Girls Gone Green

I saw a press release about a global warming 'virtual march' ( we'll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the "Stop Global Warming College Tour" beginning April 9th in Dallas. I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore's movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the Post Chronicle where the author makes a joking reference to a "girls gone green" tour likely being a better idea. You know, kind of like "Girls Gone Wild" except the beads they get are made of hemp - and they hopefully won't be chunky sorority sisters on drunken binges. You mean they haven't done something like that yet??? No one would ever have heard of PETA if they didn't go on trial for killing homeless pets and get aging supermodels like Christy Turlington ( perhaps NSFW ) to pose naked in their advertisements. The lack of hot girls in environmental causes is a much bigger story than figuring out what a "virtual march" is ( though I did find out the answer: you give them your email and you have done your part to save the planet ) so I set out to find out just how important the environment is to beautiful women. Not all that important, it seems, as you can tell by the roster below. So here's what we have, and you can bet the pictures take up a lot more space than the content because there is so little content to be found. Gong Li - Okay, the environment is a big winner on this one. Sure, "Memoirs Of A Geisha" stunk but it wasn't because Gong Li was anything except flawless. "Things will become really terrible if we don't take environmental protection more seriously," said she. Looks like that and she's smart too! Petra Nemcova - The name was vaguely familiar but I actually thought she was the girl who got her leg bitten off by a shark. Turns out she was in the big tsunami a few years ago and her boyfriend died, catapulting her to fame and making her an expert on the environment. The only thing that has fewer hot women than the environment, it seems, are tsunamis, so she was an easy winner here. Plus, she already broke her pelvis so it's unlikely you will hurt her much during sex. Persia White - I never heard of her, so we are really reaching now. She was a bit player on some TV show or another. It doesn't matter. She has a tattoo, which makes her look 'edgey.' College age numbskulls like girls who look 'edgey.' We're trying to motivate people who have plenty of time on their hands to 'virtual march' for Laurie David so I'd say she appeals to a good target demographic. After this it goes downhill quickly. You can save your time, and your eyesight, by simply submitting this to Digg and going to lunch. But for you masochists out there ... Daryl Hannah - My dad loves Daryl Hannah. Looking at this picture from 20 years ago, I can understand why. Looking at her now makes me think "Kill Myself" more than "Kill Bill." However, after this the only girl under 70 left was Christie Brinkley. This is a family site, so I am not putting up a picture of Christie Brinkley. So you are starting to see the problem - the environment is not getting more attention because hot girls don't care enough. Instead of putting on non-concerts and virtual marches, I think Laurie David and Al Gore should be devoting more time to getting attractive people on their side. Well, attractve women on their side. Because male environmentalists like holding on to the hope that at some protest or another a hot girl will be in evidence. Female environmentalists have the same hope. In conclusion, I did find plenty of non-hot girls who care, like in the final picture. Lady Scientist saw this draft and said, "Is that the Indigo Girls?" "Yes," I replied. "Lesbians, you know. Shows my tolerance." "Right," she said. "I notice you are always very tolerant of lesbians." I don't know what point she was trying to make but I am happy she recognized my overall inclusiveness.

Who Funds The Chocolate Consensus?

In case you were hiding under a rock, there was the scientific equivalent of an earth-shattering thunderclap that emanated from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetings held February 15th-19th in San Francisco - to be honest, they pretend everything they say is big news, you can see 20 articles from it on Scientific Blogging - but I mean this was legitimately big news. Was it that they took their own vote and decided that there is global warming after all? No, someone jumping on the climate change bandwagon is nothing new. Was it that your astrological sign can tell you what medical problems you will have? That one was a lot of fun but still not it. No, the most surprising news was that chocolate makes you smarter. Now, if you're anything like me - an outrageously sexy scientist outside but inside an irascible prick who likes to puncture junk science - this probably set off some alarms. America has, I am told, a terrific obesity problem but a scientific group says eating more chocolate is smart. So I looked into this and found that a segment of researchers claim that not only does chocolate make you smarter, it might protect against cancer and diabetes(!) plus keep your arteries flowing smoothly. Heck, one scientist even went so far as to write an article on 10 scientific reasons to love chocolate. That's a whole lot of reasons to eat chocolate. Yeah, I smell corporate porkbarrelling. Except for that last article. At least 7 of those 10 were really good reasons. And chocolate is yummy. Anyway, I did some research and here is what I found: Mars,Inc. has spent the last 18 years funding chocolate studies. So what, you say, they're in the chocolate business so they need to research it. Well, Philip Morris is in the cigarette business and Exxon-Mobil is in the oil business but if they said smoking cigarettes and burning more oil actually improved our health, you would be a little skeptical. Right here in California, at UC Davis, Mars,Inc. funds 20 investigators and created a chair in the nutrition department. That's right, the nutrition department. Mars states they have spent $10 million on research just at UC Davis since 1997. In fact, on the entire "Neurobiology Of Chocolate" panel at the AAAS meeting, only one of the researchers was not funded by Mars. One of the panel's organizers is Harold Schmitz, who just happens to be a visiting professor at UC Davis and the Chief Science Officer of ... Mars, Inc. Wow, what a coincidence. Carl Keen, chairman of the UC Davis nutrition department which gets all that money, said, "If I have a choice between a company paying for something or my tax dollars paying for it, I'd prefer the company pay." No kidding. Very Republican of you. Do you think they would give you all that money if you weren't producing research they like? Merrill Goozner, director of the integrity in science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, isn't buying it. "This is the nutrition department, for crying out loud. I think taxpayers would be pretty upset about that." Goozner co-authored a paper called Relationship between Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles so this is a topic of interest to him. The conclusion in that paper? Studies funded by industry were four to eight times as likely to reach conclusions in the financial interests of sponsors. Virtually unmentioned during the panel discussion was the fact that most of the chocolate people actually eat is low in flavanols and high in sugar. Instead they described how Kuna Indians in Panama have almost no diabetes yet consume chocolate every day. As if the chocolate and not the exercise involved in being a native is what kept them in shape. What's next, a study showing that coffee plus chocolate cures Alzheimers? We'll see. For now, Ian MacDonald, professor at the University of Nottingham Medical School and member of the Mars Nutrition Research Council ( he is also funded by Mars ) says consumers should only eat moderate amounts of chocolate. When asked how much "moderate" was, he cited half a "Snickers" bar. Who makes "Snickers"? You guessed it. Now I have to get to work making this a full-length article. The Hershey's people think I make some really good points here.