Nice Package!


Here on the West Coast, we love our pets and show our care with lavish gifts of fancy toys. The numbers of our pets seem also to be increasing. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the economic downturn that at my apartment block, dogs used to be a no, no but now its yes, welcome and the number of dogs of all sorts and sizes has mushroomed over the past year.

Of course, they must be turned out properly with collars and, more frequently, harnesses chosen for color and style to match their personalities. In poor weather they are smartly turned out in cozy waterproof coats. They march sedately alongside their minder or trot along after them on a bicycle. Rarely, these days do I see happy dogs chasing a ball or stick with tongue lolling out, or trying to herd pigeons or crows who seem to be unaware of being in need of organization.

But appearances are important and our dog is chosen to be another statement of our cool lifestyle. And, apparently, therein lies a problem. In a piece in Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Amelia Glynn puts her finger firmly on a problem. We all know that responsible pet owners get their pets neutered to reduce problems of overpopulation, strays and unfortunate behavior.  But there is, apparently, a reluctance among many owners to get this done because their macho male dog would no longer look the part.

The answer is now available. Neuticals supply silicone rubber implants to restore your dogs current wimpy appearance to full robust prominence. They no longer have to hang their tail in shame, but can wag it with abandon knowing that they will be receiving admiring glances from all and sundry.

For those poor mutts who still are trying to deal with their loss in spite of their new implants giving their package a well-filled appearance and whose ears are hanging down with that hangdog expression, there is also a solution. PermaStay ear implants will keep those ears upright and eager.


In case your preferred pet isn’t a dog, there is a range of testicular implants available in sizes suitable for rats up to buffalos, so they all can look whole again. Mice, apparently, will just have to get over it!

A nice touch mentioned in the SFC article reports that it is possible to purchase Neuticals in the form of earrings. The perfect birthday gift for the woman with a new trophy husband, wouldn’t you say?

Patently Obvious


In the current world setup, intellectual property is the hot property. This seems fine when the inventors have worked their gray matter hard, staying up nights and almost drowning in coffee, but things seem less reasonable when a sequence of someone’s DNA is patented. This spills over to GMOs when their promiscuous spreading of pollen contaminates other farmer’s crops, who then are liable to be put out of business for patent infringement.

With ‘big bucks’ promised for your patents, the patent offices are under increasing pressure to handle more and more and, as nobody likes paying taxes, with less rather than more staff. So patents don’t seem to be getting the detailed scrutiny that they once did. Reading some recent patents can be fun (1).

There is an interesting one granted by the Australian Patent Office for a Circular Transportation Facilitation Device to John Keogh. The Patent Application Number is AU 2001100012 A4 and it has nice pictures of an old style cartwheel and also a cart to put it on. I wonder if the guy who dealt with the application walks to work?

Another one is a US patent that has been granted just in time for the winter rush. This one was granted to Ignacio Aperas and the Number is 8,011,991 B2. It is for a device to help make snowpeople – the usual three-ball model – and consists of light spheres which can be coated with snow.

The so old-fashioned solid type hurt the inventor’s back and weren’t sufficiently spherical to satisfy his aesthetics, but he rather missed the other advantage. Many of us live in areas where snowfall is light and it’s difficult to make a large snowperson. Now we shall be able to, as the light spheres only need a thin coating. I have already started saving for my ‘Snowperson Maker Kit.’

  1. http://improbable.com/

Life In The Fast Lane


Many of us watch our diet and exercise regimen and still struggle to keep our weight constant, let alone reduce it. As stress in our lifestyle increases, we can direct less effort in that direction. In the face of expensive possible solutions ranging from surgery, fancy diet pills, and weight loss foods and drinks, it is encouraging to read the BBC report of a more fun solution (1).

 Mice not men are the subjects of the studies by During et al at Ohio State U. First they showed that if their mice had a socially stimulating lifestyle with lots of friends and colleagues and many little challenging things to do, they stimulated the production of the protein BDNF, (Brain-Derived-Neurotrophic Factor), that encourages more neurons to grow  from neural stem cells.

The new and exciting development is that they have demonstrated that BDNF starts the conversion process of the white fat plumping up our experimental subjects into brown, energy producing fat.

The big experiment was then embarked on. Mice who had been in a dull restricted environment and had become very plump couch potatoes were introduced to the social milieu with lots of environmental complexity to make life fun and challenging, that is, good stress not bad stress. They were given amazing mazes, wooden toys, little huts to do whatever mice do in the dark as well as running wheels and the like.

The result? In a month the mice had lost half of their surplus white fat and were now svelte little socialites. Even their body temperatures had risen due to all that fat burning. Life in the fast lane had done the trick.

The same should be true for us. A busy, fun social life with lots of fun physical challenges is something to be put on the agenda, or at least at the top of the list for next year’s resolutions.
  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14813485

Perching At The Bar


Over the millennia, plants have developed a variety of means to get pollinated. Whereas, wind may be good enough for some, others use insects, bats or birds for more reliable results. Color and odor are employed as indicators of where the pollinators should come and the reward for a good job done is, invariably, a good drink of nectar.

South Africa’s Western Cape has an impressive variety of flowering plants, all of which need pollinating. One species, Babiana ringens or Rat’s Tail has large flowers at ground level. It gets its common name Rat’s Tail because it has a strong sturdy spike growing alongside the flower. It has to be sturdy because it is the perch for the pollinator to come and do the business (1,2).

The pollinator is the Sunbird and he hangs upside down on the Rat’s Tail and sucks up his reward through his long beak. I say ‘he’ because the males get to the nectar bar much more often than the females do and, what is more, spend a lot longer drinking as well.

Some of the varieties of B. ringens can manage to self-pollinate, others can’t and rely completely of their Sunbird customers who spend a lot of time visiting one or other of the chain of Rat’s Tail Bars that are doing well on the Cape. Even the varieties that can manage on their own welcome help from thirsty Sunbird customers.

As the Bars are only available to Sunbirds, I suppose we should think of them as exclusive Clubs and not compare B.ringens with the more promiscuous behavior seen on many, many other flower species occupying more common or garden habitats.
           
  1. http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/08/10/aob.mcr172.abstract
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14788701

Car Facts


The love of a man for his truck is legendary throughout the US, but what about cars? Well, the first “Cars” animated movie was popular enough to bring on a sequel, so I guess they love their cars too. The auto parts stores have all sorts of goodies available to lavish on our darlings. Usually, image is secondary to performance as we rarely, if ever, can really push the performance to anything like a limit.

In the movie, all the cars had faces and this is a good place to start, Landwehr et al reported at the Neuro-Psycho-Economics Conference, held in Munich in 2008, that not only did cars have faces, but that they were female. Presumably most car designers are male (the ones I’ve heard of, anyway) and that may be why we have to refer to cars as ‘she’.

Anthropomorphizing our chunks of metal and plastic immediately makes us a case for the psychologists with an fMRI that is vacant (1,2). A group of Swiss guys were stuffed into the big magnet and lo and behold, the reward centers lit up when the girly faces showed up on cars.

They weren’t too keen on a macho male face. This is strange, as I have noticed a trend to this type of face on trucks and some cars showing up over the past year, so we’ll see how well these sell.

The most popular look was a warm smiling mouth (grill) in combination with stern, rather aggressive eyes (headlights). The image? Prepared to be friendly, but don’t you step out of line, now!

These preferences surely tell us more than we may want to know about the young guys at the U of St. Gallen. I, for one, will certainly be studying the front of my friends and colleagues cars in future.

But what about the girls? Oh dear, life was so much simpler when a car was just transport and not a window into the soul.

  1. http://improbable.com/
  2. J.R.Landwehr, B.Weber and A.Herrmann, Adv. Consumer Res., 38, 1, (2011).

Moving On


We can read or watch programs on studies of very old bone, or merely old bones, very frequently these days. It is amazing how much insight the paleontologists are able to gain about the lifestyle of our distant ancestors from what would seem to be insignificant details. The spirit of Sherlock Holmes is alive and well in the TV studios.

What about the distant future? Will there be a search for our bones, and if there should be, will they be able to draw meaningful conclusions? The chunks of metal from screws, pins, and hip joints will be self-explanatory, but what about silicone implants and PTFE chin extensions?

Cremations are a solution chosen by lots of people these days, so they will be out of the picture, but this brings up another question. How green is cremation?  The BBC report that 16% of the airborne mercury in the UK is from the output from crematoria (1).

Also reported in the same article are two new innovative alternatives. One of these has two competing producers of the equipment, one in Scotland and one in Australia. This method involves pressure cooking in an alkali solution so all our lipids are turned into soap and we can be flushed down the drain, leaving bones, metals, such as used for repairs to bones and teeth, but also polymer implants. The bones are then crushed as in crematoria, but I guess they have to be manually processed to remove the metal and polymer extras.

An alternative is being developed in Sweden where the plan is to freeze the body with liquid nitrogen and then vibrate it with gusto. The body is very brittle at that temperature and breaks up into small pieces. The metals and, presumably the polymers, can be sieved out and the rest composted.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555

Good Listening


One of the many reasons for our ‘big brain’ is our ability to talk to each other and this goes along with our other human abilities such as processing complicate arithmetic problems - even if we get them wrong, or playing music. So do we have a chunk of our brain devoted to these high-level functions or does the big chunk of grey matter multi task as necessary?

This debate has been going on a long time, but now Fedorenko et al from M.I.T have published the answer to the problem (1). They stuffed 48 participants into the big magnet, one at a time, of course, and talked their ear off as well as playing them nice music and scrambled music.

The fMRI scans lit up in quite different regions when listening to speech than when listening to music. The speech regions lit up most strongly when sentences were used. They are located high and a little way forward of center of the hemispheres, so hitting your spouse on the head with a skillet won’t help their understanding of what you are telling them.

Musically, we are working the little grey cells halfway down above your ears. No mention was made of the response of the candidate’s scans to an operatic aria followed by hip hop, but it’s nice to get one controversy settled.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/31/1112937108.abstract