Samina Cabral

“Swedes have grown accustomed to the idea that babies cannot be potty trained, but that parents need to wait until they are mature, usually when they decide that they no longer want diapers,” said a recent University of Gothenburg study that explored the potty training process.

I guess we can say that the general view of potty training in America is about the same as the Swedish: most parents potty train their children at two or three years of age or when they deem them mature enough. The child usually doesn’t get to help decide when that is and sometimes the parents sick of handling diapers will expedite the process.

One article I found said the average child will end up using a total of 6,000-7,000 disposable diapers by age two. That article, written in 2010, also broke down the cost per diaper of several diaper brands and the cost per year from birth to age two: $1,000-$2,240. Cloth diapers have become popular again with parents who say they are saving money and diverting diapers from landfills.

The American Journal of Health Promotion has published an Oregon State University (OSU) study that tells us what we already knew about exercise, in particular “lifestyle exercising,” and I love it because I am lazy. Are you lazy? Good. Keep reading.

Lifestyle exercises are all the little eco-friendly things you can do during the day (taking the stairs, standing at your desk, parking farther away from store entrances) that may in the long run end up being just as beneficial as a period of routine, sustained, structured exercise or as I call it “thirty minutes to an hour of my day without coffee and the Internet.”

“Biobanks are increasingly important to scientific advances, but our decentralized, fragmented research enterprise system in the U.S. has encouraged their development without necessarily providing them with the tools to survive," said Gail Henderson, PhD, professor and chair of social medicine at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Henderson is also the head of UNC's Center for Genomics and Society.

A biobank (a facility is shown at right; storing what exactly I'm not quite sure) is a place, sometimes run by a hospital or a university, that curates human specimens like blood for research purposes. Some biobanks even share their specimens or the data they’ve collected from their human body bits.

Last year Henderson and her colleagues conducted an online national survey of biobanks (facilities were offered a a $30 Amazon gift card if they participated which they should use to buy Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach) and the results are available now for us all to gawk at in morbid curiosity.  

Ten pregnant Holstein cows, the quintessential black and white farm animal but the name is also used when referring to red and white cows, at Oregon State University’s dairy were fed different amounts of flaxseed because researchers were bored with cow-tipping. Just kidding!

They were looking for the optimal amount of the supplement to a dairy cow’s current diet: mixtures of corn, grains, alfalfa hay, and grass silage.  This diet leads to dairy products that are low in concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids and other polyunsaturated fats. This doesn’t mean items are unhealthy but researchers thought that products could be more nutritious.

Ideally, the supplement would transfer its nutritional properties to the milk that is then used for other dairy products but not affect the texture and quality of the final product sent to grocery stores.

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has some good news about citrus trees affected with Huanglongbing disease (citrus greening disease) or the obviously less fun to say HLB: sick trees will always affect the taste of the fruit that is used in orange juice, a delicious breakfast beverage, but sometimes we won’t be able to tell.

A research team in Fort Pierce, Florida- where the United States Horticultural Research Laboratory is located- studied Midsweet, Hamlin, and Valencia oranges with or without HLB symptoms over two growing seasons. They found that orange juice squeezed from fruit with HLB symptoms  usually contained higher amounts limonin and nomilin. These two compounds gave the juice a bitter taste but even though the amounts were higher they were generally below the level that could be detected by people.

ARS researchers say the fruit that is affected need only be mixed with healthy fruit to produce a juice that is palatable. Now if you are anything like me and have had the luxury of fresh-squeezed orange juice the liquid was never drinkable until I had poured about two or three cups of sugar in it and then chased that down with three bowls of Frosted Flakes.

Lowland tapirs, like the yaks featured last week, are making a comeback due to conservation efforts. The tapir is still listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List though and are still affected by habitat loss and low reproductive rate: a single birth every 2-3 years and they only live for about 30 years.

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Study looked at the tapir population in a network of five remote national parks along the border of northwestern Bolivia and southeastern Peru in South America. Using a combination of camera traps, interviews with park guards, and subsistence hunters, the researchers estimated at least 14,500 lowland tapirs in the region.

I’ve talked about the Asian Carp invasion (bighead carp and silver carp) before and I can never remember the details. Are they here? Where is here when wildlife officials are monitoring all five Great Lakes and interconnected waterways from the Gulf of Mexico northward? What are the control methods currently in place and why can’t I buy Asian Carp at the store if it’s comparable to walleye and can be fried? If it can be fried don’t set it aside!

Apparently one of the methods to prevent the carp from entering Lake Michigan, the Great Lake that is shared by four states and is not bordered by Canada, in Illinois is an electric fence. But researchers, including Cory Suski an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, think two barrier methods is better than one and so they drugged some fish to the point of disorientation with carbon dioxide.

There is a reason why after listening to a focus group an unknown corporation somewhere coined the phrase “one-stop shopping” because having to visit more than a couple of stores in a day for the things you need can stress you out.  

You hear the plea from friends and relatives all the time: “I just want to go in, get what I need, and get out.” When did going to the store for cereal and coffee turn into an expedition on par with fighting your way into a jungle to retrieve the artifacts of a lost civilization? We have choices though and that’s what makes being a human so nice.

But you know who doesn’t have a choice when it comes to where they get their food? The endangered howler monkeys living in the fragmented forests of Mexico.

A team of scientists from the research organization Max Planck in Germany dumped some stuff into the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in the name of science! They also used underwater robot technology to study the results after dropping four wood logs (Douglas fir) with smaller logs attached on the seafloor at depths of 1,700 meters or over 5,000 feet.

Three of the logs were deployed using the remote operated vehicle (ROV) Quest 4000, the little robot NOAA used back in September of last year to study underwater volcanoes in the Lau Basin. The Max Planck study was conducted in 2006-2007 so the ROV had plenty of time to rest up for NOAA.

Yesterday “the strongest evidence yet that the red planet may have supported life” was published online over at Nature Geoscience.

Shut down Curiosity! It’s all over! Except not really because the key words here are “evidence” and “may have.” The authors of the paper and NASA scientists sound like they aren't interested in throwing in the towel on Mars and still want to uncover all of its secrets.

Curiosity has yet to comment on the paper called “Groundwater activity on Mars and implications for a deep biosphere” that contained data supplied by its cousin the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or MRO.  Curiosity’s latest tweet was on Friday when it boasted that a life-sized model of itself referred to as “Ms. Curiosity” would be rolling in today’s inaugural parade. The rover, still playing in the dirt, seems largely unconcerned about the paper.

Doctoral candidate John Taylor, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Crop Sciences,  was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens that were being circulated by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Taylor told the university’s news office that of the NGO lists he saw one reported almost 700 urban gardens in Chicago.

700 urban gardens may seem like a lot but when you start to think about the size and population of the city that one list didn’t seem accurate to Taylor. He surmised that there were actually more than what the lists presented. The content of the lists weren’t always accurate either and Taylor said some of the greenery was just well, greenery: planter boxes or landscaping that did not produce food, at least not food for humans.

So Taylor partnered with Assistant Professor Sarah T. Lovell at the same department to obtain a more accurate count of urban gardens with the help of everyone’s favorite time-waster and map on the Internet- Google Earth.

Lately there hasn’t been a lot of happy news coming out of Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles if you follow Lakers basketball. Don’t lie and tell me you’re a Clippers fan the other basketball team that plays there. No one is a Clippers fan. But the good news is the next time Jack Nicholson gets up (Adam Sandler not available at all games) and walks out in disgust he can throw his trash away sustainably thanks to new recycling stations designed by GreenDrop!

“Partnering with GreenDrop allows Staples Center to incorporate a convenient waste-diversion system that patrons can easily utilize without increasing operational costs,” explained Lee Zeidman the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Staples Center. “We evaluated other containers, but GreenDrop was the best option for the arena’s recycling needs.”

The GreenDrop is the best option for sports arenas because the containers were designed in part by a sports arena. They were even designed to have advertising slapped on them. In Los Angeles this means ads for Smart Water, Pechanga Resort & Casino, and Carl’s Jr.

“Wild yaks are icons for the remote, untamed, high-elevation roof of the world,” said Joel Berger, who led an expedition for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana. “While polar bears represent a sad disclaimer for a warming Arctic, the recent count of almost 1,000 wild yaks offers hope for the persistence of free-roaming large animals at the virtual limits of high-altitude wildlife.”

Berger and a team of scientists from China and America took a census of the yak population in a rugged and remote area called Hoh Xil in China: a nature reserve about the size of West Virginia. In Mongolian the name means “blue ridge” or “beautiful girl” and no matter what you want to call the place, it’s were the wild yak (Bos mutus) makes its home.

They counted 990 yaks to be exact and they are excited about what this new data might mean: the yak population is now flourishing because of conservation efforts.

Yesterday the EPA, the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, and the Municipality of Tijuana (TJ as the locals tend to call the border town) opened the Urban Composting Center. San Diego’s own Miramar Greenery composting facility was brought in to help the new center with institutional composting practices.

“We are thrilled to celebrate the opening of this center, a model for communities throughout Baja California as they incorporate composting into their everyday practices,” said Jared Blumenfeld the EPA’s Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest, “The composting center will help protect the environment on both sides of the border by reducing waste within our shared San Diego/Tijuana watershed that would have gone to landfills.”

Blumenfeld is in the area for a short visit to San Diego and Mexico. He is scheduled to meet with tribes in San Diego, tour a solar panel plant in Tijuana, and visit the Toyota Manufacturing plant in Tecate, Mexico. The plant makes Tacoma pickup trucks and the Tacoma truck bed.

The Dream Lab is a program sponsored by the British Council. In 2008 they asked universities in the UK to create competitions that would help develop science and design education in China.  Kingston University answered the call and was selected by the British Council to run their contest focused on how farming, cooking, and eating will change during the next four decades.

“The competition wasn't simply about food,"  said Professor Catherine McDermott, a Kingston University curating expert and the project’s leader, "It was also about biotechnology and the massive advances being made in farming techniques and considering how designers - the very people who create our restaurants and kitchens - react to these changes."

A team of students from Dalian Nationalities University, in northern China, took the theme and ran with it to design a contest-winning “eco-kitchen” that sounds less like an organic garden and sustainable kitchen and more like something out of the Jetsons.

Last year was the ninth warmest year since 1880 according to NASA scientists. The agency added: with the exception of 1988, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000. 2010 and 2005 are ranked as the hottest years on record. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is no longer a relevant song because of science!

This new data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and NOAA was presented today at a joint conference. Representatives remarked that their comparison is accurate but does differ slightly due to where on the planet measurements are taken or not taken.

It’s Monday and no one is feeling this whole beginning of the work week thing but maybe this time it’s because you have the (insert menacing music here) the flu.

It’s going around according to every media outlet and Google has even provided a map that shows how severe they think the flu will be across the country. At first the map, based on search data, indicated that Connecticut would be spared but now they are in the same boat as the rest of us. A software glitch caused the discrepancy.

Andrew Duxbury, M.D., an associate professor in the Division of Gerontology, Geriatrics and Palliative Care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, has given us three rules to follow that will help “older adults”-people 65 years or older who are more susceptible to the flu due to weakened immune systems- avoid the flu.

On Friday NOAA submitted a mandated biennial report to Congress that identified 10 nations that had fishing vessels engaged in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in 2011/2012. A few of these countries weren’t doing enough to prevent the unintended catch (bycatch) of protected species last year. The report is a part of the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act.

The U.S. will start work with or continue where they may have left off after the 2011 report with these 10 nations: Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, Venezuela, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Spain, Tanzania, Ghana, and Mexico. Portugal and the five countries listed above in italics have corrected some of their IUU issues with new laws and regulations.

Label reading at the grocery store has become for many shoppers a good habit. However, when we are in a rush and need to make snap decisions we only have time to look at the front packaging which is why companies slap easy to understand phrases and symbols on their products: “Low Fat!,” “0 Trans Fat,” and “No HFCS.” 

Stores, for example Walmart, have created in-house symbols to direct us to the healthiest products they sell but as we have all heard a million times before packaging phrasing is not always accurate or standardized.

A study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health looked at foods that are “whole grain" because even though we know we should eat whole grains that are nutritionally better for us than say a sweet, delicious vending machine honey bun, “no single standard exists for defining any product as a ‘whole grain.’

A handful of still images that give us a glimpse of a 10 foot giant squid have been circulating on the Internet and they are definitely real.

The thought of a giant squid is terrifying and fascinating and the images are from a video taken 2,000 feet below the North Pacific Ocean about 260 miles south of Tokyo with a special camera called a Medusa by a team of scientists.

The actual video footage will air on the Discovery Channel’s Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real on January 27th and a Japanese television station will air the footage this weekend. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet we may be treated to some bootleg footage of the Japanese airing but until then let’s take a look at this marine creature of mythical proportions.