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In Print: Cooking With Cicadas
The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN.
Apparently skewered invertebrates (and sea horses) are standard snacks in Beijing. The cicada shish kebobs are in the center.
Credit: National Geographic/Photograph by Victor Fraile, Corbis
The cicadas are coming. Here at Newscripts headquarters in Washington, D.C., we’ve been tracking Brood II’s invasion progress warily. Senior Editor Linda Wang, who has survived previous infestations and lived to tell the tale, assures the Newscripts gang that we will survive. As Linda remembers, the last infestation brought annoying buzzing sounds and dead bodies strewn on the sidewalks–dead cicada bodies, that is. Phew.
As she writes in her Newscripts print column this week, Linda isn’t terribly worried about this impending resurrection 17 years later. Instead, she’s adopted the stance of “if you can’t beat them, eat them,” thanks to her discovery of some cicada recipes in a National Geographic article.
“Cicada recipes?!” you exclaim. (Okay, we exclaimed it.) Apparently insects are high in protein and low in fat and carbs, which we suppose sounds healthful. There’s even a legitimate, university-backed cookbook that has recipes for cicada dumplings, cicada rhubarb pie, and sizzling chili cicadas.
Linda isn’t quite ready to go home and blanch some cicadas she finds on the sidewalk, however, just to try out these recipes. “I can barely cook normal food on my own, so if I eat cicadas anywhere, it’d be at a restaurant or fast-food joint,” she muses.
So far, she’s tried a grasshopper taco at a tapas restaurant in D.C. and recalls: “Honestly, there wasn’t much flavor to it, it was just salty and crunchy. Not terrible, but not amazing either!”
She also thinks it would be fun if McDonald’s chimed in with a cicada milkshake on the Dollar Menu. “If I have to eat a cicada,” she says,” I might as well enjoy it!”
If you enjoy it so much, Linda, you can have ours, too!
Amusing News Aliquots
Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Sophia Cai, Bethany Halford, and Jeff Huber.
Siberian researchers recover the first-ever sample of mammoth’s blood, which was preserved in ice. Credit: Semyon Grigoriev/The Siberian Times
Icy Siberian conditions preserve mammoth blood and muscle tissue. Can mammoth clones be far off? And will we be able to use them as vacuums and showers like the Flintstones did? [Siberian Times]
Study finds that diet soda harms teeth just as badly as crack cocaine does. So either diet soda is more harmful than you initially thought, or crack cocaine is less harmful. [My Fox Atlanta]
Well hello there, hydrogen. You look gorgeous. [iO9]
Marijuana stash more than 2,000 years old is discovered at a Chinese grave site. Time-travel movie starring Cheech and Chong now seems inevitable. [NBC News]
Apes may be even closer to us, or at least our children, than we thought–they, too, throw temper tantrums when their risky, emotional choices don’t pay off. [NBC News]
For all you chemists working on top floors in high rise buildings, let this be a lesson to you: Throwing your glassware out the window can be lethal. [Slate]
Time-lapse video documents what the Mars Curiosity rover has been doing for the last nine months. If the Curiosity rover was on parole, its officer would be well pleased. [Huffington Post]
Create a hand-shaped, light-responsive hydrogel, check. Ask Robin Williams if he’d be up for a remake of “Flubber,” pending. [Wired]
In Print: Toys Will Be Toys
McDonald’s website leaves it up to interpretation what divides these two types of toys.
The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN.
As the cashier at the fast-food restaurant is finishing our order, she grabs a small plastic doll and tosses it in my kids’ meal.
“Excuse me,” my mom says testily. “You didn’t give my daughter a choice of toys.” Even at age six, I can tell my mom is using tremendous restraint to give this young woman a chance to rectify her unintentional wrongs.
The woman looks at my mom, then at me, and asks, “Well, do you want the girls’ toy or the boys’ toy?”
I don’t remember if I ended up picking the doll or the toy car on that particular occasion. But I do distinctly remember the feeling of trying to weigh the gaps in my own eclectic toy collection with the point my now-fuming mother was trying to teach both me and the young woman at the cash register. Toys are toys, and kids should be able to choose their own interests without feeling undue social, gender-specific pressure.
Boots toy signage–with science kits in the boys’ section–before customer outrage led the store to redo how they label toy sections. Credit: Twitter/@SeanEGray
Twenty years later, I call my mom and tell her about this column, and she’s outraged we’re still having this debate. As I write in Newscripts this week, the gender-specific labeling of toys came under fire in England recently. Specifically, customers and online advocacy group Let Toys Be Toys took issue with science kits and chemistry sets being designated for boys. Since the backlash, toy giant Tesco and pharmacy chain Boots have changed their girls- and boys-specific toy labeling and issued apologetic statements.
Amusing News Aliquots
Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Sophia Cai, Bethany Halford, and Jeff Huber.
High school junior Justin Beckerman tests out his submarine at Lake Hopatcong, in New Jersey. Credit: Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger
Kids these days do some pretty wild stuff. This New Jersey teen built his own submarine. [NJ.com]
Approximately 78,000 people have paid money to apply to be one of the first four settlers on Mars. And for those who aren’t selected, Earth’s toilets still offer plenty of opportunity to flush money down the drain. [NBC News]
Listen to Paul. Don’t let sad kitten ruin your job interview. [ChemBark]
Here Europeans are worrying about horse in their meatballs, while Chinese consumers have to worry about bird flu in their KFC and rat in their mutton. [NPR]
Study finds that people with nicknames earn more than those with longer names. What do you think about that, Sport? [TheLadders]
Find some psych study conclusions a bit weird? That may be because their subjects were primarily WEIRD. [Slate]
Sucking on a child’s pacifier may promote the child’s defenses against allergies. It also teaches stressed-out parents how to self-soothe. [ScienceDaily]
And last but not least: Mates in Australia, check out today’s solar eclipse. The rest of the world can watch it via live feed. [National Geographic]
In Print: Droplets of Rain, Strands of Honey
The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN.
Petrichor: The rainy-day smell comes from a potpourri of compounds. Credit: Shutterstock
People living in the Bay Area rarely complain about the weather. But San Francisco-based Senior Editor Jyllian Kemsley tells Newscripts that, lately, she’s been a bit wistful for rain. “We’ve had very very little here since December. The California news last week, in fact, was that the water content in the snowpack is 17 percent of ‘normal,’ ” Jyllian says, noting that they probably mean “average” instead of “normal.”
So for this week’s Newscripts print column, Jyllian dug through old literature to learn the chemistry of the scent of rain–or petrichor, as Australian chemists Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas coined it in 1964. Turns out, they were able to isolate an oily yellow material responsible for the characteristic rain scent (that this Portland-raised Newscripts blogger knows so well). Although Jyllian doesn’t know the original motivations of rain-scent researchers, she does point out that Bear appears to have been a talented chemist.
Also inspired by a scientific question raised in the 1960s, Jyllian’s second Newscripts item discusses why honey and other viscous fluids don’t drip off of a spoon like water but instead stretch to lengths that seem to defy physics. Traditionally, scientists thought falling fluid is driven by gravity and not viscosity, but that doesn’t explain why honey can maintain a droopy strand for 10 meters or more, whereas a thin stream of water breaks up into droplets after a mere 10 cm.
The ’60s scientists weren’t the only curiously fascinated ones. Assistant Editor Craig Bettenhausen says: “I distinctly remember when I was a kid turning on the sink, looking at it with a strobe light going, and having my mind blown by the realization that it was lots of little droplets and not a continuous stream.”
But thanks to a 2013 study, these collective curiosities are answered. The researchers found that the length of a fluid strand depends on small waves in the materials. These waves amplify over time and once large enough, break the fluid stream. Because viscosity dampens the amplification, honey gets to hang on a little big longer.
“A Boy and His Atom”: The World’s Smallest Movie
Forget pushing electrons, IBM researchers-turned-filmmakers have moved 5,000 atoms to make a stop-motion film–the world’s smallest, confirms Guinness World Records. How can you watch such a tiny movie, you ask? Well, the frames in the film are magnified about 100 million times. (To give perspective: “If an atom were the size of an orange, then the orange would be the size of the whole planet Earth,” the researchers say.)
Meet Adam and his toy atom:
And you thought Disney/Pixar was good at tugging on your heartstrings with no dialogue and bare-bones animation. But in comparison to Disney’s Oscar-winning “Paperman,” which is a little longer than 6 minutes and had dozens of animators, this team of IBM researchers used the tools they had in their lab to make the 242-frame “A Boy and His Atom.” The team used a scanning tunneling microscope to drag atoms along a surface, then took pictures after each move to make the stop-motion film. I’ll let them explain:
For more on how it was made, watch all of their behind-the-scenes videos here.
h/t Chemjobber via Beth Halford
Amusing News Aliquots
Ants maximize their time on the smooth felt (white) and minimize their time on the rough felt (green) to reach their destination in the fastest, albeit indirect, way. Credit: Simon Tragust/NBC News
Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Bethany Halford, Jeff Huber, and Sophia Cai.
Wonder how ants descend mere minutes into a picnic? Ants optimize routes for speed, a la Fermat’s principle of least time. [NBC News]
Ladies, looking for a fertile fella? Seems men who sport kilts “have significantly better rates of sperm quality and higher fertility.” From the Scottish Medical Journal, of course. [Improbable Research]
Researchers believe frog feet could be used to aid intestinal health. Connoisseurs of French food say, “We’re way ahead of you.” [ScienceDaily]
Forget anxiety meds, Tylenol shown to help dampen fears of existential uncertainty or death. [Gizmodo]
Not that we would try it, but there’s some interesting chemistry behind the marijuana-infused spirit known as the Green Dragon. [PopSci]
Feeling lazy and unmotivated? Blame your lazy and unmotivated parents … preferably via the Internet, so you don’t have to get off the couch. [Huffington Post]
Dogs who have been spayed or neutered live longer than those who haven’t. Canine community reconsiders its animosity toward Bob Barker. [e! Science News]
And you thought running columns was tedious. What about studying where people stand in an elevator? [NPR]
Check out a related video:
CHEMIST HULK Smashes Questions, But Protects Identity
In the age of Internet memes and viral videos, a window of opportunity opens for sometimes the most random–and often hilarious–alter egos. Meet CHEMIST HULK (@ChemistHulk), who is a Twitter phenomenon inspired by the Marvel comic but also by fellow tweeters @ECONOMISTHULK (6,500+ followers) and @DRUNKHULK (185,000+ followers), among others. By comparison, CHEMIST HULK is just a few Twitter weeks old with just a few hundred followers, but he’s already causing ripples throughout the chemistry online community. He discusses lab work, science awards, and the puzzling aspects of puny human society:
WHAT HULK FAVOURITE SCIENCE? EASY. MECHANOCHEMISTRY. FUNCTION ON PRINCIPLE OF SMASH AND CRUSH, OVER AND OVER.
— CHEMIST HULK (@ChemistHulk) April 5, 2013
HULK BE CONTROVERSIAL! HULK THINK OUR NOBEL SHOULD BE WON BY BIOLOGISTS! HULK FINDS BEAUTY IN COMMON GOALS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH!
— CHEMIST HULK (@ChemistHulk) March 31, 2013
HULK HATE SELF-HEALING POLYMERS. ONCE SMASH, STAY SMASH.
— CHEMIST HULK (@ChemistHulk) April 4, 2013
And this week, he agreed to be interviewed by Newscripts. But of course, it was in typical online fashion, as he (or she?) doesn’t want to reveal the secret identity of the chemist version of Dr. Bruce Banner.
SC: I admit, I’m new to the CHEMIST HULK bandwagon. How did you find yourself come about on Twitter?
CH: HULK SEE PLACE IN WORLD FOR SMASHING OF PRECONCEPTIONS BY MAKING ERUDITE SPEECH COME FROM SIMPLE COUNTENANCE. HULK ALSO DECIDE TWITTER HAVE NICHE FOR HULK CHEMICAL EXPERTISE.
Amusing News Aliquots
Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Bethany Halford, Jeff Huber, and Sophia Cai.
Let’s just hope it can’t swim that fast. Credit: CNN
Scientists find that experiencing prolonged periods of pain can change a person’s personality. Surprisingly, their study did not involve screenings of new Jason Bateman movie “Identity Thief.” [io9]
Pain could be doubled, now that a bull shark with two heads was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Use of “good shark, bad shark” tactic on its victims feels inevitable. [Boing Boing]
And you thought bubbles were those innocuous things that made bath time fun. Now, they’re poised to rip battleships to pieces. [Improbable Research]
The battles continue under the sea, where sea hares ward off predatory spiny lobsters with one of the oldest tricks in the playground book: stuffing something up their nose. [Yahoo!]
Chewing gum after colon surgery is tied to faster recovery time. World waits to see how Bazooka Joe and the Fruit Stripe zebra will use this knowledge for their own monetary gain. [Reuters]
Speaking of ulterior benefits of food, wonder if this means stuffed mushrooms will be showing up more often at lab group meetings. [Independent]
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