Have you ever found yourself wondering about the species identification of the molluscan muscle in your mouth? The answer can be as slippery as the animal.

Accurate seafood labeling is a constant problem, largely due to the length of the supply chain. Customers have to trust what the restaurant or supermarket tells them, and the buyers for those businesses in turn have to trust what their suppliers say. This game of fish telephone can go around the world, as globalization shuttles seafood between distant markets.

Among seafood, cephalopod labeling is some of the least informative. Often there's no attempt to get any more specific than "squid" or "octopus", and even those terms seem dubious when you realize how often people mix them up.

An artificial big toe found attached to the foot of an ancient Egyptian mummy is the world's oldest prosthetic.  At least for now.   It predates the previous earliest known practical prosthesis , the Roman Capula Leg, by several hundred years.

It wasn't simply cosmetic.   The two toes, a three-part wood and leather artifact housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the Greville Chester artificial toe on display in the British Museum, also helped their toeless owners walk like Egyptians.

David Kirby, the author of Evidence of Harm, and a major promoter of the debunked idea that thimerosal causes autism, has a new article at Huffington Post, in which he commits a string a fallacious appeals and specious speculations concerning the persistence of the autism-vaccine myth. 
 Kirby closes his lengthy piece with an unjustified appeal: “The CDC estimates that there are about 760,000 Americans under 21 with an ASD. Even if just 1 percent of those cases was linked to vaccines (though I believe it is higher), that would mean 7,600 young Americans with a vaccine-associated ASD.”

A University of Leicester ecologist has warned that Kenya is being “bled dry” by the UK’s demand for fresh flowers, a timely concern given Valentine's Day.   Dr. David Harper, of the Department of Biology has been working at Lake Naivasha in Kenya as part of ongoing research and projects on the ecosystem of lakes there and has called on UK supermarkets to show more concern about the health of the natural environment that the flowers come from.

Blaming supermarkets seems a little much but academics know better than to blame individuals so telling poor women they shouldn't get flowers would have some backlash - faceless corporations are fair game.

How does something made of loose particles sometimes behave like a solid, liquid or gas? For example, dry sand acts like a solid when you stand on it but like a liquid when you try to scoop some up in your hand.

Or how Saturn's rings act like a fluid.    Dr Nikolai Brilliantov from the University of Leicester Department of Mathematics is intrigued by the maths of things like that and is going to give a free lecture on February 15th in the University’s Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 1, at 5.30pm titled ‘Statistical mechanics of granular matter: simple concepts and complex phenomena’.

You've heard of Granola, we all have.   But is it a green technology?   Yes and no.   It turns out the name is no longer trademarked so when Virginia Tech computer science faculty member Kirk Cameron and co-founder Joseph Turner decided to create intelligent software power management green software for use in servers, personal computers, and laptops, they named it Granola.

Covered in the popular media with the engaging headline Scientists discover how to make squid go completely berserk is a recent study about squid pheromones.

Squid species of a particular family, Loliginidae, are famous for their spawning aggregations. They gather together in certain areas at certain times of the year, and the females lay eggs in elongate capsules attached to the seafloor. A cluster of capsules is often referred to as an "egg mop" and a collection of mops as an "egg bed." Stumbling upon on egg bed while diving can be a dramatic sight.

Since Valentine's Day is approaching, it's a good time to combine X-rays from the NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)  into a new image of a ring - not of jewels - but of black holes. The composite image is of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth.