Weird Science

[Uncle Mxy]

[Uncle Mxy]

Remember to impose brand recognition on your babies!

http://www.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=622618

"One of the implications is that your brain is signaling to you that the items have been previously rewarded," Serences said. "Our brain is treating those things differently than those that have been associated with no rewards or those that have been associated with fewer rewards than in the past."

In an unusual finding, the researchers found that the brains of the subjects seemed to remember which targets were more rewarding even if the subjects themselves actually forgot.

[Uncle Mxy]

Saskatoon university student tries to save beer
http://www.thestar.com/article/558660

Haakensen has helped discover three new methods of detecting beer-spoiling bacteria, including a DNA-based technique, that has big breweries around the globe hoisting pints in celebration.

Breweries usually have to keep batches of beer for two to three months to make sure they haven't spoiled before cases are shipped out on trucks to liquor stores, says Haakensen.

"What we've done here is, by using DNA methods, we can actually figure out in a matter of one to two days if that beer will spoil," Haakensen says.

"It's kind of a bit like making a cookie recipe. It's not hard to follow a recipe from a cookbook, but it's really hard to come up with that recipe and that idea to begin with."

[geerussell]

It's science... sort of. The article even includes a helpful demonstration video.


The Ultimate Fart Silencer

Everyone farts… Whether it be in public, on a date, or during an interview, it happens and we know how embarrassing it can be.

Luckily, a man named “Big Chicken Mushroom” from WuHan, China, has invented the “Fart Silencer”, a small plastic tube that you… um… put in your anus.

Users are instructed to insert the open end into their anus when they feel a fart is coming. This should eliminate any unwanted sound farts tend to produce.

Users are also instructed to spray a cotton ball with their favorite perfume and put it into the “Fart Silencer” to eliminate any unwanted odor that might occur.

[Glenn]

Because farting is so much worse than unzipping your pants and shoving this up your ass when you feel a fart coming.

[Uncle Mxy]

One small step for hair, one giant leap for Soylent Green:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-nuf122608.php

Human hair waste provides nutrients to container plants

VERONA, MS—Agricultural crop production relies on composted waste materials and byproducts, such as animal manure, municipal solid waste composts, and sewage sludge, as a necessary nutrient source. Studies have shown that human hair, a readily available waste generated from barbershops and hair salons, combined with additional compost, is an additional nutrient source for crops. Although human hair has become commercially available to crop producers in the past couple years, it has not been proven to be an exclusive source of nutrients in greenhouse container production.

[Uncle Mxy]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7813114.stm

More people need to donate their living brain tissue to medical research if cures for diseases like dementia are to be found, UK scientists say.

They say research is being hampered by a gross shortage of brains and are urging healthy people as well as those with brain disorders to become live donors.

[UxKa]

Because farting is so much worse than unzipping your pants and shoving this up your ass when you feel a fart coming.

Well, depending on the bouqet to be emitted and the use of a scented cotton ball, that could be debated.

[Uncle Mxy]

Tell the tooth, baby...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401941_pf.html

As long as there are hockey players, there will be niche markets for false teeth. But the real news about the future of dentures is that there isn't much of one. Toothlessness has declined 60 percent in the United States since 1960. Baby boomers will be the first generation in human history typically to go to their graves with most of their teeth.

And now comes tooth regeneration: growing teeth in adults, on demand, to replace missing ones. Soon.

[Uncle Mxy]

Obviously, this research was done by a Detroit suburbanite trying to justify intellectual superiority over the Detroit city dwellers:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...ts_your_brain/

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."