Animal Planet's Giving Me A Birthday Gift!

I've thought for a long time that Animal Planet has been dropping the ball on something. You see, they're supposed to be a whole network dedicated to Animals. Large, small, domesticated, wild - all of them. And they generally do a great job of that. They have specials about all kinds of creatures, from the littlest bugs to the largest whales. But they have overlooked one kind of animal, and it's kind of a biggie. Of course, since it's me talking, I'm referring to parasites.

I mean, come on - it's the most popular lifestyle on earth (just ask Carl Zimmer). How can a channel dedicated to animals of all kinds ignore the largest group of animals we have?

They can't - and they aren't. This summer, Animal Planet is premiering a new series called "Monsters Inside Me," a lovely foray into the disgusting, fascinating, and dangerous parasites that live inside people. As they write in their press release for the show:'

Not all monsters are big. In fact, some of the most deadly organisms in the world are invisible to the human eye. Using size to their advantage, microscopic parasites quietly invade their hosts without fear of inhibition or detection. Once inside, these creatures wait in concealment for months, or sometimes years, before striking—all the while, silently feeding off their victims...

“MONSTERS INSIDE ME is part horror movie, part medical detective story,” says Marjorie Kaplan, president and general manager of Animal Planet. “Parasites live everywhere—our water, soil and even in the air we breath. When it comes to these stealth creatures, there’s no where to hide.”

It's as if they heard my unspoken demands and decided to make an entire series to placate my whims - and, just to let me know that it's just for me, they're premiering it next week on July 1^st - MY BIRTHDAY. It's the best birthday gift Animal Planet could have gotten me*!

Monsters Inside Me is hosted by biologist Dan Riskin, who has a PhD from Cornell and currently works at Brown University studying the only mammalian parasite in the world - the Vampire Bat. He, along with medical professionals, probe into real cases of people infected with parasites large and small, from annoying to life-threatening.

Anyhow, mark your calendars for July 1^st at 9 PM EST! I'm also working on getting you some special sneak peaks or behind the scenes info from Animal Planet... so stay tuned!

*besides a nice, face-to-face interview with Dave Salmoni - HINT HINT

New Series "Understanding our Bodies: The Physiology of Nutrition"

Hey there Observations of a Nerd readers,

If you've been here long enough, you might remember me mentioning a side project that I write for called Nutrition Wonderland. Well, it's taken on a life of its own, and it's now a fully-functioning and amazing site on nutrition and health - you should go check it out.

I wanted to tell you guys about my newest endeavor there called "Understanding our Bodies: The Physiology of Nutrition." I'm writing a series about how the way our bodies work relates to what we eat and how we feel. If you like some of the stuff on here, you should really go check it out. Two installments are already up, Leptin, the Fullness Hormone and Serotonin, The Connection Between Food and Mood. They're both chock full of great information about our bodies and the science that went into what we know about them, and there will be more to come in the series.

Anyhow, I figured you might need something to read as I'm busy prepping and moving to Hawaii and have generally failed to be entertaining every day :)

Until Later,
Christie

Don't try this at home...

**giggle** That is one bold monkey - but the music really makes these videos.

Weekly Dose of Cute: Fennec Fox Babies

Yeah, yeah, I've done these little guys before. But come on - just watch the video. I dare you to claim that you are not overwhelmed by the Cute.


HT Zooborns, again. Those guys kick some serious ass when it comes to finding the world's cutest animals

I WANT

So, I kind of have an obsession with small and miniature versions of things. I saw this car in a parking lot yesterday, and I just couldn't help snapping a pic. I WANT THIS CAR.


It's a baby car! Isn't it ADORABLE? Someone should buy me a car like this. Seriously.

Warning: Absolute Genius.

Beaches come with warning signs about hazardous marine life or rough seas. Now, finally, someone is warning the marine life about its biggest threats. They're putting labels on aquarium tanks so that the sharks inside can read the danger that lurks on the other side of the glass:



HT Oceanic Dreams
Absolute genius, Save Our Seas - absolute genius.

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite: Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga

There is an entire family of wasps who use other species to raise their young, and they're a seemingly endless source of sci-fi worthy parasites. I've covered a few of them before, but none is quite so elegant as Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, a Costa Rican wasp with a fascinating and unique way of keeping its young safe until they can cocoon and turn into adults: it preys on spiders.

Spiders wouldn't seem like the best choice for nanny, what with their taste for bugs and all. But the daring Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga uses them anyhow. Unlike many parasitic wasps which lay hundreds or thousands of eggs into their hosts, this meticulous mom carefully avoids getting trapped in a hungry spider's web while it paralyzes the soon to be host temporarily and lays only one egg on the host spider's abdomen. Soon enough a larvae hatches, which stays on the spider's back sucking hemolymph (spider blood) through small holes while the spider goes on as if there's nothing new to see. It continues web building, eating and all its other daily activities for the next one to two weeks.

Before the spider knows it, the larvae is ready to pupate. But, as it turns out, a spider's web isn't the best place to cocoon up. It's a bit flimsy - designed to catch small flies not hold a heavy, thick cocoon. Though it does have one advantage: the sticky strings keep the cocoon suspended, safe from hungry ants and other creatures which might snack on the helpless wasp-to-be. Luckily (for the wasp, anyhow), the larvae has a special trick up its sleeve to make the web into a sturdy cocoon fortress. It has the spider spin it a thick, small, reinforced cocoon platform instead of a normal web then sit, motionless, in the middle, awaiting its fate.

How the larvae did this, for awhile, was a total mystery. Then some scientists looked a little deeper into what exactly goes on in the spider's last days. It turns out that the baby wasp uses some kind of chemical injected into the spider to achieve its web-building mind control. Instead of the usual five-step web building the spider does to build its regular patterned lair, it repeats only the first two, creating the cocoon ready platform (PDF of descriptive paper). If the larvae is removed just before the spider is killed, it still does a strange web alteration, but eventually goes back to its normal web pattern in a day or two.

With the platform ready and the spider patiently awaiting his ultimate demise, the larvae then freely molts, kills the spider with a toxic poison, and sucks the remains of the juicy insides out before discarding the carcass and building its cocoon. The platform keeps the growing wasp safe from other creatures until it emerges. The complete change in web-building style is one of the most impressive cases of host manipulation anywhere in the animal kingdom. And just imagine if we had a parasite that could so cleanly alter our behaviors to suit its needs!

Submit your questions for an interview with the Discovery Channel's Senior Science Editor Paul Gasek

There is a lot of debate in the shark biology community about the ever popular Discovery Channel yearly event "Shark Week."

On the one hand, it's an intense, interesting week of programming which draws a lot of viewers and attention to the animals that shark biologists hold near and dear to their hearts, the impressive Elasmobranchs themselves.

But many biologists argue that the portrayal of sharks by the Discovery Channel is wrong - that they jazz up the death, blood and gore to produce what is nicknamed "Shark Porn" : Creative activity (writing or pictures or films) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate an intense fear of all species of sharks. Many even call for the public to boycott Shark Week altogether.

In light of the debate, the ever talented shark biologist and fantastic science blogger WhySharksMatter from Southern Fried Sciene has managed to wrangle the Discovery Channel's Senior Science Editor Paul Gasek to discuss Shark Week and this issue in general. But, there's one problem - he needs questions. He's asking for your help and suggestions on what he should talk to Paul Gasek about. So go put in your two cents!

It's a huge opportunity for someone so high up in the food chain at Discovery to agree to such an interview - so go help my fellow blogger out, and be sure to stay tuned to Southern Fried Science for the actual interview!

Weekly Dose of Cute: African Pygmy Hedgehog

I wasn't exactly a normal kid. I loved animals, and after much convincing, I somehow got my mother to agree to let me have hedgehogs. Two of them, actually. One was a regular colored one named Spickle (because, she was "spickly" - spiky and prickly) and an albino one named Popcorn (because he was not only popcorn-colored but he liked to make popping noises and jump 4" in the air in a ball when he was upset). Anyhow, these photo reminded me of my favorite childhood pets:

C'mon, ain't they CUTE?! And just look at the pig-like nose - you can see why they're called "hogs".

Sorry... and more!

Hey there my dedicated blog readers,

Sorry there hasn't been much from me all week. I'm moving to Hawaii in less than a month, and between preparing for that 6,000 mile trek, a pick up in work (I suspect my boss trying to get the most out of my last couple weeks here), and general life, I've been really, really busy. I know, it's no excuse to ignore you, but it's the truth. So I apologize - I'll try to post more, but if I'm MIA for a little longer, at least you have a reason.

In the meantime, I suggest you hit the sidebar and check out the other great blogs I have on my blogroll - they're being better at posting than I am right now.

On an up note, The 3 Quark's Daily Science Blogging Contest has chosen The Top 7 Finalists.

Oh, and YEAH, we're in :). Thanks again to all of you who voted for my posts to get into the semifinals round - thanks to you, The End Of The Age Of Man? is duking it out with the best of the best for Top Quark!

The Votes Are In

It's June 8^th, and the votes are in for the first round of the 3 Quark's Daily Science Blogging Contest. The top 20 posts have been announced, and... drumroll please...

We're in! TWICE!

That's right, falling in at #17 is The End Of The Age Of Man? and barely squeaking in unnoticed at #20 is A Marine Biologist's Story. So a huge THANK YOU to all of you who voted!

Now, posts are being subjected to a harsh judging panel from 3QD, and a final 7 will be announced on June 11^th. Those top tier will face Steven Pinker, who will ultimately decide the Top Quark!

Thanks again to all of you, and good luck to the other contestants. It's a battle royale of great science blogging - there are posts in there by great writers like David from Southern Fried Science and Darren of Tetrapod Zoology, two of my favorite blogs. Go check out some of the other semi-finalists - they're great reads!

Time to Kiss and Tell!

Well, sort of.

A fellow blogger (Sheril, of The Intersection) is doing a survey experiment about kissing for a book she's writing called The Science of Kissing. It sounds like it's going to be a great book, but to finish it, she needs people to help her with an experiment. It's really simple - all you have to do is number a series of photos based on the type of kiss you think it is. She explains everything in her post. So go answer the quick survey and help her write a book!

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite: Schistosoma spp.

Yeah, those caterpillar mimicking trematodes were impressive. But we humans have our own trematodes which are pretty nasty, too. One group of trematodes which uses humans as a final host is the genus Schistosoma, like Schistosoma masonii on the right.

Like other trematodes, Schistosoma spp. have very complex live cycles involving multiple hosts. Here's a quick overview image:

So: the schistosome's life cycle. They start out as little eggs which leave the adult's host (humans) through the waste systems in urine or feces. These eggs then hatch into the first larval stage, which is called a miracidium. The miracidium seeks out a snail and burrows through its tissues to get to its gonads. There, it asexually reproduces to create 'sporocysts', and in the process thousands of copies of itself while castrating the unlucky mollusk. When the time is right, these copies transform again into cercaria, which kind of look like sperm, and for the same function: swimming. Upon bursting out of the snail, these little swimmers hunt down the nearest suitable host they can find by actually swimming towards them.

Now here's the sci-fi and kind of gross part. The cercaria, upon finding a nice new home, secretes an enzyme that breaks down our skin and burrows in deep. Soon enough, it finds a capillary and travels via our blood to our liver. There, they mature into adults, gorging themselves on red blood cells and finding mates to have casual encounters leading to lots more eggs.

And, like so often with parasites, it's the eggs that are the worst part. Some species of Schistosoma can produce thousands of eggs a day. These eggs aim ultimately to pass through the intestinal walls or the urinary tract and leave in feces or urine, but most fail to do so. Those that fail wreak havoc on our bodies. Because of enzyme secretions by the eggs, our immune system launches a devastating attack which ends up harming us more than the invading parasite young.

The disease state of being infected, called schistosomiasis, is awful, and more than 200 million people are infected worldwide every year, 300,000 of which die from it. It's a chronic infection which is a big problem in some third world countries where easy access to clean bathing waters and trematode-fighting drugs are unheard of. Infected individuals experience abdominal pain, cough, diarrhea, fever, fatigue, anemia, enlarged spleen and liver and generally feeling like crap. If untreated, eggs can end up in the nervous tissues and the brain, where they can cause seizures, paralysis, or spinal cord inflammation. Children who are repeatedly infected can develop anemia, malnutrition, and learning difficulties.

But, far worse than all of that is the calcified granulomas. Our bodies, in response to the invasive parasite, tell our immune system to attack at full force where the trematode's eggs end up. Over time, these damage tissues can take in calcium and become hardened scar tissue. The more eggs and the worse the body's reaction, the more hardened tissue forms. The chronically infected end up with large, hardened masses of liver and bladder, which, eventually, are fatal.

The sad part is that treatment is easy and safe, but so many of those who are infected have no access to it. The drug of choice is praziquantel, and each tablet costs approximately $0.08. To treat a child, which takes a few tablets, costs $0.20. Even still, many in the heavily infected areas cannot afford to keep taking the medication, which, by killing the worms, prevents the liver damage from getting bad enough to look like the children above.

Scientists are working on a vaccine for the elusive worm, but as with trying to vaccinate against any metazoan parasite, it's tough to find something that doesn't change to avoid immune detection. In the meantime, other measures include understanding which waters are infected, when the cercaria are most active, and getting villages safe, clean drinking and bathing water so they don't have to end up wading in trematode-infested waters.

Carnivalia!

It is with great pleasure that I announce to you all that Carnival of the Blue #25 is up! What better way to celebrate World Ocean Day than to read the best of the best in ocean blogging!

And, if you haven't already, don't forget to check out the Carnival of Evolution #12 over at Deep Sea News.

Any other important carnival announcements I missed?

Less Than 6 Hours Left - Go Vote!

Ok. Seriously. If you haven't voted in the 3 Quark's Daily Science Blogging Contest, do it. Now. There's only 6 hours left, and the clock is winding down until Midnight EST!

And, for that matter, Observation's Of A Nerd's 'A Marine Biologist's Story' and 'The End Of The Age Of Man?' are flirting with spots #19 and #20. So if you vote for one of them, you might just be guaranteeing its spot in the next rounds of competition!

Conservtives more easily disgusted

Our emotions are strongly tied to our morals. We're more likely to think something is wrong if it repulses us, even if we can't describe exactly why or how it is wrong. For example, most people would disapprove of consensual adult incest between siblings, but few would be able to articulate exactly why it is 'wrong.' This is very different from moral beliefs deduced from reasoning. These moral intuitions, which are highly motivated by emotional response or learned associations, are quick and require little supporting evidence in the person's mind.

Since emotions affect our morals, it easily follows that they affect our political beliefs. Two studies from Cornell University explored this relationship between disgust and politics and found a very interesting result: conservatives, particularly those that are conservative with respect to social issues like abortion and gay marriage, are more easily disgusted.

Why do humans feel disgust in the first place? Many scientists believe it evolved as a way of avoiding disease or unhealthy things - rotting fruit, feces and urine, wounds oozing puss, etc. Our bodies naturally react with revulsion to things that carry disease, parasites, or risks to our health. Disgust is ubiquitous in people. All people show a very specific face when feeling disgust, and can readily identify that same face in others: a raised the upper lip and wrinkle the nose, for example. Feeling disgust and seeing it in others is hard-wired into our brains: people with Huntington's, a neurodegenerative disorder, cannot tell when others are disgusted and do not show disgust when presented with something revolting.

So why do some of us feel disgust towards things that are not imminent health threats? No one's really sure. The assumption is that somehow our morals got tied into a much more primitive system (that of disgust). It's a phenomenon called preadaptation, where something that evolves for one purpose is later used for another. Think of feathers, for example. Many scientists believe that feathers evolved for displays or disguise, and only later were utilized in flight.

Issues like gay marriage and abortion are heavily rooted in moral beliefs. So researchers from Cornell University wanted to know how disgust related to those political views. What they found was that conservatives, in general, are more easily grossed out and repulsed by things.

To understand the link between disgust and politics, Cornell researchers performed a few experiments. First things first, they wanted to show how the human face responds when disgusted. In the first study, published in Science, they gave participants foul drinks and had them view photographs of uncleanliness and contamination-related disgust stimuli, including feces, injuries, insects, etc. In both cases, participants responded with the clear, well-known face of disgust (a look you probably had when you saw the image at the top of this post). They then had the participants play a game where they were treated unfairly to see if a moral situation provoked that disgusted facial expression. Sure enough, the same snarled lip expression occurred (Left). They even asked the participants afterward about their feelings, and offers that were rated as more disgusting were significantly associated with more activation of the levator labii region.

But the researcher's didn't stop there. In another paper, published in the journal Emotion, the researchers further probed the relationship between disgust and morality. This time they had participants take the Disgust Sensitivity Scale (DSS), a psychological measure which quantifies a person's sensitivity to a variety of forms of disgust from core disgust (feces, etc) to blood and gore, and even unusual sexual practices (like incest). They then compared this to the participants self-reported religious affiliation and political views. High sensitivity to disgust significantly predicted conservative views on topics like abortion and gay marriage, a connection not explained by religious affiliation. The same was not true for other non-disgust related issues like affirmative action, labor unions or gun control.

Even still, the researchers weren't done. Self reported data has its own flaws and faults - mostly, people lie or don't always represent themselves as they really are. So to test the connection between disgust and morality implicitly, the researchers designed a unique experiment (PDF). They had participants look at a scene. In it, a director appears to be encouraging two men or a man and a woman to kiss in public. They then took measures of disgust sensitivity. When asked if there was anything wrong with two men or straight couple kissing, the participants mostly said no. But when asked if the director intentionally encouraged the couples to kiss, those who were more sensitive to disgust were more likely to view the director's action as intentional when encouraging the gay couple - but NOT when encouraging the straight couple. This implicitly showed a bias against gay kissing even when the participants self reported as non-biased - a bias tied to their sensitivity to disgust in general.

In short, conservatives, especially those who are conservative on disgust-driven moral initiatives like gay marriage or abortion, are more easily disgusted. Since disgust is, at least in part, rooted to genetics, its possible that a part of our political views are literally determined in our genes.

The question is, how tied to our instinctive disgust system is this moral disgust? After all, it is the instinctive disgust which is in our genetics. A review of the article published in Science makes this note:

Unfairness and other moral violations may directly affect the disgust output system, after processing by some other evaluation system, or these violations might simply activate the verbal label "disgust," which would then activate the disgust output system. The outcome of either route would include the facial expression of disgust.

This means that while the data is convincing in tying disgust to political views, it doesn't say whether this disgust is innate, like repugnance of dirty toilets, or learned through our environments and merely hitchhiking on the disgust system. It's possible that the disgust shown and felt on moral issues comes from the word disgust being used to describe it, not from an inner sense of revulsion or morality.

But if it is rooted deeper, it's entirely possible that our genes help determine our political views, even before we understand what a liberal or a conservative is. Even without cultural influences, it is likely that those who are easily grossed out or squeamish are more likely to be conservative on moral issues.

Which makes sense, too, when we look at current moral stances. Many liberal viewpoints stress a logical understanding of the issue and a general "if it doesn't hurt another person, it's OK" attitude towards behaviors. Conservatives, on the other hand, press upon people to follow their instincts. Leon Kass, a noted conservative bioethicist, has argued for what he calls "the wisdom of repugnance" - that our natural aversion to something is evidence of its evil or wrongness. This different approach to defining 'right' and 'wrong' is at the center of disagreements between the two parties.

I think research like this fascinating because it probes deep into our understanding of why we feel the way we do. So often we spend so much time focusing on why one animal does this or why another does that we forget that we, too, are animals. We neglect that, as complex as our intellect may be in comparison, we still are shaped by our genes and our environments. And I think understanding is key, especially when it comes to politics. If we cannot understand why people feel how they do, we can never truly decide what is right or wrong for our society and ourselves.

Citations:
1.Chapman, H., Kim, D., Susskind, J., & Anderson, A. (2009). In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust Science, 323 (5918), 1222-1226 DOI: 10.1126/science.1165565
2.Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., & Bloom, P. (2008). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals Cognition & Emotion, 23 (4), 714-725 DOI: 10.1080/02699930802110007
3. Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., Knobe, J., & Bloom, P. (2009). Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays. Emotion, 9 (3), 435-439 DOI: 10.1037/a0015960
4.Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & Fincher, K. (2009). PSYCHOLOGY: From Oral to Moral Science, 323 (5918), 1179-1180 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170492

A Better Mood Broadens Your Field Of Vision

You often hear that happy people see the world differently. They look through 'rose colored glasses' or 'on the bright side.' There are a lot of phrases that connect mood and sight. Those less optimistic, as well, claim to 'see things as they are.' It's no surprise, then, that new research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that mood really does change how we see the world.

Though the pessimists "realists" might claim to be the ones who are most in touch with actuality, its the optimists that actually see more of the world around them. That's because, as researchers from University of Toronto have found, those who are in a better mood have a widened field of vision and see background and peripheral objects that their down counterparts ignore.

To see how mood affected vision, the researchers had people self-report their moods before and after looking at images while undergoing a fMRI brain scan. The Images had a central face with houses behind it. To get them to focus on the face instead of the houses, they were asked to determine which gender the face was. Meanwhile, the brain scan monitored what parts of their brains were being activated by the task.

Both happy and grim people saw and processed the image of the face in the center, which showed on the fMRI as activation in the fusiform face area (FFA, in green). But when it came to the seeing the whole picture, the participant's mood had a strong effect. The researchers found that those who said they were in good moods had more brain activity, particularly in the parahippocampal place area (PPA, in blue), a portion of the brain used to process places. In other words, they noticed the houses in the periphery, too, while the gloomy participants didn't.

"Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment," said Taylor Schmitz, lead author of the study, in a press release. "Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world." In the end, it seems, it's the optimists who get to see the big picture and are more in tune with the world around them.

While the scans look convincing, as with any study, more research is needed to understand exactly why or how mood impacts our brain activity and vision. It's possible that being in a better mood, while widening our field of view, also leads to us getting easily distracted. Bad moods, perhaps mediated through stress hormones, allow us to focus better.

But, for now, if someone tries to bring dampen your mood by saying you're unrealistic, you can tell them to stop being such a pessimist. And if they say that they're not "pessimistic," they're just "seeing things how they are" - correct them.


Schmitz, T., De Rosa, E., & Anderson, A. (2009). Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (22), 7199-7207 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5387-08.2009

C'mon guys!

I know, I know - there are still 3 days left of voting on the 3 Quark's Daily Science Blogging Prize. I shouldn't be sweating it yet. But c'mon - we're right on the cusp of the top 20 with A Marine Biologist's Story AND The End Of The Age Of Man!

I'm biting my nails watching the numbers slowly creep. About 30 more for each and they'll probably coast right into the next round - you can do it: you have the power! I've got the medical students where I work voting. I know my fans can match them vote for vote! You guys, after all, are the best blog readers on the internet!

I know not all of you have voted. Some of you voted for others - it's ok, I forgive you. But if you haven't voted and you don't have other favorites, please, please, please - go vote for one of those two! You gotta scroll a ways down to the Os (for "Observations of a Nerd"), but you'll get there. And then, if you're really awesome, send the voting link along to a couple friends and have them do the same. Just give me a chance to battle it out in the judging rounds!

Thanks to all of you who voted, for me or not. It's a fun contest to be a part of (good luck to everyone in it) and your votes are key to finding a Top Quark!

The Happiest Sheep Ever.

This image just made me grin like the Cheshire cat.


Thanks, Allie
(who, in turn, got it from Animal Planet's Twitter Feed)

Oooo I'm a winner!

No, not Publisher's Clearing House.

And not that 3 Quark's thing - not yet, anyway. You know, you could go vote for observation's of a nerd, though, and better my odds...

But, no, I'm referring to something way more awesome to win. I'm this month's everyONE PLoS ONE Blog Post of the Month! Miraculously, out of 48 entries, the kind folks over at everyONE have chosen my post on a PLoS paper about size and status as this month's winner.

Thanks for the love, everyONE! I know those other posters are incredible bloggers, so I feel really honored to have won amongst this elite group!

Time to Vote!!

All right all 300 or so listeners of mine (wow, that sounds like a lot). The voting link is up for the 3 Quark's Daily Best Science Blog Post. So go and vote for your favorite science blog post(s) - though, if you need suggestions, there are four down in the Os that I think are phenominal. The top 21 posts in terms of voting by June 8th get judged by the elite panel to determine the winner, so for me to have a chance at that year's supply of Ramen I'll have to hope to make it into the top 21!

There are some others that I could be OK (I guess) with you voting for. There are 3 by Southern Fried Science, for example, which are also very deserving. But, really - check out that O section. It's a good one. My picks: Observations of a Nerd's "The End Of The Age Of Man?" or "A Marine Biologists Story".

Weekly Dose of Cute: Let's Be Friends

This adorable image is thanks to Let's Be Friends, a blog of images of odd animal friendships. I love the simple motto: "If they can do it, then so can we."