Roller coaster mania

I once rode the Aerosmith Rock 'n' Roller Coaster seven times in a row down in the Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. After my seventh ride, my brain felt loose in my cranium and my head was pounding with pain. I immediately took two Advil and thankfully did not throw up.

So how is it, scientifically, that a 78-old man can ride a roller coaster 90 times in one day?

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)

You just have to go to the link and read it ... the LHC just can't catch a break.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

What's that you're smelling? Nostril rivalry decides

The title of this article begins with "NOSTRIL RIVALRY," which is intriguing enough, since I'd heard about ocular and two-ear rivalry (both of which this article in Science News explains briefly).

Essentially, when the nostrils take conflicting whiffs of scents, the brain decides which one you will smell.

In an experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to

two different scents, one in each nostril. One nostril was connected by a tube to a bottle of phenylethyl alcohol, which smells like rose petals. The other was connected to a bottle of n-butanol, which pongs of marker pen. During each whiff, the volunteers breathed in both scents.

Volunteers indicated whether they smelled rose, scented marker, neither or a combination. After each volunteer's 20 trials, spaced out to keep the noses sharp, the researchers found that smell perception alternated, more or less, between rose and markers.

I think it's cool that the smell perception alternated for rose and marker smell, neither of which is really all that bad. Wonder how much alternation there would be if one smell was gross and the other was pleasant? I wonder if the brain would seek to protect us by blocking out the yukky smell in favor of the pleasant one? Most likely there will be further studies to find out!

Why We Walk in Circles

I remember in the beginning of the second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Two Towers), Frodo and Sam are in Mordor walking in circles on their way to Mount Doom. Remember?

"This looks familiar."

"We've been here before, we're walking in circles."

I thought, how can you be walking in circles when you are supposed to be headed toward the giant volcano in the distance?

This article in Science Magazine doesn't explain it, but it's a good an intro as any today.

Interesting stuff. People tend to walk in circles on cloudy days when dropped in the middle of nowhere, while the tendency is to walk in more straight paths on sunny days.

And someone actually got funded to check it out!

The idea for the study came from a German science television show called Kopfball (literally, "head ball," as in soccer), which tries to answer viewers' questions, says the study's first author, Jan Souman, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. The producers contacted Souman and his colleagues, who study perception and action, to find out if the common belief about walking in circles was true. "We didn't really know, but we thought it was an interesting question," Souman says. So the researchers collaborated with the program, resulting in an episode that aired in 2007.

One comment below the article is: "Actually, Kopfball is a lot like Myth Busters. Less spectacular mostly but somehow Myth Busters has yet to make it into a scientific journal I guess."

Brain Craves High-Calorie Foods When You Skip Breakfast, Study Shows

Twenty healthy, non-obese people skip breakfast and participate in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan while looking at pictures of food. There are two groups of food: high calorie food which consisted of pizza, cake, and chocolate; and low calorie food like salad, fish and vegetables.

Surprise, surprise:

The brain's reward center lit up more vividly, or became more active, when the person saw a high-calorie food as opposed to a low-calorie choice. (The taste and smell of food can also activate the brain's reward center.)

However, when the participants ate breakfast and had the same test repeated 90 minutes after eating breakfast, the brain's reward center did not show any significantly greater activity when shown the high-calorie photos.

I know that personally, I will find chocolate more appealing than vegetables any day, even though I am a vegetarian.

Maybe it's just me ...

However, the point is this: If you eat a healthy breakfast every day, you won't be looking at the vending machine junk food with love in your eyes, causing your waistline to expand. Capisci?

Scientists invent kitchens that clean themselves

Of course, my eyes were immediately drawn to the title of this article.

You see, I have two teenage boys. It's just me and two teenage boys. Teenage boys are, well, not very clean. I could use harsher words ("disgusting" is a good word), but in order to be fair and diplomatic and tactful, I'll just say that they are "not very clean."

I go to bed pretty early because I wake up pretty early. They stay up pretty late because they are teenage boys. Each morning when I wake up, it's a new adventure in appallingness. Is that even a word? Blogger has underlined it in read, so methinks it's a made-up word.

Back to the article.

A self-cleaning kitchen? Wow, I dream about that. It's even better than a self-cleaning oven because it's the whole kitchen. I feel warm and euphoric inside.

Here's the premise. If a thin layer of a teflon-like coating is added to your kitchen work surfaces, they can be wiped clean with water. No more harsh detergents, no more scrubbing. Even teenage boys could handle that. (maybe)

But wait, there's more!

"Added to cleaning sprays, paints and sealants, the materials could also be used to produce self-cleaning floors, walls and windows."

Self-cleaning floors, walls and windows? What will all my homemaker friends do with all their newly found free time?

The reality is this. Even if the coating stuff really does repel oils, and only requires water to clean it up, someone is still going to have to make contact with the surface with a wet rag to do it. The coating does not include magic hands and magic arms that will spring up and wipe itself down.

Don't get me wrong, I think new innovations to lessen the burden of housework in these busy busy busy lives of ours is great! But I think my kitchen (and bathrooms and living rooms and every other room occupied by my teenage boys and their friends) will be clean only when they are grown and leave the nest.

From the LA Times: Mac & Cheese not on Mars astronaut's menu

When we are down in the dumps, what do most of us reach out for? Comfort food! Mashed potatoes, meat loaf, spaghetti and meatballs, ice cream, .... The list goes on, and includes macaroni and cheese.

NASA must provide the crew with some 20,000 meals -- light, with a shelf life of five years. Scientists are experimenting with packaging and preservation, but so far, mac and cheese is out.

Unfortunately, the shelf life for mac n cheese is too short to include it on the menu for astronauts who will explore the planet Mars. I wonder if Hostess, the company that makes the everlasting and never-spoiling Twinkie, can come up with a way?