"If we are speaking of chocolate, sir, I should be happy to eat my words."
— Annette Marie Hyder



New Evidence That Dark Chocolate Helps Ease Emotional Stress

A loud snap made them all jump. Professor Lupin was breaking an enormous slab of chocolate into pieces.
"Here," he said to Harry, handing him a particularly large piece. "Eat it. It'll help." -- Professor Remus Lupin, from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, By J.K. Rowling

Professor Lupin, quoted above, knew that chocolate was just the thing to offer Harry Potter after Harry was attacked by the soul-sucking and happiness stealing Dementor.

Besides being delicious, there is new scientific evidence to support the popular wisdom of prescribing chocolate as a mood enhancer.

ScienceDaily reports: The "chocolate cure" for emotional stress is getting new support from a clinical trial published online in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. It found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in the bodies of people feeling highly stressed. Everyone's favorite treat also partially corrected other stress-related biochemical imbalances.

Read the entire article here.

Butterflies in space

When NASA's space shuttle Atlantis launches for the International Space Station today it will carry a University of Colorado at Boulder butterfly experiment that will be monitored by thousands of K-12 students across the nation.

ScienceDaily reports: The butterfly payload was designed and built by BioServe Space Technologies in CU-Boulder's aerospace engineering department and will carry two butterfly habitats containing monarch and painted lady butterfly larvae and enough nectar and other food to support them as they develop. CU-Boulder, with the help of elementary and middle school students, will compare the growth and development of butterfly larvae in the weightless environment of the International Space Station with butterfly larvae being raised simultaneously in participating classrooms on Earth.

Dubbed "CSI03 — Butterflies in Space," the project is the fourth K-12 educational experiment to be flown by CU-Boulder on ISS.

Read the entire article here.

Excerpt from Icarus and the Delicate Art of Wing Drying
From The Consequence of Wings (On Angels and Monsters and Other Winged Things)
Annette Marie Hyder

The butterflies shake their wings
the ink still wet
on every stitch-fine scale.
Wind fingers them
in mourning
reads them much like Braille.

What do lepidoptera gossamer
and shut-eyed wind
have to do with me now?


Link to butterfly related article and poem