Mercury levels in Tuna caught off the coast of Hawaii haven’t changed in the last 27 years, reports Science Blog. Accordingly, the mercury in these fish is more likely to be coming from a source other than pollution, which has increased airborne mercury over the same time period.

Eat your beans, they are good for you. I’m not touting them just because I’m selling candles for the cub scout pack fundraiser, but because they contain significant quantities of flavinoids, nature’s own anti-oxidants. The darker the bean, the better, although no word if that also influences musical production as well.

The long delayed Gravity Probe B satellite is getting close to launch. It was conceived before me; it was kicking around the halls of Stanford back when I went to school there; and it will be launched on a Delta II from Vandenburg AFB – the kind of mission I worked on in my youth. Enough about me, though. It hopes to answer the question, does space twist as well as bend? Or to put in scientific terms, does the earth drag space time with it as it spins — what’s known as frame dragging, and a still unproven prediction of General Relativity. If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet, be sure to hit the links to learn more.

Here’s a fun article about flatulence. It reports some of the findings of fart doctor extraordinaire Michael Levitt.

Women and men break wind just as often – although the volume may be lower with each puff.

Loudness and odor are uncorrelated – silent isn’t necessarily deadly (but it sure can be!).

Hydrogen Sulfide not only gives flatus (the technical name for fart) its pungent aroma, but is as deadly as cynanide in the blood stream – no wonder is smells so bad.

This article has not only the the facts about flatulence but also the wonderful phrase “high drama flatulence”.

One of the other benefits to the early stages of the Atkins diet – less flatulence because of the reduction in carbohydrates that fuel the bacteria that make it.

One last thought to leave you with on this subject: you have roughly 10 times more bacteria living in your gut than you have cells in your body, and getting rid of them isn’t an option.

Now I have another thing to blame my parents for – my nearsightedness. Although my mother was barely nearsighted, my father not at all until late in life (as he would put it “I’m near sighted on my distant vision and farsighted on my near vision”), I’m very nearsighted, and my brother had better than average vision. According to researchers at Ohio State University, your chance of developing myopia (nearsightedness) increases if your parents have it. They also found that myopic children spend more time reading for pleasure and score higher in a test of basic reading and language skills. I’ve sat in meetings of engineers and counted how many wore glasses (plus how many were white and male), and many’s the time I’ve been in meetings where we all were white males wearing glasses or contacts.