A study published today in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology concludes that Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is as effective as anti-depressants in controlling long-term depression.

I've had personal experience with MBCT. About ten years ago, my personal life hit a very low point that left me more than sad -- I was paralyzed, weepy, unable to see the bright side of anything, listless, always tired. I recognized the symptoms of depression and spoke to a psychiatrist I knew. He recommended MBCT in the form of David D Burns's The Feeling Good Handbook. Despite its cheesy title, the book was just what I needed: a series of simple exercises that used empiricism (writing down what happened around you and how it made you feel, and what alternative explanations you could think of for others' behavior) to help change the habits of thought that led to the downward spiral. It wasn't long before the depression lifted, never to return (so far -- and if it does, I know what I'll do).

I've never spoken in public about this before, but I have quietly passed on the book to many of my friends when it seemed needed, always with good results. So I'm not surprised to hear that this research ("led by Professor Willem Kuyken at the Mood Disorders Centre, University of Exeter, in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Economics of Mental Health (CEMH) at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Peninsula Medical School, Devon Primary Care Trust and the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit") shows that MBCT works in cases of chronic, long-term depression. This is especially good news, since chronic depression (which runs in my family) is especially hard on the person experiencing it as well as those around her or him.

The holidays are prime-time for difficult emotions. If you or someone you know is experiencing depression, know that it's not a sign of weakness or personal inadequacy. Help is simple, widely available and effective.

Professor Willem Kuyken of the University of Exeter said: "Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that's because they tend to work. But, while they're very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse. MBCT takes a different approach – it teaches people skills for life. What we have shown is that when people work at it, these skills for life help keep people well."

Professor Kuyken continues: "Our results suggest MBCT may be a viable alternative for some of the 3.5 million people in the UK known to be suffering from this debilitating condition. People who suffer depression have long asked for psychological approaches to help them recover in the long-term and MBCT is a very promising approach. I think we have the basis for offering patients and GPs an alternative to long-term anti-depressant medication. We are planning to conduct a larger trial to put these results to the test and to examine how MBCT works."

Depression Treatment: Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy As Effective As Anti-depressant Medication, Study Suggests

Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck's work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use...

...[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

The Effort Effect, Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Thanks, Dad!)

Robert Pearlman, editor of the space history and artifact website collectSPACE, says:

Here's a really neat video recorded tonight from NASA TV that shows Dr. Don Pettit demonstrating his zero-g coffee cup. Not only is it cool space food, but its a science lesson, too!

Sunday Morning Science with Dr. Don Pettit (Collectspace Forum) Astronaut demos drinking coffee in space (YouTube)

Related:

* NYT writer drinks NASA water distilled from the finest astronaut pee and sweat.
* NASA astronauts answer questions from on board the Space Station via YouTube

Above is a picture of the hand-blown recreation of the LSD molecule that I received for making a donation to the Erowid Center, the non-profit 501(c)(3) organization behind Erowid.org. Erowid has been a measured, sane repository for chemical and counterculture information online for twelve years and relies on donations to continue its operation.

Nearly anyone who has looked up drug and entheogenic plant information online has stumbled across — and subsequently been edified by — Erowid. For a subject as politically and personally charged as ingesting chemicals, Erowid remains one of the few rational sources of real-world experience reports, safety warnings, and advocacy of safe but individually accountable drug use available online or elsewhere.

If you're like me, your recreational and experimental drug use has tailed off over the years, but even so, I still use the site as a reference and source of entertainment. (I probably shouldn't laugh, but some of the negative experience reports can be hilarious. Hang on, lil' cowboy!) Moreover, "check out Erowid" is the first advice I offer to a young head. Kids are going to experiment — better they get unbiased information about the risks and rewards of their drug use than rely exclusively on well-meaning but often ignorant peers.

I am proud to give Erowid my money. Throw 'em a buck!

Art Glass Molecules incentives [Erowid.org]

Forget behavioral economics -- the Naked Scientists science podcast interviews a scientist who is investigating the hormonal basis for bubbles and crashes. It's endocrinal economics!

John - We found that the traders, if they had high testosterone in the morning relative the the median levels, they made a lot more money for the rest of the day than they did on the days when they had low testosterone.

Meera - When most people think of testosterone they obviously associate it largely with males. Does this then mean that females are relatively unaffected?

John - Women have about 10% of the testosterone that men do. It's entirely possible that they're not subject to this kind of overconfidence.

Meera - But you're also looking into levels of cortisol, as well.

John - That's right. In the current environment that may be the more interesting steroid. When the market turns around it turns into a crash what can happen is that cortisol, which is a stress hormone, can become elevated in the bodies of traders. Cortisol, if you're exposed to it chronically at high levels for a long period of time, it can have a devastating effect on both the mind and the body. In terms of affecting traders decisions what it can do is affect the memories you recall. You tend to recall bad memories, negative precedents. You tend to see risk where maybe there is none. You become fearful, you feel anxiety. I think that decreases a trader's appetite for risk. While testosterone is causing people to take too much risk cortisol is causing people to take too little risk in the crash.

Hormones and the Money Markets

Oh, what won't intrepid NYT reporter John Schwartz do for space journalism! Snip:

There are many elements of [NASA's current Space Shuttle Endeavor] mission, which is devoted to further construction of the station and improvements that will allow the station to double its crew size from three to six next year. But the gizmo that is getting the most attention is the “water recovery system,” which will recycle the station’s water supply. That’s right: urine, sweat in the air, waste water and other forms of moisture will be fed into the system, distilled and sent back to the tap.

The system, created at a cost of about $250 million, will recycle about 93 percent of the water used aboard the station. The cost of lifting supplies up to orbit is so high, though, that NASA estimates the system could pay for itself in as little as two years. Similar systems would be essential to maintaining long-term bases on faraway outposts on the Moon and Mars.

The astronauts don’t have a problem with this system. As Sandra H. Magnus, one of the astronauts who will be among the first to drink water produced by the new system aboard the station, noted in a recent interview, our earthbound water has been endlessly filtered through bodies, evaporated and rained down again. “We drink recycled water every day,” she said, “on a little bit longer time scale.”

You'll have to read the whole piece to learn how the stuff tastes.

The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US.

The conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling: in a nutshell, the "serious" stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of "hanging out, messing around and geeking out." That is to say, all the "time-wasting" social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.

Ito and her team establish a taxonomy of social activity, dividing it first into "peer-driven" and "interest-driven" -- the former being what kids do with their real-world friends, the latter being the niche interests that drive them to locate other people who are as fascinated as they are by whatever brand of esoterica they fancy.

Within these two categories, the researchers break things down further into "hanging out" (undirected, social activities), "messing around" (tinkering with media, networks and technologies) and "geeking out" (delving deep into subjects based on global communities of interest) and for each one, they describe the successful and unsuccessful techniques deployed by parents and educators to direct kids' activities.

All this is explained in a crisp, 55-page white paper, a snappy two-pager, and a full-length book called (appropriately), "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media." All three are available as free downloads, naturally, and the book can also be purchased as a physical object in a year when it's published.

This project is the best set of research-driven recommendations and observations about young peoples' use of technology I've seen -- it's the perfect antidote to the scare stories of "internet addiction" and pedophiles stalking MySpace, and the endless refrain about "kids today." If you care about kids and want to understand how they use technology and why, this is a must-read.

Two-pager, White paper, Book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (download), Digital Youth homepage

The New Yorker has an interesting article by John Seabrook about researchers who study the brains of psychopaths: "Suffering Souls."

The scanner was housed in a tractor-trailer parked behind the prison’s I.D. center. We followed a correctional officer through an internal courtyard to the rehab wing, which consisted of a large common area surrounded by two-man cells. The prisoners were standing at attention outside their cells, some holding mops and brooms. I entered a vacant cell and saw the occupant’s brain, a grainy black-and-white image on a piece of a paper, its edges curling, tacked up over the desk.

Then we walked through the common room and out a door at the other end, passing under a large poster with lines that read, “I am here because there is no refuge, finally, from myself.” The officer led us along a corridor of offices in which students from the University of New Mexico, where [cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Kent] Kiehl is on the faculty, conduct psychopathy interviews and also counsel participants in the drug-treatment program. Carla Harenski, one of Kiehl’s postdocs, was interviewing a beefy guy with a tattoo on his neck. Her office, like those of all the researchers in the lab, is equipped with a button she can press to call for help if an interview gets out of hand.

In order to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths among the Western volunteers, Kiehl and his students use the revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R, a twenty-item diagnostic instrument created by Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist, based on his long experience in working with psychopaths in prisons. Kiehl was taught to use the checklist by Hare himself, under whom he earned his doctorate, at the University of British Columbia. Researchers interview an inmate for up to three hours, and compare the inmate’s statements against what is known of his record and his personal history. The interviewer “scores” the subject on each of the twenty items—parasitic life style, pathological lying, conning, proneness to boredom, shallow emotions, lack of empathy, poor impulse control, promiscuity, irresponsibility, record of juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility, among other tendencies—with zero, one, or two, depending on how pronounced that trait is. Most researchers agree that anyone who scores thirty or higher on the PCL-R is considered to be a psychopath. Kiehl says, “Someone who scores a thirty-five, a thirty-six, they are just different. You say to yourself, ‘Aha, here you are. You are why I do this.’ ”

Harenski recently interviewed a Western inmate who scored a 38.9. “He had killed his girlfriend because he thought she was cheating on him,” she told me. “He was so charming about telling it that I found it hard not to fall into laughing along in surprise, even when he was describing awful things.” Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”

"Suffering Souls." (Image credit: John Ritter.)

The New Scientist has the skinny on the latest salvo in the war on Darwin: a resurrection of Cartesian dualism, with the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard:

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Creationists declare war over the brain (Thanks, Bill!)

Modern Fred's scans of vintage Japanese movie-monster posters include some spectacular pieces, none moreso than the anatomical cutaways of Godzilla, Gamera and co. I always wondered about their skeletal structure! Kaiju Eiga (via Geisha Asobi)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's posted a nifty Instructable video demonstrating the technique for spotting the secret spy-codes that many color laser-printers and copiers embed in their output. These dots were long-rumoured, but it wasn't until EFF discovered them that their existence was verified and their code was cracked. EFF's working on Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover which government agencies requested these dots, and what they do with them, but in the meantime, you can use the techniques in this video to spy on your friends and neighbours, just like the Feds! Yellow Dots of Mystery: Is Your Printer Spying on You? (via Make)

See also:
* Seeing Yellow: call your printer's manufacturer and ask why they spy on you
* EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints
* Do forensic printer marks slow down printers?

Bill Higgins sez,

Starting in 1942, Jack Williamson wrote a series of stories about tough space miners who go after antimatter asteroids. There's the hope of unlimited energy, but the danger that any touch unleashes nuclear hell.

In the latest issue of Symmetry, a magazine about particle physics, I've traced the chain of scientific developments in the 1930s and 1940s that inspired Williamson to write his "Seetee" tales-- if not the first, certainly the most influential stories to explore the physics of "contraterrene" (CT) matter.

Fermilab, where I work, manufactures antiprotons in quantity, so I enjoyed looking backwards at the ancestors of our business, tracking down the long-ago crossover where an abstruse possibility in nuclear physics led to speculation that flowed from astronomy to meteor science to SF.

Best of all, we obtained an image of Jack Williamson's carbon copy of "Collision Orbit." In their regular "Logbook" feature, the editors treated the manuscript with the reverence due a historic lab notebook, letter, or graph.

The Seetee stories originated in a weathered shack back of the family home on the Williamson ranch, which Jack built himself in 1934 so he could write in seclusion. This shack is still the object of occasional pilgrimages by 21st-century science fiction writers. See Scott Edelman's tour.

( Symmetry describes itself as "a magazine about particle physics and its connections to other aspects of life and science, from interdisciplinary collaborations to policy to culture.")

Antimatter’s science fiction debut (Thanks, Bill!)

Marilyn sez, "Astronauts returning from spacewalks have noticed a distinctive smell of fried steak on their space suits when they take them off. Who knew?!" Turns out, the cosmos is not vegan.

He said: “When astronauts were de-suiting and taking off helmets, they all reported quite particular odours.

“We have already produced the smell of fried steak, but hot metal is more difficult.

“We think it’s a high energy vibration in the molecule and that’s what we’re trying to add to it now.”

Space smells of steak, say Nasa (Thanks, Marilyn!)

In a thought-provoking rant, the Effect Measure science blog challenges the idea that science students should (or can!) know what a "fact," a "theory" and a "model" are. These are not simple, settled concepts, but rather areas of hotly contested debate.

Most scientists also can't properly say what distinguishes science from pseudoscience, say what a fact is, give a satisfying rendition of what a theory is, etc. The problem is that Mr. Williams can't do it either, because there is no agreement on these knotty matters. He seems to think these are simple and settled questions. But finding adequate criteria that separate science from pseudoscience, the so-called Demarcation Problem, remains an unsettled question in the philosophy of science. It is so difficult, and possibly so fruitless, that many philosophers have ceased to be concerned with it. Similarly, what is a "fact"?...

A wag once commented (and I have quoted here often) that to expect a scientist to understand the philosophy of science is like expecting a fish to understand hydrodynamics. I guess the same thing goes for science educators, although it is less excusable. Mr. Williams seems to be under the impression that these extremely difficult foundational issues are settled and should be common knowledge for all scientists.

A rant about science educators

National Geographic Nikon's picked its best microscopic images for 2008 and there's some stunners this year -- like this high-mag view of the antibiotic powder mitomycin. Best Microscopic Images of 2008 Announced (Thanks, Marilyn!)

David sez, "Three guys won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but there was a fourth scientist who did critical work but now makes $10/hr in a Toyota dealership! Despite the star system, science is a team sport, except that sometimes a team player contributes long after he's been sent to the minors."

But instead of focusing on his hard luck, Prasher said he is happy for his former colleagues. While it was perfectly within his rights not to share the cloned gene with others, Prasher said he felt an obligation to give his research a chance to turn into something significant, even if he was no longer a part of it.

"When you're using public funds, I personally believe you have an obligation to share," Prasher said. "I put my heart and soul into it, but if I kept that stuff, it wasn't gonna go anyplace."

David Mark Welch, assistant scientist of evolutionary biology at MBL, said this sort of situation is a natural byproduct of working in an industry where competition for grant money can be intense. Some grants have 100 applications but will only fund 10 requests, Welch said. That means competition — even from fellow colleagues at the same institution — can be fierce and scientists often feel the need to keep all unpublished research a secret.

Welch praised Prasher's actions and said many researchers are finding it easier to obtain larger grants if they collaborate instead of alienate. "You have to put aside any sort of personal desires to be better than everyone else because if your grant isn't funded, you're in trouble," he said.

Shuttle driver reflects on Nobel snub (Thanks, David!)

The Smithsonian has flickred 39 high resolution, public-domain images from the Scopes "Monkey" trial, the first major US trial over the teaching of evolution. Dig that natty straw boater!

During 1925, Watson Davis (1896-1967), Science Service managing editor, took numerous photographs while covering the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial as a reporter. In what was dubbed "The Trial of the Century," Scopes was tried and convicted for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan served on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. Almost eighty years later, the nitrate negatives, including portraits of trial participants, and images from the trial itself and significant places in Dayton, were discovered in archival material donated to the Smithsonian by Science Service in 1971.

Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes "Monkey Trial" in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women's Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the images.

Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs (via Wendy Seltzer)

Here's a mesmerizing ten-minute video from the Darwin@Home project (which harnesses idle computers to simulate evolution) that shows the different, bizarre randomly evolved walking-strategies that have emerged from the simulations. Darwin at Home in Ten Minutes (via Kottke)

This week's BusinessWeek Innovation of the Week podcast talks with Eyjolfur Guomundsson, the house economist for EVE Online, a massively multiplayer space game based on establishing and disrupting interplanetary trade. What's fascinating here is getting the perspective of an economist whose job is to design an economy that's "fun" -- or at least engrossing. It's not often that you get to hear economics described as an experimental science. An Economist on the Virtual Economy

Here's a fascinating analysis of the mechanics of Swoop, an online auction game (they call it "entertainment shopping") (!) that's designed to be a Skinner box for separating you from your money while confounding your judgement:

First I will lay out for you how the site works. It is a ‘auction’ site…sort of. Swoopo sells bids for $1. Each time you use a bid on an item the price is increased by $0.15 for that item. So here is an example:

Person A buys 5 bids from Swoopo for $5 total. Person A sees an auction for $1000 and places the first bid. The auction is now at $0.15. Person A now has a sunk cost of $1 (the cost of the bid they used). There is no way to get that dollar back, win or lose. If Person A wins they must pay the $0.15.

Person B also purchased $5 of bids. Person B sees the same auction and places the second bid. The auction price is now $0.30 (because each bid increases the cost by exactly 15 cents). Person B now has a sunk cost of $1. If Person B wins they must pay the $0.30. Swoopo now has $2 in the bank and the auction is at 30 cents.

This can happen with as many users as there are suckers to start accounts. Why are they suckers? Because everybody that does not have the top spot just loses the money they spent on bids. *Poof* Gone. If you think this sounds a little like gambling or a complete scam you are not alone. People get swept up into the auction and don’t want to get nothing for the money they spent on bids. I think you will understand it better if I show you an example of people getting ripped off on the site.

An auction for a laptop that says on the auction page, and I quote, “Worth up to $1,399.99″ The winning bidder, as stated on the site, placed 2020 bids. That is $2,020!! And the auction page proclaims “Savings: 0%” when it really should read negative! So Swoopo made like $600. BUT WAIT! The auction started at $0.00 and finished at $3,353.85. Now read that again. They were already up $600 from the winners bids alone. The winner sucker still had to pay $3,353.85 because that was the price of the auction. Okay, so Swoopo walks away with a cool $4,000 pure profit. (Like a bad TV commercial) BUT WITH THERE’S MORE! Remember that bids are placed in 15 cent increments. That means that if the auction finished for $3,353.85 you take that divided by $0.15 which equals $22,359 in bids!!!! That brings total profit to $22,359 (bids) + $3,353.85 (auction) -$1,399.99 (retail cost of laptop, probably not their cost) = $24,312.86

Pure Profit: A Look at Swoop (via Design with Intent)

The Asia-Pacific Space Agency continues to grow,, combining the spacefaring ambitions of China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia and others:

"Given China's diplomatic use of space, there is a very good chance they would be taking somebody from a new country," Cheng said.

China has spearheaded the founding of the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, a group intended to promote space cooperation between Asian nations. Cheng pointed out that both Iran and Pakistan are members of the group, and could be potential clients for Chinese space transport.

"I would strongly suspect that at this point in time the U.S. is probably unlikely to be taking any Iranian citizens into space," Cheng said. "But China has had successful sales of satellites to Nigeria and Venezuela, both of which are oil-producing countries, which would make Iran a candidate as someone who might send an astronaut up."

SPACE.com -- After Shenzhou Success, China Looks to the Future

Ivan writes to tell us about Patrick Buckley and Lilly Binns's new book,The Hungry Scientist Handbook: Electric Birthday Cakes, Edible Origami, and Other DIY Projects for Techies, Tinkerers, and Foodies :"It's for gadget-loving gastronomes. For people who really love to play with their food, who make their kitchen into a lab and a workshop. Your brother, your mother, your kid neighbor. Hell, it's for anyone. Cryogenic martinis, modular pecan pie, glowing lollipops, pomegranate wine, edible lingerie, and much, much more. Twenty completely ridiculous, totally fabulous, oddly educational, and sometimes even useful projects that may blow up your kitchen and will definitely blow your mind."

Pomegranate Wine: Yeast + sugar = booze. Every self-respecting kitchen chemist should be able to implement this crucial piece of alchemy. (It's also a boon if you ever find yourself in jail — stuff your pockets with Fleischmann's before you're sent up.) This recipe uses antioxidant-rich pomegranates, but pretty much any fruit juice will work. Just don't expect to get soused immediately: Fermentation, distillation, and aging can take a month or more.

Wired: The Hungry Scientist Handbook: A Lab in Every Kitchen, Amazon: The Hungry Scientist Handbook: Electric Birthday Cakes, Edible Origami, and Other DIY Projects for Techies, Tinkerers, and Foodies (Thanks, Ivan!)

See also: Smart coasters detect hot or cold beverages, created by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Avi sez, "Prof. Robert Sapolsky (along with National Geographic) has produced a superb introduction to how stress works and how best to cope with it. A summation of his lifelong study of stress, this video effectively delivers Sapolsky's personal perspective on Stress that may help you live a better, longer life."

Sapolsky's lectures on stress (see link below) are some of the most interesting scientific explanations for everyday phenomena I've ever read. Stress: Portrait of a Killer (Thanks, Avi!)

See also: Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress

Terry Pratchett's latest novel is Nation and it's like nothing else he's ever written -- except that like many of his books, it is fantastic and brilliant.

Nation is the story of two children: Ermintrude may just be the Queen of England now that a plague has struck down most of the royal family. Mau is the last survivor of the Nation, a tribal people living on a south-seas island that has been destroyed by a tsunami. They are both lost and adrift in the wake of terrible tragedy, flung together on the island of Nation. They both are blessed with doubt about the theologies of their ancestors -- and denied its succour. Together, they discover science, and use it to weld together their people and save them from despair and evil external forces.

Nation is an absolutely sweet book, a story that is part Lord of the Flies and part Treasure Island, with strong and likable characters who are forced to their limits by circumstances. The action is well-paced, the philosophy and science are deftly handled, and there is humor and fear in equal measures.

This isn't a Discworld novel or a Truckers novel -- it's not Good Omens. It's a complete departure for Pratchett and yet is recognizably him, on every page, writing with the same grace and wit we know from his other work. Highly recommended (and would make brilliant bedtime reading, too). Nation (US), Nation (UK)

Today's XKCD is epic in scope -- a log-scale map of the observable universe from top to bottom, with many in-jokes (including me!) and pop culture references. How many can you decode? Height (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, we float around in zero gravity. With me on this Zero-G weightless flight are Intel Chairman Craig Barrett; my friend Sean Bonner from metblogs; and a bunch of science teachers from grade schools and high schools throughout the United States who were on board to conduct microgravity experiments for the kids back home. As you watch, keep an eye out for the floating lego robot, a flying pig, and the barfing guy who is totally barfing for reals -- the rest of us did not, btw, I don't get sick in space.

What you see in this episode is what it feels like, guys, and it feels awesome.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable version of this video, and instructions on how to subscribe to the daily BBtv video podcast.

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(Special thanks to Peter Diamandis, and George and Loretta Whitesides)

Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is a balanced, nuanced, entertaining and vastly informative look at the crisis of water -- bottled and tap -- in the USA. Bottlemania asks the big questions about whether water ought to be privatized, takes a penetrating look at the fraught local politics that gives bottled water companies rights to extract a town's vital water and ship it elsewhere, and presents a compelling critique of the sustainability of letting the rich buy their way out of failures in public resources like water. She looks into the campaigns by water companies to "educate" restaurant servers about the fortunes in tips to be had by flattering their customers into buying bottled. The book also does a good job of discussing the amazing local water supplies that come out of the taps in many American cities, absolutely free.

At the same time, the book is not afraid to look at some of the serious problems facing municipal water supplies. The EPA have been negligent in setting and enforcing standards, little-understood