Dogs and alliums

Department of dubious advice: yesterday before work I caught a portion of the BBC's Animal Rescue Live, which had a section on cookery for dogs. The resident expert stated that onions are toxic to dogs, but that garlic and leeks are OK, and even offered a recipe including the latter two (see Dog's Dinner).
      This does not look current best advice. Many other veterinarians advise that all allium species are toxic to dogs: check out Grapes, raisins and sultanas, and other foods toxic to dogs (PDF) and this peer-reviewed ASCPA toxicology brief, Allium species poisoning in dogs and cats (PDF).

Progress report: I e-mailed the BBC's Animal Rescue Live section about this straight away. FX: tumbleweed blows by. After getting no reply or action, I re-sent the comment through the BBC website's official complaint system on 30th August. On 8th Sept I got the reply:
      "This is to let you know that we have received your recent complaint and will respond as soon as possible, however I hope you understand that the
time taken to do so can depend on the nature of your complaint and the
number of other complaints we are currently dealing with. The BBC issues
public responses to issues which prompt large numbers of significant
complaints and these can be read on our website at: www.bbc.co.uk/complaints. We would be grateful if you would not reply to this email"
      I appreciate they have to prioritise - but I would have thought that verifying the safety of a recipe with ingredients potentially toxic to its consumer would actually be worth investigating pronto. Add this one to the list of examples of the BBC's deep resistance to investigating/correcting scientific errors.

28th September 2007 - result! Dog's Dinner is now a dead link.

Science photos

A regular from the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering: the annual Photography Competition. Some are general photos: others are of pleasant microstructural landscapes. The Alumni entries, urban and other scenes with an engineering slant, are also very good. Check out the 2006, 2005 and 2004 archives for more.
      Micrography used to fascinate me at university, when I had more or less unlimited access to a scanning electronic microscope; here are a couple of similar images I took of vapour-deposited haematite: #1 / #2.

The real Harry Potter?

Interesting exercise: Shane's weblog at the Daily Telegraph has set the task to write proposed endings for the Harry Potter series. See Another task: write the ending of the final Harry Potter.
      I've only one comment on Harry Potter (almost certainly not a new one) inspired by the sheer psychological implausibility of the Potter mythos. It's hard to believe that someone brought up by a foster-family who keep him in a broom cupboard would be so normal after such psychological abuse (and perhpas other abuse that is not mentioned). In that light, the scenario of being revealed to have special powers, and having a crucial role in great events, could well be interpreted as Potter's fabulation, a wish-fulfilment fantasy rather like Frederick Rolfe's fantasy of elevation to the Papacy in Hadrian the Seventh.
      I've posted an ending to this effect at the Telegraph blog.

Stylish marriages

Via MetaFilter, Khymos, Martin Lersch's website and blog, now about a year old, on the science of food and cooking. It takes its cue from the "molecular gastronomy" coined by Kurti and This, and popularised by Heston Blumenthal. The interesting aspect compared to many other sites on the topic is that it has more specifics and explanations, notably this list of pairings, which offers foods which ought to work together because they share a volatile flavouring molecule. The blog, nicely categorised, offers the recipes and results of many such pairing experiments, and this is the subject of an ongoing food blogging event, TGRWT ("They Really Go Well Together"). This is quite inspiring.

O?

Yesterday, while looking for a Sudoku, I ran into a nice example of crap tabloid medical reportage, in the Daily Mirror article Brain bug beater. "Docs baffled as Phil comes through meningitis 8 times," it says. "MEDICAL miracle Phil Parry has baffled doctors by beating the deadly meningitis bug EIGHT times ... Tests have drawn a blank, although Phil believes his rare blood type O is a factor ... Phil's doctor thought he had flu when he first contracted lymphonic meningitis 14 years ago".
      Now spot the mistakes. 1) Group O isn't rare; 44% of Britons have it (see the National Blood Service stats). Perhaps they mean O negative. 2) There's no such thing as lymphonic meningitis outside this Mirror article and a very similar story in the Birmingham Mail a few weeks back, Meningitis victim baffles doctors. I'm not a doctor and wouldn't presume to diagnose anyone over the Internet, but Google offers the suggestion that this might be the garbled name of a real condition called lymphocytic meningitis. Furthermore, the first few hits show there's a syndrome called "recurrent benign lymphocytic meningitis" associated with herpes simplex virus, which would fit the pattern and symptoms described in these news stories.
      So, I suspect, there isn't a great mystery here, and we have a standard baffled-experts struggle-against-adversity story spun (via errors that could have been checked by a couple of minutes with Google) out of what's likely a reasonably-understood situation.

Smell the change

As of 1st July, England became the largest nation in the world by population to have a complete ban on smoking in indoor public places. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm still going through a phase of half-regretting the change. I'm not a smoker, but I do like pubs and I feel a certain loss at the dismantling of a cultural fixture. Smoke, despite its clear downsides, has been part of the ambience of the English pub. Since the ban, the lighting seems harsher (without smoke's diffusion effect) and pubs smell of, well, either of nothing or faintly dirty. The change has made an alien environment.
      This, I'm well aware, is entirely misplaced nostalgia for a personal ambience that was achieved via health risk to me and the addiction of other people. It could be likened to - hypothetically - my enjoying opium dens (despite not smoking opium) because I like the decor, the chance to practice my Chinese, and the quality of the tea. Nevertheless, pubs are going to have to work on their atmosphere.
      One possibility could be to make pubs smell evocative in other ways than smoke, just as baking bread, coffee or beeswax furniture make a house smell appealing polish to potential buyers. A greater focus on food is one option that's already being explored, but it could also be done artificially. Companies such as ScentAir already have large portfolios of scents, with systems for delivering them into an airspace. Smell as Media, by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye of the MIT Media Lab, is a nice overview of the wider technological possibilities.
      As explored in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, smell is a primitive and powerful medium, and there's plenty about it on the Web. Best site I know on the subject: Professor Tim Jacob's University of Cardiff Smell Reserach Laboratory, with its Olfaction tutorial.
      You can't believe everything you read on smell, though. I mentioned this a while back but it bears repeating: Smell, science and the press (PDF). This 2004 editorial for the Current Science journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences tells how Nature Neuroscience was forced to publish a paper discrediting a theory hardly anyone in the neuroscience field believes, simply because of popular publicity. Luca Turin's claim that olfactory receptors respond not to molecule shapes but to "vibrations" - had been publicised via by a BBC documentary, A Code in the Nose, and Chandler Burr's book The Emperor of Scent. Only trouble is, it doesn't work: Putting a smell theory to the sniff test by Renee Twombly at Rockefeller University reports how the vibration theory failed to correctly predict how some chemicals would smell. Neverthless, the jury appears still out: while the vibration theory is still very much a minority view, the prevailing shape theory also has weaknesses. For example, some molecules of near-identical shapes smell very different.
      Whatever your view, Turin's recent article, Rational odorant design (PDF) is enlightening reading on the complexity of designing chemicals of a specific smell (Turin's company, Flexitral, is having some success in developing novel odorants, with a particular slant in finding substitutes for problematic standard ingredients - e.g ones such as citronellol now known to be allergenic).