If you think Yellow Menace is boring (Hey, we have real lives too! Much as I’d like to trawl the Internet all day…), then check out this blog by a plant in Japan.

Plant Blog

It has a little help from an engineer who wants to learn to communicate with plants. Personally, I think communicating with plants with be a disaster. A lot of people are already vegetarians because they can’t bear to eat intelligent animals; if they find out plants can think too they’ll all starve.

(I tried the vegetarian thing in high school for two years…by the end of it I wanted a hamburger so badly I would have killed my own mother for it. I tend to be anemic and when my iron is low I can tell because I crave raw meat…so I guess that little experiment was doomed from the start.)

Looks like all the fearmongering  regarding the operation of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has finally borne fruit. Inspired by numerous reports that the ginormous particle accelerator could potentially jump-start black holes which would then consume the planet, 16-year-old Chayya Lal took an overdose of medication to avoid dying in the ensuing cataclysm.

Chayya’s parents said she had spoken of her fears about the “Big Bang” experiment.

“Chayya had asked me a number of times whether the world would end as they were saying on television,” her father Bihari told the Hindustan Times.

“We tried to divert her attention and told her not to worry about any great disaster,” the Mail Today quoted him as saying.

The Mail said the local police inspector had raised doubts about the reasons for Chayya’s death and had vowed to investigate.

As sad as this is, I have to amusedly wonder what one has to lose if the world is going to end anyway? Why kill yourself when you’re convinced the entire world is going to be swallowed whole by a black hole? Dead is dead, ain’t it? And why choose certain-death over maybe-death?

A little forethought goes a long way…

So says a recent study that investigated the correlation between religion and the mental health of minorities…and speaking as a Filipino-American recovering Catholic (snicker), I can totally grokk where this is coming from.

Among adolescents who never attended church, Asian-American adolescents reported 4 percent fewer symptoms of depression in the preceding week than did their African-American peers.

In comparison, Asian-American youth who attended church at least once a week reported 20 to 27 percent more symptoms of depression than their white and African-American peers who attended at the same level.

Latino adolescents fared about the same as Asian Americans, reporting 6 to 14 percent higher rates of depression symptoms than did African-American and white teens when attending church at least once a week.

The results showed that in stark contrast to the findings for white and African-American adolescents, Asian-American adolescents who never attended services and Latinos attending at intermediate levels were the least likely to be depressed within their groups.

I always feel depressed when I’m dragged into a church service, usually because it means giving up doing something useful in lieu of paying lip-service to someone else’s invisible sky-friend.

I hate to say it, since it reinforced Hollywood stereotypes…but most scientists are big geeks.

I know this because my husband is a scientist, and he is a big geek (I am a big geek too, but I am not a scientist). Also, many of the scientists we know are big geeks.

He is a biochemist, which means he does things with proteins a lot. Proteins, and glass bottles, and mice. Some time ago he informed me that when scientists discover a new protein, they get to name it (if I could name a protein, I would call it Gloopy McFluffernutter, with an umlaut over the r, but no one asked me). There is actually some poor protein out there called SonicHedgehog. I am not even kidding. I bet all the other proteins beat up on it.

But at least now poor SonicHedgehog has a companion in silly named-ness. Some geeky Japanese scientists have named a protein Pikachurin, after the adorable/annoying as hell character of Pokemon fame.

For a description of Pikachurin and what it does, check out this link:

http://www.imeg.kumamoto-u.ac.jp/coe/liaisonlab/g24.html

Japan’s first orbital laboratory has opened its’ doors…and you know what that means…

Off-topic, but I’m excited about it (being a big Ray Bradbury fan and all): NASA’s Phoenix lander has successfully made it to Mars! The last polar lander, uh….didn’t quite make it.

(In space, no one can hear you explode).

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080525b.html

The Phoenix will be scooping up stuff and analyzing it to see if Mars once held water (and if it still might). I prefer to see it as NASA taking another step toward getting me to Mars before I die.

Okay, I’m going to ask our readership for a slight indulgence.

I know there are probably a few of you who are ready to permablock our site at the mere mention of Mr. Richard Dawkins. If you’re one of those people, then please just ignore this post and pretend you never saw it.

Read the rest of this entry »

…and, boomerangs behave in space exactly the same as they do in the Earth’s atmosphere. I know, kind of a letdown, eh? I blogged about this last month (which you can no longer read since our archives went down the tube when I moved everything over to Wordpress), and I’ve been wondering ever since what came of it. See for yourself.

Now I want to know what’s going on with the origami paper spaceship.