I'm here today to talk about a very strange paper: Penetration of the oral mucosa by parasite-like sperm bags of squid: a case report in a Korean woman.

This study, published in February in the Journal of Parasitology (?!), presents the tale of a woman eating squid who experienced "severe pain" and a "pricking, foreign-body sensation" in her mouth. A doctor found and removed "twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms" from her tongue, cheek, and gums.

So a young earth creationist museum put some dinosaurs in its advertising.  Ho-hum.

While the atheist panic machine lumbers into action once again - after all, kids like dinosaurs, what if they go and learn not to steal and stuff while they are there? - there really isn't much to worry about if you are not in the panic business.

Two days ago I discussed at ICFP 2012 the most recent results of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the allotted time of my talk I could only cover few analyses, and I obviously chose some of the most interesting ones, so that was already a summary. Here I am bringing the information collapse one step further, by giving a itemized summary of some of the points I made, just in case you are interested. If you want to, you can also download the original slides of my talk from here (but be careful, it's a 8Mb file).

Think it takes James Webb Space Telescope money-pit type funding to do (or someday do) astronomy these days?

Not so, some astronomers get it done with a lens equivalent to a digital camera. As the saying goes, it's not the size of your aperture, it's the vigor of your numerical analysis that counts.

The KELT North telescope in southern Arizona has a tiny lens - really tiny.  But it has revealed the existence of two very unusual faraway planets in a big way, according to Ohio State University doctoral student Thomas Beatty and Vanderbilt University research scientist Robert Siverd, who detailed their discoveries for the KELT-North team at the American Astronomical Society national meeting in Anchorage.

ArQule, Inc. and Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd. announced final results from a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, phase 2 clinical trial with the selective MET inhibitor tivantinib 

as a single-agent, investigational, second-line treatment in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The data was presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) (abstract number 4006).

Do you want to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana?  Did you cheer when a judge in one state broke the law regarding the Ten Commandments and hissed when a judge in another state broke the law regarding gay marriage?

Freedom is a moving target, as is social authoritarianism, and how people seem to come down on one issue often shows how they think on a whole raft of other ones. 

AMSTERDAM, June 13, 2012  -- Elsevier has added a new enhancement to SciVal Strata, a web-based performance evaluation tool that allows users to conduct highly customized performance assessments of research teams and individual researchers. The new functionality provides the capacity for objective assessment of a specific selection of a researcher's work in addition to their complete publication output. This option is critical when selecting the most impactful papers to be submitted for various government or institutional assessments. In addition the enhanced functionality will prove useful to individuals applying for grants and showing funders the impact of the research they supported. 

MELBOURNE, Australia, June 13 -- In what is being billed as the world's largest international study of online consumer behavior, involving over 36,000 users (though that sounds low - we could easily get more than 36,000 respondents to a survey today), differences between online behavior cultures were found, including the secret to success - which appears to be simplicity. 

The Webreep online consumer survey analyzed consumer behavior on the internet between May 2011 and May 2012. Participants were distributed across 7 regions, including France, Germany, Spain, Australia, China, and Russia.

The study found Americans are the most trusting, 20% more than Europeans, Chinese (23%), and Russians (33%).

Oxitec's novel genetic fluorescent marking technology can substantially improve control of the cotton pest moth, pink bollworm, according to findings of a new study. 

A new study has found that individuals taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are more likely than non-users to experience decreased energy, fatigue upon exertion, or both. The researchers suggest that these findings should be taken into account by doctors when weighing risk versus benefit in prescribing statins. 

Statins are among the most widely used prescription drugs on the market and therefore increased attention has focused on statins' side effects, particularly their effect on exercise. While some patients have reported fatigue or exercise intolerance when placed on statins, randomized trials had not previously addressed the occurrence of fatigue-with-exertion or impaired energy in patients on statins relative to placebo.