inkycircus

Salad dressing face mask to the rescue

'Restoring' priceless works of art has never been an easy task. While it might have seemed like a good idea back in the 1960s to cover the porous marble of Michelangelo's David (and plenty of other valuable frescoes) in an acrylic polymer called paraloid, now it just seems downright insane. But how do you get the toxic coating off once you've plastered it on? Not with a nail brushes that's for sure. So step up the face mask.

A team from the University of Florence have discovered a way to make oil and water mix, by using a sugar-like molecule to emulsify them. Like a nanoparticle salad dressing without the vinegar. Or mustard. Anyway, the artwork is draped in thin Japanese paper and then the 'dressing' is poured on. This poultice is left on for a couple of hours and hey presto, no more paraloid. This technique only works where the slap happy sixties restorers plastered their paraloid, it's no help where other damage has been done in the name of restoration. But for David and his compatriots, it's good news indeed.

Via ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: NZRIC)

Beware: low-flying vultures ahead

IS THAT A TASTY ROTTING CORPSE I SEE? YUMMY. (PHOTO: BUGDOG)
How often have you had your plans shelved by the threat of low-flying vultures? Most likely, not all that often. Unless you're fond of building crime-scene simulation body farms which most of us probably don't do all that much. The farms provide an environment where decomposition of dead bodies can be studied by forensic scientists. But Texas State University have had to put their plans to make a body farm on hold, after a local airport claimed the vultures attracted by the cadavers would endanger the aircraft. Suprisingly enough, people living nearby weren't all that happy with the idea of body farm either. Rotting corpses wouldn't exactly enhance the neighbourhood or raise the value of your property. Mark Hendricks, a university spokesman had this to say "There's a lot of people who don't want it their backyard, and that's certainly understandable, it's a controversial project, there's no doubt about it."

Reach for a leech

Leeches are officially recognised by the Food and Drug Administration as a 'medical device'. The definition of a medical device is:

"an article intended to diagnose, cure, treat, prevent, or mitigate a disease or condition, or to affect a function or structure of the body, that does not achieve its primary effect through a chemical action and is not metabolized"

These days they're not used for hokey blood letting or for treating or nervous disorders, they're used for easing congested blood and swelling, especially after plastic or reconstructive surgery. This isn't exactly breaking news, the FDA made its ruling back in 2004, but that shouldn't get in the way of spreading the word about a weird and wonderful fact, I think.

(PHOTO: SZEN)

Random medical cure o the day

IF YOU DON'T HAVE A WART BUT YOU DO HAVE DUCT TAPE YOU COULD ALWAYS MAKE A LITTLE HOUSE FOR YOUR BRUSSEL SPROUTS. (PHOTO: !ALEX!)
Got a wart? Fearing social rejection and humiliation? Fear not. All you need to re-enter society as a newly smooth individual is a roll of duct/duck tape. Nobody knows why it gets rid of warts, but it does. All you have to do is put a piece of tape over your wart and leave it for a week or so, then have a go at the weakened wart with a pumice stone, and you'll be sorted. That's if you can stand the shame of walking around for a week with tape on your face, but we have to suffer to be beautiful.

And if you ever find yourself in a late night pub argument about whether the versatile silvery tape is named after a vent or an aquatic bird, the answer is that there is no answer. It was developed in WW2 as a waterproof sealing for ammunition cases, and rumour has it that was made to withstand water like a duck's back. But it's certainly used to fix ducts, and plenty more besides, and has been since long before any mention of ducks came along. A company sells the tape under the brand name 'Duck Tape', but wikipedia opts for the duct spelling. Duct or duck, the fact remains that the tape is fabulously useful. And it gets rid of warts. So there.

Via The Boston Globe.

Bacteria bling

THIS IS CLEARLY WHAT THE LIT-UP BACTERIA WOULD LOOK LIKE. (PHOTO: BLUE_ARIM)
Sometimes it's obvious when someone has an infected wound and sometimes it's not.But it's a pretty safe bet to say that most of the time it's less than ideal to have to wait until the would looks infected before you start to treat it, so a good early warning system is a serious plus. One that's quicker than sending a little sample off to a lab to have them analyse it and get back to you. One that's much more like making bacteria light up like fairy lights so that they're nice and obvious. By developing a polymer that would bind to bacteria, change shape, and emit light.  The lights wouldn't actually be visible to the naked eye of course, you'd need a fluorescent lamp to see them, but they would appear really quickly, and announce the presence of an infection forthwith. This could be extremely useful where you don't have access to a lab, say in a war zone, but being able to spot infection quickly would always be useful anywhere really.

Via BBC News.

Pity the skink

I promised myself I wouldn't post any more animal stories, then I started reading about the stumpy-tailed lizard, or skink, and I couldn't help myself. In order to produce a little skinklet, this scaly creature has to undergo a spectacularly challening pregnancy. One that makes a human pregnancy seem like a walk in the park. The lizard is covered in rigid scales, so its growing baby has nowhere to go. Instead of creating a bump, the baby squishes mum's organs, particularly her lungs and digestive tract. To the point where at the end of her pregnancy she can't really move much, or breathe, or eat. But even more eye-watering than this is the size of the offspring by the time it's born. It will typically weigh up to 35% of the mother's own weight. That's like me giving birth to a 23kg or 52lb baby. Compare that to average human birth weight of 7.5lb, and the biggest ever baby who weighed just over 22lb and you'll begin to see how impressive a feat this is. The benefit for the lizard is that this giant baby is far from helpless when it's born, so doesn't need too much parenting. But that's quite the maternal investment, don't you think?

Via ABC News Australia. (PHOTO:BUSHIE)

Safer on dry land

PICTURE THIS THING 10M LONG AND YOU'LL GET MY DRIFT. (PHOTO: CX ED)
Really really deep water scares me. I love swimming, I'm not afraid of water at all, but if I can't see the bottom of the water I'm not happy. Why? Because I always imagine that one of these is right under my toes. It weighed 450kg and took 10 hours to land. It's 10m long. A London bus is 8m long. That's a mighty big squid. A colossal squid to be exact. One expert said "calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres." There's some scary stuff in them thar oceans, I'm telling you.

Sounds that make you go ew

I THINK THIS SIGN IS MEANT TO SIGNIFY A WATER FOUNTAIN, BUT IT REALLY DOES LOOK LIKE A 'BE SICK HERE' SIGN. AND IT'S INFINITELY NICER THAN IF I'D POSTED A PHOTO OF ACTUAL PUKE, DON'T YOU THINK? (PHOTO: SEEDPIX)

Dr Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at Salford University, we salute you. To spend a whole year listening to disgusting noises to prove which is the most awful? That's dedication to science. At his website Sound 101, Dr Cox asked volunteers to listen to a selection of sounds and work out which was the worst. Among the 30-strong list was nails on a blackboard, the wail of a baby, a microphone screech, a dentist's drill, bad violin playing,a dog yapping and someone puking in a bucket. The vomiting is astonishingly realistic, it's not at all suprising that it topped the poll as most repulsive noise.

Lots of the sounds on the list are just plain annoying rather than dreadful, they only become unbearable if they keep on going for ages and ages. Babies crying is sad if you hear it for a few seconds, hours of it makes you want to kill the wretched child then kill yourself. But 2 seconds of vomiting noise makes my stomach heave. Apparently it was done with watered down baked beans. I knew that when I listened but I still felt queasy. Ew.

More from The Guardian here. Go to the website here and have a listen if you dare.

Sparkling sponges

When it comes to kitchen sponges, I demand a high standard of cleanliness. Somebody leaving the sponge or j-cloth bundled up in the bottom of the sink after washing up will get a ticking off, because if there is one thing gauranteed to annoy me in the kitchen it's a stinky sponge. That, and finishing the ketchup. But that's beside the point.

A bunch of scientists at the University of Florida have found a way to springclean those sponges, using a piece of equipment found in most kitchens.They prepared some truly revolting sponges (soaked in raw e-coli-rich wastewater) and then zapped them in a 'common household' microwave for 2 minutes, and found that 99% of the bacteria, viruses and spores were anihilated. To blast all the beasties on the sponge took a little longer, 4 - 10 minutes, but 2 minutes made a good enough stab at it.

I like the idea of a spotless sponge, but the article at ABC News Australia has left me with a couple of thoughts. Apparently, people often wash their sponges in the dishwasher. This is bizarre. I've sometimes put j-cloths in the washing machine, more often I just put them in boiling soapy water with dettol for a quick stew. Dishwashers? Seriously, who does that? Secondly, and more importantly, if I have a sponge that might be infused with e-coli it's going in the BIN not the microwave...

(PHOTO: VIERDRE)

Hap-pee new year

In Britain, we are currently in the grip of a hosepipe ban and a water shortage (yes, still) even though it's now winter and pouring with rain more often than not. Go figure. Anyway, since the beginning of the 'drought', the inhabitants of my household have become water nazis, trying to use grey water to water the house plants, and not flushing the loo for only pee. Apparently, this is standard practise in Australia, where they even have a slogan - 'if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down'. Delightful.

It's not so standard here, but it's getting to be that way now that we're all aware of trying to make a difference, however small. Indeed once you get over the slight ick factor of not flushing your loo every time you use it, it begins to seem utterly absurd to use a whole cistern full of clean drinking water to get rid of a cupful of urine. But apparently it's not only shockingly wasteful to do so, it's also counterproductive, as it makes sewage processing more difficult than it should be. Urine is evil. Processing it to remove the high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphates in it wastes vast amounts of energy, and we would actually be much better off not diluting it with so much water when we want to get rid of it.

When we visit our pristine white toilets we may think we are displaying behaviour that shows our evolutionary breeding and separates us from the apes. Not so. We are making a bad situation worse and would be better off peeing onto our flowerbeds. But that might be one green green step too far for me and I suspect for many of you too...

I learned all this from this truly superb article in New Scientist about how your toilet is wrecking the planet. Go read it. (Photo: by me. It's the Mannequin Pis in Brussels)