The never been baked club.

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/bloggers/mo-rocca/

The glory of Science

Where have you been? While "the lab" is where I spend most of my day most days, last week I was fortunate enough to be able to join the Seawolf as crew for one of their trawl series and work in the glorious outdoors. Granted, I now am very sore, very tired, and very behind in the lab, I still had a blast.

So- what is a trawl? Well, it is a giant weighted net that you drag behind a big powerful boat and capture everything that happens to be unfortunate enough to be in front of it but behind the boat. I would equate it to clear cutting a swath of forest to figure out what birds, mammals and insects live there or removing the top of a mountain to mine its minerals.

That sounds destructive? Well yes, it is, but theoretically we are only taking a small sample of what is out there.

What is out there? Lots of cool things,

silver strip anchovy

Sharks and sea robins

Rays

Some fish...

oooo! I itch!!!

Long Island has many incredibly beautiful beaches. Sadly enough the beaches tend to be lined with poison ivy. While my legs are the worst off, I found that acrylic paint works best when trying to relieve the itch and am not willing to wash it off to take a picture, so you must just guess what my legs look like from this picture of my hand.

So why does Colorado still have the highest melanoma rate?

While listening to this weeks Wait, wait, don't tell me!, I heard that scientists at Rutgers University have found that rats that had a combination of regular exercise and caffeine intake also displayed increased destruction of precancerous cells that had been damaged by the sun's ultraviolet-B radiation (A.K.A. fewer cancerous cells actually made it past the rats normal defense system). Being a grad student (What! The coffee cart is only open till 11:30pm!, but what happens if the expresso machine in my office dies?), and a regular at the gym, this excited me. Maybe all those summers working long hours at the pool, undergrad in Hawaii, and a youth spent in the state with the highest melanoma rate won't mean that I will have skin cancer after all! Then I started thinking. If exercise and caffeine help prevent skin cancer (Aloha Boulder residents), why does Colorado still have the highest melanoma rate?

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/07/rutgers_caffeine_exercise_help.html