Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 12.31
- The weirdest indicators of serious medical risks – From cerberus40.
- UK’s foreign aid strategy puts focus on safe abortion and contraception – From an anonymous reader.
- Get the inside scoop on dog cloning – From Gloworb.
- Wee progress on asparagus smell – “Two experiments, involving a set of 38 adult male and female eaters and sniffers (recruited via a newspaper ad.) have made steps towards clarifying the enigma – confirming that there are genetic factors at work when it comes to being able to detect the odor.”
- Cute Animal Friday! Best Maru moments of 2010 from Madfishmonger. Christmas at the Porter house involves epic tree destruction by kitties.
Over the years, our immune systems are exposed to many kinds of pathogens. The older we get, the more practice our immune systems have. And yet, the older we get, the more susceptible to disease we are. Looking at it that way, the weirdest indicator of risk of health problems is old age.
I didn’t know some people couldn’t smell that asparagus odor…possibly the last brand new thing I learn before the end of this year, lol.
That asparagus experiment was infamous at my high school. Mr. Roth, the biology teacher, did it every year. After many years he started to wonder what the pure chemical smelled like. He ordered a bottle of methyl mercaptan to find out. Not a big one for reading instructions he failed to note that the boiling point of the liquid was well below room temperature. To his credit he knocked the glass stopper off inside a fume hood where the contents started to boil vigorously. The vapors went up the hood, across the roof, and back down into the windows. That day the entire school found out who could smell the chemical and who couldn’t.
i didn’t know asparagus has an odor. i’ll have to sniff it net time i have some.
@davew: That’s just an awesome science class story…plain awesome.
I think that one is as much fun for science teachers as the PTC genetic testing.
@captsam, I don’t know about the asparagus themselves, but you can definitely smell them next time you do #1.
For that matter, I’ve also been able to detect having drank a lot of coffee that way.