"cold" news and stories

Ice cream headaches, a.k.a. brain freeze, are caused when quickly-eaten cold foods come into contact with the roof your mouth. Since the mouth doesn't have time to warm up when eating or drinking quickly, the nerve center there panics and sends signals to your brain that indicate the body is freezing. Blood rushes to the brain and the eater feels a sharp, stabbing type of pain that lasts anywhere from 30-60 seconds in most people.

Strangely, ice cream is the most commonly cited cause for head pain, but it can be avoided easily. Most people feel that positioning the cold foods at the sides of your mouth will prevent brain freeze. This allows the food to warm up slightly before coming into contact with the roof of your mouth. If you're drinking something frozen, like a smoothie, don't aim the straw directly at the roof of your mouth, either. The other "cure" is simply to eat more slowly.

Breyers released their Double Churned ice cream this week. If it sounds like something you've had before, you're probably confusing it with the Dreyers/Edy's Slow Churned variety. In any event, more churning in commercial ice cream is supposed to make it creamier (though there are proponents of homemade ice cream who aim to keep their churning to a minimum no matter what), so the ice creams should be a hit.

Breyer's just did a survey on American ice cream eating habits. From their "Real Dish on Ice Cream" study, they learned that 87% of Americans have ice cream in the freezer and 71% have at least two kinds or more. A very crafty 20% try to hide their favorite flavor where other family members won't find it. They also said that men and women are equally likely to crave ice cream when they are happy.

The only question left to answer is whether the happiness was ice cream based, or whether being happy just made them want ice cream.

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Is Fear Factor your favorite show, but you don't like the idea of eating icky things enough to apply? Do you have small children who think it's fun/entertaining to eat variously gross foods? The Popsicle company is coming to your rescue! Unlike the Cherry Chip Bada Bing! ice cream sandwiches, which tie in to the hit Sopranos show via name alone, the new Fear Factor Pop-Ups try to get the eater involved in the spirit of the program. The sour cherry flavored pop has an eyeball gum-ball atop it and the sour watermelon flavor is coated with "sour lemon slime." There are only four pops in a box, but that should provide more than enough ammunition for your child to gross out the neighbor's kids - at least for one afternoon.

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As the season for Peeps is upon us once more, people begin to look to Peeps for more than just a sweet snack. The fluffy marshmallow critters, chicks and bunnies alike, can provide hours of entertainment when properly utilized. Strangely, it is not only children who play with their food in this instance, but adults. Since they inspire far more fascination than your average marshmallow, one can only attribute their entertainment value to the fact that the chicks and bunnies look so much more realistic - "realistic" in the sense that they do have an actual form, unlike a more traditional marshmallow. Alternatively, it could be the bright colors that people find so appealing.

PeepResearch.org is a wealth of information, detailing the outcome of nearly every likely situation a Peep  is likely to be in, including extreme heat and extreme cold, as well as chronicling the effects of smoking and alcohol on Peeps who have given in to temptation.

Bunny Survival Tests is slightly more disturbing than PeepResearch.org because there seems to be a degree of enjoyment from the creators of the site in seeing what happens to the sweet little Peep Bunnies when exposed to a variety of hazardous situations.

Other, less scientific examples of Peep amusements include how to joust Peeps and Peep-henge, in addition to the very cool PeepsShow.

[Photo by PeepResearch.org]

A study was done recently that concluded that obesity might be contagious. This conclusion was extrapolated from data that showed an increase in the weight of chickens who had been exposed to the human adenovirus Ad-37. Adenoviruses can cause colds and other illnesses in humans. The reasoning seems to follow this line of thought: Chickens, when exposed to a particular, contagious human virus, got fat . Since it is a human virus, humans who catch this virus will get fat. Since the virus is contagious, it follows that obesity is contagious.

So is obesity only contagious when the carrier of the virus has a cold? Can you catch it from sitting next to someone on an airplane? To say that this line of reasoning is flawed is an understatement. It is simply incorrect.

Simply because a cold can cause a chicken (or a human, for that matter) to gain weight does not mean that all weight gain is caused by colds in general or this virus in particular. Nor does it mean that because colds are contagious, so is weight gain. Someone needs to retake their deductive reasoning courses.

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