Weird Science discovers that video games can kill

Video games are harmful to children: But not how you think. The paper's title suggests it's bad news, starting with the phrase "Dying to Play Video Games." But the harm turns out to be pretty indirect, as it comes from carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out that, during the power outages caused by Hurricane Ike's landfall in Texas, the use of faulty generators sent about 20 children to the ER. In 75 percent of those cases, it turns out their parents started up the generator in order to allow their kids to play video games so they could while away their time in the dark.

This wine tastes of Mount Shasta National Forest: It's a scene that's made its way to a number of movies and TV shows I've watched: the wine snob carefully sniffs and sips a glass of wine and, after a moment of contemplation, names the region and year of origin of the wine. Well, the snob's got nothing on a mass spec. Given enough samples to work with, the folks who study wines (oenologists, if you must know) can actually figure out where the barrels it was aged in came from. Or, as the authors put it, "the statistical analysis of a series of barrel-aged wines revealed that 10-year-old wines still express a metabologeographic signature of the forest location where oaks of the barrel in which they were aged have grown." And, showing that the study of wines is subject to the same sort of buzzwords that afflicts other fields, the authors have tagged their paper "systems oenology" and called their methods an "oenolomic approach."

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