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Temptations that might become irresistable

... as a result of the incessant drive to make learning too darn safe. Not that this is a terribly new development (I wrote about this sort of thing here and here), but it appears that anxieties about terrorists and meth-labs are sucking all the chemically goodness out of chemistry sets: Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today's sets cover perfume…

Free IS and CS books online

One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few: Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/. Sure there are lots of books on information…

From the Archives: Interview with CJ Rayhill, Senior Vice President at Safari Books Online

I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview with CJ Rayhill, then of Safari Books Online, is from September 27, 2007. ===================================== Welcome to the latest installment in…

Our High School Science Teacher Conference - It Rocked!

So, this is one of the things that has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks. Essentially, the lab hosted a largish conference for high school science teachers (about 95 registrants) - as well, we took the tact of blogging the conference so that almost all of the content is already up (by my calculation, all content will be up by week's end). Here are some highlights: - We had 4 great talks (available to view) by William Rees, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Patrick Keeling, and Brian Ellis, who covered a wide range of topics, but all (fittingly) involved elements of sustainability, education,…

Seeing a laser from the moon

There was an xkcd feature a while back which asked the question "If everyone in the world shined a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would we be able to see it?" The answer was no. A laser pointer doesn't put out much light, and even seven billion of them doesn't represent a whole lot when spread over vast areas of the lunar surface a quarter million miles away. Even if you ramp up the light source to those helicopter-grade searchlights, no dice. On the other hand, it's asking a lot for a beam of light to make it to the moon, bounce off in all directions including mostly into empty…

Rumors about the Internet's demise have been exaggerated

Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode. From the Economist Tech.view: And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common. Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in…

In Which I Am Grumpy About Education

In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but I sprained my ankle playing basketball at lunch, which kind of blew a hole in my afternoon... Looking at her posts, though, it's hard to really engage with her critique, because there's next to nothing there to engage with. In the most recent post, the closest thing to a…

New Reviews of the BMHB and the BECB

The Big Monty Hall Book is now more than three years old, but new reviews still appear occasionally. The latest one comes from the magazine Significance, published by the Royal Statistical Society. The reviewer is Tom Fanshawe, a statistician at Lancaster University in England. Alas, the review is not freely available online, so permit me some excerpts: [The Monty Hall problem] will be familiar to most people who have studied probability, and, given a modicum of probability theory, it is not a difficult problem. Does it really warrant a whole book? It is a credit to Jason Rosenhouse that…

A To-Do List For Reducing Plastic.

This Friday is World Ocean Day and to get the week going I thought I would start with a practical "what can I do post". Peter already discussed why plastic is a bad thing for the ocean. I will focus on what you can do to reduce your plastic waste and consumption. Let's face it...you and I my friend are both lazy. Potentially if you're reading this then you're an American, like I, and even lazier than the rest of the world. We need things easy and spelled out for us. So here is a list.   No plastic grocery bags.  Obviously the easiest one and the one you already know about.  Ask for paper…

The Irritation of Being a Captive Market

Two annoying technology moments yesterday: 1) Kate and I got cell phones when we bought this house, and have been overpaying for them for quite some time. We rarely use them (partly because we get no signal inside the house), and have never come close to using our monthly allocation of minutes. Verizon now offers pre-paid plans, which would save us a good deal of money that could then be spent on baby toys, so we went to the local Verizon store to switch over. And immediately got told that they couldn't guarantee that we could keep the same numbers. And then that it would take an hour or so…

"Mary Rosh" proves Lott lied

Kevin Drum suggests that the large scale of the Lott/Rosh deception suggests that Lott maybe could have carried off a conspiracy with this witness. Sorry, but I still don't buy it. Lott's a liar, but he's a clumsy one. He could have saved himself most of the embarrassment of this Mary Rosh affair, if he had lied and had "Mary" admit to being Lott's wife. Kevin also comments on Lott's fishy statistics. Tom Spencer also doesn't think Lott is off the hook and seems rather unimpressed by the silence of Clayton Cramer and Glenn Reynolds. Over in the…

Recent Events in Stem Cell Research

Since the discovery of IPS Cells, the stem cell field has exploded. Here's a few links on the latest developements. First, two cool papers came out recently. In the first from the Jaenisch lab, mouse IPS Cells were differentiated into erythrocytes and used to cure sickle celled anemia in a mouse model. This would be a first application of these IPS cells in a therapeutic setting. In the second paper from the Yamanaka group, mouse and human IPS Cells were created by overexpressing 3 of the 4 genes used in the original protocol. In fact the gene that was omitted in this new protocol is myc,…

A Science Film Festival in Saint Paul (Get a discount from me!)

Ever been to a CON? Like, ComiCON, or CONvergence? One of the best parts of a CON is the science, often involving panels with interesting science experts, or perhaps even a film or two. Well, Twin Cities denizen Ryan Johnson founded and organized a new thing, which is set up as a film festival, to provide these fantastic CONnish features in a very attractive package. Admission is by the day, and thus less expensive than the average convention. Also, you can get a 15% discount if, when you go online to buy your tickets, you use the code "laden" The Northstar Science Film Festival is a new…

How to discourage scientific fraud.

In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher's piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don't keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher. But there's another piece of his article that I'd like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud. Gallagher writes: There are much better methods of subverting fraud. There is little…

SLA 2009 Preview

SLA is the Special Libraries Association - it's really my home professional organization.  I often go to basically 3 conferences in my profession: SLA, ASIS&T, and Computers In Libraries.  You come back from SLA and you want to buy something. You come back from ASIS&T and you want to style="font-style: italic;">study something or just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to style="font-style: italic;">build something. So they all have purposes.  By far, though, SLA is the most important to what I do for a living. This year should be really exciting -…

Best Science (Fiction) Books 2012: io9

(Yeah, yeah, I know. This list isn't strictly part of my regular list of science books lists, but hey, it's Boxing Day and we should all be a little extra self-indulgent and buy ourselves something nice. Being a fan of the full range of science fiction, fantasy and horror genres, I have been paying attention to those "best of 2012" lists as I see them online -- as well as crime fiction and cookbooks, natch -- so I thought I'd share one of the nicest ones I've seen with all my readers. Enjoy!) Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the…

Removing the Legal Barriers to Prediction Markets

An team of economics all-stars -- including a couple Nobel laureates -- advocates in Science for the removal of legal barriers to establishing low stakes predictions markets in the US: Several researchers emphasize the potential of prediction markets to improve decisions. The range of applications is virtually limitless--from helping businesses make better investment decisions to helping governments make better fiscal and monetary policy decisions. Prediction markets have been used by decision-makers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the health care industry, and multibillion-dollar…

Going paperless in academia?

A reader recently sent in the following question: Hi Ladies -- I've been reading your blog for most of my graduate career, and am currently beginning my first post-doc position. I've got a question for your readers, and I'm dying to know if anyone's really come up with a good solution for it. How can you become a (nearly) paper free academic (with the exception of lab notebooks)? I ask this because after moving from my rather large (by grad school standards) office to a rather restricted lab space, I've been forced to realize that I can no longer keep all my printed and scribbled on pdfs. I'm…

Links for 2010-07-10

Energy Secy advances nano science in spare time - San Jose Mercury News "This is Chu's second such meaty scientific paper in recent months, both published in the journal Nature. The first, published in February, was following Albert Einstein's general relativity theory and better measuring how gravity slows time. Both were published while he has been energy secretary, but started long before he took the job in January 2009. A third study is in the pipeline, Chu said. None of this is the sort of thing Cabinet secretaries usually read, let alone write. For the Nobel Prize-winning physicist,…

How online dating will make slaves of us all

This is aimed as a companion piece to my article published in the Times Eureka magazine on the mathematics of matchmaking. There isn't room in a serious newspaper for flights of sci-fi fantasy, but the technology I saw while researching that article left my head reeling with the possibilities that lay ahead. To recap: most matchmaking engines online work on a system of collaborative filtering. By studying how you behave, they create a personality profile and compare this to other users on the site. When they find someone who acts in a similar way to you, they use this person's activity to…

The Real Story on Jet Packs

"all human beings would like to be able to fly--not by plane or helicopter or oversize cannon, but strapped to a thunderous gadget with intuitive controls" So, what's the problem with getting a functioning jet back off the ground? According a recent piece in Popular Mechanics, "everything." First, let's get one thing straight. Most of these devices are not jet packs. They are rocket belts. The distinction is important. Rocket belts are gimmicks that emit steam (or whatever) at a high velocity for a few seconds so you fly around a little. This is essentially the humanoid equivalent of…

Friday Fun: Free Online Classic Rock Concerts!

I'm talking about the new-to-me Wolfgang's Vault! Among other things, it includes a Vault Store, where you can buy prints and other swag; the Concert vault with 2859 concerts, the Crawdaddy magazine & archives. The concerts material can be sliced & diced into playlists and radio shows. The concerts are by, among others: The Allman Brothers, The Band, Black Sabbath, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt, Lynyrd Skynyrd, MC5, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Van Morrison and The Who. As I type this, I'm listening…

NYC readers: RUN, do not walk, to the Merc tonight

Modern Skirts, the musical darlings of the Athens, GA, music scene, will be making their New York City live debut this evening at the legendary Mercury Cafe. They'll be playing with tremendous Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, Jennifer O'Connor, and indie stalwarts, Portostatic. Modern Skirts are an intelligent piano- and guitar-based band with impeccable focus on interesting and intoxicatingly infectious song structures centered around tremendous vocal abilities, most often from the fresh tenor of Jay Gulley, but all of the guys can sing...I mean, really sing! They list as their primary…

The Divine Right of Capital

At the time of complicated economic and financial news, I am reminded that the economic system and the financial system are quite separate in this country. The proposed bailout of the financial system only tangentially affects the economy - banks are needed to give out loans, so banks need to have the ability to do so. But the core of the crisis is the housing mortgage problem - shouldn't the Feds use those $700 billion to pay off all those foreclosures and iffy loans? That would give the banks and lending companies money AND at the same time ensure that people get to keep their houses and…

How to Wreck Your Career With Social Media

This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar format and Friday's travel with the Incredible Screaming Pip, I didn't actually make any notes for this, so what follows is my sketchy recollection of what I said; omissions and misstatements are a reflection of my dodgy memory, not an attempt to distort anything. The title is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, because the goal is really to not wreck your career with…

Frank Drake speaks

You've all heard of the Drake Equation, a little exercise in rough estimation which attempts to approximate the number of intelligent, technological species in our galaxy. Here it is, if you haven't: N=R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets fl is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop…

"Your Brain on Computers": The Missing Topic of Increased Pseudo-Productivity

The NY Times, on Monday, had an article about the effects of extensive computer use and interconnection on human cognition. The usual concerns are raised about attention deficits, lack of concentration, obsessive activity, and the like. The story focuses on a family that is, well, flying through The Intertubes, often to the detriment of what needs to get done: When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company…

New Albums: Roy Zimmerman, George Hrab

Californian Roy Zimmerman is a satirical singer in the vein of Tom Lehrer (who endorses him). He recently released his seventh solo album, Real American, and I'm happy to say that Zimmerman has lost none of the brilliance us fans have come to expect. The disc has 13 tracks of which 3 are spoken political comedy. My favourite is the live-recorded boogie tune "Socialist!", which recalls "I'll Pull Out" from Zimmerman's previous album. It's sung in the voice of a hillbilly Republican who sneers at all the socialists in the audience. They've driven to the gig on public streets, gone to public…

The ethics of blog anonymity

I took on the ScienceOnline09 anonymity panel because I thought it might be interesting, but the conversation that has developed has turned this into a much deeper issue than I had anticipated. I'm stepping into a big, brown pile of ethics here, and hopefully Janet won't make too much fun of me. Abel over at TerraSig has a number of posts up already, and today DrugMonkey brought up a very interesting question. The science blogosphere, being a new medium, is slowly developing a set of practical normative ethics (geez, I hope that's the right term), and that this is a critical time to start to…

CDC's NIOSH says WHAT about asbestos???

[Update 4/22/2011: see CDC's NIOSH corrects asbestos statement] It was almost too much to believe. Here I was attending the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization's (ADAO) annual meeting, mingling and learning from patients and researchers about asbestos-related disease, and I hear that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has just issued its treatise on asbestos. That document, called a "current intelligence bulletin" is supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific information on a hazard and risk of harm…

The Friday Fermentable: figuring out chords while drinking wine

Much hubbub is to be had today over the work of Dalhousie University mathematics professor, Dr Jason Brown, in solving the mystery of George Harrison's opening chord of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 guitar. The PDF of Prof Brown's report is available online. As the report and article show, The Beatles did indeed record this in one take with no overdubbing such that Harrison could not have played the chord alone. We now learn from Brown's work and others that Harrison and Lennon played two different guitars but the nice flavor was added by producer George…

AAS: the return of the snippets

more invaluable science nuggets and pretty pictures The Galileoscope is a very cheap but functional 50mm astronomical refractor kit for introducing kids to optical observing; NB PRICE GOES UP NEXT WEEK! They can also be donated - through an online click. But, now Ric and Jean Edelman of Edelman Financial Services have donated $250,000 to the AAS to buy and distribute 15,000 Galileoscopes for distribution to teachers around the US for use in classroom. Nice one. Hm. Y'know Goldman Sachs could go a long way towards repairing their public image with a token $250,000,000 donation towards a…

A beetle genome

Tribolium castaneum - Red Flour Beetle The genome of the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum was published today in Nature. This latest insect genome is interesting not for what it says about beetles but for what it says about another model species, the venerable fruit fly. The more we learn about other insect genomes- the honeybee, the mosquito, and now the flour beetle- the more we see that the famed Drosophila fruit fly is an odd little beast. The bee and now the beetle, it turns out, are both rather normal. They share a lot of proteins with mammals, and fish, and other animals we…

Glitter, Martha Stewart, Easter Pie, Darfur and Bill Clinton: Now there's a list you don't see very often...

(see the show here - go to video 6) Just got back from some time off, where my wife (Kate) and I had a week to explore the city of New York. It was the first time for us, and it was a pretty busy week where we tried to fit in as many of the sights and sounds as we could. Anyway, one of those days included a visit to Martha Stewart's television studio (Kate is a big fan), and it was here that we were treated to the strangest collaboration of items I have ever witnessed in a 50 minute block. What we saw included Conan O'Brien learning the ropes behind glittering eggs (it was the pre-Easter…

Where do they get the idea that librarians are anti-2.0?

Yet again someone said to me in a meeting: librarians don't like web 2.0, they always push back against it. Ok, so this clearly doesn't describe all of the librarians I hang out with online or any of the ones I work with. My guess is that there are two things that really spawned this. The whole don't-use-wikipedia thing and the whole controlled vocabulary rules thing. I've described well-meant but overly simplistic heuristics some educators used to teach about evaluating web sites. Along with those, there's typically and outright ban on Wikipedia. The truth is that there is a lot of good and…

Short Story Club: "The Things" by Peter Watts

Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison is doing a Short Story Club, hosting discussions of SF short fiction. As I always vaguely regret not reading enough short fiction to make sensible nominations for the Hugos, this seemed like a good opportunity to read a selection of stories that a smart person with pretty good taste thought were worth discussing. As a bonus, these all appear to be available online for free, so it doesn't require me to buy, let alone subscribe to, one of the big magazines. The first story up in this year's edition is "The Things" by Peter Watts. It's a fast read, if you…

Cognitive Monthly

I am pretty much on record that I would not pay for anything online (to be precise, to pay for content - I certainly use the Web for shopping). But with some caveats. I have been known to hit a PayPal button of people who provide content and information I find valuable. And I would presumably pay, though not being happy about it, if the information behind the pay wall is a) unique (i.e., not found anywhere else by any other means) and b) indispensable for my work (i.e., I would feel handicapped without it). But I am not subscribed to, or paying for, anything right now and haven't been in…

Savvy Brazilian Musicians Harness the Power of Pirates

The BBC's global tech news show Digital Planet reports from Belém in Brazil on a rootsy version of the new business model that's likely to supersede the traditional music industry. It's musical sneakernet. Since the invention of sound recording, musicians (and to an even greater extent, record companies) have made their money by putting out recordings and controlling who could copy them. In the analog era, this was fairly easy, as sound quality degraded with each successive copy generation. Whoever had the master tape of a hit song easily made money off it. Also, song lyrics and other…

Not an after life but a Second Life; chat with DemFromCT (with Update)

As an (unplanned) follow-up to today's morning post about public health use of the internet we have tonight's event in Second Life, a chance to meet and chat with wiki partner DemFromCT: Our next installment of the Virtually Speaking interview series takes place TONIGHT, Thursday, at 6pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern. We are very excited that DemFromCT can join us to talk about public health policy, in particular preparedness for a pandemic. He and I have been trading comments on some skepticism I have about this, so this is going to be an especially interesting discussion. All skeptics are welcome…

Reason, Emotion and Consumption

One of the frustrations with writing a science book is that you keep on bumping into brand new research that you want to include. That's precisely what happened to me when I read this just published paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Leonard Lee, Dan Ariely, and On Amir. The behavioral economists were interested in evaluating which decision-making system - the slow rational, deliberate approach (System 1) or the fast, emotional, instinctive approach (System 2) - was best suited for everyday consumer choices. The question, of course, is how one defines a "superior" decision. Who's to…

The Squid gets the last laugh

I'm not one of those people that thinks bloggers are all powerful but I know that blogs are often an effective way to expose bad behavior by some corporations. If I know this, you'd think everyone in the corporations would know it, too. I guess the word didn't get out to Best Buy: Best Buy sent a cease and desist letter to blogger Scott Beale (Laughing Squid) for having had the audacity to blog news that prankster/comedy troupe Improv Everywhere selling t-shirts that were a parody of the Best Buy brand. Whether or not the parody is legally in the clear is one matter, but Best Buy…

Smoke Signals, Blogs, and the Future of Politics

This I first posted on June 24, 2004 on www.jregrassroots.org, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics. What do you think? Was I too rosy-eyed? Prophetic? In the beginning there were grunts, tom-tom drums, smoke signals, and the guy on the horse riding from village to village reading the latest King's Edict. That is Phase I in the evolution of media. Phase II was ushered in by Gutenberg. Remember the beginning of Protestantism? Luther nailing copies of his pamhlet on the doors? That was also the beginning of the first great Universities, such as those in Genoa, Padua…

Smoke Signals, Blogs, and the Future of Politics

This I first posted on June 24, 2004 on www.jregrassroots.org, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics. I love re-posting this one every now and then, just to check how much the world has changed. What do you think? Was I too rosy-eyed? Prophetic? In the beginning there were grunts, tom-tom drums, smoke signals, and the guy on the horse riding from village to village reading the latest King's Edict. That is Phase I in the evolution of media. Phase II was ushered in by Gutenberg. Remember the beginning of Protestantism? Luther nailing copies of his pamhlet on the doors…

Stuff I showed on my panel at AAAS

Since I don't do PowerPoint but use the Web for presentations instead, and since the recordings from AAAS are not free (yes, you can buy them, I won't), and since some people have asked me to show what I showed at my panel there, here is the list of websites I showed there. I opened them up all in reverse chronological order beforehand, so during the presentation itself all I needed to do was close each window as I was done with it to reveal the next window underneath. I started with http://www.scienceonline2010.com/ to explain the new interactive, collaborative methods in science journalism…

Links for 2009-12-28

John Crowley Little and Big - Health Care Reform "At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it's very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled. If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month's worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them all up each month at once. However, if it so happens that one or another of these was first filled on a different day from the others, it can only…

And now⦠Texas

This Thursday, the Texas Board of Education will vote to adopt science textbook supplements. You'll recall that the board approved new science standards a couple years ago, and that they were a mixed bag. They dropped inaccurate language about "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories (language used to attack evolution in textbooks last time they did textbook adoption). But they stuck in a line about "all sides of the evidence," whatever that means, and inserted language requiring greater scrutiny for evolutionary concepts than for all others, and inserting creationist ideas about…

Reading Diary: The innovative university: Changing the DNA of higher education from the inside out by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring

It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…

Reading Recommendation for today

The Great Limbaugh Con by Charles M. Kelly, published in 1994, is even more current and up-to-date than it was then. And it is not really about Limbaugh himself - he serves only as a starting point. There are many Limbaughs out there now who parrot the same stuff and what he pioneered in the early 1990s is now a big industry for the Right. Furthermore, some of the right-wing rhetoric that Rush invented is now not just a standard GOP advertising lingo, but also deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche and will take a lot of effort to neutralize. The book describes, for instance, exactly how…

Norovirus and histo-blood group antigens

Weve all heard of that stupid book/diet that tries to tell you what to eat based on your blood type. Of course thats stupid and just a gimmic to get you to buy hundreds of dollars of crap 'supplements' for your blood-type (oh for Petes sake...). I totally didnt know this before I read this neat Nature review, but there are actually viruses out there that can use the histo-blood group antigens (A, B, O) as their receptors! Noroviruses! Apparently, Type O are the most susceptible to some kinds of norovirus infection, and Type B are the least. Now, this might be something other kids learned in…

Hamburger MakeUp Artistry

tags: Hamburger Make Up Artistry, food porn, Buy Me That, streaming video This video is a segment from the popular series "Buy Me That." Featured is a "makeup artist for food," who provides us with this behind-the-scenes look at how burgers (and fries) are made to look their best for television. This just makes you want to run out to buy and eat some fast food, doesn't it?