Mosquito biting activity increases 500 times during a full moon phase, and they prefer blondes with smelly feet

Mosquitoes appear to prefer blonde people with smelly feet. Did you see the moon last night? Got mosquito spray? Mosquito biting activity increases 500 times during a full moon phase! There are more striking facts in this video excerpt from National Geographic.

The video is part of the Amazing Animals YouTube playlist by National Geographic:



Medical Geek Humor on Twitter

The tweets below are part of the series Medical Geek Humor on Twitter - they recall a TED moment from 2009:

@loic Bill Gates released mosquitoes at #TED we're all leaving the room and getting sick about 4 hours ago from web


@stevewhitaker Don't worry about the buggy mosquitos Gates released at #ted. Microsoft's working on a patch that's due out next year. about 14 hours ago from twitterrific
AllergyNotes Releasing mosquitoes by Bill Gates into a startled crowd at TED described as "an amazing TED moment" http://is.gd/iu0o about 12 hours ago from web

AllergyNotes Gates spreads malaria message with mosquitoes http://tinyurl.com/cxwo2e 12 minutes ago from TweetDeck

pyknosis Nice to hear Bill Gates picked up a hobby during his retirement: entomology. http://is.gd/izJn (Not surprised he likes the blood-suckers.) 14 minutes ago from web

pyknosis Don't get me wrong. Not saying B Gates is a bad person. He's not. He just created and championed software that can suck the life out of you. 12 minutes ago from web
pyknosis BTW, now that I understand the context, I think this is a winner of a tweet: http://is.gd/izK5 11 minutes ago from web: "If Steve Jobs had released mosquitoes, everyone would be wanting one."

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Comments from Twitter:

Vijay @scanman: Mosquitoes are mini-vampires

Tariq @ucisee: Mosquito biting activity increases 500 times during a full moon phase - "appear to pref blonde with smelly feet."

Kathy Mackey @mkmackey: Ha! No one likes full moon!

Times have changed

@ConanOBrien:

http://twitpic.com/17lx53 - I no longer have health care. Could someone show this to a dermatologist and get back to me?

@pyknosis:

I'm a hematologist, not a dermatologist, but looking at that, I give you 7 months. Don't worry. That's a really long time.

That's just good humor, as Happy Hospitalist likes to say.

Can you describe coefficient of variance in 140 characters?

"Can you describe coefficient of variance in 140 characters?", asked a medical librarian on Twitter:

laikas RT @shamsha: need help: can someone plz describe coefficient of variance in English? thnx! 34 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Some people obviously can:

@HCIR_GeneG: It's a measure of variability of a data sample, without paying attention to absolute values. Can be used to compare diff. distributions.

@flutesUD: CV = Std Dev / Mean. Tells u how variable the data are regardless of their units. Lets u compare across different types of studies.

My suggestion:

DrVes@laikas @shamsha Check the Wikipedia definition, click on the links in the description and you'll get there... :) http://bit.ly/18NnEH29 minutes ago from web in reply to laikas

In probability theory and statistics, the coefficient of variation (CV) is a normalized measure of dispersion of a probability distribution. It is defined as the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean .

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Rule of Twitter: When one million followers is actually... zero

From Twitter account of David Pogue of NYTimes:

Pogue 1 million followers today. A little scary: that's more than read the Times, more than watch CNBC, more than read my books... NO PRESSURE! 21 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Pogue via @ridgeley: 1M followers for @pogue, but most are spam. [DP sez: Probably true. Rule of Twitter: # of followers, divided by 10?] 8 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Pogue OK, you guys are telling me: 1/2 of my 1M followers have moved on. 25% are spam. 25% are auto-follow. So that comes to... NO FOLLOWERS! :) 6 minutes ago from TweetDeck