It seems scientists haven’t quite figured out the exact causes or treatment for those annoying eyelid twitches most of us occasionally suffer through.

Fasciculations are the result of some kind of irritability of the nerve fibers. Because fasciculations are benign, they haven’t been studied particularly deeply. (But, not all involuntary muscle twitches are fasciculations—more on that later.) So we don’t really know even where in the nerve the irritation is picked up—it could be in the cell body, could be further out in the fibers, nobody really knows. It is also thought that the exact localization of the fasciculation is random, meaning that you will feel a twitch in your arm or leg or eyelid without having necessarily irritated a nerve anywhere near the place you experience the twitch.

Causes are also only loosely understood; there are certain behaviors that can trigger fasciculations, including too little sleep, too much exercise, a lack of magnesium, and the use of stimulants (especially caffeine), but no study has been able to concretely pin a cause on fasciculation. These presumed causes are correlations; adjusting your stress, magnesium, caffeine, sleep, and exercise level can help with fasciculations, but that’s not evidence of causation.

So to get rid of the little buggers, try making some changes in your life. Or just suffer through them. *sigh*

(Source: PopSci)

After reading this list of crazy actions and comments by Toronto mayor Rob Ford, I’m left with two questions:

1. How did this man get elected?
2. How has he not been recalled or otherwise thrown from the office?

(Source: New York Magazine)

For Pike’s 30th birthday, the San Francisco Zoo brought in some snow. Her face says it all.

(Source: BuzzFeed)

“Psychic” Sylvia Browne is back in the news again after the escape from captivity of Amanda Berry in Cleveland. Browne now-infamously told Berry’s mother that Amanda was dead. The woman died a few years back without ever finding out Browne’s assertion was wrong.

Although, if she’d known more about Browne’s record, she may have been able to take some hope.

Early in 2010, an article in Skeptical Inquirer provided an extensive study of Sylvia Browne’s predictions about missing persons and murder cases, along with her messages and visions “from beyond the grave.” It examined every episode of the Montel Williams TV show after 2002, when she began to be featured there regularly, and explored older cases in newspapers, finding 115 examples of these appearances and articles, and comparing them with the actual facts and Browne’s oft-repeated claim that her accuracy rate, to quote her exactly:

     …is somewhere between 87 and 90 percent, if I’m recalling correctly.

Sylvia’s recollection – strangely – is very, very, poor. It was shown that in not one of those 115 records – some of which had to be recovered from data that had been deleted from video records and/or published documents – was she correct!

That’s worse than chance. If you flipped a coin with one side representing “alive” and the other “dead”, you’d get better results than if you listened to Sylvia Browne.

(Source: James Randi Educational Foundation)

Here’s a unique form of political protest, courtesy of an Australian schoolchild: Chucking a Vegemite sandwich at the Prime Minister.

The media went a little crazy even though the half-sandwich missed by a good distance. The Prime Minister, though, was good-natured about it:

“But I think out of hundreds and hundreds screaming overexcited kids, one kid thought they might be just a little bit naughty and had a little squealing sense of delight as they did it. So there was half a sandwich, which was really on the ground, it wasn’t anywhere else. A bit of high jinks.”

(Source: The Telegraph)

At least he’s honest.

(Source: BuzzFeed)

A newly discovered fairyfly has been tagged with the beautifully evocative name Tinkerbella nana.

Fairyflies are tiny parasitic wasps and include many of the smallest known insects. Just how small are these guys?

So how small can an insect be? Huber and Noyes conclude, rather convincingly, that no insect smaller than 150μm in length would be capable of flapping flight and none under 125μm could completely lift their body off the substrate and effectively ambulate. Females of a mymaridclosely related to the new species, Kikiki huna, at 158-190μm, are thus effectively at the lower limit for a flighted insect, and the male of Dicopomorpha echmepterygis at that for normal walking.

(Source: The Guardian)

In the new study, researchers led by Clayton and fellow Cambridge psychologist Ljerka Ostojić decided to study whether Eurasian jays understand that other jays have their own desires and motivations, an ability known to cognitive scientists as “state attribution.” It’s not in itself a full-blown theory of mind, but it’s a key component.

….

The researchers allowed male jays to watch as their mates, separated from them by a screen, ate their fill of either moth larvae or mealworm larvae. The males could then offer either a single mealworm or moth through the screen as a gift.

For jays as well as people, variety is valued: A jay that’s gorged on moths will generally prefer to eat mealworms afterwards, and vice versa, just a person satiated by chocolate will next take a slice of cake.

The male jays’ choices bore that awareness out. After watching their mates eat one type of food, the males consistently made gifts of the other. Based on what they’d observed, they knew what their mates would want. Importantly, females didn’t communicate a preference. When their meals were hidden from sight, males failed to give the desired gift.

This distance between humans and animals keeps shrinking.

(Source: Wired)

IPEDS Data Center is a free consumer information tool designed to help students, institutions, university administrators, statisticians, and others get information about more than 7,000 postsecondary institutions in the United States - such as programs offered, student enrollment and completions, retention and graduation rates, prices, financial aid available, degrees awarded, and human resources data. The tool supports several fuctions [sic] that facilitate data retrieval from the system.

After a couple of days of on-and-off searching for enrollment trend data for a couple of universities, this finally got me what I need. As a bonus, it’s fairly easy to use.

(Source: IPEDS Data Center)

But I think it is a mistake to think that we stop being told what good and bad books are at the school level. It continues every day. You are informed about a book’s perceived quality through a number of ways. One of those ways is the cover. The cover may be the biggest message-bearer. Other messages include: blurbs (who they are from), comparisons, review coverage, store placement, and categorization.

And the simple fact of the matter is, if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it. If we sell more — and we often don’t — it is simply because we produce candy, and who doesn’t like candy? We’re the high fructose corn syrup of literature, even when our products are the same. It’s okay to sell the girls as long as we have some men to provide protein.

Maybe this idea that there are “girl books” and “boy books” and “chick lit” and “whatever is the guy equivalent of chick lit”* gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints. Maybe we should do boys the favor we girls received — a reading diet featuring books by and about the opposite sex. Clearly, it must work.

One way we can do that quite easily is by looking at the covers. We’re told not to judge books by them, but… EVERYBODY DOES. That is what they are for. They are the packages that get your attention, that give you messages about what to expect.

(Source: Huffington Post)

After a decade of war, thousands of veterans are transitioning into civilian life with one of the military’s most generous benefits: tuition reimbursement. They’re heavily recruited by a growing number of schools eager to tap into the full ride at public universities (or $18,000 a year for private schools) veterans get after three years of continuous service.

But as GI money flows into Minnesota schools — totaling $300 million since 2009 — fewer GI Bill programs are being monitored. In Minnesota, the state agency charged with overseeing programs that get GI Bill funding has been ordered by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs to cut back inspections by as much as 80 percent, raising concerns that many GI Bill programs can become subject to waste, fraud or abuse.

Meanwhile the number of programs approved for GI Bill funding continues to grow, jumping 30 percent in the past decade. Since 2009, more than 180 Minnesota schools have received funding.

All of those schools are supposed to be kept in line by two inspectors. Just two.

Now there are a number of schools falsely claiming that veterans can use their GI Bill money for tuition there, that they have other accreditations they actually don’t, and that they follow VA funding procedures they don’t. All of those things mean that veterans often end up footing the bill for training that they thought they’d already paid for with military service.

The knock on effects from public sector budget cuts continue to mount.

(Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune)

…it’s been clear since the onset of human spaceflight during the Cold War that the unique, low-gravity environment of Earth’s orbit has strange effects on fire and firefighting efforts.

And those strange effects include

fire in space burns at lower temperatures and more slowly, and that fire extinguishers relying on pressurized liquids can actually cause fires to spread and grow.

And materials that are fireproof on Earth are … not so fireproof in space.

On Earth, [fire] was only able to burn in the direction of air flowing into the fire. But in space, it was able to burn both in the direction of the air flow and against it. That’s because of the buoyancy of air itself: hot air on Earth rises, drawing cooling air into a lit fire and regulating its size and speed. But in space, there is no buoyancy, so “if you get just enough oxygen to the flame, the flame is able to spread happily,” Ferkul explained.

In other words, fire down here requires a draft to keep going. In space, it just needs access to oxygen.

(Source: The Verge)

In cores of sediment drilled from the Pacific Ocean bottom, the researchers found traces of iron-60. It’s a heavier isotope of iron forged only by supernovas and mostly vanishes in a couple dozen million years. What’s more, they found the iron-60 inside 2.2-million-year-old bacteria organs called magnetosomes, which the microbes use to sense the Earth’s magnetic field.

It’s the first concrete example of Carl Sagan’s famous “We’re made of star-stuff” declaration I’ve run across.

(Source: PopSci)