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.

Gapminder is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using statistics to change the world for the better. I just used its online graph-creating software, Trendalyzer (acquired in 2007 by Google), to create a chart of how per capita sugar consumption has changed in the U.S., India, China, and Germany over time (guess who wins?).  It’s neat to look at even in the static version you see above, but what’s even cooler is the fact that Trendalyzer makes statistics move! Woah! To see it in action, go here and click “Play.”

WARNING: This shit is addictive. I also made graphs showing how increasing gender equality smacks down poverty, how access to water swirls infant mortality down the drain, and how cellphones exploded onto the globe beginning in the 1980s. (That last one isn’t terribly revealing, but it’s fun to watch.) I also tried to graph the correlation between the number of billionaires in a country and the number of disasters of various kinds, but sadly there was insufficient data on this point to prove a clear causal relationship.

It’s all pretty amazing—and just plain pretty. And, of course, much of the available data reveals—in a fashion that’s dramatic and hard to ignore—facets of global inequality, those gaps the site is minding.

Last time we wrote about an interactive graph it was a even little more morbid.

PHOTO:Neurodiversity

I’ve recently become fascinated by the use of self-reported questionnaires in psychological research, and have been noodling around looking at some measures that are freely available. My current favorite is the Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, et al. Here are some choice questions from the 27-number test.

Please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements:

1. I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances. (Maybe I should be troubled by the fact that I don’t understand why this is supposed to provoke disgust.)

3. It bothers me to hear someone clear a throat full of mucous. (My husband + allergy season = ARGH.)

10. It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the socket. (Okay, but if they put it in my glass I might have to put a frog on their pillow).

How disgusting would you find each of the following experiences?

19. Your friend’s pet cat dies, and you have to pick up the dead body with your bare hands. (Aw, that’s really sad. Can I stuff it?)

20. You see someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream, and eat it. (Whatever floats your boat, baby. Just stay away from my cone.)

22. You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week. (There is not enough ewwwww in the world for this.)

You can take the test and score yourself here. I got 38 (the highest possible score is 100). You?

PHOTO:Anna-rchy

British newspapers are reporting this week that biological psychologist Colin Hendrie, of the University of Leeds, has just completed a study showing that a woman seeking to entrap a man should bare precisely 40% of her skin. Less and you’re neglected, more and you’re avoided.

Says the Telegraph of the study’s methods:

Four female researchers… discreetly observed women at one of the city’s biggest nightclubs from a balcony above the dance floor. Using tape recorders hidden in their handbags, the researchers took note of what female clubbers were wearing and how many times they were approached by men asking them to dance… each arm accounted for 10 per cent of the body, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent.

Also of note: Women who not only bared 40% of their skin, but also dressed in tight clothing and danced “provocatively” attracted the most offers to dance. Wait, what? No fucking way!

Other research articles authored by Hendrie include Evidence to Suggest that Nightclubs Function as Human Sexual Display Grounds, published this year to the astonishment of the biological psychology community. He also wrote the groundbreaking 1998 paper Evidence to Suggest that Self-Medication with Alcohol is Not an Effective Treatment For the Control of Depression.

My old colleague at New Scientist - a man who actually proposed to his now wife using a troupe of trained golden retrievers - has found another use for this handy band of canines: teaching physics.

It’s amazing how the distinction between an electron shell and cloud comes alive through blurry puppy fur!

Watch and enjoy. Next I would like them to explain the quadratic formula.

An MBA student and his professor recently completed a study of 300,542 randomly chosen Twitter users, because this is what business students do. What did they find?

1) 55% of Twitter users are female.

2) Men and women tweet at the same rate. Which is to say, almost not at all. The study authors calculated the median number of lifetime tweets per user as one. One! This, they say, means most Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. Lazy arses.

3) Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

4) The average male Twitterer is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (and 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman). The average female Twitterer is also more eager to see what the guys are up to: she’s 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. 

Quote: These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Aw. That’s sad. Maybe you deserve a little love, guys.

Inkling doesn’t have an official Twitter account yet, though it’s in the works. This news fills us with both trepidation—how can we compete with all these seemingly scintillating male Twits?—and hope: Just make more than one 140-character Zen statement about science in two months, and it’ll be like we’ve published a career’s worth of books. Sweet.

Edited to add that now we DO have a Twitter account! Exciting times, these. Follow us here.