On the first third* night of Hanukkah, my doomsday soothsayer gave to me...

Happy Hannukah, everybody! In honor of the yearly festival of lights, I have decided to enlighten you (pun intended! Yuk yuk!) about 8 things you're probably better off not knowing. You can thank me later!

1. Laptops and sperm and DNA fragmentation, oh my!

Hey, wanna know what happens to sperm after it sits in a petri dish under a laptop with an active WiFi connection? Good news: some scientists have just published a study on that very topic! Bad news: the sperm do not fare so well; after 4 hours in a Petri dish under a WiFi-connected laptop, they suffer from decreased motility and increased DNA fragmentation. Better news: The study includes an awesome diagram:

If you don't have access to the article as referenced above, you can go here for a snarky review of it.

2. Hot news (pun intended!) from the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.

Oh dear, the permafrost is melting, and methane is pouring out. This is NOT GOOD.

3. How about a nice relaxing cruise...to your doom?

You know how sometimes you read news stories about people going missing on cruises? Well, I've found a website with everything you ever wanted to know about people disappearing on cruise ships. Spoiler alert: In the past 11 years, something like 172 people have disappeared from the giant boats. That's no Titanic, but still: wow.

Quasi-related.

4. Arsenic in your apple juice?

Oh dear, are we sending our kids the way of Napoleon**? Consumer Reports says maybe!

Yep. In the January 2012 issue, Consumer Reports describes a series of tests measuring arsenic levels in commercially available apple and grape juices. Alarmingly, CR found surprisingly high levels of arsenic in many of the juice brands--levels that push the limits of or exceed federal drinking-water standards.  That much arsenic is really not good for your health...and it's even worse for your children's.

Although the CR piece does not mention Napoleon or his possible arsenic poisoning** (sorry for the false hope on that one), I think it's worth a read--though be warned it's a bit long. If you're too lazy to read the whole article, perhaps you'll like this bulleted summary that Consumer Reports provides:

• Roughly 10 percent of our juice samples, from five brands, had total arsenic levels that exceeded federal drinking-water standards. Most of that arsenic was inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen.
• One in four samples had lead levels higher than the FDA’s bottled-water limit of 5 ppb. As with arsenic, no federal limit exists for lead in juice.
• Apple and grape juice constitute a significant source of dietary exposure to arsenic, according to our analysis of federal health data from 2003 through 2008.
• Children drink a lot of juice. Thirty-five percent of children 5 and younger drink juice in quantities exceeding pediatricians’ recommendations, our poll of parents shows.
• Mounting scientific evidence suggests that chronic exposure to arsenic and lead even at levels below water standards can result in serious health problems.
• Inorganic arsenic has been detected at disturbing levels in other foods, too, which suggests that more must be done to reduce overall dietary exposure.

More about arsenic here!

**Oh. Looks like my 10th grade global studies teacher was wrong about that...bummer.

5. Guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses: Confirmed by science.

This isn't really end-of-the-world news, but it is somewhat interesting: Some scientists in Austria have demonstrated that wearing glasses makes people appear less attractive--but more intelligent.  Or, to be more accurate, the scientists have determined that wearing any kind of glasses makes you look smarter, but traditional (not rimless) glasses make you less attractive.  Rimless glasses apparently mitigate this effect.  Guess I'll be wearing my contacts more often!

Sadly, I don't have access to the full article, but a nice summary can be found here.

6. Athiests are worse than rapists?

More social science-y news: People apparently mistrust atheists about the same amount that than they mistrust rapists. In fact, according to this recent study, the reason atheists are disliked in general is because people deem them untrustworthy. The article's reasoning supporting this conclusion is a little convoluted and social science-y and will take too long to describe here, but I do want to talk about one piece of the puzzle, specifically study 2 of 6. This study involved using the 'conjunction fallacy' as a roundabout way of getting at people's underlying prejudices, something i'm not entirely sure I'm on board with, though I'm definitely interested in the rather alarming results.

Study 2 of 6 went as follows: 105 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia read the following scenario, and were then asked to characterize the person described therein.

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away.

Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

Specifically, after reading the above description, students were asked which of the following was more likely of Richard, A or B; the Answer Options that were presented varied randomly across students.

Richard is...

	Answer Option 1	Answer Option 2	Answer Option 3	Answer Option 4
A	A teacher	A teacher	A teacher	A teacher
B	A teacher and a Christian	A teacher and a Muslim	A teacher and a Rapist	A teacher and an Athiest

Logically, the answer is (A) every time: It is impossible that any of the (B) options would be more probable than answer (A), which necessarily includes all of the options laid out in (B) (hence the name 'conjunction fallacy'). In any case, check out the proportion of times that students selected B in the different conditions:

What. The. Crap.

I'd write more, but I'm only #6 of 8 in this post and it is getting long. You can find more about this article here, and can read the whole thing here.

7. Cigarettes are the true gateway drug

Remember how in DARE, they told us that marijuana was the gateway drug?  How if we tried it we would doubtlessly devolve into cocaine addicts within the week?  Turns out they were wrong; the true gateway drug is nicotine.  Why?  Well, I don't understand all the science (Check out all the jargon in the article (makes me wish I had continued taking science after 11th grade)), but the gist is that nicotine primes your body to really feel the effects of cocaine.  This lady has a nice summary of how and why that happens.

And finally, the pièce de résistance...

8. Naegleria-laced Neti Nettles Neurons

A nod to Manjula for the tip on the following news story, which is a perfect follow-up to my previous posts on tap water and waterborne brain-eating amoebas:

Brain-Eating Amoeba Fatalities Linked to Common Cold Remedy

Evidently, two people in Louisiana have died after using nasal irrigation devices filled with tap water.  How?  Glad you asked. You see, the water employed in the nasal irrigation procedure was from the tap, and contained our old friend Naegleria fowleri, which if you'll recall is an amoeba that, when introduced to your nose, can swim up to your brain and cause trouble.  In two recent and unfortunate cases down south, this seems to be precisely what has happened.

Setting aside the issue of why on earth anyone would want to pour water up one nostril and out the other, the alarming thing about this news story is that Naelgeria fowleri has now been confirmed to be in tap water...meaning it can and does survive the water treatment process, at least in Louisiana. Fortunately for us all, the CDC says it's unlikely you'll contract brain-eating amoebas from your drinking water if you keep it out of your nasal cavity.  Or, to more funnily quote Raoult Ratard, state epidemiologist for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals:

"Drinking water is good to drink, very safe to drink, but not to push up your nose".

Sage advice for dangerous times.

Never heard of a Neti pot?  Let me let Drew from Toothpaste for Dinner demonstrate how it works:

And, finally, that's it. HAPPY HANUKKAH!

*Meant to post this two days ago, but man, work and life and eating BBQ keeps me too damn busy.

America's mantra

Money, money, money makes the world go 'round*

Is capitalism sustainable in the long term? That's a question I find myself thinking about every now and again, much to the chagrin of several of my friends who have been treated to my half-baked ideas on the issue. Thankfully for you guys, before I could write an ill-informed tirade of my own, I came across some smarty-pants economist's two cents on the issue in the form of an understandable, short, and readable essay. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that many of the issues I blog about are seen by the author of this piece to be challenges to the future of capitalism as we know it, essentially because what's good for making money now is often not what's good for quality of life later. I'll let the author explain a little further:

...even the leading capitalist economies have failed to price public goods such as clean air and water effectively. The failure of efforts to conclude a new global climate-change agreement is symptomatic of the paralysis. [Ed. note: RELATED, JEEZ.]
...
It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely unhealthy diet. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, 34% of Americans are obese. Clearly, conventionally measured economic growth – which implies higher consumption – cannot be an end in itself.
...
...today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations. For most of the era since the Industrial Revolution, this has not mattered, as the continuing boon of technological advance has trumped short-sighted policies. By and large, each generation has found itself significantly better off than the last. But, with the world’s population surging above seven billion, and harbingers of resource constraints becoming ever more apparent, there is no guarantee that this trajectory can be maintained.

Anywho, I thought the essay provides some good food for thought. Go read!

*Surprisingly disturbing, yet awesome.

Oh god, oh dear god.

Stop the presses: Contagion is coming true.

Well, in ferrets at least. Yep. Seems as if a mad Dutch scientist has created a strain of bird flu that can be transmitted from ferret to ferret without direct contact--through the air. This is terrifying the scientific community, as the avian flu was one of the most deadly ever recorded in humans--it killed six in ten who contracted the virus. The only saving graces preventing the bird flu from spiraling out of control and killing 60% of the earth's population (both in 2006 when it was all the rage, and now) are (a) the lucky fact that, so far, the only way people have contracted bird flu is from birds themselves, and (b) the lucky fact that that the virus spreads very inefficiently, binding to cells only very deep in human lungs.

Because bird flu is so deadly (once contracted), many scientists have been concerned that it could mutate into a strain that is easily spread from human to human via coughs and sneezes and whatnot. Enter Ron Fouchier, Dutch researcher at Erasmus Medical Center, who embarked on a course of research that has lead to the existence of a bird flu strain that can be easily spread from human to human via coughs and sneezes and whatnot.

Scientific American describes the research as follows:

To help answer [the question of whether bird flu could ever morph into a disease that can spread among people, via a cough or sneeze, by attaching to nasal or tracheal membranes, as the seasonal flu does], Ron Fouchier...and his team "mutated the hell out of H5N1" and looked at how readily it would bind with cells in the respiratory tract. What they found is that with as few as five single mutations it gained the ability to latch onto cells in the nasal and tracheal passageways, which, Fouchier added as understated emphasis, "seemed to be very bad news."

The variety that they had created, however, when tested in ferrets (the best animal model for influenza research) still did not transmit very easily just through close contact. It wasn't until "someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid," Fouchier said, that they observed the deadly H5N1 become a viable aerosol virus. In the...experiment, they let the virus itself evolve to gain that killer capacity. To do that, they put the mutated virus in the nose of one ferret; after that ferret got sick, they put infected material from the first ferret into the nose of a second. After repeating this 10 times, H5N1 became as easily transmissible as the seasonal flu.

The lesson from these admittedly high-risk experiments is that "the H5N1 virus can become airborne," Fouchier concluded—and that "re-assortment with mammalian viruses is not needed" for it to evolve to spread through the air. And each of these mutations has already been observed in animals. "The mutations are out there, but they have not gotten together yet," Osterhaus said.

Think we're safe because this flu has so far only infected ferrets? Bad news on that front. As ScienceInsider notes:

Ferrets aren't humans, but in studies to date, any influenza strain that has been able to pass among ferrets has also been transmissible among humans, and vice versa, says Fouchier: "That could be different this time, but I wouldn't bet any money on it."

Hence the title of this post: Oh god, oh dear god. I think it is high time to invest in some emergency face masks (designer, if you must), and to perfect the art of the antiflu elbow-bump (endorsed by Nobel Laureates!).

Thanks to Mahdroo for the tip on this one.

***

In other news, it seems I may have jumped on this honey-not-being-honey bandwagon a little too early. (Thanks to Anonymous for pointing this out.) I still think it makes sense to buy locally-produced honey, though...if you ask me. Which nobody did--but hell, it's my blog, eh?

Not that I condone the distruction of property...

...but sometimes graffiti can make a marvelous improvement to a billboard.

Observe:

Apparently this was spotted in downtown Seattle last month (source).

Honey, McRib, Peak Oil, Earth from space, Surprise link

The title of today's blog entry is not creative, but it is descriptive. With that, let's begin.

1. Oh, Honey: It's like I don't know you anymore.

I've learned some terrible things about honey this week. Let's start with the fact that a lot of stuff that is sold as "honey" in supermarkets (three quarters of it, maybe) can't legally be called honey. This is because the honey has been been ultra-filtered to have the pollen removed from it, and the FDA has ruled that honey must contain pollen to legally be called honey. Now, whether or not honey has pollen in it most likely seems somewhat inconsequential from your perspective (why should you care if your honey has bits of flowers in it?), but don't be lulled into complacency. Without pollen in the honey, there is no way to trace the source of the honey, and this means there's no way to tell where your honey comes from. And you definitely want to know where your honey comes from, because--apparently--the cheapest honey around is from China, which is also where the most dangerous honey is from. Says Food Safety News:

A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.

Yep. Evidently, Chinese honey is very often tainted with chloramphenicol, which can cause fatal reactions in 1 in every 30,000 people. The United States doesn't even let food animals eat the stuff! And then there are the heavy metals in the honey--it seems mom-and-pop beekeping operations in China have a pesky habit of using "small, unlined, lead-soldered drums to collect and store [their] honey." This is no good, people. No good.

But how does contaminated Chinese honey get into the US of A, you ask? Especially if all the pollen has been filtered out of it--and if everybody knows it's poisonous? Simple: via (a) negligence of the FDA, and (b) honey laundering schemes (I kid you not--look, senator Schumer from my home state made a whole stink about it last year). The United States has placed steep tariffs on honey from China to dissuade their import; in response China has adopted the practice of routing its honey through other countries, most recently India. Europe allows neither Chinese nor Indian honey to be imported...but America apparently has no problem with the Indian variety despite the well-known fact that much of it comes from China. America: land of the free and home of the brave honey eaters!

Which is all to say, I think the Food Safety News report on honey laundering, where a lot of the above information comes from, is definitely worth a read.

From now on, I think I'll stick to honey I purchase from local producers.

2. Ribses.

I've never eaten a McRib sandwich, and I have no intention of ever doing so. But I'm gathering from a lot of postings on Facebook, commercials on TV, and various internet articles, that the McRib is/was back on the market--for a limited time only (apparently, you've missed your chance to eat one at this point). Two things I've read about the McRib have stuck with me, so I'm sharing them with you.

(Side question: Why am I reading about the McRib at all? Because it's oddly fascinating, that's why. Also because I am nothing if not good at procrastination...more important things to do? Time to research the McRib on the interwebs!)

Numero Uno. Yesterday I read skimmed a fascinating article about the McRib as arbitrage, in which it is argued that McDonalds only introduces the McRib when pork prices are falling. The author even made a graph to prove it (blue is the price of pork, black is when the McRib has been reintroduced):

Neato, huh?

In addition to being an interesting read--definitely worth a perusal--the McRib arbitrage article also contained a one-sentence summary of the American fast food industry that I liked very much (such nice imagery):

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of.

And what a nice segue that is to McRib thing Numero Dos: What's the McRib made of? It's certainly not made of actual ribs. If you've digested one of these things, you probably don't want to know the ingredients...but I'm going to tell you anyway: The patty is comprised of chopped up pig innards and "plenty of salt." The bun? Well, that contains 34 ingredients, among which is azodicarbonamide, something also found in gym mats, and a banned ingredient in European and Australian food.

I'm sure there's a joke in here about "chewing on that" next time you chew on a McRib, but it's not coming easily to me so I'll just move on.

3. We're so screwed.

This is a really, really interesting article about public/scholarly debate, popular perception, and the reality of overpopulation, over-consumption of resources, and the future of the world (if you can't view the full article, a summary is here). Rather than abstracting the article in my own words, I'll just quote a large bit of text from the conclusion--the authors write much more eloquently on the subject than I could. I know the following quote is long, but it's a nice reminder of the bind the world is in and I encourage you to read it all.

The world today faces enormous problems related to population and resources. These ideas were discussed intelligently and, for the most part, accurately in many papers from the middle of the last century, but then they largely disappeared from scientific and public discussion….Most environmental science textbooks focus far more on the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on them. The failure today to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil, indeed of peak everything, into scientific discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society. The concept of the possibility of a huge, multifaceted failure of some substantial part of industrial civilization is so completely outside the understanding of our leaders that we are almost totally unprepared for it.

There are virtually no extant forms of transportation, beyond shoe leather and bicycles, that are not based on oil, and even our shoes are now often made of oil. Food production is very energy intensive, clothes and furniture and most pharmaceuticals are made from and with petroleum, and most jobs would cease to exist without petroleum. But on our university campuses one would be hard pressed to have any sense of that beyond complaints about the increasing price of gasoline, even though a situation similar to the 1970s gas shortages seemed to be unfolding in the summer and fall of 2008 in response to three years of flat oil production, assuaged only when the financial collapse decreased demand for oil.

No substitutes for oil have been developed on anything like the scale required, and most are very poor net energy performers….Our new sources of “green” energy are simply increasing along with (rather than displacing) all of the traditional ones.

If we are to resolve these issues, including the important one of climate change, in any meaningful way, we need to make them again central to education at all levels of our universities, and to debate and even stand up to those who negate their importance, for we have few great intellectual leaders on these issues today. We must teach economics from a biophysical as well as a social perspective. Only then do we have any chance of understanding or solving these problems.

4. Now some fun. Look at the Earth from space!

5. Finally, the surprise link. What the...

I'm never eating seafood again!

I'm a little late on this news, but I just had to share: Seafood is evidently not safe to eat unless you catch it with your own two hands!

By "not safe to eat seafood," i mean it's probably safe to eat, but if you order it at a restaurant or buy it in a grocery store you may not be getting the type of fish advertised. According to some recent investigative journalism by the Boston Globe, fish mislabeling is rampant in Boston-area retailers. It's not just Boston though--other studies have found the same is the case around the country as well.

While some substitutions are relatively innocuous, for example Pacific cod in exchange for New England cod, others sound much more terrifying. Chew on this, for instance:

In 2007, two customers at a Chicago restaurant were hospitalized after eating a toxin found in puffer fish. They had ordered monkfish.

That same year, a large shipment of escolar from Indonesia was labeled Atlantic cod and exported to Hong Kong. More than 600 people reportedly fell ill after eating it. Consumption of escolar can cause severe gastrointestinal problems because of the type of oil it contains.

I know, gross, right? Wikipedia claims that escolar can cause keriorrhea, which "is similar to diarrhea, only the body will expel yellowish-orange drops of oil instead of liquid bowel movements." Wow, that's just what I want to get when I order cod. (Pardon me while I gag.)

According to an unsubstantiated claim made in the Globe article, "at some restaurants, chefs call fish anything their imagination conjures, disguising the identity with sauces and spices." Really?? Well, if that's true* then I think it's safe to say: It's a conspiracy!** Totally time to panic and stop eating seafood.

*It's probably not.
**You will all be pleased to note that I refrained from making a joke about "something fishy going on here." You're welcome for that.

***

So I wrote most of that a few weeks ago, but never really got around to finishing. Things have been insanely busy over here; I've been travelling a lot (Vegas two weeks ago, Los Angeles this week), there was a freak snow storm, work has been hectic, and I've actually working on my dissertation...among other things. Which is all to say, blogging might be slow for a while. Please bear with me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go breathe in some of that famous LA smog. Oh, Los Angeles. How I have not missed you.

A little lead in moderation never hurt nobody!

Thanks to Jessie for today's funny:

In other news, this sounds like the most bad-ass corn maze ever.* It's just north of Boston...who wants to go?

*Also like the least bad-ass couple ever

Ever wonder which state boasts the highest likelihood of smashing one's car into a deer?

Wonder no more! According to State Farm the answer is West Virginia, where a driver has, on average, a 1 in 53 chance of colliding with a deer. This is followed by Iowa, where the chance is 1 in 77.

Wondering where one is least likely to hit a deer? To answer let me quote directly from this press release:

The state in which deer-vehicle collisions are least likely is...Hawaii (1 in 6,267). The odds of a Hawaiian driver colliding with a deer between now and 12 months from now are approximately equal to the odds that that driver is a practicing nudist.

I suppose if anyone would have figures relating to the odds of a driver being a practicing nudist, it would be an insurance company.

Friday fears, facts and funnies*

1. Some people are concerned about robots taking over the world. Me, I'm more concerned that the monkeys will overwhelm us someday. (Disclaimer: I use the term "monkey" to mean any kind of primate; I shamefully do not know what distinguishes a monkey from other kinds of monkey-like beings. Orangutans are orange though, I know that.) Anyway, in July I ran across a fascinating article about which I haven't had a chance to properly blog but which I want to share before I forget. Listen to this, people: Monkeys are giving themselves pedicures! Combine that with those monkeys that have figured out to hunt with spears, and it's not too large a leap to think that the apes will be inventing gunpowder pretty soon, after which they will come for us.
   
   
2. On my birthday (aside: I am now 30 and still not a "doctor," womp womp), it was revealed that my three-month-long campaign to improve my office's coffee situation was successful: We replaced our awful, ancient, dirty, foul-coffee-making coffeemaker with a Keurig! Everyone is thrilled (I'm the best assistant director ever!)...except for me, because I realized that (why did I not think of this before) I'm not really sure what is in those plastic K-cups. I mean, I know there's coffee in them, but what's in the packaging material is what I want to know. Hot water runs through that plastic cup and into my coffee cup and then I drink it...is that hot water loaded with leached chemicals? I bet you anything it's laced with BPA. (Gahhh. I said I wanted to know what's in there, but maybe I don't...)
   
   
3. Presciently related: In June I wrote a little thing about BPA I never got around to finishing:
   

   BPA's been in the news yet again, with more alarming reports about our average levels of exposure to the chemical, as well as the consequences of such exposure. Civil Eats reports:
   

   According to a new study, exposure to the gender-bending chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) is worse than previously estimated. The study, which appeared Monday [June 6] in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to recreate the chronic daily intake of BPA in humans, which leaches into our food–our primary channel for exposure–via its packaging. Researchers showed this by feeding a steady BPA-spiked diet to mice, whereas previous studies have only used a single exposure.

   One of the authors of the recently published article explains that BPA exposure via food packaging could be a significant problem, the depths of which are not yet understood:
   

   When BPA is taken through the food, the active form may remain in the body for a longer period of time than when it is provided through a single treatment, which does not reflect the continuous exposure that occurs in animal and human populations...We need to study this further to determine where the ingested BPA becomes concentrated and subsequently released back into the bloodstream to be distributed throughout the body.
   
   We know that the active form of BPA binds to our steroid receptors, meaning it can affect estrogen, thyroid and testosterone function. It might also cause genetic mutations. Thus, this chemical can hinder our ability to reproduce and possibly cause behavioral abnormalities that we are just beginning to understand.

   Grrrreat...now I'm concerned I'm getting a dose of behavioral abnormalities every morning with my (quite tasty) coffee. And I don't think this is an invalid concern, either.
   
   
4. What if human beings aren't born with an "instinct" to believe in the supernatural? Is such illogic something we really want to inculcate our children with?
   
   
5. Did you know there's a peanut shortage? Neither did I.
   
   
6. Finally, two funny videos I've been sent recently that I've watched and re-watched all week. The first you've probably seen, the second I'd guess not:
   
   
   Tuna, Eggs, Doritos, Cheesecake, Tamale, See ya!
   
   
   Straight-up got mauled by a cougar!
   
   
7. Today's Sunday, but tomorrow's still the weekend...Thank you Christopher Columbus! You are not my favorite dude, but any day on which I get paid for not going to work is definitely one I cherish.
   
   

*Wrote most of this on Friday, publishing it on Sunday, keeping the title for the alliteration.

Halt your eating!

People, I have news: It might not be safe to eat anymore.

Surely by now you've heard of the listeria outbreak linked to cantaloupes grown at Jensen Farms in Colorado? It's one of the most deadly food-related outbreaks of all time (read: in the history of keeping such statistics), with somewhere from 13 to 16 people (depending on where you get your numbers) already dead and many more sickened. Although listeria is not commonly found in fruit (but rather animal products like meat and cheese), it is a rather scary pathogen because it doesn't slow its growth in low temperatures--meaning that if you put a tainted product in your refrigerator, the bacteria just keep reproducing. Listeria is also scary because once in your body, it is "aggressive in escaping the gastrointestinal tract" and can rapidly spread to places you really don't want it to go--like your spinal cord. (Typing that, I am reminded of this gem, which is completely unrelated except in its spinal reference and in its reference to deli meats, which are commonly contaminated with listeria.)

So far, the burden of death from listeria infections has primarily been borne by an elderly population, prompting a rather hilarious (to me) comment in the New York Times from some Seattle lawyer who "represents victims of food-borne illness" (what a happy job, btw):

This outbreak [of listeria linked to cantaloupes] might turn out to be especially deadly simply because cantaloupe is a food eaten by many older people.

"Sometimes in outbreaks, it’s the population that’s consuming the food that drives the numbers...In this instance, you’ve got a lot of people 60 and older who are consuming cantaloupe."

Read: Old people love cantaloupe. Really? I thought it was a favorite among people of all ages...or maybe I'm just old at heart, because I love the stuff.

Anywho, it's scary enough that cantaloupes are contaminated and that people are dying simply because they wanted to include some fresh fruit in their diet....but what's even more terrifying is what comes to light after some innocent googling for "listeria cantaloupes." For instance, this morning I learned almost by happenstance about the following pathogens lurking in foods that could be in your house right now (she says ominously):

• Organic grape tomatoes contaminated with salmonella (September 28, 2011) (more info here)
• Ground turkey contaminated with salmonella (September 11, 2011)
• Ground beef contaminated with E. coli (Sep 27, 2011) (more info here)
• And if you're reading this from Canada, beware of your ham - it could be contaminated with listeria!

Those are just a few of the stories I stumbled upon as I was "researching" the cantaloupe-listeria thing. I could probably find many more if I tried (the FDA keeps a running list!), but I think I'm plenty terrified already. I don't want to eat anything, ever again. Hence my blanket statement declaring it unsafe to eat.

(Brief aside: here's the best recall I've read about this morning: Pepperidge Farm has recalled a batch of their Baked Naturals Sesame Sticks because of the "possible presence of small, thin pieces of wire" in the sticks. Apparently "a small number of consumers have reported minor scrapes in and around the mouth." What...the...how does that even happen?)

Food pathogens are probably the number one reason why I'm so mistrustful of the industrial food system in this country (although now I'm worried about wires in my crackers as well!). Perhaps it is time to set in motion the plan that a friend and I concocted a few years ago for an organic farm off the grid in Montana. We haven't yet resolved our issues about whether or not we will eat the animals we tend on the farm (I say yes, she says no), but we could definitely get started with the veggies. No listeria for us!

Picasa's online photo editor is suuuper fun to play with.

Contagion = This blog times a million

Perhaps ill-advisedly, I saw Contagion over the weekend and omg I never want to touch anyone or anything ever again. I spent most of the movie curled in a fetal position, stressing out, and I walked out of the theater with a very strong desire to build a virus-proof underground shelter stocked with food, water, firearms, ammunition, and a BSL-4 grade biohazard suit. It's been a few days and I still have that urge, so perhaps I will spend my 30th birthday weekend (coming up too damn soon) preparing for the next global pandemic. Orrrrr....i'll spend it drinking wine. Only time will tell.

A professor at Columbia, who consulted on Contagion (and actually invented the film's (unnamed) disease (drawing from an real life bat-->pig-->human disease jumping example)) recently wrote an interesting op-ed piece about the film in the NYT that's worth a read. It describes the reality behind the film's fiction, which I think is important to consider, because it's far too easy to dismiss a fictional star-studded film as hyperbole when it's too hard or scary to face the real truths it brings to light.

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Unrelated except in its apocalypse reference: Netflix would like to apologize for the inadvertent apocalypse.

Friday Fatigue

Man. It's hard to have a full time job, move across town/the country, write a dissertation, try to have a semblance of a social life,* AND keep up with this blog.

I've been bookmarking things to write about here, but let's be honest: I won't get around to most of it. So here's a list of things I've found interesting recently.

1. WATCH YOUR HEAD! I was informed yesterday that there's a satellite falling to earth that is going to clear orbit today, and that there's a 1 in 3200 chance it could hit a person (a statistic I have verified in an extremely detailed NASA PowerPoint). While this doesn't precisely translate into a 1 in 3200 chance that it could hit ME, I'm not taking any chances. I think I'll work from the subway today. They have wifi down there, don't they?

(Side note: In my brief research on this satellite-maybe-hitting-me business, I discovered that NASA has an entire office dedicated to studying things that fall from space and might hit me. They think of everything!)

2. The world's (allegedly) deadliest volcano might erupt soon. Not a good time to plan a trip to Indonesia, I guess.

3. Ever wonder how breakfast cereal is made? Wonder no more! (Also, eat cereal no more...ick.)

4. Speaking of icky industrial food, the first two parts of this piece have rather disturbed me. Wood pulp in our food, and tasteless OJ? Guess I'll be fresh-squeezing my juice from now on, and trying to avoid chemically-treated pulverized wood.

More on food-grade wood pulp here and here. (Worth reading about, in my opinion.)

5. More tax, more happy?

6. And finally, some fun. Researchers have analyzed male dance moves to discover what the ladies like the most. The results might surprise you, so I'll quote directly from the abstract [try here for the full article]: "Three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee."

More specifically, the following aspects of dudes' dancing seems to account for most of the variability in ladies' ratings: neck internal/external rotation (head shaking), trunk abduction/adduction (sideways bending), and right knee internal/external rotation (twisting).

Not to be a hater, but there is literally no attractive dance I can imagine that involves shaking one's head while bending sideways and twisting the right knee rapidly. But what do I know.

Do you guys remember this guy? Check out that trunk abduction/adduction!

Happy Friday.


*I am blatantly failing at my goal of making no new friends until the dissertation is done. Shame on me.

Seriously, this stuff is much more compelling than DARE ever was...

First I find out that cocaine can melt your face off, and now I learn that heavy use of marijuana can increase your chances of getting schizophrenia, especially if you use it during adolescence. What! Maybe drugs actually are bad for you!

A recent piece in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews has reviewed the scientific literature linking cannabis use and adult-onset psychosis/schizophrenia. Distressingly, the piece convincingly argues--using a number of different streams of research (particularly epidemiological (prospective and retrospective) and animal research)--that use of marijuana, at any point in life but particularly during adolescence, is linked (potentially causally?) to "schizophrenia outcomes." Indeed, pretty much all of the reviewed research on the topic that used human subjects, both from Western and non-Western populations, has shown that smoking the giggle weed is associated with a two- to three-fold increase in the risk of developing schizophrenia. The amount/extent of use is a factor as well--in one study of Swedish army conscripts, those who were heavy ganja users at the time of conscription were more than SIX TIMES as likely as non-users to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia during the 27-year study period.

During adolescence, it is thought that cannabis use interferes with the development of neuronal networks, causing permanent brain changes that raise the likelihood of developing paranoia and schizophrenia. Studies in rats have shown that immature rats are more sensitive to the cognitive effects of cannabis, and that the "detrimental effects of acute cannabinoids on behavior are greater during puberty compared to adulthood." In an imaging study of human adolescents who had "long-term use of cannabis" (side note: how long could that term possibly be?), it was found that cannabis use "was associated with gyrification abnormalities in the cortex, suggesting that early cannabis use affected normal neurodevelopment." That does not sound good.

At this point I should probably pause to point out the obvious fact that smoking the jive stick won't necessarily give you schizophrenia--there are many other factors at play as well. To quote the article I read, "cannabis use is clearly not an essential or sufficient risk factor [for psychotic illness] as not all schizophrenic patients have used cannabis and the majority of cannabis users do not develop schizophrenia." Nevertheless, there is "a developmental link between cannabis and increased vulnerability to behavioral and cognitive impairments."

So here's my advice (kids, listen up): You may not think smoking the Mary J is a big deal now, but you'll be changing your tune when you start hearing God, the Devil and Zeus all talking to you at once, convincing you you can fly and that your coworker is poisoning your lunch. Just saying. You should probably wait to inhale until you're a bit older.*

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In high school, my best friend and I were convinced that Vladimir and Estragon (protagonists in Becket's Waiting for Godot), were super stoned. Why else did they keep waiting/forgetting they were waiting for Godot?

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In other crazy drug-related news, a bunch of people (in Texas and Seattle, according to this article, but California has this issue as well) have recently gotten botulism from black tar heroin. Yes, BOTULISM. The canned food disease. (Evidently this is old news...but it's new news to me, as everything I know about heroin I learned from watching Intervention, and none of the heroin addicts (that I've seen so far) have had to be hospitalized due to botulism.) Most of the heroin-related botulism cases come from wounds associated with injection sites.

(Aside: Remarkably, people have been known to get MULTIPLE CASES of "wound botulism" (as the medical literature calls it) at their heroin injection sites. You'd think once would be enough to learn your lesson, but apparently not!)

Another even more dire potential complication of black tar heroin use is necrotizing fasciitis (aka flesh-eating bacteria), one of the only diseases I can't even read about because it is so utterly terrifying. (Seriously. I didn't even look at the text of that Wikipedia article I just linked to; I don't want nightmares tonight!) There is no way to get rid of botulism from heroin (I have no idea if the flesh-eating bacteria is get-riddable, but let's just assume no), so it's probably best to stay away from the black tootsie roll. Aaaand...that's all I have to say about that.

This has been your PSA for the day. Stay away from the drugs, kiddos.

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*This is by no means an endorsement of smoking weed or any other illegal substances.

Hurricanes and earthquakes and no dissertating at all...oh my!

So much doom and gloom lately in these here parts! First the east coast got rocked by an earthquake (aside: I love this article about the quake from the eminent Insurance Journal, perhaps for the article's title alone), and then Boston got hit by a hurricane (or almost a hurricane, anyway). I sadly did not feel the earthquake, and while I was properly terrified of Irene before the storm hit, I found the actual experience of the hurricane (or whatever it was) quite anticlimactic (as did many people, I suspect, as Irene's intensity forecast was just a bit off). We didn't even lose power! Though when I emerged from hiding at the end of the day on Sunday, I was treated to one heck of a mess on the street:

Check out this half-a-tree (rhymes with half-a-bee), perched precariously on the power lines (or telephone lines? How to tell the difference?):

Crazypants!

Though the storm caused less damage than expected, it was still pretty bad, and many experts believe there could be many more of these giant storms in the future, what with climate change and all. Next time one comes along I will make sure to not park under a tree.

That tiny branch almost hit my car!

I might also tune into the weather channel for the duration of the next storm. Sounds fun.

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Even more doomful than the earthquake and the hurricane, however, is the fact that I have done almost no dissertating for the past two weeks. This is bad bad news, people. The damn thing is never going to get done!

Though I suppose things could be worse.

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Mr. Diss is not pleased. He says, "GET TO WORK!"

No more swimming, I guess

First the ocean, now freshwater...is nowhere safe to swim?*

Always on the lookout for a nicely terrifying story for this blog, my good friend Tiffani just alerted me to this doozy:

Brain-eating amoebas blamed in three deaths

Yup, you read right. Apparently, there's a amoeba that lives in "warm freshwater" (mostly lakes, rivers, and hot springs...but also improperly sanitized swimming pools) that can travel up your nose, into your brain, and cause your death within 1-12 days (according to the CDC, an outfit I tend to trust).

The unfriendly little organism that is capable of such feats is called Naegleria fowleri, and it's made national news this week because it has killed three people this summer--so far. That's quite a lot, considering that only 32 cases were reported to the CDC in the decade spanning 2000-2010. (Actually, maybe the number of 2011 deaths is not "a lot"...more like an average amount. But I'm still worrying.)

CNN describes in simple terms what the Naegleria fowleri does:

The amoebas enter the human body through the nose after an individual swims or dives into warm fresh water, like ponds, lakes, rivers and even hot springs. ...When an amoeba gets lodged into a person's nose, it starts looking for food. It ends up in the brain and starts eating neurons. The amoeba multiplies, and the body mounts a defense against the infection. This, combined with the rapidly increasing amoebas, cause the brain to swell, creating immense pressure. At some point, the brain stops working.

Um....YIKES.

What you are probably wondering at this point (because I sure was wondering!) is what the symptoms of an amoebal takeover of your brain are. I'll tell you. Well, I'll let the CDC tell you:

Initial symptoms...start 1 to 7 days after infection. The initial symptoms include headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, and stiff neck. Later symptoms include confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance, seizures, and hallucinations. After the start of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly and usually causes death within 1 to 12 days.

It's like you think you have meningitis, but nope! The news is much worse! Just when you thought it couldn't possibly be worse.

What's most terrifying about the menace of Naegleria fowleri is not necessarily that it exists (though this is frightening indeed), but that a) it is 95% lethal (only ONE person in the US has survived an infection), and b) infection incidence increases when weather gets hot for long periods of time, and um, Global Warming, anyone?

So there you have it: Swimming in warm freshwater can lead to your death via an amoebal brain swarm. This has been your scary public service message of the day. You're welcome!

Also look! A diagram!

*I should probably say "safe and pleasant," as I suppose chlorinated and saltwater pools are a fairly safe swimming option. But swimming pools are icky.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Turns out avoiding the sun altogether is perhaps just as dangerous* as cultivating a deep dark tan. Indeed, while too much sun exposure can give you skin cancer, it seems that that too little sun exposure (whether achieved by using too much sunscreen or by staying indoors) can lead to rickets, a disease associated with Vitamin D deficiency (and pirates). AKA, a disease about which I have made a mental note to ask my doctor, specifically concerning whether a diagnosis test exists, and if so, whether it (or hypochondria) is covered by my insurance.

But I digress. Here's what I wanted to talk about: A recent piece in the Journal of Family Health Care (which I found out about here) has noted that there's been an unexpected worldwide increase in rickets cases in recent years. Such an increase is unexpected, given our modern-day learnin' and all, and in this case it's doubly unexpected because the increase has been found in landlubbers from all socioeconomic classes (and children especially). Why is this happening? One word: Sun. Or actually three words: Not enough sun. Yep, because sun exposure is an important source of Vitamin D, in avoiding the sun (or preventing your skin from absorbing Vitamin D-enhancing rays) you drastically** increase your chances of rickets. As the author of the rickets piece notes in his or her abstract (sadly, my institution does not subscribe to the publication so I couldn't read the full text; also I was too lazy to find out the gender of the author):

...the advice in recent years for children to wear a high factor sunscreen and remain covered up while playing outdoors [is] partly felt to be behind the reason for [Rickets'] re-emergence...A tendency for children to stay indoors and watch TV or play on computer games, rather than play outside when the sun is shining, is arguably also another contributing factor.

This isn't just idle speculation, I should point out. There's actually been a recent, highly publicized case of a British child getting rickets because her mother was too diligent with the sunscreen. !!!!

So there you have it: Sun = Cancer. No Sun = Rickets. Just the wrong amount of Sun and No Sun = Rickets AND cancer. Happy Tuesday.

*Where "dangerous" is loosely defined
**Where a "drastic increase" is defined as "an increase of some extent that is unknown to me and may be small"

This is the first thing that's made me want to get off Facebook...and the Internet.

What if someone could point a camera at you and instantly know your name, social security number, and penchant for Farmville? That'd be creepy, right? And invasive? I certainly think so.

But surely, you say, such a thing is the suff of science fiction. Bad news: IT'S NOT. It's the stuff of reality today.  It might be time to panic.

As I discovered in this story (and this one), researchers at Carnegie Mellon have recently combined "an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites — to identify individuals online and offline in the physical world" BY THEIR FACE.  As this article explains, "Since these technologies are also accessible by end-users, the results foreshadow a future when we all may be recognizable on the street — not just by friends or government agencies using sophisticated devices, but by anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection."  All someone has to do is point a camera at your mug and take a picture.

Lest you think this is just an academic exercise, here's a brief description of what the Carnegie Mellon team did with their technology:

In one experiment, Acquisti's team identified individuals on a popular online dating site where members protect their privacy through pseudonyms. In a second experiment, they identified students walking on campus — based on their profile photos on Facebook. In a third experiment, the research team predicted personal interests and, in some cases, even the Social Security numbers of the students, beginning with only a photo of their faces. (Source)

More info here.

I am, to put it mildly, quite disturbed.  We are way closer to a bleak dystopian future than I ever suspected.

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Fun fact: The Blogger spell checker doesn't recognize the word "dystopian."  It suggests I may have meant "dyspepsia," "Fallopian," "Dionysian" or "Bostonian."  I think I need to get a doom-themed add-on for this thing.

Idiocracy in action

Look, someone else on the internet agrees with me that we are all doomed. (What are the chances?!)

ALSO!!!!

Two books I refrained from buying at Borders' going out of business sale

It probably wouldn't be very good for my mental health to read these...

Besides, they were only 10% off and that's a pretty lame discount.

Interesting Tidbit: Food Dyes

Here's a neat little article about food dyes that I came across a while back. It should probably be called "Why I shop at Whole Foods almost exclusively," or "Why I often wish I lived in Europe." I mean...why would anyone put DYE in peas? Or orange peels? What is this world coming to! (Oh.)

Oh, god! Why am I so tall!

This just in: Tall people get cancer at higher rates than short people. Apparently this is already known in the epidemiological world, but it's news to me (Shocking news! Time to panic news!).

A study just released in the Lancet looked into the impact of height on the development of several common cancers, and found a significant and positive association between height and cancer incidence that was consistent across genders and cultures. For a large sample of British women, they also found a "clear and highly significant trend of increasing cancer risk with increasing height" even after controlling for confounding factors like age, region, socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol intake, body-mass index, strenuous exercise, age at menarche, parity, and age at first birth. Just look at this graph of adjusted relative risks (RRs) per 10 CM in height and 95% floated confidence intervals (FCI) for total incident cancer (among the British women), by height (in CM). Not that I have a full grasp on what is actually graphed here, but the trend is clear: more height, more cancer.  I've helpfully pointed out the relative risk (odds?) of cancer for my own height. It's at the top of the graph! Oh god!

The authors of this study offer several possible explanations as to why tall people get more cancer:

The similarity of the height-associated RR for different cancers and in different populations suggests that a basic common mechanism, possibly acting in early life, might be involved. Adult height reaches its maximum between the ages of 20 and 30 years. Variation in height relates to genetic and environmental influences acting mostly in the first 20 years, or so, of life; environmental factors, including childhood nutrition and infections, are believed to predominate. Hormone levels, especially of growth factors such as insulin-like growth factors (IGFs), both in childhood and in adult life, might be relevant. Circulating levels of IGFs in adulthood and childhood affect cancer risk; IGF-I levels in childhood and adolescence are strongly related to skeletal growth, and levels in adulthood, although less strongly, to adult height.

Another possibility is that height predicts cancer risk because taller people have more cells (including stem cells), and thus a greater opportunity for mutations leading to malignant transformation. Height might thus be related to cancer risk through increased cell turnover mediated by growth factors, or through increased cell numbers. The relation between height and cancer risk might underlie part of the difference in cancer incidence between populations, and changes in cancer incidence over time. Adult height in European populations has increased by about 1 cm per decade throughout the 20th century. The increase in adult height during the past century could thus have resulted in an increase in cancer incidence some 10–15% above that expected if population height had remained constant. This assumes, of course, that the effect of height is independent of changes in other risk factors.

I do not like this. Not one bit.  It's like I'm being punished for drinking all that milk and eating all those vegetables while I was growing up. Bah!

Perhaps this is why I can't remember anything these days. (It's not old age after all!)

Science just published an article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Apparently (according to this guy (or gal)) because the internet has given us the ability to look anything up, any time, the way we remember things is changing. Or, put another way, what we remember is changing. It seems we are less prone to remembering facts, and more prone to remembering where we can find facts. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but I sure know that it describes my favored memory retrieval process! The "Google effect," as it is called, is why you probably don't want me on your trivia team. I can't remember facts worth shit, but I sure can remember where I read about relevant content. (Thanks, brain. That's so useful for making me look like a non-idiot.)

As always, I am likely overgeneralizing the results of just one study. Here's the experiments that have led me to my rash conclusion (described here, as I don't currently have access to the full article.  Similar descriptions here):

In one experiment:

A group of dozens more undergrad participants read 40 trivia statements and then typed them into a computer. Half the participants were told that the computer would save their entry, the others were told the entries would be deleted. Participants in the "saved" condition performed worse at a subsequent recall test of the statements, as if they'd relied on the computer as an external memory store. Half the participants in both conditions had been instructed explicitly to try to remember the statements, but this made no difference to their memory performance. "Participants were more impacted by the cue that information would or would not be available to them, regardless of whether they thought they would be tested on it," the researchers said.

In another experiment:

A group of participants read trivia statements and then typed them out, with a message telling them which folder the statement had been saved in. Ten minutes later they wrote out as many of the statements as they could, and then they attempted to recall which folder each statement, identified by a single prompt, had been saved to (e.g. "What folder was the statement about the ostrich saved in?"). The striking finding here is that participants were better at remembering the location of the statements than the statements themselves. What's more, they were more likely to remember the location of statements which they'd failed to recall. It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.

Here's what I want to know: What the eff are we going to do when the apocalypse happens, and we can no longer access the internet??

Related:

XKCD

Happy birthday America, happy first day of work to me

Woke up a bit early for my first day of gainful employment since 2006, and I've got some time to kill. What do I decide to do? Find out about work- and firework-related death risks, of course! In honor of America's independence day, and my transition to the real world, I offer you these six ways to die:

1. Fireworks bunker explosion
2. Fireworks explosion during truck unloading
3. Falling off a cliff trying to avoid fireworks explosion

4. Sitting too damn long at a computer
5. Getting "displaced" (laid off)
6. Being unemployed

Now, off to blow dry my hair and get to work!  Well, first Dunkin Donuts, then work.

A classic.