There’s no love lost between Neil deGrasse Tyson and the UT physics department — they’re still dissing each other four decades after the Longhorn poobahs filleted his dissertation. When The Alcalde, the alumni magazine for The University of Texas at Austin, put the director of the Hayden Planetarium on this month’s cover, I was chagrined that I never knew that Tyson had walked the Forty Acres during the same time as I, in the early 1980s. Then I read the story and had to chuckle. UT can’t really claim this celebrity astrophysicist as its own because his professors failed to appreciate the brainiac’s potential, and basically flunked him. He then transferred to Columbia, where he went on to distinguished himself.

As much as I love my alma mater, I can see how someone like Tyson—a brash, African-American Yankee–would have flummoxed the status quo. On his first day, a faculty member quipped, “You must join the department basketball team!” Wince.

I’m sorry I didn’t take Intro to Astronomy so I could have caught TA Tyson’s moonwalking performance. Maybe I would have realized sooner that science can be fun. Instead, in my freshman year, I had the misfortune to take an honors tutorial called “Physics and the Modern World.” Although billed as being “for non-science majors,” the class was a disaster for me and most of my fellow liberal arts majors trying to broaden our horizons. Our big-name prof held us in contempt, a bunch of scientifically illiterate products of 1970s public education. I can’t say I blame him; most of us had never even heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I think our ignorance brought him close to tears a couple of times. By midterm, we were all flunking (except for some Poindexter – there’s always one), so Dr. Nonlinear Plasma Theory was reduced to drilling us in basic physics. I managed to pass the final by parroting his party line that nuclear energy had gotten a bad rap by knee-jerk liberals who didn’t understand that reactors were built to withstand earthquakes, airplane crashes, and even idiots at the helm. (I guess they didn’t get the memo at Fukushima.)

Reading about Tyson’s miserable time at UT, I am somewhat reassured that it wasn’t just me. And I’m grateful that he found his way “North Toward Home,” (to reference another under-appreciated UT hero, Willie Morris) and that I can read his books to catch up on all that I missed.

Cashew shells can be used to mop up heavy metals. Nature India reports that researchers have developed an absorbent material from chemically modified cashew nut shells, an agricultural waste product, which is able to remove harmful heavy metals such as copper, cadmium, nickel, and zinc from aqueous solutions. This kind of sustainable solution for cleaning up industrial waste deserves cheers from the peanut gallery.

Party girl Shan Miller

Gee, how many of the millions disabled by leprosy do you think will attend England’s “Leper Festival”? This annual event takes place on January 29, World Leprosy Day, in Taddiport, Devon, a hamlet that was a leprosy colony in the Middle Ages. The festivities include a torchlit procession, a “Leper Ball,” and an “Ugly Pageant.” Everyone is encouraged to dress up in 14th-century peasant dress “complete with spots and sores!” according to the promoter, a local artist named Shan Miller. She says that her “infamous and spectacular” party raises awareness of leprosy and she will even be taking up a collection for LEPRA Health in Action. I guess that in these hard times no nonprofit wants to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it’s hard to believe that LEPRA –which just shamed Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations into changing an offensive “leper boat” scene in their new Hugh Grant movie, “The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists”– does not find this portrayal of leprosy equally distasteful.

Next time you find yourself transfixed  by one of those indoor water walls, run away. It turns out that they can be giant bacteria incubators flinging droplets of toxins into the air. One such wall, intended to calm visitors at a Wisconsin hospital, infected dozens with Legionnaire’s Disease. Oops.

“An Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease Associated with a Decorative Water Wall Fountain in a Hospital,” a study published in the online journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, traces  the source of a mysterious and large uptick in Legionnaires’ disease cases. NPR’s Audie Cornish spoke with the lead author, Thomas Haupt, respiratory disease epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health.

“Lutefisk is cod that has been dried in a lye solution. It looks like the dessicated cadavers of squirrels run over by trucks, but after it is soaked and reconstituted and the lye is washed out and it’s cooked, it looks more fish-related, though with lutefisk, the window of success is small. It can be tasty but the statistics aren’t on your side. It is the hereditary delicacy of Swedes and Norwegians who serve it around the holidays, in memory of ancestors, who ate it because they were poor. Most lutefisk is not edible by normal people. It is reminiscent of the afterbirth of a dog or the world’s largest chunk of phlegm.”

– Pontoon: A Lake Woebegone Novel by Garrison Keillor