You may want to be wary when ordering sushi. Luckily, Columbia scientists have the low-down. (Wired)

Not looking forward to the wrath of irascible travelers Wednesday afternoon? Not to worry, apparently we’re chemically programmed to be kind. (NYT)

“Things are moving extraordinarily fast” (finally…) at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. (National Geographic)

There’s a vaccine for swine flu — and you don’t live IN CANADA. (Gothamist)

Barack Obama thinks it’s cool. (Wired)

Tired of school? Well here, have some health care debate, and some career planning! First, at 8pm in Hamilton 303, the College Republicans  host Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute to talk about health care reform in congress and elsewhere.

Then from 9 to 10:30, get yourself a science internship at the aptly named Science Internship Panel in Lerner’s Satow Room. What could possibly drag you from your room to such serious career/policy oriented discussions this close to Thanksgiving? Free. Food.

It’s only a small step towards a brave new world of medicine, but scientists in Columbia’s Biomedical Engineering Department, led by Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, have successfully created part of a jaw joint from stem cells.

The scientists say that the joint (at right) is the first “complex, anatomically-sized bone” created using stem cells, and will create new ways for scientists to treat joint disorders, and repair various skeletal problems.Vunjak-Novakovic said, “We thought the jawbone would be the most rigorous test of our technique; if you can make this, you can make any shape.

Plus, even a stem cell bone is significantly less weird than a snake with a hand. 

Numerous tipsters have highlighted the featured article in today’s Times arts section, about the still-under-construction Northwest Science Building, and its architect, Jose Rafeo Moneo. The article provides a comprehensive overview of the many difficulties that the project has faced, including building on top of the gym, complementing the Manhattanville expansion, and, um, anonymous commenters. 

Yes, to demonstrate that “not everyone is happy with the results,” the Times cites a comment from an old Bwog article. “[I]n 2007, a poster called “arch. major” wrote, ‘McKim, Mead & White will roll over in their graves,’ adding that the building made Uris Hall, the widely derided main building of Columbia’s business school, completed in 1961, ‘look like the Pantheon.’ ” Good thing there isn’t an article on Harmony in the works.

- Photo: schmuela/Flickr

Photo by AB

Bwogger Anish Bramhandkar started his year off right by heading up to the 12th floor of Mudd to catch a few minutes of Disney/Pixar’s Monsters Inc., spotted on one of those ubiquitous flatscreens.  Why is SEAS spending its considerable brainpower on kids’ movies?  Bramhandkar suggests the display is designed to convince freshman engineers that fun stuff happens in Gateway.  Let’s hope so.

During summer, students may be slaving away at an unpaid resume bullet point internship, scrambling to find something after said internship failed to materialize, or lounging around on the couch (lucky…). Professors and fortunate grad students, though, are still releasing their reports in hopes of gaining a tiny bit of recognition from a conference, providing a useful link for future users of JSTOR, or building their resume to get a better job/their precious tenure. Mostly the last one. And while the newswires are mostly dead in the middle of July, most of Columbia’s headlines are coming from these projects.

• Sleeping light? According to Medical Center researchers, that makes you more likely to be fat.
• Researchers find that a coronary calcium scan might cause cancer in itself.
• Thought art history majors would be left out? Of course not:  a sociology doctoral student claims French modernists who bloomed later were also productive for longer.
• There’s no conclusion yet, but Columbia is partnering with the University of Michigan and Harvard (among others) to study suicide and mental health in the military.
• This last study is more than a month old, but there’s no time like the present for the obvious: abstinence-only education will stop contraceptives, but kids’ll keep on having sex.
  

Now go outside and feel enlightened!

If this new-fangled Twitter thing is to be believed, there’s some big things a-poppin’ in Iran, and the world media has been calling up Columbia professors for their reactions. The man with the most screen time this time around has probably been Professor Gary Sick (at right), which is not surprising given that he was the “the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis.” That’s the kind of bullet point that gets attention, and Sick has been quoted all over the media, including the BBC, The Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and Politico. Plus, somewhat fittingly, you can follow him on his Tumblr account.

Other professors are getting in on the act as well, including Hamid Dabashi, Phillip Bobbit, and Richard Bulliet. The most creative commentary, though, has come from Ph.D. candidates Alexandra Scacco and Bernd Beber, who argued in Saturday’s Post that the election results were likely rigged because the numbers did not look random enough. Trust us, it makes sense.

In non-Iran news, one group of Columbia professors have discovered two brain systems used to accurately predict others’ emotions, and another group has found that the subway is 15 decibels quieter than it was three years ago. Also, Meghan McCain appears to have dedicated her post-election career to one proposition only: embarassing herself as much as possible. 

Image via Parsons’ home page

Columbia physics professor John Parsons lectured Thursday night about the science behind the upcoming film Angels and Demons.  Bwog sent our Fu Foundation Bureau Chief Sean Zimmerman, who actually understands these sorts of things, to observe and report.

Hollywood and science aren’t known to be fast friends, and explanations of “the science behind” often devolve into appopleptic panegyrics decrying popular conceptions of, say, cloning, or invisibility. Professor John Parsons, however, drily admired the whiz-bang world of the movies.  Showing the trailer for Angels and Demons at the start of his talk Thursday night in Havemeyer, Parsons explained that the explosions and intrigue shown were part of any physicist’s “typical day.”

To summarize Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons: Antimatter is stolen from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run by CERN (that’s the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and hidden in the Vatican City during the selection of a new Pope. The antimatter will soon explode if it is not found, and Robert Langdon, the hero from Dan Brown’s other novel, The Da Vinci Code, is the man called in to do the job right. Read more…

Anyone sauntering into Levien yesterday afternoon to shoot some hoops got a little more than they bargained for: a gym full of high-tech paper airplanes.  Red Bull’s Paper Wings Contest gathered a crowd of 20 or so engineering-types who spent an hour and a half battling it out for a free trip to Salzburg, Austria (home of the Red Bull Headquarters, where they put the real lightning into the cans), and the chance to compete with other schools’ engineering-types in some sort of world finals. 

From what Bwog hears, Columbia’s resident paper airplane geniuses–Mikey Antonakakis, Austin Brauser and Menachem Kaiser–have a decent chance of hopping a larger plane and flying to the edelweiss capital of the world.  Columbia-Red Bull pontifex and CU Formula SAE associate Nicholas Chang promises to alert us as soon as he knows how Columbia’s scores match up to the 200-or-so other schools’.

The judges, a trio of slim, heavily made-up, imported Red Bull babes, judged our boys’ designs in three categories: total flight distance, amount of hang time, and “aerobatics,” or, fancy tricks.  Brauser’s spinning paper ring took the Columbia prize for aerobatics, and Antonakakis, decked out in a Formula One driver’s jumpsuit and helmet, swept up in both distance and hang time; one of his planes flew 110 feet, and another stayed in the air for a glorious 6.63 seconds.  Kaiser’s impromptu entries–he showed up for the basketball and stayed for the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat–came in close behind Antonakakis.  Check out some pictures after the jump! Read more…

The march of scholarships continues. Three Columbia students have received prestigious Goldwater Scholarships, which are awarded yearly to approximately 300 college sophomores and juniors who are seeking a Ph.D in science and/or mathematics. This year’s recepients are Alex Perry CC ‘11, Noam Prywes CC ‘10, and Arianne Richard CC ‘10.

Each university is only allowed to nominate four students, and this is the first time in six years that Columbia has had three of its nominees selected. Perry is pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics, Prywes in chemistry, and Richard in biochemistry. Congratulations to them!