Went all out for Xmas over at mentalfloss.com. Plenty of posts on the science and/or history of various seasonal wonders, and more to come (…maybe, I dunno, ask may editor).

Are There Really Virgin Births?

Who Sent the First Christmas Card?

Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?

No more haggis!

The traditional Scottish dish, made by taking a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal and spices and boiling it in a sheep’s stomach, is at risk because lung worms are thriving in the warming climate. The parasite has always been an occasional problem, but infections in sheep are rising because there are less hard frosts on grazing land and the worms can stay on the surface longer, where they’re eaten by the sheep. The more sheep that get infected with lung worm, the harder it is for butchers to get their hands on a decent lung.

Adding to the problem is the fact roundworm and fluke, have become less common in sheep. If evidence of these parasites isn’t found in sheep droppings, then farmers tend not to give the animals de-worming treatments.

Haggis makers have their fingers crossed and some are sourcing lungs from Ireland during shortages. Offal lovers everywhere are no doubt anxious for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to tackle the problem.

Photo: Ian Britton, supplied by FreeFoto.com

The other day, I got an automatic renewal notice for my domain name, which means MattSoniak.com is a year old. To celebrate, I’ll post some old stories from the blog’s previous incarnations that I didn’t move to the current version.

First up is a piece from March about a neurological study of jazz musicians that my co-Flosser Ransom Riggs just mentioned on the m_F blog…

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Dr. Charles Limb, a former research fellow with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and a gifted jazz saxophonist himself[1]. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind.”

If you’ve ever been in “the zone,” making it up as you go along, or even seen someone hitting that sweet spot, you know it’s more than remarkable. It’s spiritual, it’s transcendent and it’s addictive.

Now, we have a clearer picture of how the brain helps us do that, a cognitive context for creative improvisation.

Limb and his fellow researcher at NIDCD’s (which is part of The National Institutes of Health) Division of Intramural Research, Dr. Allen Braun, chief of the division’s Language Section, both assumed that, as mystical as a musician might look following their muse, creativity is a matter of firing neurons. It’s tangible. We can understand it, and even see in action. That’s what Limb and Braun wanted to do: view, in real time, the brain functions of musicians during improvisation. But how do you see what musical improv (and beyond that, improvisation of any sort, from problem solving to having a conversation) looks like from the inside out? How do you view a brain on jazz? [Read more]

The best science reporting of 2008!

In any history class you’ve ever taken, the first thing you probably talked about was the Fertile Crescent. The half-moon shaped chunk of land in the Middle East, watered by the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was the birthplace of human civilization. Today, we associate the area with endless deserts, oil and improvised explosive devices.

But that’s about to change. The endless desert part, anyway. Last Friday, the United Nations announced a plan to restore Iraq’s wetlands (according to some scholars, the site of the Garden of Eden) and list them as a World Heritage Site.

The Iraqi wetlands (saying it over and over doesn’t make the idea seem any less weird, does it?) once covered a tens of thousands of square miles and were home to snakes, lizards, frogs, fish, water buffalo, gazelles, jerboa, birds and tribes of people known as the Marsh Arabs or Ma ˤdān (’dweller in the plains,” a disparaging name given to them by desert tribes).

Today, the wetlands are mostly decimated. First, fighting during the Iran-Iraq War spilled into the area. Then, in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began draining the area and diverting water flow in order to expand military access to the land, gain more political control over the Marsh Arabs and flush out rebels after a failed Shia uprising.

When U.S. forces invaded in 2003, only some 400 square miles of marsh remained. Once Hussein’s regime was brought down, locals began destroying the dams that held water back and allowed the wetlands to flood again. Today, more than half the original wetlands have been restored, and thousands of birds and fish, as well as the Marsh Arabs, have returned to the land.

The U.N.’s project, which is being partially funded by Italy, will concentrate providing safe drinking water and renewable energy for the Marsh Arabs, planting reed banks and beds and managing the re-flooded areas to ensure the return of plant life. If all goes well, Iraq could be able to approach the World Heritage Committee for listing in two years.

Image: “Marsh Arabs poling a traditional mashoof in the marshes of southern Iraq.” Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

Yesterday morning, the first proton beams took a few laps around the Large Hadron Collider. On the Mental_floss blog, I explained the physics that will save us from black holes and the fail safes that will save us from technical glitches.

If the fact that the Earth isn’t going to be destroyed by the LHC isn’t reason enough to celebrate, then we have these lil’ guys…

Cuter than the real hypothetical ones and you can snuggle with them without having to build a particle accelerator in your bedroom.

These two items popped up in my Google Reader at the same time. I present them without comment (and, again, without bird puns, which takes more willpower than you know).

New findings challenge long-held assumptions about flightless bird evolution

Five of the Largest Birds in History

Also, the Large Hadron Collider will be doing all sorts of quantum magic in less than a week. Check out the _floss on 10th, when I explain how the LHC’s handlers plan to keep it from destroying the universe.

First I have to share this short film about the power of love…

The official website also has some sketches and a making of.

And if that wasn’t enough, in real-life octopus news, researchers suggested last week that our eight-legged friends don’t really have eight legs. Coordinated tests at 16 aquariums across Europe found that octopuses favor certain limbs for certain tasks (the back two for propulsion, the front two for handling and examining objects), which the scientists say makes for two legs and six arms. They also found that octopuses can be left or right handed. The research is in its final stages now, but once it’s published I’ll give it a full write up.

When you enjoy the simple pleasures that I do – heavy metal, zombie movies, all things Batman – it’s not often that life imitates art in a way that you can appreciate. Sometimes, though, Mother Earth will surprise me with just how cool she is.

Case in point: Generations of musicians have been taking Black Sabbath-esque riffs and dragging them to lower, slower depths. We’re at the point now where some of the best guitar riffs are just a single chord degrading over the course of a few minutes at 32Hz.

The songs of male blue whales, long thought to be the way they attract mates, have likewise been getting lower over the last 40 years, and in some populations have dropped in frequency by as much as 30 percent (mind you that whale songs were already mostly too low for human ears to hear).

Besides a desire to jump on the drone bandwagon before the Next Big Thing comes along, what could be prompting the whales to lower their songs so much, so quickly?

The scientists researching the trend can’t explain it, but hypothesize that it might be because the whale population is rebounding after years of commercial whaling bans, and with more whales around, a lower song gives a male an edge when attracting a mate.