they were actually doing alright. They’re still threatened by bushmeat hunting and deforestation, but there are a few thousand of them left. That’s not many at all, but considering ZSL weren’t at all sure they’d find any, that’s relatively good news. Within days of arriving, they managed to take the above photo of a minature hippo. The subject of said photo looks healthy and hearty, and none too impressed at having his picture taken…

(PHOTO: ZSL)

I’ve been hearing a lot of grief from my scientist friends about having to write research papers or submit or edit them, etc.

Here’s a silver bullet - if you’re in Computer science that is. SCIgen randomly generates an entire computer science research paper (complete with graphs and figures) at the click of a button. All you have to do is fill in the five author fields.

For example, the trio behind inky circus came up a paper titled On the Visualization of Hierarchical Databases.

Here’s the abstract. Can I just say, who knew we had it in us?

In recent years, much research has been devoted to the visualization of XML; however, few have deployed the investigation of spreadsheets. Given the current status of classical archetypes, end-users daringly desire the refinement of the partition table. We construct a heuristic for autonomous information, which we call Emu. Such a claim is usually an extensive mission but fell in line with our expectations.

As you can see the results are pretty spiffy - which explains how three randomly generated papers made their way to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in Orlando in 2005. The 13 minute movie about the hoax, Near Science, can be viewed here. 

Giving babies probiotic bacteria - harmless bacteria normally found in our bodies, notably our digestive systems - has long been theorized to be a method of preventing allergies. From a theoretical standpoint, It certainly makes sense. According to the hygiene hypothesis, we develop allergies in part because our immune systems are under-challenged by a “too clean” environment, devoid of our natural microbes and parasites. Without the proper stimulation, it goes a bit haywire and starts attack all sorts of otherwise benign molecules, such as peanut proteins or egg whites. So if you feed babies lots of probiotic-rich foods, cultured milks and yogurt, they should have plenty of bacteria, the immune system should keep healthily occupied.

A multitude of clinical trials have tested probiotics for both the prevention and treatment of allergies. This review from January 2008 from The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that, yes, probiotics do indeed help prevent allergies, but not actually treat them. Fair enough.

It’s possible that breastfed babies get more probiotics from their mother’s milk, which might explain why breastfed babies are less likely to develop allergies. Another theory on the breast-allergy relationship is that eating food proteins (peanut, pollen, egg, dairy) via breast milk (ie mother eats it and it is transmitted to baby through breast milk) might actually help the baby become tolerant as opposed to allergic to the protein (Here is a neat little study from Nature Medicine on mice that showed just that).

Of course the studies here can be a bit conflicting. The most recent suggest that breastfeeding for 4 to 6 months decreases risk of allergies and asthma, but continuing after that seems to increase risk. Weirdly.

Now another prong to the “Breast Is Best” movement is emerging: the added probiotics from breastfeeding might help babies regulate their weights. A follow up of 49 babies from a large Finnish study that was originally testing the probiotics-allergy connection has revealed that those who had higher levels of Bifidobacteria (good and found in many yogurts) and lower levels of Staphylococcus aureus (bad) were less likely to be overweight at 7 years old. Which kind of fits with the observation that allergies and obesity are linked...any may even provide the mechanism that everyone is searching for…

Now you might get all fusty and dig up this paper, which found little connection between childhood obesity and adult obesity (only significantly predicted adult fatness after age 13..), but all told, the story that is emerging on the potential importance of healthy gut bacteria, even from a very early age, is enough to make you wanna feed your child with and then bathe them in raw milk (errr, sort of).

We always joke (half joke) that our office cats keep our stress levels nice and low.

But it’s true. They really do, according to a recent study out of the Minnesota Stroke Initiative that found that cat-less souls had a 40 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease.

Here’s what the lead researcher, who owns a cat, had to say in Twincities.com: “There may be an effect even on blood pressure but we haven’t looked at that. It could clearly have a beneficial effect that we don’t completely understand at this point.”

The study didn’t find such a protective effect in dog owners, but I don’t know. Dogs keep me pretty happy too. 

Anyone who hasn’t discovered the wonder and amazingness that is CBC Radio3 should sit up and take notice. They play new, interesting and alterna music and have wicked podcasts and are just generally fabulous. And only online and digital. Is just so nouveau, you know?

They also play some, er, weird stuff. Canadians, you know what I mean. For example, take this AMAZINGLY dorky song about the planet Venus from Jerry Jerry and the Sons of the Rhythm Orchestra, sent to us by Inkycircus gal, Simone. We here at the circus are, of course, big fans of science related musical offerings (nerdcore hip hop, bestest science pop songs and old school science educational songs) and this song certainly doesn’t disappoint....."it rains all day, rains all day, rains all day concentrated sulphuric acid.”

Everyone knows not to eat yellow snow but apparently we can’t even eat new snow as it falls out of the sky. With one beautifully neat experiment, microbiologist Brent Christner has shown that snow is chock full o bacteria. Christner wondered how bacteria were infecting wheatfields, and waved a petri dish out of an plane window to find out where it was coming from. Sure enough, he found that there were bacteria in the atmosphere, which were not only hitching a lift back to earth IN snow, they were causing the snow to form. Bad news for children (like Calvin) who want to catch snow on their tongues, good news for the bacteria floating around the globe from snowstorm to snowstorm. 

Sooo my google news alerts came up with this headline: ”Snakes on the Great Plains? Fort Collins researcher says 20-foot-long pythons could be moving north from Florida”

And needless to say it grabbed my eye. Because Gordon Rodda, a zoologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, projects that escaped Floridan pet pythons could grow to 20 feet in length and snake their way up the American lines of latitude - up the coast of California for example. Next up, is a study examining how the giant constrictors - including boa constrictors and yellow anacondas - could invade the continental US.

Nothing like wittle snakey wakey slithering away in a bid to freedom.