Penguins use "air insulation" to reduce drag

 

Absolutely the coolest science of the day.  From the BBC:

Now scientists have worked out the secret technique that penguins use to get airborne. It involves wrapping their bodies in a cloak of air bubbles – and it turns out to be the same technique that engineers use to speed the movement of ships and torpedoes through water...

But one aspect of this leaping behaviour has long puzzled biologists. As the birds swim toward the surface, they trail a wake of bubbles behind them. No one knew where these bubbles come from, or why there are there...  During this analysis, the researchers made some interesting discoveries. The bubbles of air being trailed by the penguins weren’t coming out of the birds’ lungs via the beak. Instead, they were coming from the birds’ feathers...

You learn something every day.  The work has been published in Marine Ecology, but is nicely summarized at the BBC link above.  Via Neatorama.

"End of the state GOP as we know it" in Minnesota

The Republican party in Minnesota has gone through a variety of crises recently, including a sex scandal and some financial misadventures, but I thought this was interesting:

Yet it's the third punch that has many within the strong national defense party wondering if there is any chance for MNGOP to survive the upcoming election in November. In a stealthy, below-the-radar maneuver, most of MNGOP has been taken over by the Ron Paul movement.

It appears that most selected delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa this summer will cast their votes for Ron Paul and not the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney. At my Second Congressional District convention on April 21, Paul supporters openly bragged that they had 45 to 50 percent of the state convention delegates and that they would capture the remaining 17 at-large delegates to add to the 20 they already have...

When asked whether they would support Mitt Romney if he wins the nomination, many Paul supporters said no, unless he selects U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Paul's son, as his vice presidential running mate.

That more than anything has the establishment MNGOP in a dither. Rightly or wrongly, they see many of the young, undisciplined and politically naïve Ron Paul movement members as anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-national defense and pro-legalization of drugs...

I don't have a crystal ball to see how all this will end. But from where I'm sitting it does not look good for MNGOP, which won the state House and Senate in 2010 and whose lawmakers are all up for re-election. The DFL smells blood in the water and sees an opportunity to regain both legislative chambers. We are very possibly witnessing the death of MNGOP as we know it. If so, it will have died from within, not from outside causes.

Some additional details in the op-ed piece at the StarTribune.  Two nights ago, Rachel Maddow discussed this development and noted that Ron Paul may now be the delegate winner in Iowa as well.  I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, but these developments do have some national implications.

These came out of four chicken eggs

Would you eat the dark one?  Can you identify it?  Ponder for a moment, then see the answer below the fold...

Hot dogs, anyone?

Here's the "meat" of an abstract of a paper in the April 2008 issue of the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology:

The purpose of this study is to assess the meat and water content of several hotdog brands to determine if the package labels are accurate. Eight brands of hotdogs were evaluated for water content by weight. A variety of routine techniques in surgical pathology including routine light microscopy with hematoxylin-eosin-stained sections, special staining, immunohistochemistry, and electron microscopy were used to assess for meat content and for other recognizable components. Package labels indicated that the top-listed ingredient in all 8 brands was meat; the second listed ingredient was water (n = 6) and another type of meat (n = 2). Water comprised 44% to 69% (median, 57%) of the total weight. Meat content determined by microscopic cross-section analysis ranged from 2.9% to 21.2% (median, 5.7%). The cost per hotdog ($0.12-$0.42) roughly correlated with meat content.

A variety of tissues were observed besides skeletal muscle including bone (n = 8), collagen (n = 8), blood vessels (n = 8), plant material (n = 8), peripheral nerve (n = 7), adipose (n = 5), cartilage (n = 4), and skin (n = 1). Glial fibrillary acidic protein immunostaining was not observed in any of the hotdogs. Lipid content on oil red O staining was graded as moderate in 3 hotdogs and marked in 5 hotdogs...

In conclusion, hotdog ingredient labels are misleading; most brands are more than 50% water by weight. The amount of meat (skeletal muscle) in most brands comprised less than 10% of the cross-sectional surface area. More expensive brands generally had more meat. All hotdogs contained other tissue types (bone and cartilage) not related to skeletal muscle; brain tissue was not present. 

I suppose we can take solace in the glial immunostaining being negative (re risk of BSE).  I'm curious as to what the "plant material used as a filler in many hotdogs" was.

Via Discover magazine and Neatorama.

Includes 24 pigs of metal

I had several Gilbert toys as a child, but somehow missed out on this one.  I never had the pleasure of playing with molten lead.

Via Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities & Treasures tumblr.

Arborized

Rivers forming tree-like figures on the desert of Baja California, Mexico. Photo and caption by Adriana Franco.

From a photo gallery at National Geographic.

"Size inflation" in clothing

Clothes with the same size label have become steadily larger over time. Measurements vary a bit by brand, but research by The Economist finds that the average British size-14 pair of women’s trousers is today more than four inches wider at the waist than a size 14 in the 1970s, and over three inches wider at the hips.

This means that today's size 14 fits like a former size 18; a size 10 fits like an old size 14. The same "downsizing" has also happened in America where, to confuse matters further, a size 10 is equivalent to a British size 12 or 14, depending on the brand.

As the average person’s weight has risen over the years, fashion firms have increased the measurements of their garments, partly in the belief that women feel better (and so are more likely to buy) if they can squeeze into their old size.

Norma Jeane Dougherty (1945)

A nice photo of the former Norma Jean Mortensen Baker after her marriage to James Dougherty.  At the time this photo was taken at Capistrano Mission, she would have been working in a munitions factory, spraying airplane parts with fire retardant and inspecting parachutes.  Little did she know what life held in store for her.

Photo credit Andre De Dienes, via Robs Webstek.

"Hopefully" clarified

From a story at Blogslot, reporting on the American Copy Editors convention in New Orleans:

Now it's OK in AP style to use the word to mean "it is to be hoped that," in addition to "in a hopeful manner."..

Misguided sticklers have made a fetish out of looking at something like "Hopefully the weather will be nice today" and pretend-interpreting it to mean the weather was experiencing a feeling of hope. Meanwhile, they didn't apply that logic to other adverbs used in precisely the same fashion:

Frankly, she's just not that into you. (Wait, you're being frank -- why are you saying she's being frank?) Honestly, Joliet is a dump. (Wait, you're being honest -- why are you talking about that city being honest?)
Seriously, he's an idiot. (Wait, you're being serious -- why are you talking about him being serious?)
Mercifully, I had an excuse to leave early. (Wait, you're not being merciful -- why are you talking about being merciful?)
Curiously, the cat didn't show up for dinner. (Wait, you're not talking about a curious cat ...)

Via Neatorama.

Copyediting Hustler magazine

From a presentation given at the 16th National Congress of the American Copy Editors Society:

In some ways, Althoff said, working at Hustler was like working at any other magazine, dealing with page layouts and production deadlines. Larry Flynt Publications had what he called a “conservative corporate environment.”..

“Images of a salacious nature have always included words,” he said. Those words may appear in headlines, captions and story text. That’s why, he said, porn needs editing like anything else.

Hustler’s stylebook is similar to others, Althoff said, offering guidance to writers and editors at the magazine on word choice for its readers. Among those at Hustler:

— blow job vs. blowjob
— porno vs. porn
— phone-sex vs. phone sex
— girl next door vs. girl-next-door
— cover babe vs. coverbabe

In each of these examples, Hustler prefers the latter usage. On occasion, the magazine would update its stylebook. For example, it now uses “hos” rather than “ho’s.”..

Regardless of the type of content, Althoff said, it’s important for editors to keep in mind how language evolves. “The English language is very elastic,” Althoff said. “Change it if you need to.”

Has the Queen of Sheba's gold mine been found?

From a story in The Guardian:

Almost 3,000 years ago, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, arrived in Jerusalem with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon. Now an enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory...

An initial clue lay in a 20ft stone stele (or slab) carved with a sun and crescent moon, the "calling card of the land of Sheba", Schofield* said. "I crawled beneath the stone – wary of a 9ft cobra I was warned lives here – and came face to face with an inscription in Sabaean, the language that the Queen of Sheba would have spoken."..

Although local people still pan for gold in the river, they were unaware of the ancient mine. Its shaft is buried some 4ft down... An ancient human skull is embedded in the entrance shaft...

The queen is immortalised in Qur'an and the Bible, which describes her visit to Solomon "with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold and precious stones ... Then she gave the king 120 talents of gold, and a very great quantity of spices."..

Tests by a gold prospector who alerted her to the mine show that it is extensive, with a proper shaft and tunnel big enough to walk along.

* Louise Schofield, an archaeologist and former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation.

The Discovery report of this story notes that the 120 talents of gold that Sheba gave Solomon are "the equivalent of four-and-a-half tons."

The painting is The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, by Edward Poynter (1836–1919), from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, via Wikimedia Commons and Discovery.

Deformed seafood from the Gulf of Mexico

YouTube link. 

There appears to be no argument re the existence of the abnormalities - but extensive disagreement re the cause(s).

New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010. Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause...

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome...

There's much more at the Al Jazeera source (discussed at Reddit), and in an AlterNet story via Salon:

Dr. Williams explained that “PAHs are endocrine disruptors that interfere with the normal blood-borne hormones (e.g., estrogen and testosterone) that are responsible for the regulation of reproductive and developmental processes. Only very low amounts of chemicals are needed to disrupt the normal endocrine balance of both humans and animals. Evidence of reproduction imbalance is seen in the second generation of white shrimp in the 2011 harvest. Shrimp were harvested with defective eye stalks, pleopods, and pereiopods. Such anatomical defects are occurring in the markedly reduced white shrimp population in the Gulf and warn of endocrine dysfunction that could result in the loss of the species.”

Furthermore, “The heavy metals known to be present in crude oil are being ignored in the testing of seafood. Metal toxicity can produce neurobehavioral abnormalities in sea life such as: alterations in avoidance or attraction responses; critical swimming speed; changes in social interactions (e.g. aggression), reproduction, feeding, and predator avoidance; food foraging with reduced feeding ability; loss or orientation in swimming and changes in schooling behavior. Heavy metal testing in BP Oil clean-up workers has documented increased arsenic levels in 24 hour urine specimens.”

I think a lot of confusion arises from the fact that food can be bizarrely altered by a variety of processes and still be biologically "safe to eat."

If you're married to a bookworm...

... this scenario may ring a bell.  From the weekly collection at The New Yorker.

Re sixth grade school lunches

From an open letter written by sixth-graders at Seward Montessori School in Minneapolis:

In the Minneapolis public schools, we are supposed to have 15 minutes to eat, which would be bad enough. But realistically we get only 10 to 11 minutes (we have been timing it)...

Lunch is an important social time. Teachers always tell us to socialize at lunch and recess, not in the classroom. But we cannot do that if we are scarfing down our lunches in 11 minutes... 

Almost no one finishes what he or she gets to eat. That means a lot gets thrown away, wasting food. Food waste affects many things in our world. It wastes much more than food; it wastes the time and energy it takes to make the food product. That is a sign that we are hurting our planet.

The reasons for having longer lunch times are obvious when you think about them. Weight, indigestion, waste and everything else just shows how inefficient and hurtful our lack of time is. We need change.

I don't remember how long I had for lunch in sixth grade in the 1950s, but I remember it was a social time - enforced by teachers who sat at every table while having their own lunches.  I'll bet that isn't done any more.

Tulips

"Skagit Valley Tulip Festival near La Conner, Washington."  One of the Pictures of the day at The Telegraph (credit: AP Photo/seattlepi.com, Sofia Jaramillo).