Making Science More Better For You on 10/29/07

We heard that Flea and the rest of the guys were really excited and were going to ask it to join the band

World's Hottest Chile Pepper Discovered

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2007) — Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world's hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records' recognition as the world's hottest chile pepper by blasting past the previous champion Red Savina.

In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached one million SHUs, almost double the SHUs of Red Savina, which measured a mere 577,000.

Dr. Paul Bosland, Director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University's Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences collected seeds of Bhut Jolokia while visiting India in 2001.

Bosland grew Bhut Jolokia plants under insect-proof cages for three years to produce enough seed to complete the required field tests.

"The name Bhut Jolokia translates as 'ghost chile,'" Bosland said, "I think it's because the chile is so hot, you give up the ghost when you eat it!"

Bosland added that the intense heat concentration of Bhut Jolokia could have significant impact on the food industry as an economical seasoning in packaged foods.

Bhut Jolokia? Wonder if it knows Jar Jar Binks.

Chocolate replaces the giraffe as that thing in the corner you're trying to not
think about
Resistance To Thoughts Of Chocolate Is Futile

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2007) — A research project carried out by a University of Hertfordshire academic has found that thought suppression can lead people to engage in the very behaviour they are trying to avoid.
It also found that men who think about chocolate end up eating more of it than women who have the same thoughts.

In his research project, Dr Erskine looked at the effect of thought suppression on action and used eating and chocolate to investigate this further.

He invited 134 young people (67 males and 67 females) with an average age of 22 years to investigate how thinking can affect taste preference. They were given a taste preference task, where they were asked to try two brands of chocolate and answer a questionnaire and they were also given two periods of thought verbalisation where they would have to verbalise their thoughts while alone. Additionally, they were given specific topics to try to think or not to think about.

The results indicated that there is a clear behavioural rebound among both male and female participants and both males and females who suppressed thoughts of chocolate ate significantly more than those in the control condition. Secondly, for males, actively thinking about chocolate can enhance subsequent consumption of that food.

“These findings open the door to a whole host of potential candidates for such effects,” said Dr Erskine. “For example, does trying not to think about having another drink make it more likely, or does trying not to think, or to think aggressively lead to aggressive behaviour? These questions are vitally important if we are to understand the ways in which thought control engenders the very behaviour one wanted to avoid.”

The research paper, entitled "Resistance can be futile investigating behavioural rebound," by Dr James Erskine at the University’s School of Psychology, has just been published online at Appetite.
So chocolate is really an alien plot designed to eliminate all will power? We’re down.


Actually, we thought the longest living animal was Mel Brooks
Longest Living Animal? Clam -- 400 Years Old -- Found In Icelandic Waters

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2007) — A clam dredged from Icelandic waters had lived for 400 years - is this the longest-lived animal known to science.

Can you imagine living for four centuries? A team of scientists from Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences believe they have found an animal which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for around 400 years.

When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for espousing the view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the universe.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the existing record for the longest-lived animal belongs to a 220 year old Arctica clam collected in 1982 from American waters. Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374 year old Icelandic clam which was found in a museum. Both these records appear to have been eclipsed by the latest specimen, whose age, between 405 and 410 years, has been assessed by counting the annual growth lines in the shell.

The Bangor scientists are sclerochronologists who study the growth and age of clams using annual growth lines in the shell in much the same way as dendrochronologists study the growth of trees using tree-rings. Clam shell growth is related to environmental conditions such as seawater temperature, salinity and food availability. The team analyse the shell growth histories with a view to understanding changes in the ocean linked to climate change.

The clam was dredged up by Team members Paul Butler and James Scourse during a data collection cruise in Icelandic coastal waters in 2006 which formed part of the EU MILLENNIUM project investigating climate changes over the last 1000 years. The exciting discovery was made by postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker, the newest member of the ‘Arctica’ team. “Al and Paul rushed up to my office to announce that they had found a record-breaker,” said team member Chris Richardson. A detailed assessment later confirmed that, at 400 years, the clam had beaten the previous record by a massive 30 years!!

It is very likely that longer lived individuals of the species remain to be found. Although Icelandic waters seem to provide the ideal conditions for extreme longevity, clams with lifetimes well in excess of 200 years have been found both in the Irish Sea and the North Sea.

So why do these clams live so long? The Bangor scientists are intrigued to find out and believe that the clams may have evolved exceptionally effective defences which hold back the destructive ageing processes that normally occur. "If, in Arctica islandica, evolution has created a model of successful resistance to the damage of ageing, it is possible that an investigation of the tissues of these real life Methuselahs might help us to understand the processes of ageing," explains Chris.

Adapted from materials provided by Bangor University


Headline of the day (CNN)
Cow-killing meteorite sells for $1,554

The Valera Meteorite, noteworthy as the only space rock documented to have caused a fatality on Earth. Its victim in 1972 was a cow in Venezuela.

The other headline of the day (The Obscure Store)
Coach moons girls on opposing team after contentious game

Nothing like leading by example.


Yeah, sure. They said the same thing about Bigfoot.
Scientists say dark matter doesn't exist
By Ker Than
Staff Writer

Two Canadian astronomers think there is a good reason dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to make up the bulk of matter in the universe, has never been directly detected: It doesn't exist.

Dark matter was invoked to explain how galaxies stick together. The visible matter alone in galaxies — stars, gas and dust — is nowhere near enough to hold them together, so scientists reasoned there must be something invisible that exerts gravity and is central to all galaxies.

Last August, an astronomer at the University of Arizona at Tucson and his colleagues reported that a collision between two huge clusters of galaxies 3 billion light-years away, known as the Bullet Cluster, had caused clouds of dark matter to separate from normal matter. Many scientists said the observations were proof of dark matter's existence and a serious blow for alternative explanations aiming to do away with dark matter with modified theories of gravity.

Now John Moffat, an astronomer at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Joel Brownstein, his graduate student, say those announcements were premature.

In a study detailed in the Nov. 21 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the pair says their Modified Gravity theory can explain the Bullet Cluster observation.

Using images of the Bullet Cluster made by the Hubble, Chandra X-ray and Spitzer space telescopes and the Magellan telescope in Chile, the scientists analyzed the way the cluster's gravity bent light from a background galaxy — an effect known as gravity lensing. The pair concluded that dark matter was not necessary to explain the results.

"Using Modified Gravity theory, the 'normal' matter in the Bullet Cluster is enough to account for the observed gravitational lensing effect," Brownstein said. "Continuing the search for and then analyzing other merging clusters of galaxies will help us decide whether dark matter or MOG theory offers the best explanation for the large scale structure of the universe."

Moffat compares the modern interest with dark matter to the insistence by scientists in the early 20th century on the existence of a "luminiferous ether," a hypothetical substance thought to fill the universe and through which light waves were thought to propagate.

"They saw a glimpse of special relativity, but they weren't willing to give up the ether," Moffat told SPACE.com. "Then Einstein came along and said we don't need the ether. The rest was history."

Douglas Clowe, the lead astronomer of the team that linked the Bullet Cluster observations with dark matter (and now at Ohio University), says he still stands by his original claim.

"As far as we're concerned, [Moffat] hasn't done anything that makes us retract our earlier statement that the Bullet Cluster shows us that we have to have dark matter," Clowe said. "We're still open to modifying gravity to reduce the amount of dark matter, but we're pretty sure that you have to have most of the mass of the universe still in some form of dark matter."

It’s all marketing. If they had only called it “gravy” instead of “dark matter” there wouldn’t be this problem. Besides, everyone knows the universe is held together by honey and post it notes.