Next time you check into a motel, look under the drawers and tables. Online photo-comic artist Chris Yates has been waging war on uniformity and alienation in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Utah. And those are just the ones we know about.
[Utah, It May Be Good for You]
All posts by Tom Marcinko
Of Mice, Men, Women, Children, and Bacteria: Are Microbiota Linked to Obesity?
This isn’t likely to let us off the hook for diet and exercise. But reseachers at Mayo Clinic Arizona and Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute say the trillions of bacteria in your gut may play a role in regulating your weight. Mice that lack certain bugs tend to be fatter than their germ-free laboratory counterparts, and exposing lab mice to the germs makes them fatter. How much they eat, and how often they hit the exercise wheel, don’t seem to have an impact.
What about people? One study of children from birth to age 7 found:
The children who were normal weight at age 7 had distinctly different bacteria in their [stool] samples than those collected from overweight-obese children, suggesting that differences in the composition of the gut microbiota precede overweight-obesity.
The usual caveats apply: The bacteria/obesity connection has yet to be proved, and more research is needed before this leads to obesity treatments. SFnal scenarios about genetic engineering, nanotech, weight regulation, or gypsy curses are good to go.
[Illustration: deletem3]
Question Surveillance, Go to Jail
Normally I’d leave surveillance-outrage stories to BoingBoing, but really:
Four young residents of a North Philadelphia house who circulated petitions questioning police-surveillance cameras were rousted from their home Friday and detained 12 hours without charges while police searched their house…. 9th District Police Capt. Dennis Wilson…was quoted …as saying of the residents: “They’re a hate group. We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we’ll probably have to let them go.”
If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be asking questions.
[Thanks, Eschaton; London ’05 photo by nolifebeforecoffee]
Entangled Up in Blue: Quantum Images
Researchers at the Commerce Department’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the University of Maryland have used laser beams to produce less “noisy” images, according to Science Express via Science Daily. The experiment could lead to better computers and information-storage. The images are born in pairs, “like twins separated at birth,” at slightly different frequencies. None of that is necessarily weird, but:
Look at one quantum image, and it displays random and unpredictable changes over time. Look at the other image, and it exhibits very similar random fluctuations at the same time, even if the two images are far apart and unable to transmit information to one another. They are “entangled”–their properties are linked in such a way that they exist as a unit rather than individually.
The photo-montage of quantum cats is made from color-treated images used in the experiment. The lines suggest how entanglement occurs. What else could we do with quantum entanglement? It would be fun to make entangled drawings or paintings.
[Image: Vincent Boyer/JQI]
Words for Worlds: What We’re Calling Pluto Now
You might think that a dwarf planet is, oh, a planet, and that would settle it. But the International Astronomical Union just decided that the new classification for Pluto-like objects such as Eris, Ceres — and, presumably, Sedna, Orcus, Varuna, and Quaoar — is “plutoid.” Fearless prediction: Nobody is going to like this word. If you were the first to set foot on any of these objects, wouldn’t you want credit for being first on a planet? Bad enough that I have to tell my son that Xena was only the unofficial name for Eris, and that Buffy probably won’t stand as an astronomical name, either.
[Children protest Pluto’s reclassification, c. 2006, Wikimedia Commons]
