I was stunned to learn that National Geographic has never published a story on carnivorous plants. So I wrote one. It’s now out in March issue, as well as on the NG web site. It should come as no surprise that the article is accompanied by dazzling photos that will probably make most readers forget that there’s a story lurking in the shadows, too. You can look at the pictures in the NG slideshow, and see some extra outtakes on the web site of the photographer, Helene Schmitz.

There was a time when having a pooch brought simple chores like taking the dog on regular walks, brushing its coat, and occasionally throwing a stick or prying a slipper loose from its clenched jaws. But these days, having a dog can bring strange new responsibilities–like signing the pup up to Twitter.

A new product by toy giant Mattel called “Puppy Tweets” lets the whole universe get a peek into your dog’s daily activities. The colorful little device hangs from your dog’s collar, and when it detects movement or barking it sends a message via wi-fi to your computer. The messages are translated into pre-programmed tweets and get broadcast directly via Twitter. Your pet’s twitter followers can stay up to date with the latest as he wakes, poops, and woofs.

As Mattel explains:

For example, a bark may generate a Tweet of: “I bark because I miss you. There I said it. Now hurry home.” A quick run through the house could produce: “I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and…OOUUUCHH!” Invite your friends and family to follow your pet on Twitter and help your dog follow his or her favorite puppy pals or celebrities. Puppy Twitter lets you connect with your pet over the Internet. It’s a great way to brighten your day ‘cause a Tweet from your pooch is a virtual smooch!

But even if your puppy’s tweets gain popularity, he won’t be the first pet superstar on Twitter; that dubious honor belongs to Sockamillion (Sockington), a feline with a fetish for tweets. He’s already racked up one and half million followers with twitter gems like this: “was my fur always thin over here OH GOD IT’S CAT PATTERN BALDNESS”

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Image: Mattel

For the first time, researchers have found that oxytocin–the hormone at work when breastfeeding mothers bond with their babies and when couples cuddle–can help autistic patients with social interactions. The small but pioneering study showed that when autistic adults inhaled the “love hormone” oxytocin though a nasal spray, they paid more attention to expressions when looking at pictures of faces and were more likely to understand social cues in a game simulation [Reuters].

The findings will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the results are the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating that the hormone could lead to ways to help people with the often devastating brain disorder function better [Washington Post].

People with autism or with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s syndrome have difficulty engaging in social situations [Scientific American]. They normally have trouble making eye contact and are awkward around other people. They also suffer from low levels of oxytocin–a hormone that is found naturally in humans and animals and helps humans understand emotions and social cues better.

In this study, Angela Sirigu of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lyon, observed 13 people with high-functioning autism, some of whom were made to inhale oxytocin as part of the experiments. The researchers watched the patients’ responses during a virtual ball tossing game to measure behavioral changes [Reuters]. In the task, Sirigu found that the patients who received the oxytocin nasal spray chose to interact primarily with the most cooperative ball-throwing computer character, while patients who received a placebo spray showed no preference for the cooperative character. In another experiment, the researchers asked the patients to answer questions about pictures of human faces, and recorded the focus of each participant’s gaze. The patients who had inhaled oxytocin showed that they were far more willing, though not quite as willing as controls, to explore faces, focusing longer on eyes [The Seattle Times].

The researchers are hopeful that because oxytocin proved safe and effective in this study, it could be used to help autistic people function in society. But because the “cuddle hormone” doesn’t last long in the body, some experts said the findings were more likely to encourage drug companies to develop alternative substances that had the same benefits [Washington Post].

In the past, other studies have shown that oxytocin can reduce typical autistic behaviors, causing autistic subjects to engage in fewer repetitive actions and to have less trouble identifying emotions in voices. Another study being published in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that 16 autistic males in Australia ages 12 to 19 who received the hormone through a nasal spray were better able to recognize other people’s facial expressions [Washington Post].

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Image: iStockphoto

Hey, nobody told me that having a blog would involve homework. But here’s Jerry Coyne, nudging me into talking about a story in this morning’s New York Times. Fortunately it’s interesting enough to be worth taking a swipe at.

The news is an interesting result from RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab on Long Island. RHIC has been quite the source of surprising new results since it turned on in 2000. It’s not the highest-energy collider in the world, nor did it ever aim to be; instead, it creates novel conditions by smashing together the nuclei of gold atoms. Gold nuclei have lots of particles — 79 protons and 118 neutrons — so the collisions make a soup known as the quark-gluon plasma. (We ordinarily think of a proton or neutron as consisting of three quarks, but those are just the “valence” quarks that are always there. There are also large numbers of quark-antiquark pairs popping in and out of existence, not to mention scads of force-carrying gluons that hold the quarks together. So you are actually create a huge number of quarks and gluons in each collision.)

We think we understand the basic rules of quarks and gluons very well — they’re described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and Nobel prizes have already been handed out. But knowing the basic rules is one thing, and knowing how they play out in reality is something very different. We understand the basic rules of electrons and electromagnetism very well, but chemistry and biology (not to mention atomic physics) are still surprising us. Likewise with quarks and gluons: the results at RHIC have yielded quite a few surprises. Most interestingly, in the aftermath of the collisions the hot plasma of quarks and gluons seems to behave more like a dense fluid than a bunch of freely-moving individual particles. Still much to be learned.

This latest result has to do with a violation of parity — the symmetry you get by reflecting around one axis, like when you view something in a mirror. (Unfortunately there is a completely different transformation known as mirror symmetry, which this new result has nothing to do with, despite potentially confusing titles.) Quarks and gluons interact in interesting ways, and in the many fluctuations that happen in these high-temperature collisions we can get “bubbles” that pick out a direction in space. In the presence of these bubbles, quarks treat left and right differently, even though they treat both directions exactly the same when they’re in empty space. The phenomenon is known as the chiral magnetic effect — “chiral” means “distinguishing left from right,” and it happens when you put the quark-gluon plasma in a magnetic field.

It’s worth mentioning that, while this result is interesting and very helpful to our quest to better understand the strong interactions, it does not represent the overthrow of any cherished laws of physics. On the contrary, it was predicted by the laws of physics as we currently understand them — and by human beings such as Dimitri Kharzeev and others. Parity is an important idea in physics, but it’s broken all the time — very famously by the weak interactions. Heck, even biologists know how to break parity — most naturally occurring amino acids are left-handed, not right-handed. (I think the reasons why are still mysterious, but can be traced to accidents of history — hopefully someone will correct me if that’s off base.)

The interesting thing is that the strong interactions don’t seem to violate parity under ordinary circumstances; it would be very easy for them to do so, but they seem not to in Nature. When things could happen but don’t, physicists are puzzled; this particular puzzle is known as the Strong CP Problem. (”CP” because the strong interactions could easily violate not only parity, but the combined operation of parity and charge conjugation, which switches particles with antiparticles.) This new result from RHIC doesn’t change that state of affairs, but shows how quarks and gluons can violate parity spontaneously if they are in the right environment — namely, a hot plasma with a magnetic field.

So, okay, no new laws of physics. Just a much better understanding of how the existing ones work! Which is most of what science does, after all.

Last March a new kind of flu came on the scene–the 2009 H1N1 flu, a k a swine flu. Hatched from an eldritch mingling of viruses infecting humans, birds, and pigs, it swept across the world. Here in the United States, the CDC estimates that between 41 and 84 million people came down with swine flu between April and January. Of those infected, between 8,330 and 17,160 are estimated to have died. For more details on the evolution of this new flu strain, here’s a video of a lecture I gave in November.

This flu strain has been nothing if not surprising. It was lurking around in humans for several months, undetected, before becoming a planetary infection. And before that, the ancestor of the virus was circulating among pigs for a decade, again unknown. And while the new swine flu has killed some 10,000 people in the United States alone and many more abroad, it has proven to be relatively low key–as flu goes. Some 30,000 people die in the United States every year from seasonal flu, the cocktail of flu strains that show up year in and year out.

Now the swine flu is surprising us once more. It has dwindled away to very low levels and stayed there. Meanwhile, the seasonal flu, which was expected to kick in at some point as well this flu season, is a virtual no-show. The San Francisco Chronicle has the story. In this CDC chart of total reports of flu-like symptoms, you can see that we’re in a deep trough. At this point in previous years, we were fast approaching the peak of the flu. This season, the peak came months ago, at the height of the fall swine flu outbreak.

When swine flu started to crash, some observers expected it to bounce back soon, as other flu strains have in the past. Ian York, at his blog Mystery Rays from Outer Space, offers some interesting ideas about why this hasn’t happened. He suggests that the virus has been stymied by pre-existing immunity in a lot of old people, new immunity from vaccinated children, and the protection that infected survivors now have. In other words, the virus just doesn’t have enough hosts now to sustain a new outbreak.

It’s possible that the swine flu’s raging success in the fall may have also led to the weird situation we’re in right now, with no seasonal flu at exactly the time you’d expect it. One possibility is that getting sick with swine flu provides some cross-immunity to seasonal flu. Another is ecological: the swine flu outcompeted seasonal flu so effectively at the start of flu season that the seasonal flu hasn’t been able to get a toehold since.

That, of course, could change. Seasonal flu has been known to peak as late as March. And while flu may be in a lull in the United States, it’s doing just fine in other parts of the world. For example, a nasty kind of flu called influenza B is raging around China right now according to the Chronicle. In normal years B makes up a pretty small fraction of US flu. But this is no normal year.

Scientists did a better job tracking the 2009 H1N1 outbreak than they have with previous emergent strains. They’ve got new machines to sequence virus genes, online databases to pool information from around the globe, and powerful computers to help figure out where the viruses came from. And yet, with just ten genes, the flu still continues to move enigmatically ahead of our understanding.