A prophetic story from The Onion in 2003 seems to be coming true: our pets and even lab and wild animals are becoming obese alongside humans:

Amid a barrage of commercials for new diet dog and cat foods, many owners say that their pets are being held to impossibly high animal-body standards perpetrated by the media. “I don’t care what anyone says, my Sassy looks good,” said Janice Guswhite.

Back in the non-satirical world, the findings are alarming. A study of over 20,000 animals from 12 different populations, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that over the last 20 years the animals in every population they studied have been growing significantly tubbier, paralleling the human obesity epidemic.

Not only pets are fattening up–the group also studied wild animals living near humans and animals living in labs and zoos. All of them have been chubbing-out over the last two decades. This could mean we are thinking about the obesity epidemic all wrong, lead author David Allison told Nature News:

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What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage.

According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.” But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human.

The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive, explains LiveScience:
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It’s been making headlines all week (“Twinkie diet helps man lose weight” and “Trying To Lose Weight… Try The Junk Food Diet” might be some of the worst health-related headlines I’ve seen in awhile) as the Ding-Dong Diet or the Twinkie Diet, but let’s just call it the worst diet ever for short.

The newsplosion came from an experiment by Mark Haub, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University. In an effort to prove to his class the importance of calories in weight gain and loss, he decided to drastically change his eating habits.

He embarked from the shores of a balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat (totaling about 2,600 calories per day) to a junk food diet consisting of Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos–with sides of vitamin pills, protein shakes, and small portions of vegetables. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. Why? Because he restricted his new diet to a total of 1,800 calories per day.

He expected to lose weight, but was unsure about the other health outcomes of the diet. Ten weeks later his blood tests showed that both his lipid levels and glucose had lowered, a fact that would put him in a healthier heart state, according to the American Heart Association‘s guidelines. According to ABC News, Haub even felt better:

The thing is, he began to feel healthier. He had more energy, stopped snoring, and not only did he lose enough weight to drive down his overall cholesterol and body mass index (BMI), his good HDL cholesterol crept up two points and his blood glucose — despite all that cream filling — dropped 17 percent.

Discoblog was skeptical about the hype over Haub’s junk food binge, so we asked some nutritionists and doctors what they thought of it. We came back with several different takes, but one general message. In a loud and clear voice, these nutritionists are telling America that this diet is a bad idea, and pleading with people not to try it.

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Even the sight of the reddest, rawest steak won’t get your blood boiling. Surprising new research has found that staring at pictures of meat actually makes people less aggressive.

The insight comes from McGill University undergraduate Frank Kachanoff. He wondered if the sight of food would incite men’s defensive desires, much like a dog aggressively protecting its food bowl, he explained in a press release:

“I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.”

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Scientists are starting to unravel the sex secrets of the black truffle, that rare and expensive delicacy, in hopes of making its cultivation easier.

It turns out the fungus has two different sex-like states, and both must be present to reproduce. One truffle can only be one of the sexes, and while that may not sound odd to us humans, it’s very out of place in the fungus world. Fungi are usually able to reproduce asexually and self-fertilize, lead author of the paper Francesco Paolocci told The Telegraph:

“It was long assumed that the truffle was like other fungi, but we know now that it needs the help of a partner. It has members of two different sexualities, a bit like male and female.”

Still, that doesn’t sound too complicated, right? Well, what’s hard is getting close enough to your partner to “score” when you are stuck in single-sex colonies on oak trees that are yards away from each other (which bears a striking resemblance to my undergrad experience). The researchers were the first to find that truffles tend to grow in single sex bunches, Paolocci explained to The Telegraph:

“But we found that individual trees are only colonised by a single sex of the fungi. Even when we started with a mixed colony, it quickly became dominated by one sex or the other. To produce the truffles, you have to have the two different sexual strains meeting in some way, but they can be quite far away from each other.”

It is likely that in nature this meeting is accomplished via animals that dig in the dirt and transfer spores from one colony to the other. This could help explain why it is so difficult to cultivate the ridiculously expensive foodie-magnet; when trees are impregnated with the fungus, only about 30 percent of the colonies survive.

The truffles themselves are actually the fruiting body produced by the “female” sex, which is the sex that lives on the tree roots. The “male” truffle fungus is found in the soil, Paolocci told The Telegraph:

“In order to have a productive truffle ground we need to have both the male and female strains. We have genetic markers that help us identify the male and female strains, and this can be used to increase production. It could help bring the price of these fungus down.”

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Image: Flickr/ Kjunstorm

Charges by South Korean health officials that octopus heads contain large and unhealthy amounts of the heavy medal cadmium have sparked a war with the fishermen who profit from the $35 million-a-year trade.

Octopus heads are a popular delicacy in South Korea, revered by locals for their health benefits and their supposed role as an aphrodisiac. About 12 million octopuses are sold for eating every year, says the LA Times:

Nakji, a dish featuring baby octopuses, head and all, is a popular snack at sporting events. Another dish, sannakji (“live octopus”), features squirming tentacles dipped in a sesame oil and salt sauce. Enthusiasts have been hospitalized after a wiggling tentacle lodged in the throat.

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A few weeks ago we posted a NCBI ROFL story about the transplantation of a set of lungs that caused the recipient to catch the donor’s peanut allergy. While this case isn’t new, its seemingly coincidental and ironic circumstances left us with some lingering questions–plus at least one of you accused us of posting an urban legend. So we went straight to the source, Imran Khalid, the doctor who treated the patient.

“This case was as surprising to us as to anyone else,” Khalid said. “The seriousness of the issue led us to write it up and send it to a medical journal to share it with other people.”

What happened was this: A 42-year-old woman received a lung transplant from a 12-year-old boy who fell into a coma and died after a severe allergic reaction to peanuts. Seven months after transplantation, the recipient herself had a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction to a peanut butter cookie that she ate at an organ transplant support group meeting. And no, the lungs weren’t haunted.

“She was lucky that this happened in the hospital,” Khalid said. “If she was at home or in a shopping mall, by the time help would have reached her I don’t know what would have happened.”

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Drunk fights are a typical occurrence at some bars–but why does drinking make us more likely to fight? Kate Shaw over at Ars Technica gives us a good example of a typical confrontation:

If you’ve ever had one (or ten) too many drinks at a bar, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: a drunk guy stumbles past you, spills a beer all over you, and you get angry. You’re convinced he did it on purpose, and you start fuming.

New research from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that this “thinking he did it on purpose” is because alcohol makes you likely to interpret someone’s actions as intentional rather than accidental. In a bar situation, this can translate to a conviction that an offending act was aimed specifically at you–great, so alcohol essentially brings out the paranoid narcissist in all of us.

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Itching for more green architecture? check out the future of green city-scapes, or check out some crazy vertical farm ideas in DISCOVER’s photo galleries.

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All images: Rios Clementi Hale Studios