100 centimeters of pure tooth, baby

I've mentioned the webcomic Achewood before, I know, but let me point out that one of the things that makes it great is that most of the characters have their own blogs. Yes, they're stuffed animals and cats that talk and lead normal, or at least recognizable, human lifestyles. But reading only the comic means you miss out on a number of substories that usually aren't mentioned in the strip itself -- or the story might protrude from one blog to the strip, or to another blog. Besides getting you to read one of the most entertaining and well-developed comics on the web, I actually just wanted to bring this up so I could quote from Teodor's blog:

don't you just love how since the Blog Quality Bar has been set so low, I can mention this entirely without a segue, and it will seem like high literature simply because there are no misspellings and you can't tell which band I'm listening to?

On that note, a new British reality TV show tricks its... (what are they called, stars? actors? marks?) people into thinking they've been launched into space. From what I hear, their selection process basically weeded out anyone with the slightest grasp of physics or space science, and looking at their list of 'cadets', the first thing each one of these people should be asking themselves is if they trust a space tourism program that would trust them with 'space missions'. The answer should be no. It is wonderful to see that in these modern times of cynicism and hypervoyeurism, some people are still genuinely and honestly willing to take advantage of stupid people. And by that, I mean anyone who watches this rubbish. Rubbish is British for garbage, by the way, which is what this show is. In case that wasn't clear.

In news that does not make me want to launch relatiy television producers into space, we might know what narwhals use their tusk for. Basically, they're the small white whales with a hugeous horn (actually, a long spiralling tooth) coming out the front of their head. People have made a lot of different guesses over the centuries to what it's actually for; everything from fighting other narwhals to getting food, but now researchers from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology say it's a sensory organ. Apparently it has a whole lot of nerve endings that may help the animal to detect changes in water conditions like temperature and salinity.

It'd be neat if this is true; I have questions though. For one, if it's a specialized sense organ, why don't most females have one? They're social animals but it's not unusual to find groups consisting solely of females and calves, who would presumably benefit from such a sensor as well. Secondly, it takes a lot of energy to grow a meter-long tooth filled packed with nerve endings. Is it so valuable a sense organ that it provides an profitable alternative to the existing organs? Belugas, in the same family, live in the same climate and prey on similar food, and to my knowledge don't have such specialized sense organs. But on the other hand, it could be the energy it costs to grow it only makes sense when the animal is not a female who needs to give every advantage possible to her calves, or that it's used to locate females. It certainly seems to have some use in mating behavior, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing it's useful for. So who knows, it's all very curious.