St Patrick’s Day is a rip-off!

There have never been snakes in Ireland!

That’s the conclusion of one of that country’s leading paleontologists who has found no fossil evidence of there having ever been snakes before St Patrick began converting the pagan peoples of Ireland and, so the legend goes, miraculously driving all the snakes into the sea.

The reason for Ireland’s strange reptile-free status can be found instead in the frigidity of its average temperatures and history of isolation due to ice ages over hundreds of thousands of years.

Still, any excuse for a party…

I’ll be right, thanks…

Okay. Interesting, but a little sickening… News today of a surgical first: removing an appendix via the mouth!

This is what an inflamed  appendix looks like after its removal:

Nothing more to say.

Bee’s knees. And other bits, too.

There are 2 main types of bee: sterile workers (drones) and queens. They are apparently hatched without difference and for a while at least they are fed the same stuff: Royal Jelly. Drones don’t eat this stuff for long, moving instead to a mix of pollen and nectar.

But for queens the rationing of this super-food doesn’t stop and, as a result, they become much larger and, importantly, reproductively capable.

Now, a study has discovered a possible mechanism that is triggered by the proteins found in royal jelly. Specifically, the researchers discovered that a substance contained in royal jelly stimulates the expression of a whole range of genes that result in producing a queen from regular bee larvae.

More commentary at Wired’s (rapidly becoming my favourite) science blog here.