Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is not impressed by our grade in Physics.

​The Thomas B. Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence just released its comprehensive State of State Science Standards 2012 report, which grades each state on how it teaches science to students, and Missouri ranked in the top twenty. Sadly that's no better than a C grade, as the Fordham report shows that the quality of science education in our schools continues to erode nationwide.

There are some bright spots in Missouri's report card (pdf warning). We scored a six out of possible seven in Life Science education, and we achieved a respectable five out of seven in both Earth & Space Science and Scientific Inquiry & Methodology. However, we do ourselves no favors with a dismal two out of seven in Chemistry, and we scored a deplorable big fat zero in Physics.
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She actually said "Math class is tough!" but who cares about accuracy when you're trying to make a point?

​Remember Teen Talk Barbie? Of course you do! She was the one that got famous for shaking her pretty blonde head and moaning, "Math class is tough!" which, of course, sent a terrible message to impressionable young girls who were at the age where they were just struggling to master addition and subtraction. If Barbie thought math was tough, what chance did they have?

In 1999, a few years after Teen Talk Barbie made her debut, a group of researchers published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that claimed that young girls secretly want to be just like Barbie. Well, OK, the paper showed that if, before you give a girl a math test, you tell her that girls aren't as good as boys at math, she won't score as well. That study spawned a host of replications that proved the exact same thing.

But now a psychology professor at the University of Missouri has conducted a review of the 1999 study and claims that study, and all its successors, are bunk because -- and oh, the irony of this is delicious! -- the researchers screwed up when they tried to turn their raw numbers into statistics.

Hey, math is tough!

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There's now an honest-to-God scientific explanation as to why these taste so good.

​So we all know, deep in our hearts and thighs and especially our tongues -- and despite all those resolutions we made a couple of weeks ago -- that fat is one of the most awesome things that can ever happen to a piece of food. But it is the goal of Science to illuminate and explain the mysteries of life and nature, and so a group of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine has taken the first step to discover why we love fat so much.

"My key interest in fat is to know why we crave fat," says M. Yanina Pepino, one of the scientists who worked on the study, which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Lipid Research. The answer, or at least part of the answer, lies in a gene called CD36, which is connected to the taste buds. People who make more of the CD36 protein have an easier time detecting the presence of fat in food.

This does not mean, Pepino stresses, that they like fat more. "We have to learn what the signal means," she says. "It could be how much fat they need to absorb to get the signal of satiety. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of the story."

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Note: This research does not explain the enduring attraction between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.

​Springtime, soft breezes, moonlight, music...the perfect setting for seduction, whether you're a romantic-minded human or a tree frog. But don't think the female tree frogs aren't any more picky than humans just because they happen to be, well, frogs. If a female tree frog doesn't like a dude's music, she'll just hop away, leaving him to warble to the moon by his own sad self.

Can it be that tree frogs have an inherent aesthetic sense when it comes to frog-song?

Alas, no. Female tree frogs are after just one thing, and the male frogs' song tells them if they're going to get it.

Turns out there are two types of tree frogs in Missouri, the eastern grey tree frog and the Cope's grey tree frog, and it's impossible to tell them apart just by looking. This applies not just to human scientists, but to female tree frogs as well. The most significant difference between them, which ensures that the female frog is going to get her eggs successfully fertilized, is that the eastern grey tree frog has twice as many chromosomes as the Cope's grey tree frog.

Obviously, a female frog can't request a complete report of a potential mate's genome. She can, however, as scientists at the University of Missouri have recently learned, listen to his song, which lets her know if her suitor has the right number of chromosomes.

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A field of Dictyostelim discoideum fruiting bodies.

​Depending on which source you look at, the human body contains anywhere from 50 to 75 trillion cells. Somehow they all manage to work together, carrying out their various functions to keep the whole body alive. How the hell is this possible?

A pair of biologists at Washington University have a theory: It's all because all humans start off as a single cell. That cell divides and multiplies, and its descendants develop different specialties, but they cooperate because they're all related. (If only this logic worked with human families.)

Joan Strassmann and David Queller developed their theory, which you can read about in more detail in Science, based on a series of experiments with a social amoeba called Dictyostelim discoideum, or Dicty for short. Yes, you are remembering your basic biology right: amoebae are one-celled creatures. But when Dictys' lives are threatened -- if they lack warmth or light or food (Dicty eat E. coli bacteria) -- they band together into multi-celled colonies that function as a single organism.

And here's where it gets interesting.

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Not even Geoffrey Rush and an Oscar can cure your stuttering problem.

​If everything you know about stuttering comes from movies such as last year's Oscar-winner The King's Speech, you may be forgiven for believing the speech disorder is the result of a sad childhood and a profound lack of self-confidence and can be cured with help from a wise and understanding speech pathologist and the love of the Queen Mum.

Then again, did you actually believe King George VI looked like Colin Firth?

In any case, a group of researchers at Washington University Medical School recently published a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that shows that stuttering is actually the result of a mutation in a gene that controls -- and here's the surprising part -- not speech, but the recycling process in individual cells.

In other words, the problem of stuttering is infinitely smaller and more complicated than anybody thought. You can't cure it through smoking cigarettes or reciting poetry with pebbles in your mouth or even through modern gene therapy, at least not yet. Isn't that typical?

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Ramadhan Abdulla, a Tanzanian cassava farmer who has benefited from the Danforth Center's expertise and the Gates Foundation's money.

​If there were an easy way to end starvation around the world, somebody would have thought of it by now. Obviously. But there are still one billion people worldwide suffering from chronic malnutrition and another billion who don't get enough to eat between harvests. Three-quarters of the poorest people in the world are farmers who grow their own crops. Most of them don't grow enough to sustain themselves and their families, let alone enough to sell at the market.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center has teamed up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to figure out a way to solve this seemingly-insurmountable problem.

Wednesday night Kathy Kahn, a representative from the Gates Foundation, and Paul Anderson, the director of the Danforth Center's international programs office, held a public "conversation" at the Center to explain their plans, which could, conceivably, lead to world peace. Explained Anderson: "Hunger and poverty are the major causes of insurrection around the world."

(The Gates Foundation is also working on preventing school dropouts. Let's add to their list finding a way to keep Windows computers from crashing constantly, since it seems like they're up for attempting the impossible.)

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This may not be such a good idea after all.

​A new study out of Washington University Medical School shows that women with a family history of breast cancer have a greater risk of developing the disease themselves the more they drink. That's right: Not only do you have to get felt up regularly by a cold metal machine, you have to stop drinking, too.

These findings were based on a study by Dr. Graham A. Colditz, an epidemiologist. Over the course of eleven years, starting in 1996, he and his team surveyed 9,000 girls in 50 states about the state of their health. The girls, who were between nine and fifteen years old when the study began, regularly answered questions about various factors that the doctors believed were related to breast cancer: their family medical histories; their own height, weight, waist circumference and path through puberty; and their alcohol intake.

Finally, in a follow-up survey at the end of the study, the doctors asked the participants whether they had been diagnosed with either breast cancer or what they called "benign breast disease": benign lumps that can, eventually, lead to full-blown cancer.

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Philip Verghese

​Five years ago, a group of researchers at Washington University Medical School discovered that elevated levels of an enzyme called Nmnat1 could prevent nerve damage. This got Philip Verghese, a postdoctoral research associate in Dr. David Holtzman's neurology lab thinking. Could Nmnat1 prevent damage in brain cells as well?

Verghese was thinking in particular of cerebral palsy. "Cerebral palsy is sometimes attributable to brain injury that stems from inadequate oxygen and blood flow to the brain before, during and soon after birth," says Verghese. If this goes on long enough, the brain cells start to die through a process called necrosis, where they swell and explode. The damage is permanent, and it can affect movement, vision, cogitation and communication. So far, there is no cure. But what if doctors could prevent the damage from the very beginning?

(For more about living with cerebral palsy, check out Annie Zaleski's feature "Step Right Up.")

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​If you've been to college, you've probably heard stories about those girls who skip meals in order to reserve the extra calories for alcohol. It's sort of like the stories about how the pipes in certain sorority houses are corroded because so many of the girls who live there are bulimic.

In the course of her work as an assistant professor of social work and public health at the University of Missouri (and as a former college student herself), Victoria Osborne had heard those stories, too. But since her primary area of research is alcoholism prevention, she decided to look a little more closely into what the New York Times and other publications have started calling "drunkorexia."

Osborne notes that while people talk about drunkorexia, she only knows of two studies -- not counting her own -- that examine the connections between alcohol dependence and eating disorders. "It's something that's been around for a while," she says, "but no one talked about it. It was seen as a norm, not a big deal. It wasn't systematically studied. But now scientists are more interested in learning what's going on -- because it could become a serious problem."

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