To nap, or not to nap: that is the question.

Controversy is a well-known bedfellow of science, but not where napping is concerned. Countless studies have demonstrated that taking a quick snooze improves cognitive performance, prevents "burnout," and boosts memory.

However, for many people, the perfect nap is hard to come by. These unfortunates (this blogger included) often report feeling disoriented, grumpy, and more exhausted after their daytime slumber than they were before it.

So why is this? Well, as it turns out, napping is not always as simple as merely choosing to "conk out" for thirty minutes. You have to do it right.

Remember, there are four distinct stages of sleep: three cycles of non-REM (rapid eye movement) and one cycle of REM. The first stage of sleep is characterized as "light sleep." At this stage, the subject may still be aware of the environment and is easily awakened (think dozing off in class). The second stage of sleep often lasts for twenty minutes and is where the subject loses awareness of the environment. The third stage, "slow-wave" sleep, is a very deep level and is often the stage at which conditions such as night-terrors and sleep-walking occur.  The final stage, REM sleep, is the level at which dreaming takes place.

Now that we have all become experts on sleep stages, let's return to our napping problem. To receive the numerous benefits of a proper nap, the snoozer should wake up at sleep stages two or four. If the subject does not awaken at either of these two stages, and instead wakes up in stage three, they could suffer what NASA calls "sleep inertia," a condition that is characterized by grogginess and a sharp decline in motor dexterity.

NASA has a vested interest in the science of napping. Their astronauts work in an environment where eight hours of sleep can be elusive, thus, the space agency has conducted numerous studies on napping, with the ultimate goal of creating a "mathematical model" that will allow astronauts (and others) to get the most out of their naps and to avoid sleep inertia.


Until NASA's napping model becomes available, those commonly afflicted with sleep inertia should limit their naps to under 20 minutes in order to stay out of sleep stage three. Caffeine has also been found to suppress the condition.

The ultimate goal is to catch those quick Zs, not to let them catch you.

Breathe; just breathe. You're almost there. A step. Wow, this sucks. Another step. Uggh. Two more steps. At least I'm going downhill now. Five more steps. Is that the finish line up ahead? Ten more steps. Come on, you can do it...

Wow I did it!

Each year, millions of Americans challenge themselves to complete some form of competitive race. Traditionally, these contests take the form of a 5 kilometer or 10 kilometer run over relatively flat terrain. You sign up. You run. You're done.

I don't mean to belittle 5k or 10k races, they are certainly noteworthy accomplishments. However, I don't believe that they provide sufficient physiological rigors worthy of a $20+ dollar entrance fee. (Call me a physical elitist.)

That's where the Warrior Dash storms in.

A 5k unlike any other, the Warrior Dash is a daunting test of physiological endurance and psychological fortitude. It challenges the entrant to rappel down ravines, run up hills, crawl through mud and under barbed wire, and even jump over a roaring fire.

The Warrior Dash is a stark contrast to your typical 5k run, in which you simply, well, run. To be fair, you sometimes turn right or left and occasionally you go up or down slightly. Don't misjudge my sarcasm, distance running is an incredible boon for your health and is a great way to lose weight and get in shape. But, as a test of overall physical fitness, running pales to the Dash.

Having survived the Warrior Dash in July, I can bear witness. The race begins with dual blasts of flame from the overhead scaffolding. The emanating heat feels like a smack in the face. 500 warriors erupt from the blocks and make for the first obstacle: a steep 600 meter incline of matted grass and trodden dirt that causes you slip and skid. It's only one minute into the Dash and your body is not adequately prepared for the hill. The viscosity of your blood has not yet decreased, causing an inadequate flow of oxygen to the muscles. Your legs are on fire. The hill climb requires anaerobic endurance in addition to aerobic endurance. Most warriors begin to walk, a few ignore the pain and continue to soldier upwards.

When contestants reach the crest, they're greeted with jets of water. Some are deceived by the thought of a cool, liquid embrace, but these water jets are not there to help; they are there to hinder. They blast your face and body, providing a damp reprieve from the heat, but also an unpleasant drowning sensation. This may cause brief hyperventilation and initiate constriction of the blood vessels supplying oxygen to the brain. Despite a sense of panic, contestants push themselves onward. 

Farther ahead, there's a black tent. Warriors reach the border and crawl in. The interior is dark and feels like an oven. Contestants' pupils slowly start to widen, but not fast enough. The 'rods and cones' in their eyes try to alter the levels of photopigments so that they can see. Again, not fast enough. Contestants crawl through the tent, sweating like a dog, and emerge, blinded by the sun's light.
 
Tired yet? There's still two miles to go.

Scientifically speaking, the Warrior Dash tests almost all aspects of your physical and mental abilities. Think of it as a "stress test" for your body.

Do you have a warrior in you?

"In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

                                                          -Douglas Adams

October 12th marks the 32nd anniversary of the publication of Douglas Adams' science fiction classic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In addition to providing us with a quirky, bestselling tale of space adventure, the novel introduced readers to several wondrous things, including the Babel Fish, the Infinite Improbability Drive, and the actual Hitchhiker's Guide, itself (which is, in the novel's universe, the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom).

Though Douglas Adams passed away in 2001, his mark on science fiction and technology lives on. In advance commemoration of "Guide's" October 12th anniversary, let's take a glance at the three aforementioned things that played significant roles in Adams' visionary five-part "Hitchhiker's Trilogy."

The Babel Fish
Described in the novel as, "small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe," the Babel Fish "feeds on brainwave energy." This parasitic creature has an marvelous benefit, however. If you stick one in your ear and allow it to ingest some of your brain's energy, the babel fish will grant you the power to understand any spoken language.

Such a creature or technology would be highly prized, which is why Google is currently developing a seamless universal translator for your smartphone that will replicate the babel fish's ability without forcing the user to host a brain-inhabiting fish.

The Infinite Improbability Drive
In Adams' books, the Infinite Improbability Drive allows for faster than light travel through the control of probability.

Despite the fact that this drive is pure fiction, modern quantum theory seems to allow for the notion of probability-fueled travel. According the physicist Michael Lockwood:

A subatomic particle is most likely to be in a particular place, such as near the nucleus of an atom, but there is also a small probability of it being found very far from its point of origin. Thus, a body could travel from place to place without passing through the intervening space if you had sufficient control of probability.

The Guide, Itself
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (also the title of Adams' novel) is the most "wholly remarkable book in the whole of the known universe." It is described as a small, simple, electronic book with the words "Don't Panic," written in "large friendly letters on the cover." The 'Guide' contains just about everything you ever wanted to know.

Modern similarities to the 'Guide' are numerous, but there is none more fitting than the iPad. The iPad, coupled with a connection to the internet, allows you to access pretty much any piece of information. Adams' reputation as an "Apple Master" also lends credence to the comparison.

The iPad actually surpasses the Guide in some respects - in storage space for instance. While the 'Guide' has to shorten certain descriptions in order to conserve memory space (For example, its entry for planet Earth was a mere two words: "mostly harmless"), an iPad can provide a much more detailed description through Wikipedia.

Science Inspired by Science Fiction
The Babel Fish, the Infinite Improbability Drive, and the Hitchhiker's Guide represent only a sampling of the ingenious ideas that Douglas Adams was gracious enough to bestow upon his readers. It is truly remarkable how science - inspired by Adams' science fiction - has turned the author's dreams into reality.

I love being a lab rat.

I love being poked and prodded through maze-like rooms filled with puzzles that challenge my problem-solving and spatial reasoning skills.

I also love receiving positive reinforcement when I complete those difficult challenges.

But most of all, I love the fact that I can have these experiences while sitting safely reclined in my computer chair, perhaps with a bowl of froyo (yes, froyo) next to the keyboard.

I'm talking, of course, about Portal. If you've played Portal, a video game by Valve Software, you probably understand my adoration. If you haven't played Portal, you can... for free. That's because Valve is now offering their award-winning video game for download at no charge until tomorrow; all for the noble cause of promoting science education.

Wait a tick, how will offering a video game for free help science education? After all, our students don't need another reason to be distracted from their homework. Well, Valve answers this question quite convincingly on their website:

One of the biggest challenges in teaching science, technology, engineering, and math is capturing the students' imaginations long enough for them to see all of the possibilities that lie ahead. Using interactive tools like the Portal series to draw them in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun which gets us one step closer to our goal--engaged, thoughtful kids!

Portal succeeds with flying colors in this respect. The game challenges you to solve virtual puzzles by controlling portals. You can use these portals to manipulate objects in the level as well as to propel yourself through barriers and around obstacles.

To launch their educational endeavor, Valve invited the 7th grade class from Evergreen School into their studios to try out Portal for themselves. The effect on the kids was astounding. According to Valve's Karen Prell:

[The kids] sat down with Hammer [the level design tool for Portal] and they created rooms and they compiled the maps and when those maps opened up, suddenly [the kids] were in the game featuring the room that they had built...They were so excited... so excited!

The experience provoked an equally positive reaction from the Valve staff.

"It's really exciting to see the pace at which the kids take a tiny little spark and then go off and do their own creation," Valve designer Jeff Lane said.

It is far too often that complex subjects like math, physics, logic, and spatial reasoning are represented by equations on a worksheet or multiple choice answers on a test. Games like Portal showcase the worldly implications of the aforementioned scientific disciplines by bringing them to life.

According to the students' teacher, Lisa Castaneda:

We've been working on a spatial reasoning project, so the kids were building these models and they were rotating the figures in space and they were taking pictures of them and doing drawings. Then we're able to come to Valve, and using the Hammer tool, [the kids] are working with models and rotating figures in space in order to create a level in Portal. It was just a fantastic real-world application of what we did in class.

Curious? Portal is not just for kids; it's for everyone. Download the game and give it a try. Take my word for it: your mind will never hurt so good.

In mankind's history, there has perhaps been no adversary more widely combated than our own body odor. For thousands of years, we were defenseless and without a champion to lead us in the fight against our own stench. But then, out of the noxious plume came Ziryab, the 9th century Persian Renaissance man who brought forth the first deodorant. Since then, the war with odor has been waged with stick and spray, from armpit to smelly foot, with no clear winner.

Since Ziryab's day, this timeless battle has been fought without respite, so perhaps it's time to put down our deodorizers for a moment and take time to reflect on some of the science of stink.

The Basics. Though it has often been blamed, our sweat is actually not the direct cause of human body odor. What we actually smell is bacteria growing on the skin. Our bodies have two types of sweat glands, eccrine and apocrine. Eccrine glands are the most prominent type and secrete the typical saltwater sweat. Apocrine glands, however, provide a veritable feast of fats and proteins for our resident bacteria.

A Selection of Science. For better or worse, diet has been shown to affect one's body odor. However, little research has been done to find out exactly what foods can improve or worsen our natural smell. The only documented study on this topic originates from Charles University in Prague.

Studying the effect of red meat consumption on male odor attractiveness, researcher Jan Havlicek, had thirty female subjects smell the fragrance of males that had been on "meat" and "nonmeat" diets for two weeks. Havlicek found that, "meat consumption has a negative impact on perceived body odor hedonicity." In other words, score one for vegetarians (or people who don't eat red meat).

For me, if the choice is between red meat and improved body odor, I'll take red meat (much to the dismay of my friends). But I've got another plan to mask my musky scent. I'll simply associate my stink with flowers. After all, a 2005 study from researchers at Oxford found that, "people perceive a scent differently based on the word that goes with the smell."

Researchers exposed test subjects to the smell of cheddar cheese. Some saw labels that read "cheddar cheese." Others were shown labels that read "body odor." Those who were told they were smelling cheese rated the scent more pleasant.

Eureka! I just changed the world!

"Eureka moments" have led to the discoveries of post-it notes, microwave ovens, and even special relativity.

The Greek thinker, Archimedes is rumored to have coined the term "eureka" when he realized that the volume of an irregularly shaped object can be measured by finding how much water it displaces. (This realization also resulted in Archimedes running naked down a city street in broad daylight.)

It's safe to say that "eureka moments" are highly sought after. After all, who hasn't been held hostage at one time or another by a seemingly unsolvable problem? Who hasn't dreamed of devising a revolutionary idea? Who hasn't wanted to invent something truly original?

Scientists have been hard at work attempting to discover the mode of "eureka!" for some time now. While they have not succinctly answered the question of how "eureka moments" are reached, they have made numerous attempts to document neural activity at the time that insight is attained. Two separate studies from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Northwestern University found that "eureka moments" were associated with right anterior brain activity.

Despite this interesting research, these studies do not yet tell us that which we all seek to know: how to achieve insight on demand. Scientists at least know that "eureka moments" usually come about after a mental impasse is reached.

But most of us know that, too. It is these impasses that are so incredibly frustrating!

Ah, but wait; there's more. Scientists have also discovered that "insight often occurs when the person is not even aware that they are thinking about the problem." Even though taking your mind off a perturbing problem is extraordinarily difficult, it seems that this can be the wisest course of action.


In another study, researchers found that subjects allowed to "sleep on" a difficult problem were twice as likely to gain insight on the hidden rule to solve it. The researchers thus reasoned that "sleep, by restructuring new memory representations, facilitates extractions of explicit knowledge and insightful behavior."

Would you spend $22,000 on a virtual island? A British gamer did.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Holly Finn asked a different question:

Which is dumber--buying "The Knot," a beautiful Bottega Veneta handbag made of woven satin and trimmed in python, or buying a tractor in the online game "FarmVille"? The first is real and costs $1,380. The second is virtual, priced under $20. I know which I'd choose. But then, I like python.

Frankly, I would choose the FarmVille tractor. This is not because I like FarmVille - I have never actually played it - but because spending $1,380 for a purse seems a tad exorbitant.

This minor disagreement aside, Finn raises an excellent point in her article, stating that, "The value of most things--perfume, cars, houses, handbags--is, in fact, largely virtual... So today, why do we continue to label things 'virtual' and 'real'?"

Finn went on to mention a collection of studies showing how virtual world experiences affect real world perceptions and actions. For example, Stanford researchers found that subjects who participated in chopping down virtual trees were more likely to conserve paper and recycle in the real world.

With this virtual spillover into reality becoming so evident, the social stigma attached to purchasing virtual goods in online games or social sites is coming to an end. A 2010 report found that the value of  the United States virtual economy could reach $5 billion by 2015.  It's apparent that people are starting to realize that the only difference between buying a new outfit for your champion in League of Legends and buying a turquoise polo from Express is that you have to put the Express polo through the wash (and probably iron it afterwards).

By the way, the British gamer who bought that aforementioned $22,000 virtual island earned a return on his investment in less than a year. He did so by selling virtual land parcels and collecting taxes from other gamers. How's that for entrepreneurship?
 

Why aren't more college students choosing science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) majors? 2010 statistics show that for every new Ph.D. in the physical sciences, the U.S. graduates 50 new MBAs and 18 lawyers. In addition, the number of computer science majors in the United States has decreased by 27% from 2004-2007.

Delving deeper, the National Academy of Sciences released a new report in 2010, called, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5." As indicated by the ominous title, the report shed light on some startling statistics about the state of science education in the United States. For example:

"The United States now ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering."

I ask again, why is this? STEM jobs pay well and they are in enormously high demand. So what's the deal?

There are plenty of reasons for this stagnancy of STEM majors, but I'd like to focus on a simple one: science education in the U.S. needs to become more innovative.

Today, college freshmen enter school, most undecided on their major, and they take a hard look at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and might think, "This could be cool."

Then students look at the path to these majors. These roads are paved with courses like calculus, statistics, organic chemistry, physics, and hours upon hours of lectures and labs. Students might think to themselves, "This is college; it's supposed to be fun," or, "This doesn't look anything like what I want to be doing," or "A job at Facebook is not worth four years of torture." After seeing this dreary path, students might elect to become business majors instead.

The aforementioned situation is not simply due to laziness on the part of students; it's an inherent problem in the STEM curriculum. A lot of the required classes in these majors are simply not representative of the work that's being done today at places like Google, Facebook, and Apple. Those places are hip, cool, and glam. Calculus is not.

Luckily, colleges are starting to get the message and are beginning to reform their STEM curriculums. According to the New York Times:

Even universities not known for computer science or engineering, like Yale, are seizing the moment... The new curriculums emphasize the breadth of careers that use computer science, as diverse as finance and linguistics, and the practical results of engineering, like iPhone apps, Pixar films and robots, a world away from the more theory-oriented curriculums of the past.

These new curriculums are a great starting point for improving participation in STEM majors, and they are already starting to have some effect. In 2010, the number of computer science degrees being awarded rose for the first time since 2004.

But let's be honest, the real reason behind the recent rise in computer science majors is due to the remarkable examples of innovators like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Colleges should ask their advice on how to improve STEM curriculums.

We are a nation of germophobes, specifically bacteriophobes. Today, It seems like wherever you go antibacterial hand-washing stations are available within sneezing distance. This makes sense in certain settings - a hospital, for example. But when I can't walk two aisles at the grocery store without running into one of these bastions of cleanliness, our society's germophobia has gone too far.

There are a couple of possible reasons for this fear: either bacteria really are that bad or they just simply need a new publicist.

The latter is undoubtedly the case, and Dr. Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine might be a good candidate for the position. In a recent interview with The Scientist, Blaser commented on the benefits of bacteria and made an interesting prediction about the future role of bacteria in human healthcare.

...I believe that doctors of the future are going to be [replacing friendly bacteria]. When babies are born they're going to figure out what's missing, and just as a child gets their immunizations, they'll get a dose of the missing bacteria so that they can get the early life benefits just as all their forebears have.

Studies have shown that probiotics (friendly bacteria) may have a wide range of positive effects, affecting conditions such as diarrhea, lactose intolerance, colon cancer, high cholesterol, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, and even stress. Unfortunately for us, Blaser believes that the current overuse of antibiotics is driving many of these health-promoting probiotics to potential extinction. According to Dr. Blaser:

There is epidemiological evidence on Helicobacter pylori, which has been the dominant ancient organism of the human stomach since time immemorial, that it is disappearing. Helicobacter is becoming extinct. This is what has got me thinking in this area, because if Helicobacter can become extinct, so can other organisms.

Guys, we've got trouble. And unfortunately it's not as simple as trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for Pool.

According to psychologist Philip Zimbardo, "Guys are flaming out academically and they're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women."

Just look at these statistics:

• Boys are 30% more likely than girls to drop or flunk out of school

• For every 100 women that graduate college, there are 77 men that graduate
  

• Two-thirds of special education students are male

• Girls outperform boys at all levels from elementary to graduate school

So what are the causes of this unsettling situation? Zimbardo suggested that the main fault lies with excessive internet use, video-gaming, and pornography viewing among males, all of which are arousal addictions. This means that afflicted men require consistent novel stimulation to satiate their desires. School and traditional relationships may not supply this demand, but the porn and gaming industries will. As this new stimulation becomes more and more unique, males could sink further into mediocrity.

"Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement, and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, and interactively passive. They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly," Zimbardo asserted.

As male brains are being "rewired," boys lack quality guidance from older and supposedly wiser men. Only 4% of elementary school teachers are male and a plethora of teenage male role models are either jackasses, steroid-users, or video-game characters.
My fellow males, we have a problem. And what do you do when you want to find out how to fix a problem? You Google it. A quick search uncovered some possible ways that we can handle our current predicament:

1. We can place self-imposed controls on our use of the internet, video-games, and pornography.
2. We can admit that we have problems and discuss possible solutions. (Even though studies have demonstrated the obvious: that we think discussing problems is a waste of time.)
3. We can claim reverse gender discrimination, but this will probably be a non-starter.
4. We can wait to take action until after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 comes out.
5. We can all join a boys band just like in the 1962 classic film, The Music Man.

As you may have noticed, the problem of male mediocrity won't be easily solved. Especially when the internet and other sources of entertainment are so darned distracting.

A bar is a hotbed of social interaction. It's where friends are made, where shenanigans abound, and where (responsible) inebriation can spawn surprisingly keen insights. In light of these observations, the bar might actually be one of the best venues to discuss the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world.

So, if you're looking to impress a new acquaintance or just want to show-off your science smarts for your compatriots, here are the three best science topics to discuss at a bar.

1. Drink with me if you want to live. A 2010 study found that those who abstain from alcohol consumption had higher mortality rates than moderate or even heavy drinkers. The researchers followed 1,824 participants aged 55 to 65 for twenty years. Over the study's duration, 69% of the abstainers died, 60% of the heavy drinkers died, and only 41% of the moderate drinkers died. The authors of the study were careful to note that even though drinking is associated with longer life, alcohol can still be hazardous to your health. If you've ever tripped over a curb then you know what I mean.

2. Why are we here? We all venture to the bar for different reasons. We might be letting off steam, drowning sorrows, or succumbing to procrastination. For those who fit into the latter category, here's an interesting scientific tidbit: According to the Ainslie-Rachlin Law, "Our decisions... are guided by the perceived values at the moment of the decision - not by the potential final value."

This means that if you find yourself at the bar instead of studying for your exam, you have likely fallen victim to the low-hanging fruit of a fun night out. On Monday, you knew that Friday's test was more important than a night of revelry.  But when the phone rings on Thursday night, the tables have turned. An alluring reward (a good time at the bar) is now within your grasp and it's perceived value has grown too powerful to ignore. So the next time that you're at a bar the day before a big test, four shots deep and already missing the dart board, tell your friends about the Ainslie-Rachlin Law, and why they were just too tempting to disregard.


3. After a night at the bar, why do I feel like I've run a marathon? The sobering process initiated by your liver results in the build-up of acetic acid and lactic acid in your muscles (most commonly in your legs). You can remedy this build-up by drinking lots of water and satiating your alcohol-induced appetite with bananas instead of pizza.

If scientific knowledge doesn't provide a spark to your beer garden revelries, you can always try a joke:

Some helium floats into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve noble gases in here." The helium doesn't react.

Sometimes it's nice to enjoy the little things in life. Things like watching television after a hard day's work, munching on salty potato chips, or having sex with your significant other. But as scientific studies have frequently demonstrated, it is these little things in life... that can kill us:

• For those twenty-five or older, every hour spent watching television shortens his lifespan by 22 minutes.

• Excess salt intake--almost unavoidable in American society--is widely considered to cause hypertension, which leads to heart disease. (Recent studies have begun to dispute this commonly held opinion.)
  

• People are 2.7 times more likely to suffer a heart attack when they are having sex or immediately afterward compared with when they are not having sex.

All of this should really come as no surprise. Every choice we make in life has some effect, however minute, on our lifespan. Adding all of these effects together makes the matter of our longevity a very complicated issue, and also makes some of the aforementioned factoids seem ridiculous.

Is it detrimental to watch television for five hours a day? Undoubtedly. Could excess salt intake cause hypertension? Sure. Does sex boost your risk for a heart attack? Depends on the vigor of the intercourse.

One thing is for certain, however. Chronic anxiety is not good for your quality--or quantity--of life. So don't spend too much time worrying about whether the little things in life will kill you.

Even though it may shorten my lifespan by twenty-two minutes per hour, watching Family Guy on television is one of the little things in life that I enjoy. And as I've learned from Peter Griffin, "The world doesn't move to the beat of just one drum. What might be right for you, might not be right for some. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have..." the conclusion to this blog post.

The not too distant future...

Walking down the meat aisle, you peruse the protein selections. Ohhhh "Black Angus" hamburger. Yum. Oh look, there's some "grass-fed" lamb. And some "free-range" chicken, too. Oh, I'm so glad those chickens get room to roam. Hmmmm. "Lab-grown" steak. Well that sounds inter- wait, what? "Lab-grown?"

That's right, synthetic meat could hit grocery store shelves much sooner than you think. According to Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, the first successful instance of meat grown in the lab could be as little as six months away.

While the timeline for synthetic meat is becoming clearer, there is still one pressing question left unanswered: how will this meat taste? Researchers still admit that they have no idea. (Uh... like chicken, maybe?)

Though synthetic meat may not be a boon for the taste buds, it could be an incredible boon for our planet. Studies comparing the production of synthetic meat versus normal meat have shown that synthetic meat production would create only 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions, require up to 99% less land, and consume 7-45% less electricity.

As a devoted advocate of sustainability, I believe that this is an marvelous chance to transform the meat industry from a resource hog to a sustainability work horse.

But, as a devoted omnivore, I am seriously concerned with the potential lack of blood on my dinner plate.

For many vegetarians, however, there may be less of a conundrum. Synthetic meat represents a chance for them to sink their canines into a nutritious, slaughter-free, and sustainable source of protein.

The meat has already made a fan out of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In 2008, the organization offered a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."  

So go ahead, my vegetarian friends, embrace your "inner carnivore." Tell you what, if you finish your lab burger then you can have a big bowl of organic quinoa for dessert!