Chocranut

Lightly-salted peanut wrapped in a sweetened dried cranberry, then covered in dark (>75%) chocolate.

Hydra bud

To reproduce asexually, hydra bud. A bump grows on the lower stem of the adult, elongates, grows tenticles, develops a seperated body cavity, and finally releases from the mother to be a perfect little clone. This particular bud needs another few days of growing before it can detach, but its tenticles are already armed with poison stingers, and it can catch prey, or eat plankton passed to it by the tenticles of the mother. I've only seen this food-passing a couple of time, and it could even be coincidental, but it is nice to think that even cnidarians get tasty treats from their mommies.

Fussy Hydra babies

Hydra babies come in two types, buds and hatchlings. Buds grow like tree branches out the side of the main trunk of their parent. Eventually the branch is almost as big as the trunk, and they separate, and you have two hydra. Eggs also grow on the sides of their mothers, but they need to be fertilized by free-swimming sperm that are released by male hydra. Then they make a hard shell, detach from the mother and settle down to wait some weeks or months before a tiny hatchling wiggles out. Where the buds are like small copies of their parents, the hatchlings are tiny and genetically novel individuals. They are too small to easily eat the crustaceans we usually feed the adults and buds (Artemia) so we feed them mashed Artemia, except they like their food alive. I have ordered rotifers to see if they will eat those, as they are smaller and softer than the Artemia.

I find myself looking forward to having rotifers in the lab again. They are just so familiar at this point.

Cold and Fat

Cold places tend to have fatty cuisines. The usual explanation for this, although I know of no rigorous test, is that cold weather requires us to burn lots of energy to stay warm, and our bodies respond to this greater demand by causing us to eat more rich foods.

This simple idea has several profound implications that I will now proceed to invent.

The first implication is that " burn lots of energy to stay warm" means something very similar to "increase metabolic rate." So people in colder environments should have higher metabolisms. This matches with the current experience of myself and my wife. For the past months the temperature outside our apartment has rarely gotten above freezing, the wind is always blowing and it is generally damp. Our apartment is somewhat difficult to heat, so it is generally cool and sometimes downright cold inside. We have been eating a very rich diet, and rather than gaining weight, I think we are both loosing a bit. And although the short days cause a degree of lethargy, I have been generally quite productive, with fewer problems of concentration than usual.

There is good reason to think, in fact, that colder climates lead to greater productivity. Colder countries are systematically more economically productive than hotter countries, air conditioning raises productivity considerably, and hot countries experience more economic growth in cool years than in warm ones. My preferred speculation is that this is because the experience of coolth induces greater physiological throughput, allowing for greater activity. If one needs to expend energy to keep oneself warm, why not put that energy to some good use, such as thinking, building, or working. Why shiver when I can use the same energy sharpening the knives or generating a hypothesis?

Allow me one further observation and conjecture. Germans, who eat very heavy diets but on the average are less heavy than Americans, are in the habit of opening all the windows whenever it gets warm inside, even if it is below freezing out. Two apparently unrelated stereo-types of modern Americans, both of which have some basis in fact, may in fact be causally related. These are, we are very fat, and we keep our houses very warm in the winter. Perhaps the miracle diet so many have been searching for should include turning down the thermostat. If we burn more calories when we experience cold, and we want to burn more calories, perhaps we should experience more cold.

Sprouting collaborations

In the last week I have agreed on two major collaborations (with a Harvard professor and the Director of a Max Planck Institute) ordered some tens of thousands of Euros worth of equipment for my own experiments, hired two lab assistants for those experiments and promised my boss that I would perform a significant reanalysis of a set of data I already have in collaboration with another member of the lab. My wife and I also made some very tasty Brussels sprouts with garlic, soy sauce and lemon juice.

Here's the recipe:

Wash the sprouts, peel off any out leaves that don't look good, and cut each sprout in half.

Cut up a head of garlic.

Juice 2 lemons.

Heat a large cast-iron skillet or other frying surface, large enough to fit all the halved sprouts in a single layer. Put on a fair bit of oil and bring to very hot. Pour in the sprouts and use a spatula or fork to flip them over so that the flat side of each is down. Slide them around some so they all cook evenly. Cook them like that until they are somewhat charred on the bottom. Then flip them over and roll them around so that the other surfaces get cooked. They will still be somewhat too hard inside, so pour in a scant cup of water and cover while the water rapidly boils off, steaming the insides. Once the water cooks off, taste a couple of sprouts and if they are still too hard inside, pour on a little bit more water. Once they are done, remove them to a large bowl and put the garlic on to fry. After a minute, pour some splashes of soy sauce over the garlic, and let it cook down a little bit. Mix this with the lemon juice, salt and pepper, and pour it over the sprouts. Serve hot.

Why I can love chocolate

The conversation usually goes something like this:

Me- I'm allergic to caffeine. It makes me get a terrible headache, then get really sleepy and sleep for 12 hours and then I still have a terrible headache.

You- Um, but I see you eat chocolate all the time. You're always talking about chocolate and writing about chocolate. You are a total chocolate adict.

Me- Yeah! I love chocolate. It's my main drug.

You- Um, but chocolate has caffeine.

Me- Well, it has a tiny bit, but mostly it has other closely related chemicals.

I've had this conversation with enough dozens of people that I figured I should look up what was in chocolate. And it turns out I actually did know what I was talking about (for once). According to this article in the journal European Food Research and Technology, cacao beans have three main kinds of very similar chemicals in the group called methylxanthines. These are theobromine (named for the Cacao tree, Theobroma cacao), caffeine, and theophylline. Raw fermented beans straight off the cacao tree have lots of theobromine, very little caffeine and almost no theophylline. In the various preparation steps between then and when I actually eat it, much of the caffeine is lost. The concentration of these various chemicals depends a lot on the strain of cacao, the growing conditions and the processing, but most chocolate has 20 to 100 times as much theobromine as caffeine. A cup of hot cocoa has about half as much caffeine as a cup of decaf coffee.

The fact that chocolate doesn't make me have a terrible headache and put me to sleep is likely (likely meaning I am speculating) either because there is too little caffeine in it to matter or because it has so much theobromine. Theobromine could be counteracting the caffeine, or it could be competitively excluding the caffeine from the neuroreceptors it normally binds to. Basically this means that theobromine and caffeine are so similar that they stick to the same spots on my neurons, and if the theobromine gets there first, the caffeine may not be able to stick, and therefore not affect me. But the moral of the story is I can eat chocolate without worrying about the caffeine making me sick.