Not only do evil fast food companies make us fat and tempt our children with deceptive advertising, they also make us impatient, according to a new study in Psychological Science.

In fact, mere exposure to fast food and related symbols can make us impatient, increasing preference for time saving products, and reducing willingness to save, the study found.

Now that the latest battle in the invertebrate wars seems to have died down a bit (victors inconclusive, of course), I can post a list of cool things about cephalopods that have put them in the news lately, without it necessarily having to serve as ammunition. (<---WOW, that was the most awkward sentence ever, but guess who DOES NOT CARE, because she has been locked in a basement for a week writing her dissertation! HI!)

1. They used to rule the world. As I'm sure Dr. Fuchs discussed in his lecture:

Ignacio Ellacuria wrote,"with Mons. Romero God is past for El Salvador".

Like about four years ago, the name of Grigoriy Yakovlevich (Grisha) Perelman is again in the mass-media headlines all around the world.

Grisha is a prominent mathematician, who was able to solve one of the most perplexed mathematical problems of the last two centuries: he had managed to prove the Poincaré conjecture.

In 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, but had voluntarily and expressly refused to accept it.
Most recently, he has been awarded the not less prestigious Clay Millenium Prize, but is expected to reject this award as well.

It makes me very happy when I see new precise results on the mass of the top quark being produced by the CDF collaboration (to which I still proudly belong). CDF, one of the two hadron collider experiments operating at the 2-TeV Tevatron proton-antiproton synchrotron in Batavia, IL, has been measuring the top quark mass since 1994, one year prior to its discovery. The figure with the top candidates (histogram) from which the mass measurement of 174+-12 GeV was obtained in 1994 is shown on the right below; backgrounds and top expectation are shown by hatched lines.

Rocket science, it isn't: eating at restaurants is typically a more caloric experience than if you prepare foods at home.¹

However, the new health care law has a provision that may help customers make more informed choices about the calorie content of their food. The law requires that any restaurant chain with at least 20 outlets post calorie counts for all the food items they sell. This affects about 200,000 restaurants nationwide, WSJ reports. The general idea is that it could help consumers make decisions that will change their behavior and lead to more healthy eating habits.

Utah's red rocks have yielded a rare skeleton of a new species of plant-eating dinosaur, Seitaad ruessi, that lived 185 million years ago and may have been buried alive by a collapsing sand dune.

The discovery confirms the widespread success of sauropodomorph dinosaurs during the Early Jurassic Period, researchers say. The finding is documented this week in PLoS One

People who stay mentally sharp into their 80s and beyond challenge the notion that brain changes linked to mental decline and Alzheimer's disease are a normal, inevitable part of aging, say scientists presenting at the ACS National Meeting.

The researchers say that elderly people with super-sharp memory — so-called "super-aged" individuals — somehow escaped formation of brain "tangles." The tangles consist of an abnormal form of a protein called "tau" that damages and eventually kills nerve cells. Named for their snarled, knotted appearance under a microscope, tangles increase with advancing age and peak in people with Alzheimer's disease.

Specially medicated contact lenses loaded with vitamin E can keep glaucoma medicine near the eye — where it can treat the disease — almost 100 times longer than possible with current commercial lenses, scientists reported today at the ACS National Meeting.

Glaucoma is second only to cataracts as the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in the world. It affects almost 67 million people. Eye drops that relieve the abnormal build-up of pressure inside the eye that occurs in glaucoma, are a mainstay treatment.

Protein phosphorylation, the process by which proteins are flipped from one activation state to another, is a crucial function for most living beings, since it controls nearly every cellular process, including metabolism and gene transcription.