The Vapours

What you should and shouldn’t do

Having an immovable forehead makes a great first impression, according to researchers. Photos of people after botox injections were rated better than before on first impressions in terms of dating success, attractiveness and athletic ability. But botoxed faces were rated no better in terms of financial and relationship success or social skills.

Smokers and the overweight are most in favour of the carrot approach when it comes to deciding whether to pay people to change their unhealthy lifestyle or penalise them, US researchers have found. In the same study, people were in favour of rewarding healthy behaviour with lower health insurance, but not on charging people with unhealthy behaviours more — seemingly unaware that the two are the same.

Bad news for those seen sporting faux cigarettes in trendy bars as an attempt to break their tobacco habit. The World Health Organization has warned that electronic cigarettes, which exude a fine mist of nicotine, are not a proven method for quitting.

But unhealthy behaviour could be cheaper in the long run for fellas tipping the heavier end of the scales. Obese men have hormonal changes — including lower testosterone levels — that make fathering a child less likely.

Advances in the science of things bumping into things

Disappointing for doom-mongers and a small section of the scientific community, a report has concluded that it’s unlikely the earth will become fodder for a black hole when the Large Hadron Collider starts hurling protons at each other in the not too distant future. It’s also doubtful that the search for the Higgs Boson will turn all atoms into ’strangelets’ and put an end to us forever.

Tectonic plates go a bit funny before grinding together to cause earthquakes on the San Andreas fault. Monitoring changes in seismic wave patterns could give prior warning of quakes, say scientists.

Mars’ two-faced nature is down to a collision with a massive moon-sized space rock back in the day, say Californian researchers, not volcanic activity. The finding explains the differing thickness between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, rather than any inter-planetary bitchery.

It’s not often that the science bit on the BBC news elicits a “What the f**k?” from both myself (rational, cynical, maybe even a bit sneery) and my flatmates (one can be easily pacified by pictures of cats, you get the picture). But that’s what happened on Wednesday, when we heard that a man had ‘regrown’ the end of his finger after it was chopped off during a model plane accident.

And no, it was not the model plane that had us transfixed. In a series of pretty gruesome pictures, Lee Spievak documented the regrowth of his finger after he’d dipped it in ‘pixie dust’.

Alas, it wasn’t pixie dust, but the powdered scrapings of a pig’s bladder, or extracellular matrix. Scientists have been researching this ’scaffold’ material and others like it for years but there’s little evidence it can encourage regrowth, though it has been used to make synthetic blood vessels etc.

While I could grasp that a substance might encourage any multiplying cells to ‘grab hold’ of the dust and create a new layer, or that the substance somehow signals to the cells to tell them it’s okay to carry on growing, how was a whole fingertip, nail and all, reformed, instead of just an amorphous blob?

The scientist involved, Stephen Badylak from the University of Pittsburgh, says it’s all down to cell signalling that encourages the finger to grow rather than scar.

But after a search of the peer-reviewed literature and finding it light on information to support the claim, I was beginning to think it looked a little fishy. Turns out (courtesy of the beeb again) that a lot of scientists ain’t too pleased either  — anecdote holds no power in science — and that the finger above the bone, so long as there’s a nailbed, could simply have regrown itself, pixie dust or not, using its impressive natural regenerative powers.

Cheesy as it sounds, surely that’s the “What the f**k?” moment.