Minneapolis / St. Paul News Blog

​Science nerds, arm chair rock stars, and gamers, meet Roxanne.

Pete Nikrin, a manufacturing engineer, teamed up with an instructor at his alma mater, Minnesota West Technical College, to create a Guitar Hero-playing robot for some awesome reason. The (paranoid) android can detect transitions between light and dark pixels in whatever it is she's focused on, thanks to a sensor implanted in her left eye (the patch-like abrasion over said eye is not, as we first surmised, a nod to the late Lisa Lopes).

​About a month back, we wrote about an ostensibly education exhibit featuring preserved corpses making its unlikely debut in the Mall of America. "Bodies... The Exhibition" had elicited outcry for a number reason, the of which being the murky origins of the cadavers-- there's evidence that some were political prisoners from China who died behind bars.

PnP!/ Flickr

Downtown St. Paul in 2070

The evocatively named Union of Concerned Scientists has released a new study warning what unchecked climate change will mean for specific states, including Minnesota, and the scenario isn't pretty--unless you're really into tanning or a lemonade entrepreneur. According to the Ph.Ds with furrowed brows, if heat-trapping emissions continue to rise at their current rate, Minnesota would see:

When it comes to the evolution vs. creationism "debate," what side you come down on depends largely on your high school biology teacher's grip-on-reality (or lack thereof), according to a recent University of Minnesota study.

Published in this month's issue of BioScience (a journal put out by the American Institute of Biological Sciences), the report found that students who learned the biological ropes from admitted creationists are more likely to embrace centuries-old fairy tales themselves, even after entering adulthood.

Photo by meaduva

So you've got an itch and somehow a little scratch does the trick. Why does it work?

Scientists obviously know scratching provides some relief, but they are still trying to figure out why that happens. A University of Minnesota study tries to relieve our burning (and itching) questions about another weird part of our bodies that can cause intense life disruptions when the annoyance just won't go away.

Lutherans sure love screwing with bulbs. Especially ones at St. Olaf College. The dynamic minds won the national Rube Goldberg competition. This is seriously the coolest science competition in the nation. All those years playing Mouse Trap don't compare to the video you are about to see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Darwin_seated.jpg

You feeling that feeling? That feeling of apes making love, of fish going land roving, of birds going deep sea diving, and the potential for spider lips. Yeah, us too. It's Darwin Day today, an opportunity to cherish science. The Big D came into the world 200 years ago, and while his stay was only 73 years, his memory lives on--primarily on the bumpers of Subaru Foresters. 

Another groundbreaking study from the University of Minnesota. We're so proud. 

 

The Force may be the energy that binds the universe together, but it isn't like Superman -- it can't fly around the world and turn back time. So consider the benefit of having another three days to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum. And you do! The museum has extended the show's run until Aug. 27.

If you're a faithful City Pages reader, you learned about Minnesota's role is solving the nationwide Salmonella epidemic on our website Tuesday or in print Wednesday. In a Reporter's Notebook published on our site yesterday, I wrote about how I stumbled onto the story in the first place. Now the story has gone national.

When I first started reporting the Salmonella Saintpaul story in this week's issue, I didn't know that I'd be covering breaking news. I just had a simple question: Why was the strain of bacteria that was sickening the nation named after Minnesota's capital city?

I was watching an NBC Nightly News broadcast about the outbreak when I saw Michael Osterholm, a nationwide expert who happened to be a professor at the University of Minnesota. I figured he'd be the perfect guy to answer my question.

Osterholm did indeed know the answer--it has to do with a local professor who first diagnosed the Salmonella in turkeys--but he also told me a much more interesting story: Data from a cluster of people sickened in Minnesota was a key part of the unraveling mystery.

We're doomed! The Mayans were right about that whole "world ending on Dec. 21, 2012" thing!

Okay, probably not. Inevitably, though, this star will explode into a supernova. That's just fine, given that it's too far away for such an event to pose a threat. If it collapses in a particular type of supernova called a gamma ray burst, though ...

"It's dark as a dungeon, way down in the mine" goes the well-worn working class folk ballad. At the long-dormant Soudan mine in the Iron Range--the scene of dramatic strikes and bloody clashes in the early 20th century--physicists from Stanford, MIT and the UofM have been looking for a piece of history that is darker still: the "dark matter" that is said to make up 25% of the universe.

I still remember the day I walked in on my wife staring raptly at the TV screen. I followed her gaze and was stunned to see a girl who appeared to have two heads. In fact, it was conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel, two of the most remarkable people in Minnesota.

I was reminded of this today as I flipped through the new issue of Newsweek and saw a picture of the Hensel twins in a swimming pool. They were mentioned at the tail end of an article called Reality's Believe It or Not. Here's the part of the article concerning the Hensel twins:

You hear a lot of mixed emotions from the stars of these shows—none of whom, by the way, is paid to appear. Abby and Brittany Hensel allowed the world to watch them take their driving test, even while the conjoined twins—they have two heads but one set of arms and legs—decided who would control the gas (Abby) or the blinker (Brittany). "Abby and Brittany Turn 16" is handled with great care, the girls are given plenty of time to talk about their anatomy in nonsensational ways. They explain that they made the film "so people wouldn't have to always stare and take pictures. Cause we don't like it when they take pictures … so they just know who we are and stuff." But as the film progresses, you see that any time the twins leave their Minnesota town, people blatantly photograph them, leaving the girls feeling "violated," according to their mother, Patty. She gets teary in the documentary when she explains how she doesn't want her girls to grow up like circus performers, and she hasn't let the girls speak to the media since the movie debuted two years ago. Watch the movie now—it's still in heavy rotation on the Discovery Health network—and you can see why they'd shun the spotlight. It's hard to shake the creepy, voyeuristic feeling you get when you watch the girls make pottery or brush each other's hair. The narrator explains that they are, "in nearly every sense, perfectly normal teenagers." But we know we're watching precisely because they're not.

YouTube embed of "Joined for Life: Abby and Brittany Hensel turn 16" after the jump ...

Christopher Roller has proof of paranormal activities: the magic tricks of David Copperfield. "David admits he's using godly powers--that's paranormal," Roller writes in a lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court. "Paranormal events are occurring on planet Earth by David Copperfield and probably by most illusionists (magicians)."

The Burnsville resident is seeking $1 million from the James Randi Educational Foundation. The Amazing Randi--best known for exposing spoonbender Uri Geller as a fraud on The Tonight Show in 1973--has long offered a $1 million prize for anyone who can provide evidence of any "paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." No one has ever successfully claimed the money.

This binge brought to you by Ambien

Are you cackling at today's stories about the middle-of-the-night adventures being reported by Ambien users? According to the Washington Post, Minnesota researchers have compiled numerous reports of people eating, talking, walking, and wreaking havoc while asleep. Other stories tell of people waking up surrounded by empty Doritos bags and half-eaten loaves of bread. The New York Times story on the study described a woman who gained 100 pounds before she was willing to consider her family's bizarre claims about her nighttime eating.

February 1 marked the tenth anniversary of the coldest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota. The minus 60 degree reading (measured in the Arrowhead town of Tower) produced a weird sort of provincial glee. If memory serves, one enterprising television reporter demonstrated the extremity of the cold--and presumably, the hardiness of Minnesotans--by spraying water in the air; the droplets froze solid before they hit the ground. Even though you probably watched the spectacle from the comfort of the couch, you couldn't help but feel a little bad ass for living here.

What a difference a decade makes. In the wake of the warmest January on record, there is not much to boast about. And aside from the occasional snowmobile or SUV dropping through thin lake ice (oh, and the prospect of calimitous global climate change), there really wasn't much to gripe about either.

One more way profits trump science in drug trials

The author of the highly literate and widely lauded 2003 book, "Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream," Carl Elliot is well positioned to comment on pharma's ceaseless search for new maladies--which can, of course, then be treated profitably. In today's Slate, Elliot, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, has co-authored a terrific piece on the mechanics and dangers of allowing researchers conducting clinical drug trials to hire their own for-profit overseers.

It isn't the dramatic instant ice age scenario imagined in the Hollywood shlockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, but a team of British researchers has concluded that global warming may result in a colder western Europe.

Here at City Pages, we get a lot of junk emails from companies hoping to hype a product. Once in a crescent blue moon, one comes along that strikes our fancy.

According to the SATT (Site Assessment of Tornado Threat) software 3.0 utilized by VorTek LLC out of Huntsville, Alabama, the most tornado-prone spot in Minnesota is less than a half-mile west of State Highway 111 and approximately three-fifths of a mile north of U.S. Highway 14 near Nicollet. From 1950 through 2004, a whopping 54 tornado track segments have touched down or passed within 20 miles of that point, including two F3's and three F4's.

Among biologists, other scientists and anyone else who bothers to pay attention, it's no secret that plants and animals are vanishing from the earth at an appalling pace. The sixth wave of extinction, as the trend is referred to, is occurring far more rapidly than five extinction waves that preceded it. By some estimates, approximately 40 species of plants and animals disappear from the earth every day. There is scant mystery as to the cause: a nasty invasive species, the savvy ape, has crowded the globe, gobbled up most of its resources, and fouled its water and air.

For anybody interested in Minnesota's native fauna, one of the most disturbing trends of recent times has been the dramatic collapse of the state's once-robust moose population. The numbers tell the story. In 1985, the moose herd in northwest Minnesota was estimated at approximately 4,000 animals. The most recent surveys place the count at fewer than 300.

For about a decade, researchers have struggled mightily to find an explanation for the spike in mortality rates. To do so, they placed radio collars on some 152 animals, collected road kills, and performed about 160 autopsies. The conclusion? In a nutshell, the moose are dying off because of climate change.

There's a superb story by Ken Wells in last Friday's Wall Street Journal titled "Oil, Saltwater Mar Louisiana Coast, Threaten Future." Here are some salient excerpts:

[A]t least 193,000 barrels of oil and other petrochemicals were blown or driven by tides across the fragile marshy ecosystems and dense urban areas of the Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes, southeast of New Orleans.... The spills... approach the scale of the famous 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill, which dumped 240,000 barrels of crude oil....

Coastal Louisiana's wetland produces a third of the nation's commercial seafood--about a billion pounds of fish, crab and oysters annually--the most in the lower 48 states.... The mixture of sewage, rotting vegetation and oil... has been devastating to aquatic birds. More than 5 million migratory birds, including a number of rare and endangered species, make use each year of the Louisiana estuary's marshes, swamps, bays and bayous. Coastal Louisiana also harbors the largest nesting population of bald eagles in the lower 48....

Coastal Louisiana holds the earth's seventh largest wetland and is America's largest estuary, containing 30 percent of all U.S. coastal marshes... Yet the state's coastal ecosystem is less well known than places such as Chesapeake Bay, whose fishery production it dwarfs. It receives far less adulation than the Florida Everglades, though it shelters far more species of wildlife, fish, and birds.

Some scientists... are convinced that the conditions of the wetlands of the St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes contributed to the number of oil spills [at least 40, ten of which are major] during Katrina. One example: Pipelines originally buried under the marsh 20 years ago had become more vulnerable to Katrina's surges as the landscape changed... [T]he Plaquemines Parish president says he heard of cases where "the force of the storm surges forced a lot of pipelines to the surface, snapping them like sticks of dried spaghetti."

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration: Rita crosses Florida keys, heads for Gulf Coast

The Independent (UK): Global warming "past the point of no return."

Reuters: WHO: World has slim chance to stop flu pandemic

This report on the nation's youth from today's Washington Post:

Study: Half Teens Had Oral Sex

Slightly more than half of American teenagers, ages 15 to 19, have engaged in oral sex, with females and males reporting similar levels of experience, according to the most comprehensive national survey of sexual behaviors ever released by the federal government.

The report today by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the figure increases to about 70 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds.

The research suggests that abstinence programs have shifted kids' sexual practices to non-intercourse activities. In fact, a quarter of all "virgin" teens have engaged in fellatio or cunnilngus.

In a detail that only a Marxist or a guidance counselor at Edina High could explain, oral sex is most popular among white teens whose families are in the uppper income brackets.

Bodies, fuel, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, bacteria, gasoline from cars and up to 6,000 gas storage tanks in the city, garbage, sewage.

--list of contaminants from WWL-TV live webcast

Searchers were armed with proof of what many holdouts had long feared: The floodwaters are thick with sewage-related bacteria that are at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety limits. The muck contains E. coli, certain viruses and a type of cholera-like bacteria....

The danger of infection wasn't limited to the New Orleans area. The bacteria is feared to have migrated to crowded shelters outside the state, where many evacuees are staying. Four deaths - one in Texas, three in Mississippi - have been attributed to wound infections, said Tom Skinner, spokesman for the CDC.

--Associated Press

Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico - the only viable option if the city is ever to return to even a semblance of its former self -would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region....

The waters now swilling around the streets and neighbourhoods of New Orleans will probably end up either in the Mississippi River or in Lake Pontchartrain, just to the north of the city, where they are likely to react with the oxygen in the water and deprive all living creatures, starting with the fish, of the means to life.

"We're looking conceivably at zero-dissolved oxygen, which will lead to the death of fish and other organisms," Dr Zeliger said. "If the migratory birds who pass through the area find any fish to eat, they will be contaminated so the birds will start dying in large quantities ... Reptiles and snakes are going to be driven out of their nests and habitats, which has implications for human safety. We're going to see water moccasins [a highly venomous snake], which are nasty critters, and alligators threatening people."

--The Independent (London)

As engineers began pumping out the Big Easy this week, creating small but visible wakes of water behind street signs and tree trunks, the water they're moving carries a volatile mix of everything imaginable - from household paints, deodorants, and old car batteries to railroad tank cars, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. While state officials stop short of calling it a toxic soup, at least so far, federal environmental officials call it catastrophic....

Meanwhile, a warehouse explosion along the river in New Orleans and an oil spill several days after the hurricane passed through have added to the challenge. "Everywhere we look there's a spill," said Mike McDaniel, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, in the state's first major assessment of hurricane Katrina's environmental impact. "There's almost a solid sheen over the area right now."

--Christian Science Monitor

Tests of water covering New Orleans showed excessive levels of E. coli bacteria and lead, federal officials said Wednesday, providing the first confirmation that the floodwaters caused by Hurricane Katrina are posing health risks for emergency response workers and residents who have remained in the city.

While neither substance has been blamed for any deaths, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said state and local officials had reported three deaths in Mississippi and one in Texas from exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, a choleralike bacteria found in saltwater that poses special risks for people with chronic liver problems.

--New York Times

Of all the terrifying urban myths surrounding the Great Minnesota Get-Together, Blotter can confirm that at least one is true: All the beer served at the state fair is weak.

Turns out every brewery must serve up what's commonly known as 3.2--alcohol content of each frosty 12 ounces by weight--at the fair. The big breweries--such as, in the case of what's served at the fair, Heineken--produce hundreds of thousands of barrels of watered-down lager and ale every year, so the process isn't much of a stretch.

But for smaller brewhouses, like Summit in St. Paul, the process is a little more involved.