Now i know that every last news source online has done this story already, hell it’s on the Drudgereport frontpage as i write this, but if for some reason you refuse to read anything but our humble blog here’s the story (plus it’s hard to not write a headline about watermelon viagra).

Without really going into much details (which would be hard too seeing as how this is more biology/medicine and I’m a physics student), they have found out that watermelons contain large quantities of a substance called citrulline, which has the benefit of increasing blood flow in your body, which is of course the same thing that Viagra does. It’s however not the exact same, as Viagra is organ specific, while watermelons would target the entire vascular system. The basic message is: fruit is good for you!

This is of course also a perfect time to bring in one of the most controversial XKCD comics ever made, the infamous fruit chart.

As you can plainly see, the watermelon is not a top contender in the fruit wars (in fact i’d have it even lower on the tasty bar, it’s bland as hell!). If for some miracle you don’t know XKCD, i can HIGHLY recommend reading it. It’s a comic with a bunch of nerdy humor and science jokes, but also bunches of quirky stuff, easily one of my top3 favorite places online.

P.S. Some practical advice to everyone, don’t get drunk the day before you have to move out of an apartment, spending a day hung over in cleaning supply fumes is far from optimal.

One scientist at least seems to think so. Assistant professor Mark Changizi, from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, suggests that those annoying optical illusions that your friends send you through mass-emails, are nothing but your eyes trying to predict the future.

Now no-one is suggesting anything paranormal here, but rather an ability we have gotten through evolution, to theorize as to what would happen in the near future, given what we are seeing now. This would also explain reflex moves such as quickly ducking out of the way of a fastball. Take for example the picture on the left, there you have a big dot and lines radiating from it, which kind of looks as if you were traveling at high speed through a tunnel or towards something. The vertical red lines appear to bend a little bit if you look in the middle, as the brain is predicting what it expects to happen next in this scene (if we were in fact moving). These “premonitions” help compensate for delays caused by neurons traveling from the eye to the brain (one tenth of a second), because by the time the brain has received the information, the situation has already changed, so this guess gives us an approximation of what the situation might look like now, helping us to make the right reactions. I’ll forever look at optical illusions in another light now, if I’m bothered to look at them at all that is.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, and how the professor has categorized various optical illusions into a periodic table of sorts, i recommend the press release.

Well i guess that “working on” is a bit of an understatement, as they already have a working hand-held device capable of identifying various bacteria and fungi already in use at the international space station. They are however still working on getting it even better. You see, the current version can detect some bacteria, and a recent upgrade to it allows it to detect some fungus as well (which is good, as it can damage equipment). They are working on getting even more capabilities on it (detecting more types of bacteria), and hoping that the end-product will actually perform much like a medical tri-corder from Star Trek, capable of detecting what ails a crewman who has fallen ill and such. If you look at the picture to the left here, you can even see that it kind-of looks like a tri-corder (post-original series anyway).

Now don’t get me wrong, i don’t have anything against health/medicine or anything (in fact i rather enjoy my own), but if you’re trying to copy star trek you could’ve picked something cooler then a medical tri-corder. Be that as it may, more Star Trek inspired technology can never be bad, although I’m sure we’d all prefer the holo-suite for some depraved fun.

If you’re interested in reading the whole story, head over to NASA’s website.

Ok, so there are some press-releases popping up now from the University of Washington, about a new video game that is making some bold claims (or at least has some bold goals), their have made a video game where us mere mortals are allowed to contort proteins into 3D shapes in hopes of creating something that is of actual use (link to game website).

The game is based on the actual physics of proteins, and the hope is that gamers around the world will embrace it and gain a sixth sense of sorts to building proteins in a good way, in fact, David Baker, one of the biochemists working on the project, says that his 13 year old son is better at the in-game protein bending then he is. So i guess they’re hoping that kids will gain an intuitive understanding of the physics involved and contort the proteins accordingly, utilizing the natural 3D puzzle solving skills that we humans have.

You might think that it’d be easier to just have a computer have a go at brute-forcing it’s way through it (try every permutation and see what works best), well they’ve already tried that and the number of different proteins needed to be tested are ridiculous, according to the article, it would still take centuries to solve even if all the computers in the world worked on it. So this is why they are trying to come up with an innovative way of finding new breakthroughs in medical science.

I tried downloading the game and playing it, and it was fairly easy to get started and work through the introduction part that explains to you the basic tools at your disposal (even worked fine with wine on my Linux computer). I do have serious doubts about the hefty amount of buzzwords used in their press-release though, take for example this line from one of the scientists:

Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.

Plus of course the mention of perhaps curing HIV with it. This is obviously just shrewd PR work, as it is something that makes for quite catchy titles (”Will the next noble prize winner be a 12 year old gamer?”, “Will gaming nerds cure HIV?” etc), but it almost always seems that science press-releases with too many buzz-words are too good to be true.

I really wish i knew more about biology/chemistry so I’d be more qualified to comment on this whole thing (being a physicist myself), as i DO find it to be a very interesting idea, regardless of my distaste for their PR campaign. They claim that very soon they will be holding competitions for people to make proteins that might be of actual use in the medical industry and such, where the top proteins in the competition will actually be produced and tested in petri dishes at Dr. Bakers lab (and given credit if they publish an article on it).

I’m curious though, how they actually intend on picking winners out of possibly thousands of protein structures submitted, as they don’t know beforehand exactly what protein will solve whatever problem it is they have at hand, but that might just be skepticism from someone that does not grasp this field well enough.

So i guess this means that in the case of a nuclear war, cockroaches AND humans will survive. Researchers found a new drug after noticing that some cancer cells were resistant to radiation therapy, and managed to reproduce it into a drug that is currently working for mice and monkeys (trials in humans are planned).

Radiation is really just light (electromagnetic waves) of a very high energy, which has some very adverse effects on cells, triggering a suicide effect known as apoptosis. In fact this is why they use radiation, they want the cancer cells to do this and thereby being destroyed. The problem is though, that radiation is a cruel mistress and does not discriminate between healthy and cancerous cells, calling for the radiation to be very targeted so it only effects the cancer. This new drugs promises to temporarily make healthy cells resistant to the suicide effect, while the cancer cells will still die. Thought being that cancer patients can take this just before having a radiotherapy session.

The drug obviously has other uses that may be quite advantageous, such as protection against nuclear fallout, dirty bombs or KGB spies. Although i always get slightly suspicious when seemingly unrelated research finds some kind of military use as well, i always get the feeling that it’s a ploy to get research money (there seems to be a LOT of research money going to military stuff these days).

News from BBC
Abstract in Science Mag