Beth Skwarecki

Sabre-toothed cats had weak bites - a new comparison of Smilodon's skull with a modern lion's shows that the cat probably didn't run up and bite its prey with those teeth. Probably it brought prey down with a full-body tackle (it had extra strong claws) and then used the famous teeth to make the kill once it had the animal pinned. At least, that's the latest theory.

Velociraptor's 'killing' claws were for climbing - I'm just ruining all the prehistoric artists' conceptions today, aren't I? Analyses of velociraptor claws shows they weren't sharp enough to disembowel prey, but were strong enough to hold the dinosaur's weight as it climbed trees.

Kids, even babies, judge others based on skin color - and we exacerbate the problem by keeping the subject taboo. The author writes of his own son: "Katz's work helped me to realize that Luke was never actually colorblind. He didn't talk about race in his first five years because our silence had unwittingly communicated that race was something he could not ask about. ... we started to overhear one of his white friends talking about the color of their skin. They still didn't know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase 'skin like ours.' And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own."

Swine flu vaccine: Too little, too late (SciAm article, first half available online) - When you're trying to make enough flu vaccine, boosting production with new methods and adjuvants is at odds with safety and testing (and the potential for lawsuits). The author seems to think litigation is the problem; but if people are suing because they've been harmed by the vaccine, wouldn't it be more correct to say safety is the problem? Deciding how much risk is appropriate is a tough question.

Jell-O shots in adolescence lead to gambling later in life - When you want to study alcohol and risky behavior in rats, do it right! Yes, they really fed the rats jell-o shots, and taught them to gamble.

A single dose of H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine may be enough, something of a surprise because initial reports from the CDC said it might have to be a two-shot vaccine. That means twice as many people can be vaccinated with the available doses. There was a swine flu shot available in 1976, and people vaccinated or exposed back then (or in 1918!) seem to be protected against this year's strain. Seasonal flu immunity somehow "primes" H1N1 immunity even though the seasonal flu shot doesn't, by itself, confer full immunity to H1N1. Bottom line: get a seasonal flu shot (available now) and a single dose of H1N1 vaccine (available in October).

Placebos are getting more effective. If your new drug doesn't perform any better than a sugar pill, does that mean it's useless? Some already-approved drugs perform just as badly, even though they stacked up well against placebos when they were first tested. Meanwhile, placebos are useful for more than just testing: "The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively." How do placebos work, anyway? Can you get around anti-doping rules by giving an athlete fake steroids? Can you even really compare today's Prozac trial results to the originals, given our changing understanding of depression? Good questions in this article from Wired.

Skim milk isn't automatically better than full-fat, something I've been trying to tell people for years. "'Probably most people who think of themselves as nutrition-savvy would be astonished to learn that evidence of whole milk’s being a ticket to an early grave is conspicuous by its absence,' says food historian Anne Mendelson in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages." Also notable is the type of fat in milk from pastured (grass-fed) cows - more omega-3's and less of the supposedly "bad" fats.

Will my son be born late, like I was? OK, so this isn't a national news item but rather something of personal interest. I was two weeks late myself. A study of 77,000 Norwegians found that "Gestational age of the child at birth increased on average 0.58 days for each additional week in the father's gestational age (95% confidence interval 0.48-0.67) and 1.22 days for each additional week in the mother's gestational age (1.21-1.32)." Meanwhile a Danish study suggests that gestation length is 23-30% genetic (but they didn't find a paternal component).

Midnight snacks pack on the pounds. The research, done in rats and involving high-fat foods, isn't exactly ready for sweeping extrapolation. But I liked the article for this quote specifically: "'How or why a person gains weight is very complicated, but it clearly is not just calories in and calories out,' says Fred Turek, professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University and director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology." (Contrary to popular belief, people are not bunsen burners.)

Brain differences between men and women aren't necessarily hard-wired - finally, somebody making sense on this subject. A team at the U of Iowa found that the Straight Gyrus (SG) of the brain is larger in women and seems to correlate with interpersonal skills. But! They also compared SG size to a test of gender, in the personality sense - are you very masculine or very feminine? - and found it correlated better with gender than with biological sex. They also found that the relationship was reversed in children - boys had the larger SG. So do women have naturally better social skills or is that a skill they develop over time, resulting in brain changes? For once, somebody isn't willing to jump to a conclusion.

(The writer of this article, Lise Eliot, has written a book on how differences between boys' and girls' brains are shaped by culture: "Boys are not, in fact, 'better at math' but at certain kinds of spatial reasoning. Girls are not naturally more empathetic; they’re allowed to express their feelings. By appreciating how sex differences emerge—rather than assuming them to be fixed biological facts—we can help all children reach their fullest potential.")

People 32,000 years ago may have spun flax into twine (this is the same stuff as the fabric linen). We don't know what the threads were used for, but speculation is rampant - clothing to keep warm? Rope to tie sharp things to sticks and make weapons? Or, um, nothing? "It’s possible individual flax fibers blew into the ancient cave, got buried and then became twisted during microscopic analyses," says Harvard archaeologist Irene Good, who isn't impressed with these fibers but told Science News that people probably did make some kind of textiles around that era. Ancient pottery (around 26,000 years ago) sometimes includes imprints of nets and ropes.

Late Blight's genome published - the fungus that is wiping out tomato crops across the Northeast US this year (and that caused the Irish potato famine way back when) may owe its success to highly variable effector genes buried in its "junk" DNA. ("Junk" DNA is never junk, people. We just don't always know what it does.)

Brown spots in bananas glow blue in UV light. The color change, from degrading chlorophyll, probably attracts insects (lots of animals can see in UV) but is also interesting to scientists as a marker of cell death.

How long food keeps in the fridge - a chart from the new FoodSafety.Gov website. Marion Nestle says, "If we can't have a single food agency, we can at least have a single food safety site. Now if Congress would just pass some decent food safety laws..."

I'm going to try to make this a recurring thing. Five things I thought were interesting this week:

Factory-farming frogs is now possible (sort of) but still seems like a bad idea. "Just over half the marsh frogs survived three years of intensive farming, whereas only 5 to 8 per cent of the pool and edible frogs did." Doesn't sound very humane to me. The upside is supposed to be protecting wild frog populations in Asia from overharvesting. But is this really a good solution? One expert says: "it may be better to simply harvest frogs sustainably in the wild rather than building elaborate, energy-intensive farms that rely on fish meal." To quote another: "I hear frogs' legs taste like chicken. Eat that and leave the frogs alone."

But Genetically "pain-free" animals would make abusive farming practices ethically OK! "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering," says a philosopher who published a paper on the subject this week. This ignores the idea that physical pain is the only kind of suffering that matters. Let me tell you, if I had to live in a battery cage, I would be pretty miserable with or without my Nav1.7 gene.

Lefties may have been rare in Victorian England. While currently 11% of British people are left-handed, only 3% of Victorians waved at movie cameras with their left hand. (The modern control was a Google images search of people waving.) In the Victorian clips, older folks were slightly more likely to wave with the left hand, so the researchers concluded that lefties were a dying breed that, later, bounced back.

Female fruit flies prefer to keep sex short. This is surprising (to the researchers) because male flies have pinchers and other nasty ways of supposedly keeping the females from getting away. It seems all kinds of sex research includes the assumption that the males are in charge and females are passive - and that assumption always breaks down as soon as researchers start looking into it. Best quote, about the methodology: "The team propped up the dead [female] insects—Weekend at Bernie's-style—to convince the males that they were still alive and ready for sex." (They mated longer with dead females than with ones that could get away.)

The Manahatta Project aims to reconstruct what the island looked like before it became the heart of New York City. National Geographic reports that Eric Sanderson, an ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, compared old maps and modern GPS readings to reconstruct what the island was like in 1609. (Although the article doesn't mention, the actual click-and-zoom map includes Lenape settlements and their likely uses of land. It's not like the place was unsettled.)

Bonus links! Improve your life with science!

• Avoid mitochondrial diseases by using somebody else's cytoplasm!
  
• Motivate your kids by saying they're hard workers, not that they're smart!
  
• If you're in an Olympic wrestling match, wear red!
  
• Decode your genome for just $50,000 - if you are this guy!
  
• Smuggle cheese to impress your friends!
  

The New York Times says that Emeril is allowed to change recipes, "because he is a highly trained chef." You, on the other hand, are not. If you do, you will be compared in the New York Times to people who substitute kool-aid powder for orange zest. "Gourmet has 8 test kitchens and 11 food editors," says an editor at Gourmet magazine. This means that if you think a Gourmet recipe would taste better with some tweaking, you are wrong. According to the New York Times, anyway.

Snooty food editors would disapprove that I substituted light brown sugar for dark brown sugar in this butterscotch pudding when I made it today. (I was craving the rich puddings I used to get at the Cornell Dairy Bar when I used to work down the street.) The pudding turned out thick, rich, and delicious and was quick to make: mix sugar, eggs, and cornstarch, whisk in hot milk, and finish with blobs of butter. You can eat it right away if you like your pudding warm.

Moving on (see, I've learned there is an order in which to present these), I had a lot of fun today at the website WhoPooped.org, thanks to the Minnesota Zoo. Not just a poop quiz (hehe!), the site teaches you about where animal poop comes from. You can drag the food into the animal's mouth, watch where it goes in the little cartoon digestive system, and read the little info cards while (in one case) an ostrich stands by and farts at you. It (not Twitter, despite what the "social media" people will tell you) is the best website ever.

According to Kathleen Fasanella, fashion industry guru, that law that plans to criminalize "copied" clothing designs is dangerously close to passing. Kathleen explains what's so bad about it here: basically, it will put almost everyone out of business. Use the links in her post to write to your lawmakers. As I said in my letter, there is a reason why clothing was exempted from copyright law. It makes no sense to offer copyright monopolies for functional items like clothing, no matter how "original" the designer says their design is. Nothing is original in fashion; it's all been done before.

Is that enough links for now? I also thought this witch bottle was pretty neat.

Just a heads-up: science posts will now be cross-posted both here and at the loxosceles science blog.

Regular readers of this blog don't have to change a thing - just keep reading here and you'll be OK.

Comments are not synced, though. In fact, comments on this blog seem to be broken. Oops. Working on that.

If you can't get enough of me, you can also follow me on twitter.

Teri sent me this link to Simple Tricks that Make You Look Smart.

I can personally recommend the following:

4. include a picture of your house when you give people directions.

5. Before you take something apart to fix it, take a photo.

8. Oil your spoon or measuring cup, and honey won't stick to it.

21. Before juicing a lemon, squeeze or roll it. (This seems to break open some of the juice-containing compartments; because the skin is still intact, you can be as rough as you like and not get squirted.)

Some of the tips are kind of dumb, like #2 - spray thread with hairspray? How about you just lick it? Then you don't have hairspray all over everything (like the thread you're going to lick).

And let's talk about #7, how to get ketchup out of a ketchup bottle. If you need a tip for this, you are overthinking it! Ketchup is a viscous liquid. It WANTS to slide down the glass bottle and onto your plate. Just tip the bottle over (so it's almost horizontal) and it will slide right out. You can amuse yourself by whacking it on the 57 if you like.

1. Archer Farms "Indian-inspired" meals from Target. I never thought I would stoop to buying groceries from Target, but look! For $4 you get rice, curry sauce, a side dish, and some over-sweet chutney. It feeds two people heartily. (We add our own meat or veggies to the curry sauce, and cook extra rice, but the total cost is no more than $8 for dinner for two.)

2. High-waisted skirts like this one. I don't know what suddenly made me stop hating this style and start loving it. Maybe the fact that it looks AWESOME on me. (I made my own with Vogue 8425.)

3. Text adventure games! I never liked these as a kid because I could never guess what to do next. Well, either my brain grew or they started writing 'em better, because I devoured three of these things recently and found them intriguing and intelligent and not impossible to play.

First I played Everybody Dies, which starts out all "go east"/"go west"/"it's boring here" but gets interesting after you die the first time. As far as I can tell there's only one ending, but the puzzles are fun and I found the story stuck in my head for hours afterwards, which I think means it's a good story.

Since Everybody Dies was the 3rd-place winner in the Interactive Fiction Awards, I then went and played the first-place entry, Violet. This is an awesome game for procrastination from your nanowrimo novel and/or paid writing projects. In it, the major puzzle is battling procrastination so you can write, because bad things will happen if you don't. (I played this game while waiting for a call back from someone I was interviewing for an article, which is the freelance writer equivalent of "my code is compiling").

4. You see where this is going. After playing about three games in two days I was flooded with ideas for text games I could write. Like one based on my nano novel! Or one where you don't move in space but you can travel through time! or one where you're asleep and have to destroy your alarm clock so you can get back to the quest in your dream where you need to get to the airport that is also a mcdonald's!

Want to play along with the Beth's Craziness game? (the metaphorical one, not the inevitable text adventure) Just apt-get install frotz inform inform-doc. Tell me how yours comes out.

[psst zcode linux ... just trying to help out the googlers]

Bottlemania: how water went on sale and why we bought it. An excerpt from the book of the same name. See also A tall, cool drink of ... sewage by the same author.

The story of the shit knife:

The Inuit didn't fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.

Athletes on the edge: interviews with a traceur, a cold-water endurance swimmer, a sword swallower, a competitive eater, and a human cannonball.

Protective RNA virus - this is pretty neat: "The "protecting virus" contains an altered gene that makes it harmless and prevents it from reproducing in a cell. If another influenza virus invades the cell it still remains harmless, but rapidly reproduces and prevents infection by literally crowding out the new influenza strain."

Some of the world's strangest fences

"IN A WORLD without Don LaFontaine ... we'd all make a lot more money." (RIP)

A recipe misprint leads to nutmeg poisoning

Hollywood's 5 saddest attempts at feminism