Link roundup

1. Great article at Wired. Here's the start:

James Scott encountered that scent for the first time a decade ago in a town called Lakeshore, Ontario. Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.

Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

2. Broccoli Gratin recipe.

3. Negative review of the new Games Workshop resin finecast miniatures.

Link roundup

1. Totally bizarre story of a nuclear power plant mishap that killed three men in 1961 Idaho. "When one of the trio was buried, his family asked to see the coffin: permission was only granted when they agreed to rush through the funeral in five minutes."

2. Fast Company chose Reshma Shetty as one its most creative people in business:

At MIT Shetty earned her synthetic-biology chops by helping engineer a strain of E. coli bacteria that smelled minty fresh, eliciting praise from experimental biologists who hated the outhouse stench of unadulterated E. coli.

3. It's Star-Lord and a sort of space Dr. Moreau in "More Than Human" by Doug Moench, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Bob McLeod.

Link roundup

1. Sky on fire. Via.

2. Fast Company has a great article about Cargill's creation and marketing of the sweetener Truvia:

TRUVIA HAS ITS OWN tribute message, an ode to the comfort Cargill wants to provide. "Have you ever cured bad news with hot choc-olate? Ever snuck downstairs to eat a cookie before breast-feeding the baby at 3 a.m.?" If the answer is yes, you are part of Cargill's new demographic, the Yoga Momma, the company's name for the typically harried but well-intentioned working woman.

On a recent day, McFerson and Truvia's marketing director, Ann Tucker, explain the tao of Yoga Momma-ism. "The Yoga Momma wears yoga pants but may never make it to class," Tucker says. "It's more about a mind-set," McFerson adds. Both readily admit this sounds like them. "I've never been to class, but I have the pants," McFerson deadpans.

The brand homage was conceived by mothers at Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago. "What is cool about Cargill is it's a pretty female-based group," says Donna Charlton-Perrin, one of the campaign's architects. "There is a line in there about how women have a complicated relationship with sweetness. Everyone just had this autobiographical understanding of how that goes." Not surprisingly, Yoga Mommas tend to be prime spenders on health-related supermarket goodies. To reach them, McFerson spent lavishly to secure a name (which sounds like true plus stevia, and was devised by Lexicon Branding); a logo (light green type with a tiny stevia leaf, by Pentagram); and clever print and TV ads designed by Ogilvy.

3. Goofy mystery awaits Detective Rex Starbuck in House of Mystery #251.

The weird and wonderful world of bioluminescence

"In the deep, dark ocean, many sea creatures make their own light for hunting, mating and self-defense. Bioluminescence expert Edith Widder was one of the first to film this glimmering world. At TED2011, she brings some of her glowing friends onstage, and shows more astonishing footage of glowing undersea life."

Link roundup

1. FYI, you have to pay $150 to $495 to be nominated for a Webby award.

2. If you missed it, Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean said he "hated" Neil Gaiman and called him a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota." Neil Gaiman responds here. His response includes a link to Dean's contact page and encourages you to share your thoughts with Mr. Dean.

3. Here's an explanation for why eating asparagus makes your urine smell. Via.

Link roundup

1. From Fast Company's article about the efforts to market carrots like junk food:

The company has been around for nearly a century now, but it boomed in the 1990s, with a breakthrough product. A local grower named Mike Yurosek had become frustrated with all the waste in the carrot business. Supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. Yurosek wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites and peeled round, he called "bunny balls." Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches long, looked like little baby carrots.

Bunny balls never made it. But baby carrots were a hit. They transformed the whole industry. Soon, the big growers in Bakersfield were planting fields with baby carrots in mind, sowing three times more seeds per acre, so the carrots, packed densely together, would grow long and skinny, for the maximum number of 2-inch cuts. Yields and profits climbed. The really big deal, the thing nobody expected, was that baby carrots seemed to make Americans eat more carrots. In the decade after they were introduced, carrot consumption in the United States doubled.

Then a couple of years ago, after a decade of steady growth, Bolthouse's carrot sales went flat. Sales of baby carrots, the company's cash carrot, actually fell, sharply, and stayed down. Nobody knew why. This was a big problem.

...

Dunn put together a series of focus groups and surveys and discovered something interesting. People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. What people meant, it turned out, was they were as likely as ever to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, they became more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. But people used to eating baby carrots weren't taking the time to wash and cut the regular ones. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or spoiled.

2. And from an article in the same issue about the business of water:

The water bill at IBM Burlington -- just to get 3.2 million gallons a day into the plant -- is $100,000 a month. The water staff turns plain municipal water into a portfolio of products, depending on whether someone is mixing high-tech chemicals or running air-conditioning chillers. IBM's utility plant creates nine custom varieties of water. Each brand of water costs 4, 5, or 10 times more than the cost of the raw water itself.

3. FYI, if you want to get a hold of the Marvel Universe Cable with baby action figure (possibly the best action figure ever), check out the new Marvel Universe case available at Entertainment Earth. Instead of the last mix, which included several doubles (including two Gladiators), this new set has no doubles, and includes a Thanos.

And speaking of EE, buy 4 Funko items, get a 5th free (Funko makes very cute plush toys you've probably seen all around the net).

UPDATE: You can find the Cable for $25, including shipping, at Amazon.

Breeding animals for violence and domesticity

Interesting article (and great photo gallery) at National Geographic about scientists breeding rats and foxes for violence and domesticity. (That's a angry rat, above.)

Link roundup

1. Hilarious photo of kids learning about the wonders of the human reproduction.

2. A Baltimore Sun photographer accepted a buyout, started a blog, and then more or less destroyed the industry for professional photographers:

By teaching a horde of novices the skills necessary to shoot photographs of a quality that was until very recently only within the grasp of an elite few, Hobby has played a significant role in the transformation of the profession. In the last few years, the market rate for many types of professional photographs has dropped by as much as 99 percent.

3. "A special mask that produces sights and smells fooled study participants into thinking they were eating a cookie they weren't."

*Buy vintage cameras at eBay.