News

One in 30 million

“No drawn butter will ever touch Fiona's tail,” CNN.com reports. “She's an extremely rare, seven-year-old ‘yellow' lobster. Fiona belongs to Nathan Nickerson, the owner of Arnold's Lobster and Clam Bar in Eastham, Mass., who has been in the restaurant business for 32 years. The special lobster was caught off the coast of eastern Canada last week by a friend of Nickerson. … Experts say Fiona's colourful appearance makes her one in 30 million. Fiona's not really yellow, but more of a bright orange.”

A topless Mona Lisa?

“Leonardo da Vinci … may have painted his famous Mona Lisa in a number of ways, including nude,” Rossella Lorenzi writes for MSNBC.com. “Now, a painting has surfaced that looks much like the original, sparking debate over just how far the master took his iconic painting. The newly revealed painting, hidden for almost a century within the wood wall of a private library, shows a portrait of a half-naked woman with clear links to the famous (and clothed) Mona Lisa. The work, which documents suggest was at least based on never-seen similar work by da Vinci, is now on exhibit at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where da Vinci was born in 1452. … The nude portrait will now undergo scientific and artistic investigations in an attempt to date the work and determine its author. Even if it is not by da Vinci (and it likely isn't, experts say), it may be based on a lost original by the artist himself.”

The Parthenon in colour

“Images of the Parthenon as a stark, white structure set against an azure sky will have to change,” New Scientist magazine says. “Researchers have found the first evidence of coloured paints covering its elaborate sculptures.” Giovanni Verri, a researcher at the British Museum in London, developed an imaging technique that is ultra-sensitive to traces of an ancient pigment called Egyptian blue. “This adds another dimension to how we perceive the Parthenon,” says Ian Jenkins of the British Museum. He says the temple would originally have looked “jewelled” and “busy.” The main pigments used are likely to have been blue and red, with the white stone showing through in parts, as well as gilding.

Frugal living can kill

“Older people are taking risks by eating food that is past its ‘use by' date, according to [Britain's] Food Standards Agency. The watchdog is now concerned that the ‘waste not, want not' ethos of the postwar period could be linked to the rising incidence of listeria food poisoning,” Valerie Elliott writes in The Times of London.

Scholarly bafflegab

“At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science,” Peter Aldhous writes in New Scientist magazine. “So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student in library and information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who revealed [last week] on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that he got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. … The paper, entitled Deconstructing Access Points made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals: ‘In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].'”

A consumer complains

“There are plenty of criticisms of American consumer capitalism and its guiding ideology, the notion that the Invisible Hand of the Market is as all-capable as the hand of God used to be,” Tom Scocca writes in The Boston Globe. “… It's not hard to spot cases where the market is inadequate to answer moral or ethical questions, such as how to pay to fix an 83-year-old retiree's broken hip. But consumer capitalism is also a disappointment at the thing it's supposed to be good at: the ordinary buying and using of stuff. It's especially frustrating when the market decides to improve something that customers don't want improved. If the consumer marketplace allows useful, effective products to disappear, then what is it good for? Or who is it good for?”

Thought du jour

“There is no ‘cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one.”

– Barbara Holland