Multifunctional cell phones spur data revolution

Q: How are all of us ?everyday users of cell phones helping to spur on the scientific revolution?

A: It's more a data revolution involving some 260 million subscribers in the U.S. alone, busily taking pictures, recording sounds, revealing locations, even measuring temperatures and sensing light, says Prachi Patel-Predd in IEEE Spectrum magazine.

As Erie Paulos of Carnegie-Mellon University puts it, the phones are ideal tools for incorporating environmental sensors of all types, able to track global temperatures, air pollution levels, wind speeds, pollen count.

This way, reading stations could be set up around cities, giving researchers thousands of mobile sensors gathering rich sets of local data.

A test run in Accra, Ghana, proved the idea could work.

Paulos' team gave portable air pollution sensor packs to taxicab drivers and students, revealing microclimates and block-to-block variations.

What surprised researchers was the participants' response.

People started exchanging pollution information with friends, and one cab driver actually took his car in for an emissions inspection.

"This digital object participants carry around can suddenly help them view their world in a whole new way."

Q: "Arachibutyrophobia" is a mouthful of a word and a sticky one at that. What kind of fear does it signify?

A: It's related to eating peanut butter but it's not the fear of peanut butter per se — that delectably sticky food.

According to the Peanut Advisory Board, a St. Louis doctor first developed peanut butter as a nutritious, high-protein food for his patients with bad teeth, say Richard Hartel and Annakate Hartel in "Food Bites: The Science of the Foods We Eat."

Thus peanut butter may be the "original geriatric food." Its ultra-stickiness, according to one source, is linked to its high-protein content, which pulls the moisture out of the mouth.

Maybe, but a dry turkey sandwich sticks to the roof of the mouth even worse, and a cheese sandwich worse still.

If you haven't guessed by now, arachibutyrophobia is a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth.

But with so many different complements to peanut butter, from grape jelly to bacon to bananas, there's no need to fear the sandwich itself.

U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was said to relish a toasted version with added bologna, cheddar cheese, lettuce, mayonnaise and a ketchup chaser.

Q: If golf is your game, take a swing at this: "What are the odds against getting a hole-in-one?"

A: They depend, of course, on the player's ability and the length of the hole, says John Wesson in "The Science of Golf."

Other factors are the protection of the hole by bunkers and the slope of the green.