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Ever wondered if your Florida grapefruit is really from Florida? After all, how can you trust those flimsy little stickers. Well, researchers have a solution to this important problem: lasers!

Via Physorg.com:

Laser labeling of fruit and vegetables is a new, patented technology in which a low-energy carbon dioxide laser beam is used to label, or “etch” information on produce, thereby eliminating the need for common sticker-type labels.

In the United States, the FDA is in the final stages of approving this “tamper-free labeling technology.” Laser-etching of fruits and veggies is already underway in New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Rim countries, and it has been been approved in many other regions.

There’s actually some science behind laser-etching. A recent study in the journal HortTechnology concluded “the fruit quality remains high as the invasion of the epidermis does not incite decay [or] provide an avenue for food pathogens,” as the laser essentially cauterizes the peel of the fruit. “The technology will offer the grapefruit industry a safe alternative to adhesive sticker labeling without enhancing decay susceptibility.” Thank goodness for that.

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Image: Agricultural Research Service and University of Florida

The weekend is finally here, and to make sure that you don’t stray off your diet, we’ll leave you with a new video on the science of overeating.

Basically your eyes are your enemy. The evidence lies in a bottomless soup bowl experiment devised by the 2007 Ig Nobel prize winner in Nutrition, Brian Wansink. Participants in the experiment were 73 percent more likely to eat a larger portion of soup if their bowl was imperceptibly refilled as they ate, according to the research titled Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake, published in the journal Obesity.

For Wansink’s take on the results, check out the episode:

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Video: minimovies.org

Yes, children are getting fatter in the U.S. And reactions are ranging from none at all to borderline extreme. On the latter end of this spectrum comes the announcement that bake sales are being banned in all New York City schools. The New York Times reports:

In an effort to limit how much sugar and fat students put in their bellies at school, the Education Department has effectively banned most bake sales, the lucrative if not quite healthy fund-raising tool for generations of teams and clubs.

The change is part of a new wellness policy that also limits what can be sold in vending machines and student-run stores, which use profits to help finance activities like pep rallies and proms. The elaborate rules were outlined in a three-page memo issued at the end of June, but in the new school year, principals and parents are just beginning to, well, digest them.

Granted, all hope is not lost for sweets-craving sugar addicts:

Parent groups and Parent-Teacher Associations are conspicuously given an exception: once a month they are allowed to sell as many dark fudge brownies and lemon bars as they please, so long as lunch has ended.

Sticks of butter will also be available at a discount.

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Image: iStockphoto

We here at Discoblog consider it our duty to bring attention to terrible science stories. Some recent notable bombs include “Woman are evil and want your husband” and “Twitter Will Make You Eeevil.”

Now, here’s an example of a good story about some bad research: The BBC reports that British researchers are conducting all manner of frivolous experiments, including how to make the perfect piece of toast. The study isn’t new— the flurry of news about it occurred in 2003—but the debate over the need for important research versus, well, silly work is as fresh as ever.

Here are the details: Leeds University food scientist Bronek Wedzicha studied what temperature of bread and butter would make the most delicious toast. The research was part of a PR effort by butter company Lurpak to get the word out—in case you were wondering—that butter is tasty.

BBC reports:

“The equation, which was spurious, captured the imagination but we didn’t get the flavour-release message across. It was aimed at the food industry and scientists working in flavour science and people who are formulating food and trying to work out what properties they need,” says Wedzicha…

“We wouldn’t work exclusively to do PR, we have to have an economic return, which in this case was a greater understanding of flavour release mechanism,” says Wedzicha. “We got £10,000 and Lurpak got some very good PR out of it.”

Granted, some areas of frivolous research have turned up interesting results. Students from University of Plymouth studied the infinite monkey theory by putting a computer in a cage with six primates, but the monkeys destroyed the computer and managed to type the letter “s” over and over again. And when a sword swallower and a radiologist surveyed 100 sword swallowers about their injuries, they learned that many suffered from major bleeding of the stomach.

There’s talk about revising the distribution of research money, so that funds go to researchers working on projects with the most social, economic, and cultural impact. However, silly science isn’t always a bad thing, some researchers argue—if someone finds something interesting while researching their life-long work, then the extra attention can only help them.

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Image: flickr/ westwrite

So your date this weekend didn’t turn out like you’d hoped. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s  sounds like the perfect remedy, right? But while a bowl of Phish Food might make you feel good now, if a recent study is any indication, the ice cream binge may trick your brain into scarfing high-fat foods for the next several days.

From PhysOrg.com:

Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain. Once there, the fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation.

While we’ve known full well that a high-fat diet is bad for you, and that obesity is on the rise, the study’s results helps explain fats’ role in thwarting the hormones that control appetite. One type of fat, palmitic acid—a saturated fatty acid found in foods like butter, cheese, milk and beef—is particularly skilled at shutting your brain up and letting your body eat more. The effect can last up to three days, which is bad news for those trying to watch their weight during beer-and-wing-fueled football weekends.

The study was performed on rats and mice, but the scientists say their results reinforce common dietary recommendations. Next up, the research team wants to investigate how long it takes to rebound from short-term, high- fat intake.

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Image: flickr/stu_spivack

• It’s arachna-Bowie! A rare, hairy, and yellow spider has been named after the master of Ziggy Stardust himself. It’s new title: Heteropoda davidbowie.

• Today’s flabbergast: If Fruit Loops are a healthy food, our derriere is a color television set.

• Swimmers of Amity Island, beware—great white sharks have been tagged up in New England (hear that, Robert Shaw?).

• It was only a matter of time: Porn hits Twitter.

• Meanwhile, Boulder, CO is being taken over by ladybugs.

Could part of the solution for global warming fit inside an ice cream cone? Maybe—at least, that’s what the developers of so-called “ambient” ice cream are hoping.

Unilever, the world’s largest ice cream producer (and owner of perhaps the world’s best ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s), is trying to figure out how to produce a new kind of frozen treat that can be shipped and sold at room temperature, before being frozen at home once purchased. The goal is to reduce the carbon that is needed to keep today’s ice cream from turning into a sloppy mess. The Times Online reports:

A spokesman for Unilever said that warm, or so-called ambient, ice cream was a “very interesting idea” but one that posed tough challenges that its scientists were trying to solve. “The key question which has yet to be fully answered is: how do you ensure that, when the ambient ice cream is frozen at home it will have the right microstructure to produce a fantastic consumer experience?”

The new ice cream may be the tastiest part of an overall program to help Unilever cut down on the impact its products, such as dishwashers and refrigerators, have on the environment. Of course, an even bigger way to reduce carbon: Eat less ice cream.

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Image: flickr / lilivanili

We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms.

Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we’d like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them.

Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish can be farmed in the ocean away from the coastal waters. The Aquapod cage has 8-foot long propellers, which are controlled and powered from a generator in an attached boat. The cage, which strikingly resembles the Apple Store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, is built with triangular panels that are coated in steel nets. National Geographic reports:

“The idea of a cage towing a buoy, with the buoy in radio contact with the shore, is quite feasible,” [director Cliff Goudey said]. “It’s a little futuristic for today’s industry, but we could have a sensor on the cage which gives its heading and a GPS system to report its effective speed over the ground.”

Another group at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory has a more open idea for a “cage”: They allow their fish to swim freely, but train them to return to their cage at the sound of a dinner bell. Granted, fish are hardly terriers: The bell worked for black sea bass for about a week, but when a school of bluefish came to dine on the bass, they refused to return to their cage despite the researchers’ offer of free food.

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Image: flickr/ Swamps

Will showing pictures of cake to dieting women send them running for the Entenmann’s outlet? Or strengthen their resolve to avoid sweets? The answer is option B, according to a study of 54 women out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New Scientist reports:

[Study leader Floor] Kroese and her colleagues asked 54 female students to look at a picture of either a slice of chocolate cake or a flower under the guise of a memory test. The researchers then questioned the students about any plans to eat more healthily and offered them a choice between a chocolate or oatmeal cookie.

Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie – which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option.

Kroese  speculates that in this case, viewing pictures of the objects of their temptation—not the cake itself, mind you, but pics of it—” reminded people of their goal to watch their weight, and helped them act accordingly.” Of course, it’s doubtful that we should start papering billboards with German chocolate cake to curb the obesity epidemic:

Kroese suggests that sticking pictures of tempting foods on the fridge door may help to bring weight-watching goals to mind. But she cautions that the results can only be applied to women wanting to lose weight: it is unclear whether they would hold in the general population.

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Not that we need an excuse to eat chocolate, but if you’ve had a heart attack, you may want to grab the Ghirardelli. Scientists know that eating dark chocolate (not milk—that’s the obesity-feeder) can reduce person’s risk of stroke and heart disease. Now researchers have found that eating chocolate can increase a person’s chances of survival after they’ve suffered a heart attack.

In the Journal of Internal Medicine, Boston researchers published a study finding that when people who’d had a heart attack ate chocolate two to three times a week, they significantly reduced their risk of dying from heart disease.

The scientists studied over 1,000 non-diabetic Swedish men and women between the ages of 45 and 70, all of whom had suffered from a heart attack in the 1990s. They were asked about their diet over the past year and about how much chocolate they ate. The researchers compared their heath exam from the three months after their initial hospital stay to their condition eight years later. They found that “the incidence of fatal heart attacks correlated inversely with the amount of chocolate consumed.”

So what’s the secret in dark chocolate? The researchers believe the antioxidants in cocoa keep free radicals from damaging cells the body. Plus it tastes so darn good.

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Image: flickr/ eszter