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Your morning medicine?

Coffee drinkers will tell you that their brains don’t really work until they’ve had their morning cups. Well, this week, neuroscientists announced that those caffeinated cups may actually protect drinkers’ brains–by shoring up a remarkable bit of anatomy known as the blood-brain barrier.

Marvelous Membrane

First noticed by doctors more than 100 years ago, the blood-brain barrier is a sort of physiological filtering system inside the tiny capillaries (blood vessels) inside your head. It helps to protect your brain from chemicals and other “foreign bodies” that may be floating in your blood, including things that do you no harm as long as they don’t invade your brain.

By allowing only certain tiny molecules to squeeze between protective cells, the blood-brain barrier protects your mental machinery from infection–even as it enables essential communication between your brain and your blood.

“Great,” you say, “but what does that have to do with my coffee?” Maybe a lot, especially if your diet isn’t perfect. A new study by U.S. researchers suggests that a daily caffeine supplement, equivalent to a single cup of joe, could help keep your blood-brain barrier hale and hearty.

Caffeine vs. Cholesterol

Previous research has shown that high cholesterol can lead to “leaks” in the blood-brain barrier (and may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease). Meanwhile, other previous research has pointed to a possible connection between brain health and coffee drinking.

So, for 12 weeks, the researchers fed lab rabbits high-cholesterol diets. They also gave some of their rabbits daily caffeine supplements. Then they tested the rabbits’ blood-brain barriers for damage. Result: the caffeinated rabbits had significantly less blood-brain barrier leakage.

Of course, that doesn’t mean your doctor is about to start prescribing coffee. But it certainly is food for thought. As the study’s lead researcher notes, “caffeine is a safe and readily available drug, and its ability to stabilize the blood-brain barrier means it could have an important part to play in therapies against neurological disorders.” Plus, it’s one medicine many would find easy to swallow.

–Steve Sampson

That’s no movie monster–that’s an artist’s impression of a real pliosaur. Make it bigger.

Yesterday, we swam with a great white shark. Today, we’ve discovered an even bigger marine predator–one so big and so bad it’s being called the “T-rex of the sea,” or, simply, “The Monster.” Unlike great white sharks, monsters like this one–called pliosaurs–died out millions of years ago. But that doesn’t make them any less amazing.

Measure the Monster

Norwegian scientists unearthed The Monster’s skeleton last year, on a remote archipelago not far from the North Pole. This week, they announced that the monstrous fossil represents the largest pliosaur ever discovered–and one of the largest known of all marine reptiles, too.

How big was the beast? Think of it this way. To pull its tear-shaped, 50-foot (15-meter) body through the water, it used 10-foot (3-meter) flippers. And, with a head 6.5 feet (2 meters) long and bone-crushing teeth the size of cucumbers, The Monster was big enough to swallow you whole.

The Monster was no gentle giant, either. Experts estimate that its jaws packed enough punch to bite a small car in half. And it likely lunched on dolphin-like ichthyosaurs that were 10 feet long, weighed 500 pounds (225 kg) or more, and sported sharp teeth of their own. Simply put, next to The Monster, a great white would have been shark bait.

Meet the Monster’s Family

Scientists say pliosaurs like The Monster were top marine predators during the Jurassic Period, which lasted from around 200 million to around 145 million years ago. Technically, they weren’t dinosaurs, the terrestrial titans of the time. Rather, pliosaurs were part of the large family of carnivorous aquatic reptiles known as plesiosaurs.

Never heard of plesiosaurs? Surely you’ve heard of their legendary descendent “Nessie,” the Loch Ness monster. Typically, plesiosaurs had long, highly flexible necks and mouths filled with very sharp teeth.

Pliosaurs like The Monster had shorter, stouter necks and may have used their powerful flippers to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting prey. In fact, experts say that pliosaurs may have sometimes eaten their long-necked plesiosaur cousins. Nessie wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s no movie robot– that’s a real great white shark

An Austrian man died this week after being bitten by a shark not far from the Bahamas–in waters that had been baited to make it more likely that he and other divers would come face to face with sharks.

The incident launched a worldwide debate among divers, conservationists, underwater photographers, and other shark enthusiasts about whether such “uncaged” dives with sharks should be allowed. While they debated the pros and cons of close encounters with ocean predators, we decided to learn more about the scariest shark of them all: the great white.

Feel the Fear

Known to scientists as Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark is one of the most feared predators on Earth. Spanning up to 20 feet (6 meters) and weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg), it is built to kill.

It primarily likes seals, sea lions, turtles, smaller sharks, and other fine-flavored denizens of the deep. If you’re an animal on that list and a great white gets a whiff of your succulent aroma, you’re in a sea of trouble.

A Nose for Trouble

Great whites have a highly acute sense of smell. Their nostrils, called nares, aren’t used for breathing–that’s what gills are for. Instead, white sharks use their nares to sniff the water, picking up scents at a distance of a quarter-mile (0.4 km) or more, and then tracking them to their source.

A big part of every great white’s brain is dedicated to sniffing. If you’re a prey animal and you’re bleeding, don’t bother looking for a Band-Aid. A great white can smell extremely small amounts of blood in the water from a long way off–and it figures wounded prey is easy prey.

An Eye for the Fishies

The great white’s eyesight is also excellent for hunting. Like cats, great whites come equipped with a tapetum lucidum (literally, “bright carpet”), a special reflective layer behind the retina that magnifies light and enables the shark to hunt in the dark. This adaptation makes shark eyes several times more light-sensitive than human ones.

Great whites even have extra shark-senses to help them zero in on dinner. Their snouts are dotted with small pits, called ampullae of Lorenzini, that detect the electrical fields of fish and other creatures. And, running in a “lateral line” down each side of their bodies are motion sensors. Great whites can still sense what they can’t see.

The Better to Eat You With, My Dear

Still, the great white’s real weapon of bass destruction is a terrifying set of teeth, which can grow to a length of three inches (8 cm). Shaped like triangular, serrated blades, they’re arranged in six rows of around 26 teeth each, though these numbers can vary from specimen to specimen. A great white sheds and regrows its teeth throughout its life, ensuring a fresh and healthy supply for every feeding frenzy.

A great white’s bite packs tremendous power, and in the case of larger and potentially dangerous prey, it typically takes one bite, retreats, and waits for the animal to bleed to death before settling down to dinner. They’re fearsome predators, no doubt. But they’re more into ambush attacks than epic battles between creatures at sea.

Scary as they are, we probably have less to fear from great whites than they have to fear from us. They’re now protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Meanwhile, shark attacks on humans are rare. Statistics say you’re more likely to get zapped by lightning–or killed by a deer crashing into your car–than you are to be mercilessly hunted by a shark.

And the winner isn’t . . .

Hollywood’s hottest will gather for the 80th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday. Whoever gets the Oscars, you can bet that fans of unrewarded flicks will argue that Academy voters ignored a classic work of art. And it won’t be the first time.

Arguments over Oscar-winning movies are endless (Patton: modern masterpiece or inconsequential piece of fluff?). But it is inarguable that many enduring classics were sadly overlooked by the Academy voters of their day. So today, KnowledgeNews honors the dishonored with our list of the Top 5 Most Snubbed Motion Pictures, Oscars Edition.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

The Academy Awards celebrate artistry in motion pictures, but you’d never have guessed that on Oscar Night 1942, when How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane for best picture. Orson Welles’s difficult masterpiece garnered nominations aplenty: best picture, best actor, best director, and more. But at the end of the day, the only award the film received was for best original screenplay. Welles’s consolation was that later generations would celebrate Kane as perhaps the greatest motion picture of all time.

2. Chinatown (1974)

If you think that being nominated for an Oscar is what’s important, then Roman Polanski’s seminal detective drama–starring Jack Nicholson with a band-aid on his schnoz–did just fine. It was nominated for 11 awards, including best picture, best actor and actress, and best director. Luckily, it was also nominated for best screenplay, because that was the only award it won. The Godfather Part II was also in the running that year, and Chinatown couldn’t keep pace.

3. Double Indemnity (1944)

Billy Wilder would have been happy to share Polanski’s fate. His film–which many call the greatest of all film noirs–was also nominated for many awards, including best picture, best actress, and best director. But it didn’t win even one. The alleged best picture this time out was Going My Way, a feel-good musical starring Bing Crosby as the new priest in a troubled Catholic parish. Perhaps wartime America found it easier to celebrate sentiment over cynicism. A month after the awards ceremony, Allied forces took Berlin.

4. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but you could probably forgive co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen if they were a touch bitter after seeing their picture–arguably the best musical of all time–receive just two nominations (for best supporting actress and best musical score) and no awards. A Cecil B. DeMille circus extravaganza, The Greatest Show on Earth, somehow managed to bag the award for best picture that year, while classics like Singin’ in the Rain, High Noon, and The Quiet Man went down to defeat. Perhaps the sight of Charlton Heston in tights addled the voters’ minds.

5. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Is winning that much better than losing if all you can win is a relatively trivial award? Billy Wilder’s manic comedy garnered some respectable nominations (like best actor, best director, and best screenplay), but all it won was the award for best costume design. Apparently, Jack Lemmon really looked good in that dress. The big winner that year was Ben-Hur, meaning that the Academy thought a costume drama was better than Some Like It Hot in everything except costumes.

Special Lifetime Snub Award

And the special Lifetime Snub Award goes to . . .

Alfred Hitchcock.

In his day, Hitchcock was dismissed as an intellectual lightweight, pandering to the public in a series of shallow suspense films. The Academy was at the forefront of the anti-Hitch movement and bestowed a grand total of zero awards on three of his best films: Rear Window (1954), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).

It’s true: Hitchcock gave the people what they wanted–and what they wanted were stylish, intelligent, well-made movies with strong characters and an absorbing story. Not surprisingly, Hitchcock’s movies have survived the test of time, while his more-honored contemporaries have fallen into obscurity. So when you watch this year’s Academy Awards, keep one thing in mind: today’s Oscar also-rans might prove to be tomorrow’s timeless classics.

–Mark Diller

After a journey of more than 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion km), NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has made its first flyby of Mercury and started beaming back messages to us. Want to know what those Mercurial messages say?

Little-Studied World

“Our little craft has returned a gold mine of exciting data,” says project scientist Sean Solomon. When the last spacecraft to explore Mercury, Mariner 10, made the trip 33 years ago, it could only see 45 percent of Mercury’s surface.

Already, Messenger has seen an additional 30 percent of the surface and beamed back more than 1,200 pictures. And it’s just getting started. Messenger has two more flybys to go, in October 2008 and September 2009. Then, in March 2011, it will fall into orbit around Mercury and stay for a year. Says another project scientist, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The New Data

Well, we’ve seen a few things. New pictures show previously unknown features of the planet, including a variety of “colorful” impact craters and “The Spider,” a unique geologic formation with more than a hundred troughs radiating from a mysterious central region. Taken together, these new images suggest that Mercury’s geologic past may be more complex and interesting than scientists previously imagined.

What’s more, the largest impact crater on Mercury, called Caloris, is even bigger than scientists thought. Seeing through Messenger’s eyes, scientists now say Caloris stretches as much as 960 miles (1,545 km) from rim to rim. That’s longer than California or Italy. The object that made the crater must have been about the size of Los Angeles.

The Old Data

While scientists dig through all the new data, let’s review some Mercury basics. You remember these key facts, right?

1. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. Earth sits about 93 million miles (150 million km) away from the nuclear fireplace. Venus, about 67 million miles (108 million km). Mercury sits far closer–on average, just about 36 million miles (58 million km) away.

2. Mercury is super hot (and super cold). So close to the sun, the temperature can top 800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 degrees C). But Mercury is not the hottest planet. Venus’s thick atmosphere makes it more hellish. And the mercury on Mercury can dip to near -300 degrees Fahrenheit (-185 degrees C) in some spots. There may even be ice frozen in the deep dark parts of craters near Mercury’s north pole.

3. Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system. The place is only about a third the size of the Earth. Of course, Pluto is even smaller than Mercury, but the International Astronomical Union (IAU) no longer considers Pluto a planet. Want to know why? Find out.

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

THIS MAN IS NUTS - WANT PROOF? READ BELOW. FROM HIS OWN MOUTH - ON THE BIN LADEN TAPE

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, some of the details of the Bin Laden tape, the supposed Bin Laden tape, have been released. Now, this is a hoot. In the first place, there is no specific threat to the United States in the tape, unless there is one in code. But there’s no promise that we’re going to get hit again. There may be some code in there, but nothing direct. But it is amazing, folks, it is a liberal rant. He blames the US for global warming. He blames US corporate interests for corrupting the political process, because our politicians have to run out and raise so much money in order to run for president. He excoriates the Democrats. Now I understand why some people were saying earlier that this tape could not be good for Democrats, because what he apparently says on this tape, this Bin Laden look-alike — I’m sorry, I refuse to believe it’s Bin Laden. It’s just me. If I’m wrong, when we find out, I will be glad to admit it. I don’t have to do it very often, so I’m used to it, but I’m going to tell you this: He excoriates the Democrats, he lets it known, lets it be known, that he favors what they promise. He said, “You Democrats won the election in November because the American people want this war in Iraq over. But what have you done? You have continued to authorize billions and billions of dollars for the war. You are failing in your mission to the American people,” and on and on with things like this.He’s blaming the United States for global warming and stealing the world’s resources. It is a liberal rant. It’s everything you would hear out of San Francisco. It’s what you would hear from a major college campus, take your pick of a professor. It’s on the Senate floor. It’s anything you would hear out of the mouth of an average elected Democrat. It’s stunning. I can’t wait to get a hold of the actual transcript of this thing, because it’s obviously in a language — (speaking gobbly gook) — and it would be worthless to play that because we can’t understand it. We’re going to get the transcript of this. It may not happen until Monday, but I was watching the Drive-Bys. Jim Miklaszewski on PMSNBC was going through a brief summary of the transcript. He was focused on how this is not going to help the Democrats. Well, what do you think? Whose side are they on anyway? Why is this a surprise? The Democrats in this country are invested in defeat, they own defeat. They’re cementing that investment today and yesterday, and they’ll do so next week when the Petraeus report comes out. How can anybody assume they’re on anybody’s side but Bin Laden’s? “Rush, you can’t say it like that.” Why not? This is like back in the old Nicaragua days.EDITORS NOTE: HOLD ONTO YOUR HAT - THIS IS A STRANGE RIDE HE’S GOING TO TAKE YOU ON. Let’s review this, because I don’t care what intentions are. I care about end results. So we’ve got a budding little Soviet client state down there, Nicaragua, run by Daniel Ortega, who, by the way, is back in power down there. However, I don’t know what shape his government’s in after Hurricane Felix went in there. But regardless, you remember the Contra wars? Reagan was trying to do everything he could to get some money down there to the Contras, the so-called freedom fighters, the modern equivalent of our Founding Fathers, trying to defeat this Soviet beachhead being established. The Democrats in Congress voted down every funding effort, which is what led to the Iran-Contra scandal and so forth. But that’s the point. Any attempt to fund, the Democrats were constantly voting it down. Then after a number of votes, Ortega would get on a plane and go to the Soviet Union and he’d come back with a big aid package from the Soviet Union and he’d start bragging about it, and the Democrats in Congress: “You can’t embarrass us this way,” and they’d send people like George Miller from California and Kerry went down there a couple times, to scold the guy: “You can’t do this.” So people started saying, “You know what? You guys are actually voting with the communists, the Sandinista government down in Nicaragua.” “You challenge our patriotism?” “Well, sir, you may not be voting for them, but what would be the difference if you were? The result of your actions is you are supporting the establishment of a Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua.” By the way, they still speak glowingly of Castro. They’re not threatened at all or bothered by Hugo Chavez. So it’s the same situation here with the Iraq situation. They may cringe and they may react at allegations that they’re on the side of the terrorists, but how are their votes and their statements to be interpreted any other way? We certainly can’t claim that they’re on our side, not when the side we’re on is victory. They are clearly not for victory. They have no interest in it, total defeat. So this Bin Laden tape makes it clear that he is on the Democrat side and he excoriates them for not doing what they were elected to do. Now, if I’m a Democrat and this tape comes out and I accept the fact that this is actually Bin Laden, which of course they will, and I got this guy who blew up 3,000 Americans and would like to do it as often as he could, sidling up to me being critical because I’m not doing my job to do what he wants accomplished, which is us out of Iraq, how would I feel? Would I be the slightest bit embarrassed? If I’m Jack Murtha, if I’m Dingy Harry, if I’m Nancy Pelosi, or Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, am I embarrassed at all that Osama Bin Laden is on my side? I would think that I would be. I don’t think that is what gets through their thick skulls. They’ll come out with the requisite piece that the only difference between him and a bag of manure is the bag, whatever they’re going to say. But to people paying attention, folks, there can be no mistaking it. Osama Bin Laden expects the Democrat Party of this country to do his bidding and excoriates them for failing in this latest tape of his. MUST HAVE FOUND ANOTHER OXY CONNECTION!

“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,’” Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”

Schroeder, who as a Colorado Democrat was once one of Congress’ most liberal House members, was responding to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found people who consider themselves liberals are more prodigious book readers than conservatives.

She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who “can’t say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto responded, “Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I’m not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals.”

Given that the Bush White House is made up of obfuscation specialists, whose mendacitry is unrivaled in modern times, maybe the left should take that as a compliment.