Mole rubbing

Mole fur has no nap.  This means that it does not lie in any preferred direction against the skin.  Presumably, this is useful if the mole has to reverse direction within a narrow tunnel, an act which would otherwise lead to a very bad hair day indeed.  Moles have proverbially poor eyesight, so at least they wouldn't laugh at each other.  It still wouldn't be very comfortable, though.

Fortunately, due to the naplessness, the above scenario never takes place-- moles are immune to this particular social embarrassment, and secure in the fact that it is, as the source article puts it, "...literally impossible for a mole to be rubbed the wrong way."

Source : Discover Magazine; http://discovermagazine.com/2013/september/15-the-urban-bestiary#.Uk7BUNJzHVo

News of Eyes

What I learned this morning at the optometrist:

1. Introduction: My left eye is slightly more astigmatic than my right, which is a thing that can't quite be corrected for by current contact lens technology.  Not a big deal, I'm still 20/20 with the lenses, and my actual glasses are even better if I really care.
2. Opening: Cataract surgery has gotten really good in the last few years.  It's often quick, relatively straightforward, minimal recovery time (as in hours instead of days), and in many cases includes as a side benefit the equivalent of LASIK correction.  Getting a cataract removed can actually improve your vision significantly.
3. Development: Cataracts are also being detected much earlier than they used to be, which contributes to the ease of treatment-- the less developed they are, the easier they are to remove.
4. Embellishment:  Cataracts can be caused (sort of) by "trauma to the front of the face."  It doesn't exactly cause them per se, but an impact force on the eyeball can sort of prime it, making cataracts slightly more likely to form later on down the line.  All of which leads to:
5. Climax: I have the tiniest infinitesimalest beginnings of a cataract in my right eye, and even tinier such in my left. Possibly caused (as it were) by the air bag in the car accident I was in in '98, or even the soccer ball I took to the face back in...'87?  Maybe?  Somewhere around junior high.  Although I think that hit more on the left, if I remember correctly-- I seem to remember suffering a cut over my left eye from the beveled edge of my glasses.
6. Denouement: It's basically of no more than academic interest.  My previous OD (since decamped for another office) noted it in my file and didn't even bother mentioning it to me.  The current OD saw it on the file, peered into my massively dilated eyes, and said, "Wow, he was really picky."  Basically, I can easily ignore it for the next a decade if not two.

And now back to work, as my eyes slowly regain their previous pupillite proportions.

Flying Pringles

Most people realize that Pringles brand potato crisps (not chips) are fairly artificial.  After all, it's hard to find potatoes that grow in such a regular shape.  Although imagine if they did-- they'd look like jelly beans. Huge, potato-y jelly beans.

And now I want jelly beans.  Sigh.

Anyway, it turns out that the shape is not just a marketing decision, to make them look like duck lips when you eat them in pairs.  Proctor and Gamble (former owners of the Pringles brand) studied the shape very carefully, even going so far as to run the chips (sorry, crisps) through a wind tunnel-- at least virtually.  The digital models of the airflow allowed the company to redesign their production line to move the crisps through even faster, while keeping them from achieving full lift and taking off like little airfoils, something that would undoubtedly interfere with the manufacturing process.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-powered-computing-heralds-digital-industrial-revolution

Death to the Wild Parsnip!

Everyone knows that you should stay away from poison ivy.  Many people even know what it looks like.

Hint:  (image from http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-Poison-Ivy).

Many people have also heard of poison oak and poison sumac, and know to stay away from them as well.  But are you aware of the danger that the wild parsnip can pose?

The stem and leaves of the wild parsnip (essentially the same plant as the cultivated parsnip that we eat) contain chemicals called furocoumarins.  These chemicals are not strictly speaking dangerous on their own, but when they are absorbed into the skin, through contact with a broken plant, they can react to ultraviolet light (from the sun, presumably) and damage the nearby cells, essentially acting as a sunburn accelerant.  The problem is complicated by the fact that the damage typically takes a day or two to show up, so often a victim will just sort of spontaneously develop a burn and have no idea why.

The good news, such as it is, is that the burns aren't even as bad as poison ivy, most of the time.  If it does happen to you, keep it clean and loosely covered.  The blisters will fade pretty quickly.  And of course, if you do manage to recognize the plant, washing yourself off promptly will help a great deal.

Source: http://dnr.wi.gov/wnrmag/html/stories/1999/jun99/parsnip.htm

They can only count to 8.

A vague train of thought, inspired by Joshua Holden's comment on the last post, has led me to the knowledge that ticks do not have fingers.  Thanks a lot, Josh.

Instead, their jointed legs end in a segment called the tarsus.  Most insects have multiple claws on the end of the tarsus (or pretarsus in some cases) called ungues (singular unguis)-- the typical ant could probably count to twelve, if it could count--  but the tick (not an insect) apparently lacks these.

In compensation, it does have something called the Haller's Organ, which is a sort of combination nose/thermometer/CO₂ detector that helps it find suitable... targets, shall we say.

Still blecch.

Dogs and Cats Living Together

Cheetahs are apparently kind of finicky when it comes to breeding.  Not breeding as in pedigree, but as in the actual act of mating.  They're very skittish, and especially when they've been raised in captivity, they don't socialize very well with other cheetahs.

They do, on the other hand, get along pretty well with dogs.  So much so that some zoos are giving the cheetahs pet dogs (or possibly the other way around).  The dogs reassure the cheetahs, reducing their stress levels, and help them feel more confident when introduced to potential breeding partners.

The one drawback to the process is that the dogs (despite sometimes being outweighed by a factor of 4 to 1) almost inevitably become the dominant part of the relationship.  They spend a lot of time with the cats, but they also have to spend a lot of time socializing with other people and dogs.  Feeding time especially-- as Janet Rose-Hinostroza, animal training supervisor at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park is quoted in the source article as saying, "If they ate together there would be one really fat dog and a really skinny cheetah."

Primary source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/12/companion-dogs-cheetahs-friendship-zoos_n_2667033.html

Pizza...esque

Last night I learned that if you make a double batch of pizza dough but then forget and leave the second half in the bottom of the meat drawer for a few days, it is absolutely still "usable."  However, the extremely long rise/fermentation will do a couple of things-- it will make the dough smell disconcertingly beery, and it will super-upsize the gluten production.  It was REALLY hard to stretch out, and ended up being more of a pizza-flavored foccacia than an actual pizza.  Still tasty, though.

Bond. Chemical Bond.

Might as well ride this puppy all the way to the end (of the week).

In chemistry, there are several ways that atoms can connect with each other to form molecules.

If two atoms each have one electron available (one that is not tightly bound to the nucleus) and one space empty which an electron can fill, a covalent bond can be formed.  In this bond, the atoms share their available electrons, so that each atom can be considered filled.  A simple example is the H₂ molecule. Each hydrogen atom has one electron, and can be filled when it reaches two (if you don't know why, don't ask; it gets complicated quickly). So by sharing electrons, each atom becomes stabler.

If, on the other hand, you have one atom with one more electron than it needs for a full set (say, for example, sodium) and one atom that is one electron short of a full set* (e.g. chlorine), the first atom can actually "give" the electron to the second, forming an ionic bond.

In a more complicated system, you might (for example) have a large number of atoms of a metal, many of which tend to be short one or more electrons.  When those atoms arrange themselves into a large structure (a block of metal as opposed to a single atom), the electrons have a tendency to un-attach themselves from their original atom and go wandering around, re-attaching themselves sporadically to other atoms.  Imagine a big parking garage, with cars pulling into and out of different parking spots but never actually leaving.  The forces that keep pulling the electrons temporarily down into different nuclei are what hold the whole megillah together.  This is called a metallic bond.

There are more bonds, of course, but they get progressively more complicated and obscure.  These are the ones you're most likely to encounter in Chem 101.

*"He's one electron short of a full orbital" is a favored insult in a certain circle of especially geeky chemists†.

†That circle being the one that exists in my head.

Mouth-peeing

Bear with me, this is actually science.  

Chinese softshell turtles (Pelodiscus sinensis) spend a certain amount of their life in extremely brackish waters.  So much so, in fact, that their kidneys can't handle all of the salt that would accumulate if they processed the water in the usual biological method (peeing uses up water, so they'd have to drink more salty water to rehydrate, and all of a sudden you die from kidney failure).  So to compensate, they have an alternative.  Instead of passing the ammoniac urea out their hind end, they dunk their heads into a nearby pool, and gargle.  They're not drinking, you see-- they're using the water to rinse out the concentrated urea that they're secreting into their mouths.

Scientists are very excited about possible medical implications for people with kidney problems.  People with kidney problems are telling the scientists not to bother.  Ew.

Primary Source : http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/21/ii.full

Unexpected gender dimorphism

Male mice do not have nipples.  Neither do stallions.  Pretty much every other male mammal does, because... well, they just do.  No one really seems to have a really solid answer for why, distinct from the simple apparent fact of their existence, and that translates to a lack of good explanation for why not in the case of the rare exceptions.  All babies (in most mammalian animals) are born with them, and in typical males they just develop differently.  Note that it's not fair to say that they don't develop at all-- there's still a bunch of nerves and blood vessels and stuff back there.  It's just not expressed the same way or to the same degree.  As far as an explanation for the mice/rats/horses/possibly platypi goes, the Straight Dope (for example) simply says that nipple development is suppressed in mice by the male hormones.  Which, ok?  I guess?  But a little unsatisfying.

What is bubblegum flavor?

Everyone knows what bubblegum tastes like.  Or at least a lot of people.  Ok, a lot of Americans.  Anyway, we've all* tasted the ice cream, or the cotton candy, or chewed the gum itself.  But what, exactly, is it?

Turns out, nobody really seems to know.  All right, that's not quite true.  I mean, the people at Hubba Bubba presumably know, right?  And Wrigley.  And a bunch of others.  But each of these has their own proprietary combination of flavorings, and no one's talking.  It's a little bit like the formula for Coke-- we can make a few guesses as to some of the obvious components, but the exact proportions and some of the minor additives we can only guess at.

So here's what we do know.  Ethyl methylphenylglycidate is one of the flavors.  That's a common artificial "strawberry" flavoring.  It does not appear to be in actual strawberries, but it is fruity and berry-y and the government has classified it as Generally Regarded As Safe.

Another compound is isoamyl acetate, also known as isopentyl acetate.  This is another common flavoring, generally used as an artificial banana flavoring, although it reportedly also tastes a bit like pear.  It's dead simple and cheap to make-- I'm pretty sure it's the stuff we cooked up in high school in AP Chemistry.  Unlike the strawberry flavoring, it is an actual component of real bananas, although in the actual fruit it's only one part of a much larger collection of naturally occurring chemicals.

There are some other likely components-- most versions probably contain vanilla (or more likely vanillin), as well as methyl salicylate (wintergreen-ish), and of course some sort of sweetener (sugar, HFCS, stevia, whatever).  But the exact formulas remain a mystery.

*as previously disclaimed

Lombard Effect

When we're in a noisy environment, and we're trying to communicate, it's only natural that we raise our voices.  However, this is apparently not just a voluntary thing-- there's also an involuntary reflex, called the Lombard Effect (or Lombard Reflex), named after Dr. Étienne Lombard, where your voice will automatically rise in volume even without a conscious decision.

This effect is not restricted to humans.  It has also been observed in birds, cats, and monkeys, just to name a few.  For example, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2006.04835.x/abstract;jsessionid=2C1EDED208F8B221BC66EEEFD8F6CBFB.d02t04-- if you dare.

Negative Temperature

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this one.  You see, in a recent issue of Science magazine, a group of physicists have claimed to have achieved negative temperatures.  That is to say, a temperature of below absolute zero.

I'll back up a step and review, so you can understand why I can't help but approach this idea with some trepidation.  You see, temperature is basically a measurement of the amount of energy in a system.  At the level of particles, that basically translates to movement-- both positional and vibrational.  The lower the temperature, the less energy in the system, and the less movement.  At absolute zero-- about 273 degrees below zero centigrade-- there is no more movement.  That's why it's absolute-- you can't have less than no movement.  So how could these scientists have achieved such a feat?

As far as I can tell, by redefining "temperature."  Although what I gave is the simple, basic definition of temperature, at some point physicists decided that it would be more useful to refine this definition in a variety of ways.  In particular, in terms of the average energy of the system rather than the specific energy at any given instance.  For the most part, this doesn't make any difference-- the average energy still can't go below zero.

However, with enough control over the particles, you can create a situation where instead of having a normal distribution of particles (that is, a bunch of particles moving at close to the average and a few zipping around as outliers), you can flip that, creating a situation where almost all of the particles become "outliers", being held artificially in extreme states.  This allows you to create a pattern of behavior for the particles that is opposite to how they behave at "positive" temperature.  And if it's opposite to the positive temperature, why, then it must be negative temperature, right?  Right?

I'm not denying that it's an impressive achievement, but I really feel like there's an aspect of... semantics?  Philosophy, perhaps?  Lurking in the shadows.  On the one hand, if you can look at a system and say, "Potassium atoms in a particular arrangement at positive temperature behave in a certain way.  At zero temperature, they have these other characteristics.  In this new third situation, they have a set of characteristics that are not described by either previous category, and that in fact look completely backwards from the atoms at positive temperature, so it makes sense to call it negative temperature."  Classic "If it looks like a duck" territory.  On the other hand, the fact that your highly technical definition makes it possible to achieve a situation that was previously considered a theoretical impossibility makes me wonder if, just perhaps... you need to rethink your definition instead.

Hot on the range

This is one of those ones that I always assumed I understood-- right up until I started thinking about it.  I suspect there's a lesson in there, somewhere.

On an old electric range (I specify old for a reason), there will be one or more heavy metal coils.  When you turn on a burner, electricity flows through the coil, electrical resistance makes it heat up, and it gets hot, glowing red and cooking your food.  Right?

Well, it suddenly occurred to me, if that were the case, then touching a live burner wouldn't just burn you, it would shock you.  And electricity being what it is, this would still be the case even right when you turned on the burner but it hadn't had time to heat up, and this just doesn't happen.  This is something that you could BUT ABSOLUTELY SHOULDN'T verify at home.  So there must be something else going on somewhere.

It turns out that these classic burners are actually slightly more complicated than that.  Not much-- the basics of that theory are still correct.  But those heavy metal coils are actually hollow tubes, containing a set of wires (usually an alloy of nickel and chrome) that complete the actual circuit, separated from the tube by a ceramic insulator.  The nichrome wires heat up from the electrical resistance, but the heat then moves through the insulator into the heavy coil tubes, while the electrical current stays safely inside.  Er, not that a hot burner is especially safe, but you get the idea.

I specified old ranges, because more and more often these days you see the flat glass-topped stoves, and those often have alternate heat sources underneath the glass surface, such as powerful infrared lamps.  Then there are the induction burners, but those are complicated and generally only professional chefs and really wealthy amateurs have those.

Blood types

While my blood type (AB negative) is neither the most useful to blood banks (O is the best) nor the least (AB positive blood can basically only be given to other AB positive recipients), I can take some small bizarre pride in knowing that it is the rarest-- only about 1% of Caucasians have AB- blood, compared to the 37% who have O+.  Of course, there are other classification systems that use other characteristics of the blood, so that's not a full picture of what's going on in my veins, but it's still interesting.

Pizza Dog

Many of those who read this blog have already heard in other places, but we had a bit of a scare Christmas night.  Our dog managed to sneak into the kitchen while we were video chatting with my wife's folks (it's the future!) and gulp down an entire pizza's worth of raw dough that was completing its final rise, such as it was (I'd been having trouble with the yeast--more on that later).

Our first reaction was, "Oh, that darned dog," and a certain degree of frustration on my part because it was Xmas night and we didn't have a lot more food on hand and nothing was open, but fortunately my wife thought to check the Internet to see if we should be concerned.  Subsequent consultation with the emergency on-call vet and vet hospitals confirmed that we should indeed.

You see, raw bread doughs in general (not just pizza) have yeast in them, which, since they've yet to go into the oven, are still doing their yeasty thing.  To wit; fermentation.  This has several effects in a dog's stomach.

First, it produces carbon dioxide.  This can cause distention and bloat in a dog, bloat meaning not simply the sort of belchy sort of condition that humans get but a severe overstretching and possibly twisting of the stomach, which Wikipedia says is fatal roughly a third of the time without surgery, depending on circumstances.

Second, the yeast also produces alcohol.  This can make the dog very drunk, since it's right there in the stomach lining.  This is much less likely to be fatal, but dogs are smaller than we are, and alcohol poisoning is still possible.

Finally, the fermentation process can also produce some toxic by-products.  Most of them evaporate or are otherwise negligible in a finished baked good, but in a dog's stomach, they're just kind of sitting there being toxic, and that's not good either.

So we had to schlep him down to the emergency 24-hour vet hospital (Which we now know the location of! Bonus learning!), and they induced vomiting.  Fortunately, it was a small batch of dough, and not a lot of active yeast (see earlier comment), so we were all fairly confident that he'd be fine.  A couple of hours of observation later, we were cleared to take him home, and at this point he's probably forgotten all about it.

Horsepower

One horsepower is defined in the United States as equal to 746 watts, or (roughly) 550 foot-pounds of work per second, which translates as the amount of power needed to lift 550 pounds upwards one foot in one second.  A typical horse, by comparison, can lift just shy of 400 pounds the same distance in the same time.

Which is to say that an average horse has about 0.7 horsepower.  Which seems dreadfully unfair, somehow.

Argentinian ants

Once upon a time (as the story so often goes), there was a small colony of ants.  These ants lived in a somewhat unusual place, at least as far as ants go.  It didn't seem that unusual at first glance, perhaps-- simply a little chunk of floodplain in Argentina where a few rivers converged.  But that flooding meant that the ants were regularly washed out of their nests.

One side effect of this regular displacement is that the weaker, slower ants were weeded out fairly rapidly.  The rest relatively quickly evolved a somewhat more aggressive approach to their neighboring colonies.  You see, normally, ants aren't completely xenophobic.  They'll capture enemy ants, add them to their colony, sometimes mate with them, etc.  This means that the genetic makeup of the colony will slowly drift over time, which is generally a good thing for the species.  However, these Argentinian ants, bred by the rising waters for exceptional fierceness, simply don't do that.  When they meet an enemy ant?  They kill it.  To death.

All of which would be a minor entomological curiosity, except that sometime, back in the 1800s, a few of these ants made their way onto a ship, and were carried up from Argentina to New Orleans, where they started a new colony.  And started killing.  And spreading.  And remember, no fraternizing with the enemy!  So (and here's where it starts getting really interesting) these newly spreading colonies maintained the same basic genetic makeup as the original.  If an Argentinian ant from the motherland meets one from Louisiana?  They recognize each other, and coexist.  Genetic purity FTW.

And now, since they're so very aggressive, they've spread over pretty much the entire globe.  There are Argentinian ants everywhere, all more or less part of the same supercolony.

Primary source: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/30/ants/

Bingham Plastic Fluid

You may be familiar with the popular material science concept of the "non-Newtonian fluid," also known as the "walking on custard" trick.  This is a substance whose viscosity is variable, and (for the most part) will increase proportionately to the impact of another substance on it.  In other words, the harder you hit it, the stiffer it gets.  Jump up and down on it, and it's practically a solid-- stand still, and you start to sink in.

A similar class of substances is the Bingham Plastic, named after chemist Eugene Bingham, who was a rheological pioneer.  It is similar in that its physical properties vary depending on the applied stress, but it actually acts in the opposite fashion-- under no or low stress, it acts like a solid, but if you apply stress to it, it begins to flow like a liquid.  A good example is a stiff mayonnaise-- it spreads smoothly under pressure, but left alone it retains the peaks and ridges left by the knife.

Pizza Due

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was learning to make pizza dough from scratch, and was having some difficulties.  Well, yesterday/today was another attempt, and this time, I did SCIENCE to it!

Which means basically that I did all of the same things (keeping them constant) except for two changes I thought might improve the results (the variables).  Now, strictly speaking, for a "pure" experiment I would have only changed one thing, and thus known exactly to what I should attribute any results, but I'm a little impatient, and I was willing to accept that a positive result could be due to either variable.

As it happens, the results were near identical, which does actually tell me something-- it tells me that if I want to get different results, I'll have to change a different variable.  Unfortunately, the remaining variables are all specifically recipe related rather than technique, and I'm not sure I want to mess around with different flours or anything.  I may just decide to be happy with what I'm getting now, since it's perfectly serviceable pizza crust.

For the record-- I'm using Mark Bittman's basic pizza dough recipe from How to Cook Everything (app edition), and I was messing with hydration levels (amount of water in the recipe), cooking temp, and fermentation time (overnight in the fridge instead of an hour or two on the counter).