humor

Hoowuulyeaaaach!

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest -- dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

Generally, I'm most interested in the processes that give rise to dry bones. Particularly, dry bones that don't smell bad.

"Syrupy residue," on the other hand, is not really my thing. And I guess it's not really most people's thing:

Getting the public to accept a process that strikes some as ghastly may be the biggest challenge. Psychopaths and dictators have used acid or lye to torture or erase their victims, and legislation to make alkaline hydrolysis available to the public in New York state was branded "Hannibal Lecter's bill" in a play on the movie character's sadism.

The appeal seems to be that this generates fewer emissions than cremation -- think of it as an elaborate sort of carbon sequestration. And it has to be better than pouring embalming fluid down the drain.

UPDATE(2008/05/08): Miguel Capriles writes:

[J]ust a quick comment about your post "Death, lye thou there": the reference to the "syrupy residue" made me recollect one of John Aubrey's Brief Lives when he tells about the coffin of John Colet, broken after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Aubrey tells (in modern English, as I got it on Google Books in a version published in 1982 by Boydell & Brewer):

"After the conflagration, his monument being broken, his coffin, which was lead, was full of a liquor which conserved the body. Mr Wyld and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and 'twas of a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawn. The coffin was of lead and laid in the wall about two and a half feet above the surface of the floor."

Definitively it should be a lot nicer in the English Aubrey used.

And that, my friends, is why it is cool to have a blog. Because my readers have much better imaginations than mine.

Ooooh, they tasted it?!

In an otherwise very interesting story about the mechanism of behavioral dimorphism in fruit fly mating:

The next stage was to find out how effective the artificially induced songs were as mating calls.

For this, the "Cyrano de Bergerac" test was applied.

Not exactly a metaphor, but certainly of questionable taste in this story titled, "'Sex Pest' Seal Attacks Penguin":

Marion Island is the only place in the world where Antarctic fur seals are known to hunt king penguins on land, so the idea that the fur seal was trying to eat the object of its attention made sense.

"But then we realised that the seal's intentions were rather more amorous."

John: I got the strangest e-mail today. It was from the University -- they wanted me to fill out "an important survey from Homeland Security."

Gretchen: Uhh...that sounds odd...

J: Yeah. So I clicked on the survey, and it asks me, "Does your laboratory use or store any dangerous chemicals?" Well, I clicked "No." And then, "Does your laboratory have any laser equipment?" And you know, I'm totally thinking like sharks with laser beams, right? But I clicked "No." And then it was, "Does your laboratory use biological agents?" So, I clicked "No," and it was like, "Thank you for your responses," and that was the end of it! I mean, you'd think they could do a little background, and sort of rule out the anthropologists!

G: Yes, like you're going to reconstitute Gigantopithecus and make it into your big dumb lackey.

J: Oooh -- if you're going to choose between a few big dumb lackeys or a lot of little dumb ones, which do you pick? I mean, I categorically rule out smart lackeys.

G: Because they will rise against you.

J: Yeah.

G: So you want me to choose between Bigfoots or Oompa-loompas?

J: I guess that sort of answers itself. I mean, if you are going to send them into the basement to get something, you'd pick the Oompa-loompas, since you don't have to worry about their heads hitting the door frame.

G: Right. And you know if you send Bigfoot down there, he's going to dump in the corner or something.

J: Uh, yeah. That would be bad.

G: So if I'm going to have henchmen or minions, I'd rather have many minions than a few henchmen.

J: Yes, clearly Homeland Security is wasting their time with us!

In a New Scientist story about the feet of H. floresiensis:

"It puts another nail in the coffin of the disease hypothesis," says Henry McHenry, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis who saw the presentation.

The teaser to this post on Science Blog:

The next generation of genome sequencing has been published using the DNA of James Watson. I'll bet they used Rosalind Franklin's DNA as a test drive and didn't tell us.

The first seal is broken, and the Giant Panda Genome Project commences:

Giant Panda Genome to be Sequenced

BGI-Shenzhen is pleased to announce the launch of the International Giant Panda Genome Project. This announcement follows on the heels of the Panda Genome workshop held on January 21–22, 2008, in Shenzhen, China. Dr. Hongmei Zhu, a scientist from BGI-Shenzhen stated that, "The goal of this project is to finish the sequencing and assembling of draft sequence within six months."

Naturally, the biggest question on everyone's minds is: What is with these pandas' sexual problems?

Dr. Lin He, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who works at both Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, noted that the panda sequence obtained from this project will greatly benefit our understanding of the reduced fecundity in pandas when living under certain environmental conditions. This is a major issue for breeding programs that are carried out to strengthen the panda species as a whole.

Well, that will be tough, since we really have little idea which genes influence fecundability in any mammal species yet. But the development of knockout pandas will help discover which genes are essential.

I've been noticing lately an awful lot of stories in which some celebrity blithely espouses total pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo. Since celebrities exist only to entertain us, I can't be too concerned. After all, who takes them seriously? But I thought it would be interesting to keep track of some of the more bizarre instances.

Take Demi Moore, for instance -- who last night was lauding "leech therapy" for "detoxifying" her blood:

"They have a little enzyme that when they are biting down in you it gets released in your blood and generally you bleed for quite a bit - and your health is optimized.

"It detoxifies your blood - I'm feeling very detoxified right now. I did it in some woman's house laying on her bed. We did a little sampler first, which is in the belly button.

Leeches are a valid medical treatment for vascular degeneration and microsurgical repair, both instances in which blood flow is impeded and removal of excess blood aids in healing. Leech therapy has also been investigated as a method of local pain relief in osteoarthritis, in which leech saliva is hypothesized to contain anti-inflammatory agents.

Contrary to Moore's description, leeches do not remove toxins from the body, nor does their saliva have chelating properties (that is, of the sort that would remove toxins from the blood sometime after the leech was detached).

I suspect that the bizarre medical history of leeches, their current utility in certain medical contexts, and their freakish bloodsucking nature makes them just strange enough to appeal to a certain brand of homeopath. In the simplistic logic of homeopathy, leeches resemble things that are toxic and harmful, so they should be useful to ward away things that are toxic and harmful.

Personally, I wonder why anyone would think that a temporary parasite like a leech would deliberately concentrate "damaging" toxic substances from a host's body. I mean, what does the leech supposedly get out of it? Do these people believe in evolution?

Well, some questions answer themselves. But that's about as far into the logic of Demi Moore's "alternative" health practices as I'm willing to go.

Last week's story about the negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific productivity has brought out the cutting crew. In this blog post at "Our Daily Diary," the study is skewered:

But it was while I was switching to a magnificent Pacific Northwest microbrew porter that I saw the real problem. Looking at the graph of the 34 data points, it was clear that the entire correlation was caused by the five lowest-output scientists. Without those five data points, the remaining 29 - showing a wide range of scientific output and beer consumption habits - exhibited absolutely no correlation. Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer.

Well, that's a relief.