Researchers from the Northwestern University noticed there's something strange about religion: it's making people fatter.
We don't recall any of the commandments saying "thou shall eat chocolate cake," but an unusual new study has found that people who regularly attend religious activities are 50 percent more likely to battle obesity by middle age.
God only knows why. The scientists sure don't.
"We don't know why frequent religious participation is associated with development of obesity," said Matthew Feinstein, the study's lead investigator and a fourth-year student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity."
The study tracked nearly 2,500 men and women over 18 years. They filtered for age, race, sex, education, income and baseline body mass index. The last one's important, because it shows that the religious were getting fatter, not that fat people were getting religious.
This whimsical design by footwear designer Kobi Levi is a "shoe-in" for fun! Check out his blog for many more wonderfully unusual shoe designs: Link (my favorite is the Olive Oyl) - via Book of Joe
Hurrah! Oral biologist Israel Kleinberg have finally answered the prayers from all dentist-hatin' kids: cavity-fighting candy, made from chemicals in saliva.
The candy is fluoride-free and protects teeth in two ways. First, it raises pH levels to neutralize more acid than saliva alone. Second, it protects the minerals in tooth enamel. Arginine, an amino acid, combines with calcium in Cavistat, the candy's main ingredient, and sticks to teeth -- leaving behind a layer of protection.
Kids who ate two mints twice a day for one year had 68 percent fewer cavities in their molars than children who didn't chew the mints.
"The number of cavities, we think that ultimately is going to get to almost zero," Dr. Kleinberg said.
That would bring a smile to just about everyone's face.
While reindeer racing is fun, hipsters crave something edgier ... something like skateboarding with dogs. Behold, the new sport of Dogboarding by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert: Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] - via Laughing Squid (No animals were harmed in the making of the video)
Mere dieting is for the poor. The rich, my friends, don't just diet - they book a $5,600 week stay at a luxurious weight loss retreat.
Christina Binkley of the Wall Street Journal recounts the horror - oh the horror - of a rich man's fat camp, The Ranch at Live Oak, Malibu:
The six-month-old Ranch isn't one of the drug-rehab centers that dot the Malibu hills. But it is rehab of sorts—a luxury boot camp that aims to detoxify up to 14 (mostly middle-age) guests a week from the daily routine of cellphones, email, Diet Cokes and steak dinners washed down with Cabernet. Located on a 120-acre ranch tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains, it caters to wealthy A-listers with Spartan but perfectly appointed private cottages, and niceties such as laundry service and a daily aphorism placed on pillows ("Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle"). Yet the Ranch doesn't kowtow to its heavy-hitting clientele: The exercise is mandatory—with a vengeance.
Last week, a venomous Egyptian cobra escaped from its cage at the Bronx Zoo ... and wasted no time in opening its own Twitter account. He now tweets from @BronxZoosCobra (and in one day, got more followers than @BronxZoo):
While keepers at the Bronx Zoo’s reptile house searched on Monday afternoon for an Egyptian cobra that disappeared over the weekend, tens of thousands of people around the world had already found the snake. It was on Twitter, of course. [...]
In an exclusive (for now) e-mail interview, the cobra said its main goal on Twitter was a lot like anyone else’s: “I just want Justin Bieber to follow me,” it said. The snake also expressed a desire to experiment with a vegan lifestyle while on the loose. “This adventure is all about trying new things,” it explained. “And Zagat doesn’t have a single restaurant featuring ‘rodent cuisine.’ ”
While the cobra’s Twitter account answered, moment to moment, everyone’s questions about where it was hiding, it raised new ones about how a snake can manage to type. “Thanks to touch screen technology, it just takes a flick of the tail,” it said. And, on its iPhone, “There’s an asp for that.”
Alexis Mainland of The New York Times' City Room Blog follows the story: Link
Jason Pitts asked Lianna to the prom during third period class last week in an romantic way that made me smile from ear to ear. The lyrics are available at the YouTube link. -via Buzzfeed
This snake takes a pretty picture! The Ruby-Eyed Green Pit Viper (Cryptelytrops rubeus) is a newly-discovered species that lives near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in Cambodia. National Geographic has more picture of the snake, including its attempt to eat an entire frog that's as big as the snake. Link-Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
The uncanny valley is about to get creepier, thanks to this realistic-looking animatronic eye developed by Dan Thomson of Visionary Effects. Will this be used for movie effects, Disneyland presidents, artificial girlfriends, or working robots? Maybe all of those things! -via Laughing Squid
OK, it's not really Dress Like A Monkey Day. I just made that up. BUT, doesn't Dress Like A Monkey Day sound like a fun holiday.
Can we talk seriously? Do you ever have the urge to dress your child like a monkey? Well, now you can with the Giggles Coat from the NeatoShop! Remember, you are not weird you are just an attentive parent.
Don't worry the NeatoShop has a matching Monkey Hat for you too. Oh, you are dressed the same! That is so cute! It's also a little weird, but hey who am I to judge.
Now this is strange. When you write on word processing software, online or not, you can justify, align left, align right, or center your text. But why center your text when you can centaur it? That's exactly what this generator does. Paste in your block of text -you have to paste a lot of words, so you may have to repeat yourself to see how it works- and then his the centaur button at the bottom. Voila! Your text is then centaured correctly! Link -via The Daily What
The estate at Witley Park in Britain has been a private home and a public facility at different times. What is visible above ground is nice enough, but the secret underground and underwater construction is a treasure. Deep passages lead to the rumored "ballroom under the lake", which, as it turns out, was originally built as a billiard room, but it wasn't the only glassed-in room. Guests can watch fish swim around them -or they could at one time or another. Link -via Metafilter
Also see: more pictures at Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/sets/72057594107271287/with/128621401/
Stephen put a lot of hard work into studying a "a particular cardiac arrhythmia" for his PhD. He is deservedly proud of achieving his diploma, but wanted something more interesting to display on his wall. This artwork is made up of words from his dissertation. Cool! Link -via reddit
This circa 1939 plan for a robotic dog on Mostly Forbidden Zone piqued my interest. I did a little digging and found an interesting story behind it. The Scottish Terrier, named Sparko, was designed by Westinghouse engineer, Joseph Barnett, to stimulate interest in their electrical products. The dog was the pet of a larger human-type robot named Elektro and was able to sit up, wag his tail and do various other dog tricks on command. Three Sparkos were made but none remain today.
The last confirmed sighting of Sparko was in California in 1957. The dogs were light-followers and legend has it that one of the three dogs was hit by a car and destroyed when it wandered out of an open door at the Westingouse lab.
by Ron E. Hassner, University of California, Berkeley
Figure 1. A specimen of Heliconius erato. The Lorenz butterfly may be a member of this species.
Here is the most complete record yet compiled of the travels of the Lorenz butterfly.
The most famous butterfly in science made its first reported appearance in 1972, in a paper on chaos theory presented by Edward Lorenz to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.1 In the paper, Lorenz presented a cornerstone argument of chaos theory: very small differences in initial conditions can lead to large effects in complex systems. He entitled the paper with an appropriate example, calling it, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Lorenz’s butterfly has since appeared in every conceivable reference to chaos theory. Yet despite its meteoric rise to fame, chaos theorists soon lost track of the butterfly’s whereabouts.
Reported Sightings In 1987, James Gleick rediscovered Lorenz’s butterfly and announced triumphantly that “a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”2 Gleick could not explain when or why the butterfly had moved to Peking, of all places, why it should suddenly shift its attention from tornadoes in Texas to storm systems in New York, or where it had been in the intervening fifteen years. But in 1992, five years after Gleick’s discovery, the butterfly returned to Brazil—specifically to Rio de Janeiro—where it was spotted by Denny Gulick.3
Figure 2. Global movements of Lorenz’s butterfly.
At this point, the sightings grew more frequent. In 1993, the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park located the insect in Beijing. Two years after that, several scientists reported, in this journal, seeing the subject in Lausanne, Switzerland.4 In 1996, Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan found it frolicking in France, and immediately pronounced that “a butterfly flaps its wings in Paris… [which] results in a hurricane in Miamii.”5 The year after that, the butterfly returned to its previous haunt in China. However, as David Campbell and Gottfried Mayer-Kress were to document, it had focused its attention on the weather in San Francisco.6 Peter Smith confirmed the butterfly’s Chinese location in 1998, by which time its flapping was affecting the climate of South England.7 John B. Arden spotted the butterfly in Venezuela that same year.8
Despite its now advanced age, Lorenz’s butterfly continues to be tracked by chaos theorists. In the year 2000, it was spotted in both the Amazon rain forest and Harrisburg, Virginia.9 By 2001, it had moved to California. From there, it flew to Japan, where Grove, Ladas & Grove located it 2004.10 That same year it appeared once more in Brazil and then returned to China in 2006.11
Figure 3. The mathematical pattern known as the Lorenz attractor.
Discussion The longevity and traveling speed of the famed butterfly have occasioned some dispute about its identity. The butterfly is possibly of the species Heliconius erato (also known as the “Red Postman”), famed for its extraordinary longevity (see Figure 3). Common in South America, it has an impressive tornado-inducing wingspan of 2.25 inches.12
Curiously, the pattern of the butterfly’s movements, as plotted on a world map, replicates a pattern that is characteristic of certain systems that exhibit so-called “chaotic” behavior. The tracings in Figure 1 compare easily with those in Figure 3, which shows a mathematical pattern known as the Lorenz attractor. This pattern was named after Edward Lorenz, the very man whose theory had first called attention to this novel branch of lepidoptery. More curiously still, the butterfly shape of the Lorenz attractor resembles none other than the Heliconius erato (compare Figure 3 with Figure 2). The significance or meaning of any of this has yet to be determined.
References 1. The Essence of Chaos, Edward Lorenz, University of Washington Press, 1993, pp. 14–5 and 181–4.
2. Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick, Viking, 1987, p. 8.
3. Encounters with Chaos, Denny Gulick, McGraw Hill, 1992, p. 92.
4. “Experimental Evidence of the Butterfly Effect,” D. Inaudi1, X. Colonna de Lega, A. Di Tullio, C. Forno, P. Jacquot, M. Lehmann, Max Monti, and S. Vurpillot, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 1, no. 6, November–December 1995.
5. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 156–7.
6. “Chaos and Politics: Application of Nonlinear Dynamics to Social-Political Issues,” David K. Campbell and Gottfried Mayer-Kres, The Impact of Chaos on Science and Society (Celso Grebogi and James A. York, eds.), 1997, p. 41.
7. Explaining Chaos, Peter Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1.
8. Science, Theology and Consciousness: The Search for Unity, John Boghosian Arden, Praeger, 1998, p. 23.
9. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, Roger Lewin, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 11; Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change, Robin L. Teske and Mary Ann Tetreault, University of South Carolina Press, 2000, p. 116.
10. Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World, Ervin Laszlo, Arthur Charles Clarke and Kay Mikel, Berrett-Koehler, 2001, p. 10; Periodicities in Nonlinear Difference Equations, E. A. Grove, Chapman & Hall, 2004, p. 38.
11. The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking, Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird, Springer, 2004, p. xxi; Science and Grace: God’s Reign in the Natural Sciences, Tim Morris and Don Petcher, Crossway Books, 2006, p. 332, note 23.
12. “Longevity Studies in a Tropical Conservatory: Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth?”, John R. Watts, Butterfly Pavilion of Westminster, CO, p. 8, table 2; “Schmetterlinge und Brustwarzen,” L. Arazi, Annals of the German Society for Entomology, vol. 8, no. 2, 1994; “Lifespan of Butterflies,” J. A. Scott, Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, vol. 12, 1973.
