The SATs might have made you hate analogy problems, but this one sure is tasty.

That clangy thing taking up space in the bottom of your Guinness or Tetley’s can might soon be done away with and replaced by a coffee filter.

The ball inside the Guinness can, called a widget, contains a pocket of nitrogen gas held under pressure. When some lucky person opens the can, the pressure is released and the gas shoots out into the beer through a small hole and creates the foam.

You may now be thinking, Wait a minute—most beers seem to have plenty of gas bubbles even without some fancy widget. The thing is that Guinness and similar brews need the widget because nitrogen bubbles are smaller than those filled with carbon dioxide, the bubbling gas in other fizzy drinks. The small nitrogen bubbles make Guinness’ foam deliciously thick and creamy, but it’s harder to get the gas to come out of solution. The widget forces lots of excess nitrogen into the beer, setting off a well-timed bubble eruption.

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Not many people would be excited about getting shocks to their vagus nerve, but a new electronic device implanted into the abdomen does just that in an effort to keep appetites in check.

The tiny device, called abiliti and made by Intrapace, attaches to the vagus nerve, which sends status updates about the body’s organs to the brain. The pacemaker then hacks the nervous system’s normal communication, according to the company’s website:

The abiliti system is designed to support these good habits by making the patient feel full sooner when eating. The abiliti system may also help in keeping them satisfied longer and helping them to eat less frequently.

Intrapace reports that the 65 study participants in the initial trials have lost on average 22 percent of their body weight; the biggest loser dropped 38 percent. (These results  haven’t been published or peer-reviewed.)

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Most people outgrow the days of carving rivulets in mashed potato mountains or castles out of seasoned squash—but  scientists aren’t “most people.” One ragtag team of researchers and culinary experts are harnessing the power of 3-D food printers to bring the science of playing-with-your-food to new levels, such as outer space.

In a project called fab@home, Cornell’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory and the French Culinary Institute have made a giant leap for mankind by fashioning a miniature space shuttle made of pureed scallops and cheese.

So what does it take to create such intricate food sculptures? Cornell graduate research student Jeffrey Lipton told CBC News:

“The process is pretty simple … Just as … your 2D printer puts droplets of ink onto a page to create an image, this draws lines of material on top of each other to create a 3D object.”

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Rocky road. Vanilla fudge ripple. Pralines and cream. The hardest decision in the life of some ice cream enthusiasts is choosing a flavor. Government officials, though, have made that choice a little bit easier after they stormed a London ice cream shop and confiscated a flavor made from human breast milk.

Dubbed “Baby Gaga,” this mammary morsel—a blend containing Madagascan vanilla pods, lemon zest, and, yes, human milk—debuted last Friday and was so popular that it sold out the same day. Touted as organic and free-range (I hope so!), this ice cream was created from the milk of 15 lactating women, who were paid $2.40 for each ounce of milk, which explains its whopping price of over $22 per serving.

London authorities put the kibosh on this ice cream after they received two complaints from people who were squeamish at the thought of ingesting a stranger’s body fluids. The fear (beyond the awkwardness factor) is that people innocently enjoying a novel ice cream flavor could contract hepatitis—a virus that can be passed on through breast milk. So is Baby Gaga really dangerous? (more…)

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Microscopy often yields striking snapshots, but these colorful compositions have a less-than-glamorous subject: fruit fly intestines.

The insides of these humble critters may help researchers understand the human digestive system. Each of us has something like 500 million intestinal nerve cells, yet little is known about what they’re up to. According to a recent Wellcome Trust press release, fruit fly feces (seen in image 3 above) have helped researchers at the University of Cambridge understand how the gut’s nerve cells affect metabolism.

“We reasoned that what comes out of the gut may be able to tell us about what is going on inside,” says Irene Miguel-Aliaga, who headed the study. “So, we devised a method to extract information about several metabolic features from the flies’ fecal deposits–which are actually rather pretty and don’t smell bad. Then we turned specific neurons on and off and examined what came out.”

Examining fruit fly poo allowed the scientists to assign different functions to different intestinal neurons. Some regulate appetite, for example, while others adjust intestinal water balance during reproduction.

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A paper that explores the unlikely coupling of warm wine and the electric properties of iron is currently making its rounds on the media circuit—leading us to conclude that people get excited about science when there is alcohol involved.

“Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make incredibly discovery,” declares the (slightly inaccurate) headline on io9. “’Tis the season to be pickling your liver in alcohol,” announces the (slightly irrelevant) opening line of a CNET article.

The researchers’ experiment—led by Keita Deguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan—involved first submersing an iron alloy in various hot alcoholic beverages, and then finding the temperature at which the treated alloy starts to display superconducting properties. A superconductor is a material that has no electrical resistivity, allowing electrons to flow through it with essentially zero friction.

The paper abstract, which was published on arXiv, gives an overview of the experiment’s findings and method (although there’s no mention of beverage consumption that might have inspired these scientific antics):

“We found that hot commercial alcohol drinks are much effective to induce superconductivity in FeTe_0.8S_0.2 compared to water, ethanol and water-ethanol mixture…. Any elements in alcohol drinks, other than water and ethanol, would play an important role to induce superconductivity.”

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Fat is in the news: Not just because of the world’s obesity problems, but because one agriculture company accidentally fattened up the Houston Ship Channel on Tuesday by spilling 15,000 gallons of beef tallow into it.

The fat was in an onshore storage tank owned by agricultural company Jacob Sterns and Sons, which for unknown reasons leaked about 250,000 gallons of animal fat. About 15,000 gallons seeped into the channel through a storm drain, and immediately solidified after hitting the water, Coast Guard spokesman Richard Brahm told The Wall Street Journal:

“Luckily the stuff is easy to clean up,” Mr. Brahm said. “It solidifies at room temperature, so as soon as it hit the water it just kind of sat there.”

The floating fat looks like a collection of dirty little icebergs (officially called “patties”), but is causing some problems. Three quarters of the northern end of the channel had to be shut down for the cleanup effort–luckily it didn’t block tanker traffic along the waterway.

The US Coast Guard helped clean up the fat in the channel, and finished pitch forking and booming the floating fat earlier this week. Luckily the spilled fat isn’t expected to have a large environmental impact, and cleanup was relatively simple, officials told CNN:

“It was good that it’s cold and not summertime because the cold helped the fat congeal and allowed workers to scoop it up,” said Texas General Land Office spokesman Jim Suydam. “Also, the bugs would have been nightmare if it were summertime.”

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Image: USCG

Toddlers can learn, cats can be taught–so why not take the next step and potty-train our livestock? Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration is encouraging its pig farmers to do just that with the countries’ six million pigs. The move will clean up the farms and help prevent water pollution, they say.

To keep the pig waste from flowing into the rivers (and to save water on cleaning up farms), the pigs are trained to relieve themselves in a trough. The “toilets” are smeared with feces and urine to attract the pigs–kinda like that spot on the carpet where the dog keeps relieving itself. All it took to start the porcine potty-training revolution was one genius farmer in 2009 trying to avoid the Taiwanese government’s “water pollution fee.” He noticed the difference immediately, he told the Mail and Guardian Online:

“The pig toilets on my farm help me collect about 95% of all pig waste, making cleaning much, much easier,” Chang Chung-tou, a pig farmer in Yunlin county, said.

After a trial of 10,000 pigs by Chung-tou and others in 2009, the Taiwanese EPA recently released a report detailing their findings, and recommending all pig farmers jump on the potty-training bandwagon. TreeHugger sums up their findings:

The Taiwanese EPA in their most recent announcement suggest that aside from [reducing] the amount of waste water by up to 80% pig farms were also cleaner and less smelly, and additionally the trotter toilets helped reduce illness among the pigs and boosted their fertility by 20%.

Agricultural waste is a major environmental concern–the most notorious pig farm accident occurred in North Carolina in 1995, when the dike around a lagoon of pig waste collapsed, spilling 25 million gallons of waste across the landscape. And while we applaud the potty-training initiative, we wonder if it could be taken further: If the farmers were really green they could use this poop to power their farming operations, their cars, or even satellites!

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Image: Flickr/Tambako the Jaguar

Sick of invasive snakes eating through your wiring and biting your babies? Don’t have any tylenol-doped mice to lob at them? You might be in luck, we have a few ideas of what to invasive species that insist on making pests of themselves.

Idea #1: Make Them Into Dinner

Become a part of the “invasivore” movement by ingesting some tasty lionfish (pictured) or asian carp, and by nomming on some kudzu or Japanese knotweed. One “almost serious” invasivore, Rachel Kesel, blogged on the subject and talked to The New York Times:

She said in an interview that she was studying in London when she wrote the post, which grew out of conversations about diet and ecology. “If you really want to get down on conservation you should eat weeds,” she decided. And so she blogged. She now works for the parks department of San Francisco and said she did indeed pursue the vegetable side of the diet she proposed. “I’m really looking forward to some of our spring weeds here,” she said, notably Brassica rapa, also known as field mustard or turnip mustard.

A second, meat-eating invasivore named Jackson Landers has been teaching other ecologically-minded eaters how to hunt and eat local invasive species, including feral pigs, two species of iguana, armadillos, starlings, pigeons, and resident Canada geese.

“When human beings decide that something tastes good, we can take them down pretty quickly,” he said. Our taste for passenger pigeon wiped that species out, he said. What if we developed a similar taste for starlings?

If you’re in Florida, Chowhound has some good tips on cooking python meat, FYI. And Louisiana residents can peruse nutria recipes to help deal with that invasive water rat.

Idea #2: Make Them Into Shoes (or Other Clothes)

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Every year, the Sense About Science group puts out a list of some of the most egregious blunders made in science and medicine during the past 12 months. But they’re not talking about surgeons’ errors or the research mistakes of lab workers; instead, SAS focuses on celebrities who adopt fad diets and bogus healing remedies, and then spread the nonsense around the world.

In 2010, many celebrities–including David Beckham, Robert De Niro, and Shaquille O’Neal–jumped on the “Power Balance” sports fad (don’t actually go to that website, it will make you stupider). This absurd system suggests that plastic bracelets and pendants with holograms will optimize the body’s natural energy flow because they’re “designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.”

Sigh, I suppose we actually have to say this: There is no way a hologram could change your athletic ability. The website doesn’t even try to explain the company’s “science.” But just so we cheapies don’t all go around strapping our credit cards to ourselves before a long run, Michael Blastland responded to a claim from Shaq (who endorses the product) that the bracelets help him win basketball games. From the SAS report (pdf):

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