Slow motion videos of various animals capturing prey —

The Chinese Giant Salamander is mesmerizing. — Maggie •

Corporate executives indicted for willfully endangering public health —

Officials from the Peanut Corporation of America are being indicted for their roles in a 2009 salmonella outbreak that killed at least nine people. It's rare for this kind of prosecution to actually happen, writes Maryn McKenna at her Superbug blog. But, in this case, there's mounds of evidence that executives circumvented safety testing, ignored positive salmonella results, and pressured their employees to send out product even though it might be tainted. Here's the money quote, from PCA's former president, revealed in an email recovered by the prosecution: "Shit, just ship it." — Maggie •

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At the Smithsonian's Smart News blog, a fun post looking at historic debates in America's science media about whether it's okay to eat horse meat, with links to some Scientific American articles from the 1860s and 1870s.

One such article published in 1875, "Shall We Eat The Horse?," argues that "in not utilizing horse flesh as food, we are throwing away a valuable and palatable meat, of which there is sufficient quantity largely to augment our existing aggregate food supply. Supposing that the horse came into use here as food, it can be easily shown that the absolute wealth in the country would thereby be materially increased."

A decade later, SciAm published this piece screengrabbed above, on the shifting cultural norms that made eating horse totally not cool.

Scene from a Houston grocery store, courtesy of a touring author's life. I did not buy any of these things.

Junk food, grocery store, Houston, TX, USA

A long, investigative feature on junk food, health and the processed food industry in yesterday's NYT consists primarily of interviews with tortured and semi-tortured junk food scientists and execs who have perfected the art of getting you to eat food that makes you sick. It's quite a read:

Eventually, a line of the trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day’s recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar.

When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for criticism. “One article said something like, ‘If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.’ ”

Well, they did have a good bit of fat, I offered. “You bet,” he said. “Plus cookies.”

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.” (Bible would later press Kraft to reconsider its reliance on salt, sugar and fat.)

Here's another good bit:

To get a better feel for their work, I called on Steven Witherly, a food scientist who wrote a fascinating guide for industry insiders titled, “Why Humans Like Junk Food.” I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food [NYT/Michael Moss]

(Image: Snakes?, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from reallynuts's photostream)

Jenise sez,

When a new pizza place opened up next door to my favorite happy mutant cafe in Salem, MA, I had to wander in. The delectable smells wafting out certainly helped nudge me through the doors. Inside, I found the place brimming with SF memorabilia, including a life-size Borgified Picard statue acting as maitre'd and framed pictures of all eleven Doctors, with an empty frame reserved for Number Twelve.

All the pies have excellent names. I am particularly fond of the Geidi Prime, and but I also love the vegan Twiki for its phenomenal eggplant. And what could better finish off dinner than the Zhaan, a blueberry-topped dessert pizza.

As it turns out, Flying Saucer Pizza Company is owned by the same folks that own the aforementioned Gulu Gulu Cafe next door, where the bar is festooned with comic action figures and they make the best freaking creme brulee lattes ever. Add this to the enormous Harrison's Comics right across the street, and you've got a little slice of mutant heaven.

Flying Saucer Pizza Company (Thanks, Jenise!)

Just look at it.

Banana dalek, Sylvia Toth's box of custom bitmap shortbread cookies, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Bunnies attack at Denver Airport —

Bunny rabbits at Denver Airport have caused thousands of dollars' worth of damage to cars, having become fond of eating exposed wiring. The USDA is unable to remove them fast enough. [CBS Denver] — Rob •

4,500 years of yum —

Researchers map the history of curry by analyzing chemical traces in ancient Indian pottery. — Maggie •

From Inhabitots. It doesn't matter if you're vegan or like "wed vewvet" cupcakes, I could watch young Petey Rojas all day. What a cute kid. (HT: Tara Tiger Brown)

As I watched competitive eater Takeru Kobeyashi consume a 12" Domino's pizza in one minute, I realized that I could probably do this, and that if it wasn't Domino's, I could probably do it twice. Not that I'm supposed to. Carbs don't agree with me. But if you need to dispose of evidence in pizza form, and Takeru Kobeyashi is busy, I might be your guy.

Takeru Kobeyashi Eats a whole Pizza In One Minute