The never-ending story*

I don’t like to brag** so I’ll let my former major professor do it for me:

I engage in this shameless self-promotion because this story was hard. Really hard. You’ll notice in the video component that many shots have Christmas trees in the background. That’s not because it’s always Christmas in Northwest Georgia.*** That’s because I started this project back in November.

…and I actually turned it in January 9th. There it was–video, print story–all done, with cute little Chelsea-isms comparing traffic on fast food row to a clogged artery. Trouble was, I really didn’t do what the assignment asked me to do, that is, answer the question, “Why is Pickens County so much healthier than neighboring Murray County?”

I tried again. And I still couldn’t answer the question.

So I made that the point of the story.

I know it gets a little confusing sometimes, but the media is not God. We actually don’t know everything, and, try as we might, we can’t find out everything. Don’t get me wrong, we can figure out a lot of things, like a given state’s Medicare spending or how a senator voted on excise taxes.

But why one county is healthier than another? Give me a break. This is hundreds of thousands of people we’re talking about here. Who am I as a reporter to tell you why one grouping of them is healthier than another?

As it turns out, I’m no one. Because that’s the sort of question you pose to an epidemiologist. So I found a few of those, and they couldn’t really answer the question either. You see, looking at available public health data constitutes surveillance. From that, you can spot patterns and areas for further inquiry. That takes money, time and effort (and I can guarantee you a journalist typically doesn’t have the first two.) Depending on what you want to know, you launch one of several types of inquiries involving real people–not just populations.

So if you’re interested in knowing whether proximity to a carpet mill is linked to cancer incidence, you could do a cohort study, monitoring people living at different distances from said mill over time and tracking who gets cancer. If you maybe don’t have that much time but do have access to patients in a hospital, you can do a case-control study, which would evaluate the proximity to the carpet mill of patients admitted for cancer as opposed to those admitted for, say, a broken bone. These and other study types are subject to bias and therefore are better left up to professionals.

Hence, I don’t know why the people in Pickens County are so much healthier than the people in Murray County. I have quite a few leads, and I hope my story opens the door to a more exacting investigation (or ten).

That said, one of the editors who picked up this story felt that the answer was clear: the people in Pickens County made more money than those in Murray, so that’s the reason. Case closed.

While I understand his reasoning and appreciate the ills that come with (relative) poverty, I certainly hope that’s not the case, or at least, not entirely. What is that saying? That if you have five dollars in your pocket and I have ten, then you’re more likely to catch the flu next season? Could it really be that simple? And if it were, why?

To me, it all deserves a closer look.

*I chose this title in part because of something really embarrassing that happened recently. A friend of mine mentioned a song he wrote about Atreyu, and I asked him, “Isn’t Atreyu that dog thing from The Land Before Time?” …Yeah. That “Think before you speak” lesson is a tough one to learn.

**Ha.

***Although jury’s out on whether everyone is a relative or a friend of a relative of everyone else up there. How else do you explain my being deemed at fault for someone else rear-ending me as I was stopped in a left-turn lane with my blinker on?

Cover Girl

Right now, I’m too excited/overwhelmed to actually write about this event* so I’ll leave with a picture, which is supposedly worth 1,000 words. And if you’d like to know what those 1,000 words are, read the story in question here.

Somebody asked if that’s me on the cover. No, it’s not. But I did take the picture and write the accompanying article. Second best, I guess.

*And I also just finished a 5,500 word assignment talking about this very thing…

There will be a test

Seeing as I graduate in 9 days, I guess it’s good that I’m finally learning what they’ve been trying to teach me all along: Though it doesn’t actually exist in humans, journalists should strive for objectivity anyway. Convergence allows us to tell the same story in a different way with a totally different impact. Of the ethical principles, respect for persons is key.

As a masters student in health and medical journalism, I didn’t have to write a thesis or take comps. But there was a test, and I have a feeling it will continue to pop quiz me throughout my career…except now the stories I’m writing are real.

All smiles on camera. Click on the image to view the video.

Turns out they always were.

Meet Hammad Aslam, also known as my hero. In a story about to be published, I write about how he came back from a debilitating accident and continues to work toward his dream of becoming a doctor.

Hammad is one of five people I’ve interviewed this semester (for five different stories) who happens to use a wheelchair. I wish I could say this was a coincidence, but the media sometimes overrepresents minorities such as disabled persons for the sake of human interest.*

And as a source of inspiration, Hammad certainly doesn’t disappoint. One minute he’s coming out of a coma on the brain injury floor of the Shepherd Spinal Center, and the next he’s hacking it alongside his peers in medical school. In the video story, we meet a man who made enormous strides over the course of a year–his voice, his posture and his very presence all signal Hammad’s coming into his own.

…But of course that isn’t the entire story. At the start of the interview process, Hammad was brave enough to direct me to his blog. When I finally got around to reading it during the writing stage, I was a little surprised to find out I was in it.

An excerpt from his latest entry:

When I read this and the rest of the post, I cried. Here I was, just trying to get an interview in for my independent study. Of course I thanked him for his time and his honesty, but I never thought to thank him for his suffering, some of which I put him through.

For Hammad, every photo he sees of himself and every memory he recounts act as bricks in a wall separating his old life from his new one. By creating content from his tragedy, I’m speeding up the process by which he must accept himself as a paralyzed person. This whole time I saw myself as a pain-in-the-butt student taking up people’s time. I never stopped to think that, by virtue of being interviewed, they too would stop to think… and feel.

This is what makes the concept of objectivity so slippery. It’s not just about politics, it’s about actual people. How can we categorize their lives objectively as they unfold before us? Sexy as it may seem, how do we put them in a box?

Like Hammad, I will not let the tough questions deter me. Rather, I’ll recognize them as they come up and do my best to grow from them. And sometimes, when confronted with the big questions–the ones that demand we understand why things are the way they are–like Hammad, I suppose I’ll have to work with “I don’t know.”

*I’ve heard more than one editor use the term “sexy” in referring to topics at which the public craves a closer look. You can understand how that term, in context, can make you a little uncomfortable. Ooooh, AIDS…sexy.

Misty sugar-flavored memories…

I took the most wonderful course this semester called Factual Literature: The Art of Narrative Nonfiction.* For said class, we’ve been assigned to write a series of essays following from the themes of our readings.

It’s actually quite a challenging task. I came into journalism school a creative writer, had the purple prose red-penned out of my system, and now work to find the middle ground. Memoir–though it happened to me–is quite tough, and I always seek to sneak in a little reporting.

Let’s see how I did with this one. We were reading Kim Severson’s Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Changed my Life and were assigned 1,000 words on a food or food experience. I picked something that is arguably not a food at all, but very close to my heart.

Without further ado…

Food Essay:

Can’t kick my aspartame

The year is far less memorable to me than the time of day; we were in a white Mercedes station wagon, so I must have been nine or ten. But the late afternoon sun shone such a halo glimmering amber tones on my mother’s dark brown bob that I know I’ll remember that moment forever.

My mother is so beautiful, I thought to myself, Her hair is the color of Diet Coke.

As a writer—a health journalist, at that—the irony is not lost on me that for my paragon of splendor and sentimentality I’d evoked a beverage comprised almost completely of chemical additives. Healthy or not, Diet Coke has as natural a placement in the landscape of my life as the Alps out the window of an Austrian hostel.

On Fridays, I’d walk home from school (I’m no Oliver twist; we lived across the street) anticipating the reward awaiting me for a week of workbooks and piano lessons and choir practice and dance. On the weekends, my brothers and I were allowed TV. More scintillating for me, we were allowed to drink “Coke.”

Mom poured it in a glass for us, so I didn’t know it wasn’t the real thing. A trim tennis-playing runner of half marathons, she gave us what she drank herself. This was the nineties, mind you. We all thought we were healthy.

Only later would I realize the joy in my drink was artificially born. I went out with friends at fourteen and ordered a Coke, and it was horrible. The syrup seemed to separate from the water which, while iced, was just not cold enough. Post-swallow, the sugar—its flavor too pointed, too honest—settled slimily on the edges of my tongue.

Drinking that, I felt betrayed. This was not the Coke I’d met coming in from the light into my freezing house to drink in that sparkly darkness. Having drunk “the real thing,” I loved my Coke even more. The sharpness of the bubbles that touched first my lips, then my tongue, then my throat, then effusing in my body and signaling sanguineness to my soul. The dark amber color I could almost taste, subtly sweet with a chemical cool I’d come to crave.

So you might say I’m a little defensive of Diet Coke.

“I know it’s bad for me,” I whine to whoever will listen, “but I can’t live without it.”

There was a series of months that I did, however, but not very well. Diagnosed with vocal nodules, I tried first the “bland diet” to minimize acid erosion before resorting to removal surgery. The bland diet is just that—nothing spicy, nothing fatty, nothing tangy, nothing alcoholic, nothing caffeinated. Basically I was living on plain noodles and lettuce… and water. Ugh.

Because I was a singer at that point, I decided to see a therapist regarding my loss, which I logically posited as my ability to sing. I was cranky, I told him, getting short with the people I loved. My head hurt. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping. Clearly I was depressed.

“That’s not depression,” said the therapist, “that’s withdrawal.”

Most likely, what I was addicted to was caffeine. But some behaviorists believe that the rituals surrounding the drinking of diet soda can hook the drinker into a psychological addiction. Because it has no calories, consuming diet soda has no immediate negative consequences like weight gain, making it a hard habit to kick. (And don’t get me started on Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. The gold bottle says it all: this drink tastes like a battery.)

But Diet Coke does contain aspartame, and aspartame is bad. So says the amorphous canon of fashionable fact which also tells us trans-fats can kill us and that we’ll live forever if we consume antioxidants, whatever those are. And up until now, I’ve accepted that fact. It only makes sense; aspartame is a chemical and chemicals cause cancer. Duh.

Once again, the irony is not lost on me here. I’m a health journalist who works in research communications. I know how knowledge comes to be. But somehow I separated my bad little habit from the logical pursuit of truth on which I’ve based my daily writing.

And people have set out to prove that aspartame causes cancer. Thus far, they haven’t been able to show that aspartame has any systematic negative effects at all. In 1996, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis ignited suspicion that aspartame caused brain tumors when they released a report showing an increase in tumor incidence that paralleled the emergence of aspartame in 1981. Trouble is, that rise in brain tumor frequency started up in 1973.

In 2005, The European Journal of Oncology published a study showing that aspartame induced lymphomas and leukemias in rats. The rats used in their study had been exposed, as they explained, to the mouse equivalent of eight to 2,083 cans of diet soda daily. You know, somewhere between eight and 2,083. And the incidence of cancer did not increase along with increase in aspartame uptake. So I’d venture to say this study merits a re-do.

Let the record show I know that Diet Coke isn’t good for me and I should be drinking water. But bad for me? Maybe not.

Now an adult, my weeks remain full of papers and editing sessions and play practices and blogs. When Friday rolls around, the crisp break of the seal as carbonation bursts from the can hits my ears like a sigh of “Job well done.” And when I drink it in, cool as my mother’s mezzo engaged in tennis talk, I’m reminded that life—consumed in moments natural or not—is beautiful.

*Part of its wonderment stems from its student body. It’s a formidable group of class leaders and free thinkers, people who, like myself, are willing to stay for a full, lively, structured discussion when the professor is out sick. So dorks. But the greatest.

Laughter might not really be great medicine, but it’s certainly a good learning aid

I updated my resume today! I got to add a new and exciting title: “Guest Lecturer”.*

"Trust me; I'm pretending to be a doctor."
Click on the image to watch the video.

Recently, my major professor was approached by a professor of Field Epidemiology who was looking for someone to teach his class about writing news releases and creating press kits. Given that my colleague Kathleen Raven and I both do such activities for our livings, we were thrilled to be selected.

Beyond coming up with a formula for activities both Kathleen and I now find second-nature**, we were tasked with making writing about research interesting for the students.

Although they were in the process of collecting data for their own projects, we decided to assign them news releases writing about other people’s research. This decision was made in part because it’s only fair that they do once what we do every day, but mainly because their previous guest lecture came from our professor, who taught them how to speak to the press.

What better way to learn the blunders of dealing with the press than to have to act as the press themselves? Hence, Kathleen and I created assignments based around published epidemiological*** studies and simulated interviews with the researchers behind said studies.

Like I said, in extracting quotes from the simulated interviews, they learned about the mistakes scientists can make in speaking with the press.****

For instance, some researchers talk incredibly fast and give you a ton of information (almost as if they’re reading from a screen) but then never tell you how they came to know said information. Exhibit A: my simulated interview on diabetes in Africa.

Others get really familiar with you and make things really cheesy… when said things are a discussion of diarrheal disease outbreaks. Gross, white lady posing as Ajit Damle.

Upon request, I’ve removed Kathleen’s videos, but trust me when I say they were both hilarious and awesome. My favorite part was when she said–pretending to be a professor, of course– “Feel free to call me anytime, but I’ll be at a conference Thursday through Monday.”

Anyway, while the videos might be kind of silly, the end results spoke for themselves. By the next class, our students were pros at creating snappy headlines and gripping, informative ledes. The winning news release started as follows: “If health is wealth, America is going bankrupt,” AND it came from a non-native English speaker.

Just goes to show you how a little self-deprecation–and a little detective work, as Chelsea-as-Ajit-Damle would say–can go a long way.

*Believe it or not, my expertise extends beyond accidentally sending people a link to a clip from Back to the Future.

**Actually, neither of us has had to create a press kit ever. But we certainly know what they are, and what makes them good or not so good.

***No, this is not the study of skin, although the root word “epi” is the same and means “cover”. “Dem” (as in democracy) means people. And “ology” of course means study. So epidemiology is the study of that which covers the people–be it disease, laziness, or a current of carcinogenic waste.

****That’s right, we made them bad on purpose. Totally.

Maybe I should have gone back in time and double-checked…

Funny thing about copy and paste… the shortcut commands are different for PC and Mac. That means if you’re used to working on a PC and you’re copying and pasting something on a Mac, you run a pretty high risk of not doing it right.

This here's the wrong rootin' tootin' hyperlink.

That’s when people get sent stuff like this.*

I’ve been working on a video story about a group of UGA researchers who do work with people who are paralyzed. I finished the first draft last week, and my boss caught some pretty normal errors… For instance, I spelled the name Gary like “Gardy” on a lower third.**

This is why we do drafts of things. Usually the only people who see these mistakes are the people I work with. They laugh at me and then life goes on.

The double-checking process certainly shouldn’t end with the drafting process. Emails, for instance, must be scanned for spelling errors.***

Now that much of our portfolios as journalists has moved online, the double-checking process needs to extend to hyperlinks. Lesson learned (the hard way).

So my friend and I have an inside joke about the hootenanny scene from Back to the Future. He’s sick today, so I posted the link to a video of said dance (extremely low-definition and filled with random pictures of the actors) to his Facebook wall as a “feel better” gesture. Then I emailed a source, saying, “As promised, here’s the link to the video I did on your involvement with the lab.” The video showed the source using an Functional Electric Stimulation (FES) bike to work out his paralyzed leg muscles.

Imagine the look on my face**** when he said “You might want to check that link” and this popped up.

Luckily, this source had an excellent sense of humor, and the following exchange ensued…

Him: Hahahaha. I can only imagine what the explanation for this could be.

Me:  Glad you liked the (real) video… FYI, my friend and I have an inside joke about that scene from Back to the Future, and I was trying to cheer him up by posting that link on his wall. Oops! 

Him: Hahaha okay. I just hope you didn’t send him the McCully video, because I don’t think he’d find FES cycling as entertaining as I did!

Me: Who, Dr. Scott? No, only Dr. McCully, Melissa, Zoey and the people in my office have seen it.

*Digital Silence*

Me: Oh you mean my friend. Man I am killing it today.*****

*Yes, that is me and my dogs circa 2007. I accidentally sent this link to a Professor once when trying to send him a draft of another (more professional) video on my YouTube channel. I’d remove it from my videos, but I don’t have Pocket anymore, so I just don’t have the heart.

**The “Gary” in question was Gary Dudley, the former director of UGA’s Muscle Biology Laboratory. Professor Dudley passed away from cancer after coming back from a traumatic brain injury that confined him to a wheelchair. That’s why it’s especially not good that I gave him the accidentally hilarious moniker of “Gardy Dudley.”

***Especially in pitch letters and job inquiries. Nothing like a terrible first impression to get you the monies.

****Remember my post a while back about UGA’s prolific inventors? If I could invent anything, it would be an invisible camera that takes pictures of your face all day long. That way, I’d actually get to see my reaction to all the ridiculous situations in which I seem to find myself.

*****For those of you wondering why I’m even more discombobulated today than normal, I had my final divorce hearing this morning… and somehow I’m still blogging about my “work”! You’re welcome.

It takes a village

The idea of citizens taking care of one another has, sadly, become mired in political connotation. Altruism can be construed as an evil when it comes at a cost.

Whatever rhetoric you use to frame the issue, the fact remains that there are people who–for reasons beyond their control–need more help than they have available to meet their basic needs.

Kinesiology professor Kevin McCully demonstrates devices for physical therapy in the Exercise Vascular Biology Laboratory.

Among those parties are people who use wheelchairs to get around. They are afflicted with a variety of disabilities–from muscular dystrophy to cerebral palsy to paralysis. But many of their challenges are the same.

According to University of Georgia’s Institute for Human Development and Disability, people with disabilities are about 150% as likely as able-bodied people to be obese. The combined effects of obesity and disability cost the United States upwards of $44 billion every year.

It makes sense why disabled people would experience health problems. I mean, of course they’re inactive. They can’t move their legs, right? Wrong.

In a story I just had published, I reported on a new course to be offered by the University of Georgia on wellness for people suffering from disabilities. This isn’t your classic lecture/paper-writing college seminar, mind you.

Students will be paired with participants from the community who use wheelchairs and will create a project based on their academic backgrounds–ranging from physical therapy to environmental design–to address their partners’ needs.

“This is a population that we need to help, be involved with, use our student body to help, and to conduct more research as to how we can improve the quality of their lives,” said Kevin McCully, who spearheaded the course.

McCully and his laboratory assistants were inspired to create this course because of their research in UGA’s Exercise Vascular Biology Laboratory. What they do in there is nothing short of miraculous. They apply electrical stimulators to the legs of disabled patients so that they move–lifting weights, peddling stationary bikes, etc. The exercise appears to nip issues like cardiovascular disease–problems exacerbated by inactivity–in the bud.

And being electrically stimulated isn’t the only way for disabled people to get a workout. In the new course, McCully anticipates seeing projects from environmental design students creating and adapting living spaces that lend themselves to wheelchair activity, among many innovations on the part of a diverse student body.

The point is, we can’t expect the health problems faced by disabled people to go away on their own. It takes a village.*

*Coincidentally, it also takes a village to put out a news release at this institution. Members of said village are wont to edit the lede out of your story before it goes to press, leaving a not-quite relevant and painfully long nut graf at the top of your story. In case you were wondering, the intended lede for this story was: “Research in exercise science has the potential to shock the system at UGA–literally.”

If at first you don’t succeed… remember that you don’t have MRSA or a job cracking nuts between stones

It is with overwhelming pride that I announce the publication of my latest work: a story about inventions coming out of UGA and an accompanying video. Is this stuff good? Sure. Was it worth the eternity it took me to get it to press? I hope so.

They say the Argan nut is the hardest to crack. I say it's the multi-sourced news release.

Among the many things I learned while on this assignment is the following: people are a lot more keen to respond to you when you threaten to publish tomorrow at noon. I was wondering if I had the wrong contact information for some of these folks, until–taking advice from my boss–I sent them the foreboding publishing-at-noon email. Then *poof*! Instantaneous responses. Lesson learned.

More importantly, I learned about some really cool inventions coming out of UGA. We might be most commonly known as the #2 party school in the U.S., but we’re also “The Harvard of the South.” That title comes not only from UGA’s low acceptance rate, but from its status as a Research One institution.

As I hope I’ve made clear in previous blog entries, research is a lot more than just sitting at a lab bench. And even if the research process does include sitting at a lab bench, its outcomes can have concrete global relevance.

The three inventors featured in my story had wide-ranging research applications–from cracking nuts to killing drug-resistant bacteria. I won’t go into too much detail describing them here, because I’ve spent the last two months writing a story and producing a video on them.*

Here are the little nuggets of knowledge I’m taking away from each innovation:

Hey look! No bugs!

1) When it comes to killing stuff, Mother Nature knows best.

We’ve tried spraying all sorts of stuff on plants to keep bugs off of them. Some of those chemicals were maybe not such a great idea.**

Research has shown that some of the most effective pesticides exist already in the soil, and to give them that kill-all-the-bugs-make-all-the-monies potency, they just needed a little boost.

That boost–named Bt Booster–can be sprayed onto plants along with the bacterium Bt, or genetically incorporated into plants so that they grow up to be naturally bug-resistant. Neither Bt nor its booster kills non-target insects (read: honeybees) or mammals, and because they’re naturally occurring, they don’t pose a significant run-off threat.

Zeolite: Looks like hamster food. Acts like magic.

2) When you make $5 a day, a little improvement makes a big difference.

When talking about conditions in the third world, I feel like people get a little despondent, accepting that things are terrible in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and there’s not much we can do about it. But there is.

And the answer is not necessarily throwing money at people living in poverty. You can throw nutcrackers and milk-coolers at them instead.

You know that conditioner you bought because it had Argan oil in it? Some poor woman crunched Argan nuts between stones all day for you to have that. A UGA inventor came up with the idea of a nutcracker with increased leverage and feeding capabilities so that these women wouldn’t have to break their fingers for the sake of your conditioner.

He also invented an electricity free*** milk cooler so that farmers wouldn’t have to toss out 40% of their milk at the end of the day. This development alone is worth clicking on that link for. Long story short, evaporative cooling is one of the coolest concepts I’ve heard of.

Scary bacteria?

Eviscerated.

3) I lied. When it comes to killing drug-resistant bacteria, Mother Nature doesn’t know what she’s doing.

Did you know MRSA kills more people every year than HIV/AIDS? And once you’re colonized with a drug-resistant pathogen like MRSA, it never goes away? So what would be a scrape for any person could end up being a killer for you. Real cheerful stuff.****

The reason antimicrobials keep failing is that bacteria and fungi are naturally outfitted to adapt to them. So, in order to kill the scariest strains, you need a non-natural defense.

Enter Silvaklenz and Silvion, a line of wound cleansers and ointments that harness the power of potentiated silver to drill holes into microbes, rendering them useless. This stuff kills MRSA. Heck, it kills leprosy.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, I’ve written a thousand words just now talking about this story, which comes with a bunch of pictures in moving format. You should watch that.

*I did, however, go through the trouble of linking to the story and video twice in one blog post. You should at least do me the courtesy of clicking on those links now.

**Speak for yourself, jargonjournalist. Keith Richards puts DDT on his oatmeal.

***And black magic free, I promise.

****One of the inventions for which this particular researcher was honored was actually omitted from my story and video. That’s because it involved the death of a beluga whale. This beluga whale.

I am pleased to announce…

That I have been offered a summer internship! I will be working as a science writer for the National Institute of General Medical Science, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

For them, I will produce Biomedical Beat–summarizing a scientific developments in 100 words, writing feature stories for Inside Life Science, profiling scientists for the magazine Findings, creating multimedia packages, and managing social media.

I’m thrilled and I think NIGMS is the perfect fit!

Of course, I will continue blogging about all the stuff I learn along the way–with access to NIH, I’m sure that will be a lot!

Well, at least I don’t have Chagas disease

In today’s fast-paced world, news is broken in the blink of an eye. Our online media outlets allow for that, and we can all agree that it’s great.

What’s not so great is the incompatibility between that reality and the push for multimedia content to accompany news stories.

Unless it’s a video a bystander took on her phone at, say, an Egyptian riot, a certain standard is expected for multimedia content to be publishable. Matters are further complicated when the content is created in the name of public relations for an institution like, say, The University of Georgia.

That said, I give you my most recent work:

Click the image to view the video.

It’s cute. A guy hugs a dog at one point. There’s a basset hound somewhere in there. One might even forget that the subject matter of said video is Chagas disease, a deadly infection plaguing South America and moving into our territory.*

The last video I had published to UGA’s YouTube channel has among the highest number of views for the site at 1,368. This one: 45.

I don’t expect that number to get much bigger. It’s not that the video isn’t good.** It’s just the nature of the public relations beast. What happens is that the UGA News Service puts out a print news release, which immediately goes out into the great unknown.***

So, hypothetically, if a print story were to go out without the video meant to accompany it, that would be bad.

…yeah.

On the bright side, I got a cute piece with dogs in it for my portfolio AND I don’t have Chagas disease! Hoorah!

*Long story short, if you see a kissing bug, don’t kiss it.

**It has DOGS in it!!!

***OK, not really unknown. UGA subscribes to an online service called Vocus, which distributes and monitors releases coming out. From there, science releases are often picked up by EurekAlert! where they then spread to the nerd-blogosphere like wildfire.