Yearly Archives: 2011 - Page 6

[1] Interesting posts this week:  Peter at Hyperlipid links to a new wonder drug that could rescue pharmaceutical company fortunes. In another post, Peter introduces a puzzle: The obese burn more calories at rest than the lean … but they don’t lose weight faster on calorie-restricted diets.

Via @DrEades, lack of sun exposure during childhood may be the cause of nearsightedness; 2 hours per day outdoors prevents myopia.

Mark’s Daily Apple had a nice post on oral hygiene which observes that rice farming did not introduce caries in Asia, whereas wheat farming did in Europe, and maize was the most tooth-destructive grain.

Via Fight Aging!, evidence from beetles that early life immune activity accelerates aging and shortens lifespan.

Art Ayers returned from a long hiatus with an endorsement of fecal transplants. Seth Roberts argues that personal science is becoming more productive than institutional science. Melissa McEwen declares chicken “the ultimate crap meat” and argues that “much of human history has been about the acquisition of starch and fat.” Wired discusses the mystery of the Canadian whiskey fungus.

Julianne Taylor offers “My Plate” alternatives. Dr. John Briffa writes that MSG can increase brain glutamate levels leading to neurotoxicity and promoting obesity. Beth Mazur gives us “Triggers”:

[2] Music to read by: I like the choreographed trombone throwing and handkerchief wiping. Best listened to from a standing desk:

[3] Food reward fascination: So many people have contributed intelligently to the food reward discussion that it’s impossible to link to all of them; I would say that roughly a dozen blog posts and well over a hundred comments were interesting to me.

Let me just mention a few posts:

• Stephan’s series deserves reading in its entirely, but here’s a few that speak to the issue of blandness in diets: from Thursday this week, “modern people would find [traditional diets] bland, and in some cases even unpalatable”; the first post in the series, listing “some of the qualities of food that are inherently rewarding”; and the second post, with the liquid food diet that cures obesity.
• Seth Roberts is a highly creative innovator and, via his Shangri-La Diet, pioneer of food reward therapy for obesity. He states: “At the heart of the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet is the idea that we learn to associate flavors (more precisely, smells) with calories.” The more closely a flavor is associated with calories in our mind, the more we want it. Dissociating flavor from calories leads to less wanting, lower food intake, and lower weight.
• JS Stanton has an outstanding post at Gnolls.org: Why Snack Food Is Addictive: The Grand Unified Theory of Snack Appeal.
• Emily Deans is sympathetic to tasty food.

A few comments that caught my eye:

• Todd Hargrove has set forth an interesting idea: “Even if eating bland food reduces your need for calories, it does not necessarily reduce your need for reward. Perhaps there is a reward set point just as there is a fat mass set point. If this is true, it would suggest that moving the weight set point down by eating less palatable food would fail unless it also reduced the reward set point. Perhaps this explains the emotional struggles that some people have with losing weight, and why people can tend to trade one addiction for another.”
• Andrea Reina notes that if the goal of the Shangri-La Diet is to dissociate flavor from calories, then eating tasty non-calories should be just as helpful as eating tasteless calories. R.K. replied with a link to a piece by Todd Becker quoting Seth Roberts endorsing that idea.
• ItsTheWooo2 has a fascinating story. She has shared her biography starting here, discusses the role of leptin and insulin starting here, and discusses exogenous leptin as a weight maintenance therapy here. Briefly, she believes that the obese develop extranormal numbers of adipose cells, do not lose fat cells when they lose weight, so that to achieve normal weight they have to shrink the fat cells to subnormal size, but that subnormal cell size eliminates leptin secretion. As a result, normal weight obese have subnormal leptin levels, which convinces the brain they are starving, which leads to weight regain. Therefore, the obese need small doses of exogenous leptin to maintain normal weight.
• Betty tells her story of becoming obese following an infection and then becoming slender again during a pregnancy. It sounds to me like the infection induced autoimmunity which caused her obesity, and pregnancy cured the autoimmunity which returned her fat mass setpoint to normal. Of course, Chris Kresser has previously discussed possible autoimmune origins of obesity.

[4] More insight into food reward: In an email Aaron Blaisdell introduced me to the work of psychologist Kate Wassum, who apparently has generated evidence that “the processes that control how much a reward is ‘liked’ are dissociable from those that control the ability of reward-paired cues to trigger reward ‘wanting’.”

This distinction can help resolve many of the puzzles in food reward:

• The optimal diet should be strongly liked (and thus healthy because our evolved biology likes what is good for us) but not wanted (since wanting drives appetite and addictive eating which tends to reduce the variety of the diet and induce malnutrition).
• The most obesity-inducing diet will be strongly wanted but not liked. A not-liked diet is probably unhealthy and promotes disorders such as obesity, while a wanted diet promotes overeating.

If liking and wanting are truly dissociable, then the strategy of eating bland food strikes me as a dubious one.

Bland food is food that is not liked. Eating bland food strives to reduce wanting by reducing liking. But if the two are dissociated, this strategy may not work. If Todd Hargrove is right and we need a certain amount of reward, the strategy might backfire as lack of healthy stimulation of the reward system may increase pathological wanting.

[5] Malnutrition and Obesity: JS Stanton’s snacking-and-food-reward post makes a number of interesting points, but I particularly liked his mention of the “nutritional leverage hypothesis” – basically, the idea that malnutrition causes obesity – put forward by Mike of Fat Fiction.

I have long believed that malnutrition is a major cause of obesity, but it is difficult to show that from published data, in part because the obesity often occurs long after malnourishment begins. (Possibly suggesting that methylation deficits leading to epigenetic changes are important.)

But I think that in the already metabolically damaged, it may be much easier to show that malnutrition is important, because malnutrition has a strong effect on appetite and interacts with the food reward system. So food reward research may help prove the importance of malnutrition in obesity.

In support of the nutritional leverage hypothesis, JS and Mike cite a Chinese trial in which taking multivitamins triggered weight loss.

[6] Cute animal photo:

Via Yves Smith.

[7] Kids like to splash:

[8] New US “Food Plate” to test the food reward theory: The US Department of Agriculture is replacing its “Food Pyramid” with a “Food Plate”:

One might think the USDA has adopted the food reward theory of obesity and has intentionally designed the “Food Plate” to create a bland, unrewarding, fat-less diet. But it gets worse.

They demonize some of the healthiest fats as “Empty Calories”:

Currently, many of the foods and beverages Americans eat and drink contain empty calories – calories from solid fats and/or added sugars. Solid fats and added sugars add calories to the food but few or no nutrients….

Solid fats are fats that are solid at room temperature, like butter, beef fat, and shortening.

Among the approved foods, “Dairy” includes calcium-fortified soymilk and soy beverages; and “Protein” features beans, nuts, and seeds including soy products such as tofu. Approved “Oils” include corn oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, and canola oil – but not butter or animal fats. They do count a few liquid fats among the demonized “solid fats”:

A few plant oils, however, including coconut oil, palm oil, and palm kernel oil, are high in saturated fats and for nutritional purposes should be considered to be solid fats.

I’ve long believed that Department of Agriculture bureaucrats have entirely captured the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, and use it to promote support for agricultural subsidies by propagandizing in favor of the heavily subsidized crops: wheat, corn, and soybeans. This Food Plate is entirely consistent with that idea.

As I mentioned to Steve in the comments, we’ll be working on our own graphical representation of our diet this summer. It will be slightly more complex than the Food Plate – not quite as suitable for kindergarteners, but hopefully more appealing to the food reward system!

[9] I didn’t know that’s what Little Richard looked like:

[10] Meet Bill Lands: In our book, we devoted several pages to Dr. William E. Lands’s work on omega-6 and omega-3 fats. He could give some good advice to the USDA on which oils are healthy. Via O Primitivo, here is a video of Dr Bill Lands discussing polyunsaturated fats.

[11] XMRV link to chronic fatigue a false alarm?: We’ve previously discussed the possibility that a new human gamma retrovirus, known as XMRV, causes chronic fatigue syndrome (see Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Aug 24, 2010). This week, Science published two papers arguing that the claimed link was due to laboratory errors, and their editorial called the XMRV-chronic fatigue link “seriously in question’’. The Whittemore Peterson Institute, where the link was discovered, has written a detailed reply.

[12] More on mucin deficiency and GI tract cancers: One of our most popular posts, Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, II: Mucus Deficiency and Gastrointestinal Cancers (Nov 15, 2010), discussed the possibility that a downregulation of mucin production in order to conserve glucose elevate risk of gastrointestinal cancers.

A new paper out this week (“Suppression of MUC2 enhances the proliferation and invasion of human colorectal cancer LS174T cells”) adds more evidence that a deficiency of mucus in the gut promotes cancer.

Meanwhile, yogurt consumption reduced colon cancer risk by 35%.

[13] Not the weekly video: Would you buy vegetables that were run over by a train?

[14] Shou-Ching’s photo art:

[15] Weekly video: A juggling otter:

Our prayers for the people of Joplin, Missouri and the victims of recent tornados.

Here are things that caught my eye this week:

[1] Interesting posts: Don’t miss Stephan Guyenet’s podcast with Chris Kresser, which I’ll comment on this week. Also, Stephan explains what “food reward” is.

Emily Deans discusses the influence of dirt on health; Stabby thinks he has a dirt deficiency.

Dennis Mangan notes that BCAA supplements may extend lifespan. At Robb Wolf’s blog, Amber Karnes reports an autistic child improving on Paleo. Matt Stone and Danny Roddy have been summarizing Ray Peat. Chris Highcock reports that sprinting up stairs may be the best exercise.

Mike the Mad Biologist recalls a lucky episode of serendipity in science. Craig Newmark thinks the Greeks have the most talent.

Don Matesz reports some lore from Chinese medicine:

[T]he Chinese medical view [holds] that sugar has yin effects, where yin stands for the overlapping sensory characteristics cool, calm/quiet, soft, and moist.  According to Chinese medicine, this makes sugar a medication for excessive yang conditions characterized by heat, agitation, tension, and dryness; but because it has relatively extreme characteristics, long term regular use of large amounts will create an excessively yin condition, i.e. excessive coolness, lassitude, weakness/impotence, and moisture (e.g. watery phlegm accumulation, excessive salivation), and a generally deficient condition.  Chinese dietary principles classify whole food starches as more desirable, more balanced foods–having a balance of yin and yang characteristics making them suitable for use as staple foods.

The yang condition sounds like that produced by low-carb ketogenic dieting (high body temperature, dry mucosal membranes) and the yin condition like that produced by high-carb dieting. The Chinese lore is consistent with our view that starches are better than sugars, and that eating some starch is desirable to avoid excessive ketosis which would promote fungal infections. Fungal infections are “hot” diseases in Chinese medicine.

This reminds me of an oldie but goodie, Chris Kresser’s explanation of Chinese medicine: qi is oxygen, meridians are vessels, and acupuncture points are neurovascular nodes.

Andrew Badenoch of evolvify.com argues that vegans are hotter. I refute him thus: Ms. Julianne Taylor.

Finally, John Durant offers a video of cheetah cubs playing:

[2] A song to read by:

[3] Why we don’t recommend high-dose niacin: A clinical trial of high-dose niacin for heart disease had to be stopped early this week, because it didn’t reduce heart attacks and increased strokes.

We have always counseled against supplementing niacin. Our reasoning is that niacin has both good and bad effects, but the primary good effect (raising HDL) can be achieved by dietary means via occasional ketogenic dieting without the ill effects (promotion of bacterial infections). See the book or How to Raise HDL, April 20, 2011, for more.

Thanks to Erik for mentioning the study. As I noted in my reply, strokes are strongly linked to bacterial infections of the vasculature, so it’s not a surprise that niacin would increase stroke risk. It’s also possible the statins administered with the niacin undermined its benefits.

[4] Gimme shelter:

[5] H. Pylori can cause Parkinson’s in mice: New results.

[6] Compelling scientific discovery of the week: If you have migraines and drink too much alcohol, caffeine can help you recover from a hangover.

[7] Nanny state chronicles: Denmark has banned Vegemite (Marmite) because it has too many vitamins. John J. Ray counters: “Australians have unusually long lifespans. Which is entirely due to Vegemite, of course!”

[8] I hate when that happens: Truck driver blows up like a balloon:

A New Zealand truck driver said he is “lucky to be alive” after an air hose became lodged in his buttocks and blew him up “like a balloon.”…

McCormack was rescued by coworkers and taken to an intensive care unit at a Whakatane hospital. He said it took nearly three days for his body to deflate to normal size.

Farting and burping is the therapy:

[9] Is that precipitation infectious?: Hail is full of bacteria. No word on whether they’re probiotic.

[10] They’re getting more human all the time: Scientists have discovered a bacterium that lives on coffee.

[11] Northern Lights: Photographer Stephane Vetter captures an aurora reflected off Jökulsárlón, Iceland’s largest glacial lake:

[12] Why I went to MIT: “At MIT, everyone is eccentric”.

[13] Shou-Ching’s photo art:

[14] Heroism and grief in the Joplin Tornado: This is a heartrending video, but love should be honored even – or especially – when it meets with misfortune:

Via Eric Falkenstein.

[15] Gaudeamus Igitur (“Therefore let us rejoice”): Via Danielle Ofri in the New York Times, a poem called “Gaudeamus Igitur,” by John Stone, a cardiologist from Atlanta. This poem was delivered as a commencement address to a class of Emory medical students, and gives a doctor’s view of life. One stanza:

For this is the end of examinations
For this is the beginning of testing
For Death will give the final examination
and everyone will pass.

[16] Science done the old-fashioned way: We’ve learned as much from personal experience with disease as from reading the journals – and personally-acquired knowledge is more likely to be novel and therefore scientifically significant. Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one; and then in recovery she became inspired.

“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.”

Here’s her story:

Here’s what caught my eye this week:

[1] Interesting posts this week: Paleo Pepper has compiled an online encyclopedia: the top 120 Paleo blog posts. Richard Nikoley asks: is optimality in diet a fool’s errand? He takes the view that individuals have an optimum, but not humanity. Via Seth Roberts, a fascinating story of how even doctors cannot get good care out of today’s medical system: How modern medicine killed my brother.

Also from Seth, his “morning faces therapy” has produced a great result for a man with bipolar disorder. We believe that “circadian rhythm therapies,” and bio-rhythm restoring techniques generally, are an underappreciated therapy. See, for instance, Intermittent Fasting as a Therapy for Hypothyroidism (Dec 1, 2010) and Seth Roberts and Circadian Therapy (Mar 22, 2011).

Emily Deans offers up a surprising danger of smoking pot – fungal infections of the lung:

[S]moked joints could easily be adulterated with natural fungi that grow into big nasty (and deadly) fungus balls in the lung.  I saw a case of this fungus ball in medical school in a patient immunosuppresed with HIV who also happened to smoke a lot of pot.  It could have been from other sources, of course, but my attendings assured me they had seen it several times in AIDS patients who were heavy pot users.  It’s not a pleasant way to go, and the treatments are horrible.

In a more controversial post, Emily argues that greater dopamine in the male brain creates “Genius and Madness,” while the lower dopamine feminine brain promotes sociability and social stability. But I wonder if a world led by “Generation XX” is really going to be more stable.

Mark’s Daily Apple notes that city living can be a brain drain. It certainly is for Shou-Ching and I; our nightmare would be living in New York City. Curiously I didn’t have the same sense of oppression in Tokyo, a much more open city. Boston is better than New York but we would prefer the country.

Robert Krulwich discusses the “loneliest plant in the world”: a male tree that can’t find a mate, as it is the only known surviving member of its species. Scientific American discusses how gut bacteria shape the brain. Chris Kresser suggests ways to keep your brain from aging.

Finally, if you’ve never seen a deer eat a bird, and would like to, Bix has you covered.

[2] Music to read exercise by:

The video can’t be embedded but is great. I wonder if the gymnastics were influenced by Parkour?

[3] My Favorite Posts This Week: The best posts this week were by Melissa McEwen of Hunt Gather Love, who has been running a series on “The Human Colon in Evolution.” All posts are great – I loved today’s (part 5) because it was new to me, and part 4 because it argues our “safe starches” are great foods for the gut – but they’re all outstanding:

• Part 1, Comparative Anatomy http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-1-comparative-anatomy
• Part 2, Fiber Follies http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-2-fiber-follies
• Part 3, Creepy Crawlies in the Gut http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-3-creepy-crawlies-gut
• Part 4, The Secrets of Butyrate http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-4-secrets-butyrate
• Part 5, Human Variation http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-5-human-variation

[4] Human origins elucidated:

An important paper on human origins came out this week. “A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa” used Y-chromosomes to trace the male “Adam” back to 142,000 years ago and northwest Africa, in what is now the Sahara but was then an open woodland environment. This is significant for many reasons, but one is that this region had easy communications with the Middle East along the Mediterranean coast and supports the possibility that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Africans, with significant back-migration into Africa proper, may have been an important process in the evolution of modern humans. Dienekes (here and here) and Razib Khan comment.

JS Stanton at gnolls.org had a nice essay. I don’t agree with everything in it; in particular, JS underestimates the violence of Paleolithic society. The work of Lawrence Keeley is helpful in this regard:

In browsing the comments to JS’s post I saw a link to a weird book by Danny Vendramini called Them and Us. A video by the author presents his case: Neanderthals were chimp-like super-predators and predation and rape by Neanderthals killed all the dumb humans, until the smarter humans figured out how to kill all the Neanderthals. Here’s how Vendramini imagines the Neanderthals:

There is plenty of evidence indicating that this view of the Neanderthals is wrong. I will just note that the fraction of Neanderthal genes in present-day humans is of the same order of magnitude as the level of mixing African-Americans and European-Americans have achieved in 200 years – this despite 30,000 years of selection which will have tended to work against survival of most Neanderthal genes. The idea that such extensive mixing came about through rape conducted by radically different species in perpetual warfare is, I think, totally untenable. There must have been extensive voluntary interbreeding.

Curiously, the Vendramini view recapitulates one of the earliest hypotheses about Neanderthals. This talk by Carl Zimmer shows that (at 2:40) in 1909 leading anthropologists shared Vendramini’s view of the Neanderthals, whereas today they seem — ahem — considerably more attractive:

[5] We’re glad it’s helping! Chris Kresser on Twitter:

I’ve been having some success w/modified ketogenic diet a la Paul Jaminet w/50g CHO, 6 TBS MCT oil 5g leucine.

This method of producing ketosis is much healthier than the zero-carb low-protein diets sometimes used.

UPDATE: It’s mood disorders generally, and depression specifically, that the ketogenic diet has been helping with.

[6] More on Food Deserts: Beth Mazur of Weight Maven has written of the significance of “food deserts” in the obesity epidemic. Basically, where fresh whole foods are difficult to buy, obesity rates are high.

Now the USDA has a cool interactive map showing the locations of food deserts:

Via Razib Khan

[7] Did monkeys keep pets?:

Via Yves Smith.

[8] Our book on sale: I know of at least one store that offers our book for sale: The Grainery in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Their web site has a great line from Thomas Edison:

“The doctors of the future will give no medicine , but intrest their patients in care of the human frame, diet and the cause and prevention of disease.” — Thomas A. Edison

The proprietor of The Grainery, John Kessenich, spoke recently on “Eating for Perfect Health” and might have used some of our ideas. If you happen to find yourself in Baraboo, check out The Grainery and ask John for health tips!

[9] Why the Kindle version isn’t available: I have too much brain.

[10] Primal Fashion Week: No, this is definitely not Paleo re-enactment. I doubt Neanderthal women ever wore a Sperm Coat or paired it with a Heart Tube Hat.

Personally I would prefer a cheetah skin.

[11] Low-dose naltrexone is great for Crohn’s: On my editorial calendar is a discussion of the role of endorphins and enkephalins in immunity, and the opportunity to increase their levels and circadian variability and thus modulate immunity through low-dose naltrexone (LDN), with beneficial effects against certain diseases.

While I dither, clinical studies of LDN are progressing. This week, a report came out on LDN for Crohn’s disease:

Eighty-eight percent of those treated with naltrexone had at least a 70-point decline in Crohn’s Disease Activity Index scores compared to 40 percent of placebo-treated patients.

[12] Shou-Ching’s Photo-Art:

© 2011 Shou-Ching Jaminet.

[13] Not the weekly video: Ducks Against the Wind:

Via erp, who says, “It’s getting harder and harder to keep your ducks in a row!”

[14] Weekly video: Marriage is health-improving and life-extending, especially for men, so I consider this (done in moderation!) an exemplary health practice:

Via Orrin Judd

Here’s what caught my eye this week:

[1] Interesting posts this week: Stephan Guyenet’s discussion with Chris Kresser is sure to be fascinating, because the material left on the cutting room floor is great. I especially liked Stephan’s observations about insulin’s contributions to weight loss, via promoting satiety and leptin sensitivity.

Chris Masterjohn refutes an old canard: The cannibals of New Guinea preferred fishermen, not missionaries. Of course – fishermen are more nutritious, they have more iodine.

Apropos this week’s post (Can Endurance Exercise Promote Cancer?, May 11, 2011), Keith Norris of Theory to Practice discusses the relation between fitness and health:

Personally, I’ve never gotten to the right of the part of the curve labeled “Health” and “Performance,” and spent too much time in the area off the chart called “Unhealth” and “Non-performance.”

Via Obesity Panacea’s Travis Saunders, exercise induces weight loss in controlled laboratory conditions but not in real life. Scientists discover that Vancouver bedbugs are carrying antibiotic-resistant staph (MRSA). Chronic acetaminophen (Tylenol) use doubles the risk of blood cancers. Aspirin is better.

Via Dr Cobb at Z-Health, a study showing that walking barefoot decreases stress on the knees and hips of people with osteoarthritis. Charles Poliquin defends his high-dose fish oil recommendation with a study showing that 7 people were able to take 60 g/day fish oil for 12 weeks without “serious adverse events.”

Finally, Richard Nikoley has some mouth-watering food photos.

[2] Post-Mother’s Day music:

[3] Morgellons, a medical mystery: Via The Guardian, a mysterious complaint:

Morgellons was named in 2001 by an American called Mary Leitao, whose son complained of sores around his mouth and the sensation of “bugs”. Examining him with a toy microscope, Leitao found him to be covered in unexplained red, blue, black and white fibres. Since then, workers at her Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by more than 12,000 affected families….

Optical image of what sufferers are adamant are morgellons fibres in skin samples – are they made up of alien ­matter, or are ­everyday materials the more likely explanation? Photograph: Vitaly Citovsky/Suny at Stony Brook

Back in London, I find a 2008 paper on morgellons in the journal Dermatologic Therapy that describes patients picking “at their skin continuously in order to ‘extract’ an organism”; “obsessive cleaning rituals, showering often” and individuals going “to many physicians, such as infectious disease specialists and dermatologists” – all behaviours “consistent with DOP”. (For treatment, the authors recommend prescribing a benign antiparasitic ointment to build trust, and supplementing it with an antipsychotic.)

These dermatologists don’t know much, but they know an antipsychotic drug is the treatment.

Fortunately there is an excellent doctor looking into the matter:

I contact Dr Anne Louise Oaklander, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and perhaps the only neurologist in the world to specialise in itch. I email her describing morgellons, pointing out it’s probably some form of DOP. But when we speak, she knows all about morgellons already. “In my experience, morgellons patients are doing the best they can to make sense of symptoms that are real. They’re suffering from a chronic itch disorder that’s undiagnosed. They have been maltreated by the medical establishment. And you are welcome to quote me on that,” she adds….

“That they have insects on them is a very reasonable conclusion because, to them, it feels no different from how it would if there were insects on them. To your brain, it’s exactly the same. So you need to look at what’s going on with their nerves. Unfortunately, what can happen is a dermatologist fails to find an explanation and jumps to a psychiatric one.”

[4] Let’s ride:

Via Yves Smith

This picture reminds me of a story. I once was on a long airplane flight seated next to two girls who demanded piggy-back rides around the cabin. They asked me to guess their ages. After I had guessed every age from 3 to 13, I gave up. Can you guess how old they were?

Select for the answer: They were 5½ and 7½!

[5] Does it cure being a lawyer?: A “therapy dog” is available for checkout at the Yale Law School library. But he can’t be removed from the library, because he’s a rufference work. (Via Tom Smith.)

[6] They’re born and they’re off to college, just like that: Via John Durant, a robin raises her chicks:

Robins: 4 Eggs, 4 Weeks from Fred Margulies on Vimeo.

[7] The raccoon who will live forever in our memories: Stabby has been immortalized:

It’s only the beginning, I believe. That raccoon has great things ahead of him!

[8] Those were the days: The medicines weren’t that great, but the advertising posters were cool. Via The Scientist, a slideshow of mostly 19th century medicinal posters:

[9] The old mannequin head drop prank: This one always works.

via Amy Alkon.

[10] Shou-Ching’s photo-art:

© 2011 Shou-Ching Jaminet.

[11] Video of the week: Polar photographer Paul Nicklens shares some remarkable photographs. Don’t miss the part where the friendly leopard seal tries to feed him penguins: