Potato riffs signups are STILL open! Join the fun now, or start next year — wait that’s soon! :O 

Speaking of, ExFatLoss wrote a review of the concept of riff studies, calling them “the quicksort of science”.

Another milestone in internet science: the first community trial (that we’re aware of) run by someone other than us! This is a study of the “the glass noodle diet”, a “low-fat, low-BCAA diet proposed by Brad Marshall”. Small sample size for starters but interesting results even so: 

Of the 5 people who reported their results, weight loss are, respectively, -14 lbs, -5.5 lbs, +1 lbs, -9 lbs and -9 lbs. This is actually impressive, I just wish I wasn’t the one at +1 lbs!

So if we’re discounting the people who didn’t respond from the analysis, average weight loss is 7.3 lbs, median 9 lbs, with a 80% success rate. The median of 9 lbs loss is very close to the result of the potato diet, which is an interesting “coincidence”.

A National Evil, the story of the outrageous rates of goiter in Switzerland and how they led to the discovery of iodine fortification. As usual, it rhymes with scurvy and oral rehydration therapy. This comes courtesy of @mictter, who says, “The initial trials remind me of @mold_time and of @a_m_mastroianni calls for reform in the way we are doing science now.” We think that refers to the bit where:

Hunziker… began to devise a new kind of experiment: in an early version of a dose-response trial, he prepared table salt iodised at five different concentrations to give to five families in a goitre area for five months. He worked alone, mixing close to 100 kg of salt with his snow shovel, turning it over until he was sure the potassium iodide was evenly spread. Then, loading up his mule, he set out for Grächen, a remote village even by the standards of upper Valais.

MonadGPT is a chatbot trained on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French, and Latin, and is (in theory) very scientifically literate — up to the 17th century. MetaFilter glosses this as, “O brave new world, that has such chatbots in’t”. When we asked it what causes goiter, this was its reply:

Goitre, according to Galen, proceeds from a humour that is generated in the liver, and which, being conveyed into the blood, and thence diffused over the whole body, lodges in the throat, where it occasions a swelling: And the reason why it sometimes happens, that one person has a goitre, and another not, is, because some have more humour than others: But though this opinion is generally received, yet the learned Chyrynianus, who was a physician of the greatest skill, maintains the contrary, affirming that goitres are not caused by an excess of humours, but rather by a deficiency. He relates, that he cured one man of a goitre, who had had it twenty years, and that, by giving him a sufficient quantity of food, and regulating his diet. However, it is certain, that a deficiency of the vital spirits, or animal spirits, is no less dangerous than an excess of them; for these spirits are the principal agents in the circulation of the blood, and in the nourishment of the parts.

Erika’s quick-start guide to research nonprofits — What it says on the tin. Want to do research on your own, without having to debase yourself for academia? Erika’s guide has you covered.

The B-69s are, at least according to their bandcamp page, “the world’s best band that covers modern pop songs in the style of the B-52s.” They have covers of all your favorite hits — Hey Ya, Chop Suey!, All Star, even Mr. Brightside. It’s traumatic.

UK Potato Statistics (h/t @wighthatmike)

Scientists Pinpoint Cause of Severe Morning Sickness. The story is good news, but as always it is accompanied by horrifying stories of the way doctors treat women:

Perhaps because nausea and vomiting are so common in pregnancy, doctors often overlook hyperemesis, dismissing its severe symptoms as psychological, even though it is the leading cause of hospitalization during early pregnancy … During her second pregnancy, in 1999, Dr. Fejzo was unable to eat or drink without vomiting. She rapidly lost weight, becoming too weak to stand or walk. Her doctor was dismissive, suggesting she was exaggerating her symptoms to get attention. She was eventually hospitalized, and miscarried at 15 weeks.

This perfectly captures our working relationship. No, we will not elaborate: 

One of my mother’s earliest memories is of standing in her crib at the age of about 2, yanking on her 11-year-old brother’s hair. This brother, her only sibling, was none other than Richard Feynman, destined to become one of the greatest theoretical physicists of his generation: enfant terrible of the Manhattan Project, pioneer of quantum electrodynamics, father of nanotechnology, winner of the Nobel Prize, and so on. At the time, he was training his sister to solve simple math problems and rewarding each correct answer by letting her tug on his hair while he made faces.

Back from the brink: sand-swimming golden mole, feared extinct, rediscovered after 86 years. “The De Winton’s golden mole (Cryptochloris wintoni), previously feared extinct, lives in underground burrows and had not been seen since 1937. It gets its ‘golden’ name from oily secretions that lubricate its fur so it can ‘swim’ through sand dunes. … The mole has now been rediscovered 86 years after its last sighting, thanks to a two-year search by conservationists and a border collie dog called Jessie, who was trained to sniff out golden moles.” How did they train the dog to sniff out these moles if the moles hadn’t been seen since 1937? Also, how do we get the dog’s job?