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.