Image: LilyWhitesParty

Bullying has been around forever, but it’s taken on a whole new tenor in recent years. With a new set of tools to use, bullies are no longer just roughing kids up and taking their lunch money—they’re causing serious, permanent problems for bullied kids. From internet stalking and blackmail, to using chemical warfare in the form of food allergies, bullies today aren’t like they used to be.

In today’s New York Times, Catherine Saint Louis has a story about bullies using kids’ foods allergies against them. She spoke with Dr. Hement P. Sharma, the head of the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington:

Every few months, a child recounts being force-fed an allergen, Dr. Sharma said, adding, “Even if it’s just a child who feels singled out because of their food allergy, it compounds the emotional burden.”

Many kids, Saint Louis writes, don’t really understand how serious food allergies can be. This PSA from Food Allergy Research & Education, a nonprofit group, depicts how food bullying can seriously harm children:

In one study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, 251 families were polled about their children’s allergies, and the bullying they might have experienced. Over 30 percent of kids in the survey reported being bullied because of their allergies—bullying that frequently included threats from their classmates. The study also found that about half of the bullying goes unnoticed and unreported.

Many schools are aware that this is an issue. About 15 states, including Texas and Arizona, have specific guidelines for their cafeterias that tackle food bullying specifically.

From food to Facebook, bullies have seriously stepped up their game since the days of wedgies—so much so that several government organizations have started campaigns to address it. And now, not even the lunch room is safe.

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Image: briancweed

Men say a lot of strange things when they encounter a woman they find attractive, most of which we will not print here. But one safe-for-work phrase is particularly strange: “hubba hubba.” Where did this odd little set of sounds come from, and how did it become associated with pretty ladies?

Like many expressions, the origin of “hubba hubba” is debated. Neatorama explains four of the most common theories, many of them beginning with the military. The first says that it came from the Chinese “ni hao pu hao,” and was picked up by Army Air Corps members while they were training with Chinese pilots in Florida during World War II. This version of history claims that the phrase spread through Bob Hope, the host of a weekly radio show broadcast from military bases. The problem with this theory that “hao pu hao” was completely mistranslated. It actually means “are you well,” but was mistranslated to “it is good under heaven when boy meets girl.”

The second military theory stays in the military but loses the Chinese. This one says the word “hubbub” was taken up by a military leader, who forced his troops to shout the words. The third military history says is that it’s a shortened and mutated version of the “hup hup hup” used by drill sergeants.

It might not be all soldiers’ faults though—other theories that Neatorama provides involve baseball (“haba haba” meaning “hurry hurry”) and television (one character on The Honeymooners used to say “hamina hamina” when confused or excited). The Honeymooners explanation doesn’t hold up to Oxford English Dictionary, however, as it point to 1944 as the first reference to the word, when in the journal American Speech the following sentence was published: “The inevitable fact is that the cry ‘Haba-Haba’ is spreading like a scourge through the land.”

But none of these get us to the sexual connotation of the word. For a theory on that we have to turn to Playboy, where Margaret Atwood suggests that “hubba hubba” actually came from the German word “hubsche,” which means beautiful. But linguist Anatoly Liberman, writing in the Oxford University Press’s Language blog, says that looking far beyond our borders for the origins of this word is fruitless:

Hubbub, as already mentioned, has come to English from Irish, so that hubba-hubba may be a loanword. Yet attempts to trace it to some foreign source (Chinese, Spanish, and Yiddish) carry no conviction and have been abandoned. In all probability, hubba-hubba is English.

So, as with many etymological mysteries, the origin is still pretty mysterious. And while the phrase is slowly fading into the distance when it comes to cultural relevance, it still pops up here and there. In 2004, New Zealand launched a safe sex campaign with the slogan “No Rubba, No Hubba Hubba.”

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When it’s bright outside, your face instinctively makes this scrunched up frown. You might think of it as a harmless reflex, but that sun induced frown might actually impact how you feel. One recent study tried to figure out whether frowning at the sun actually makes you angrier overall.

To conduct the study, the researchers surveyed random people walking along a beach or boardwalk. They asked people walking with and without sunglasses to take a quick survey that asked them about their feelings of anger and aggression. It is from these survey results that they concluded that those walking towards the sun without sunglasses were generally more angry from all the frowning. The authors write, “we found that participants walking against the sun without sunglasses scored higher in a self-report measure of anger and aggression compared to those walking with the sun behind and/or wearing sunglasses.”

Now, one obvious question about this study is whether the people they surveyed were unhappy because they were frowning, or were unhappy because they had sun in their eyes. The researchers thought of this. They also asked their participants about how much the sun was bothering their eyes, and accounted for that in their data analysis.

This idea that your facial expression can secretly change your mood isn’t new. Previous studies have suggested that even things like Botox can make you feel happier because you’re being forced to smile all the time. And the idea that frowning is related to the sun isn’t new either. Charles Darwin noticed the way that frowning helped to shade the eyes, writing in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:

The currogators, by their contraction, lower the eyebrows and bring them together, producing vertical furrows on the forehead—that is, a frown.

So while Darwin probably didn’t wear sunglasses, you certainly can, and it might make you less of a grump.

H/T Seriously Science?

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For a pharmaceutical company, competition with generics can be killer. When a company has the monopoly on a brand name drug, without generic competition, it can name its price. As soon as a generic begins to compete, however, it now has to drop its prices and make less money. When a company that makes generic drugs would enter the market to compete with the brand name version, many big pharmaceutical firms would simply pay the generic competition a sum of money to stay off the market. But today, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against big pharmaceutical companies, saying that the Federal Trade Commission could indeed sue companies who engaged in “pay to play” deals.

The winning opinion was written by Stephen Breyer, who was joined by Anthony Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. The dissenters were John Roberts Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Samuel Alito recused himself.

The case brought the “pay to play” issue to the Supreme Court involved a gel used to treat men with low testosterone. The Albany Herald reports:

In the case before the court, Solvay sued generic drugmakers in 2003 to stop cheaper versions of AndroGel, a gel used to treat men with low testosterone.

Solvay paid as much as $30 million annually to the three generic drug makers to help preserve annual profits estimated at $125 million from AndroGel.

The ruling of the Supreme Court states that it will not assume that all of these “pay to play” deals are illegal, but rather that any court that reviews these cases should consider them carefully. But the parties who do sign these deals will have to prove that they are not violating anti-trust laws. According to SCOTUS blog, “the ruling is likely to essentially put an end to such payments in the future.”

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Every year, 5 million to 7 million animals wind up in animal shelters across the United States. About half of those animals will be adopted. For that half, this might sound like a happy ending, but it isn’t always. Six months later, one in 10 of those adopted animals are no longer in their new homes.

A study done by the American Humane Association, in partnership with PetSmart, recently looked at three major cities to try to figure out just what happens to cats and dogs after adoption. They sent surveys out in Charlotte, North Carolina, Denver, Colorado and Fort Worth, Texas. All told, 572 people filled out the survey, and their answers have provided some key information for animal shelters.

Of the one in 10 adopted pets that were not longer with their adopted parents six months later, about half of them had been returned to the shelter. The other half had been lost, died or given away to someone else. And while the survey targeted the six-month period, they found that nearly two-thirds of the animals had been given up within just two months of adoption, and a quarter of them within two weeks.

Companion Animal Psychology says that this fact is extremely useful for animal shelters:

This tells us that any policies or interventions designed to improve retention rates need to be aimed at the very beginning period after adoption. One possibility might be to improve the information that goes home with the pet when it is first adopted, or for the shelter to keep in touch with new adoptees during the first couple of weeks.

It turns out that perhaps animal shelters aren’t doing a great job of communicating with those who take home pets. Part of the survey asked participants who they turn to for advice about their new pet. While most go to friends, family and the vet, those who asked the shelter for advice were less likely to keep their pet than those who went to friends or family.

Overall, the American Humane Association hopes that shelters will take this information and use it to figure out how to keep pets in their adopted homes.

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Menopause is a pretty weird thing, if you think about it. Suddenly, at a certain age, your body shuts down the ability to reproduce, resulting in symptoms like hot flashes, difficulty sleeping, reduced interest in sex and increased vaginal infections. The whole process seems like a pretty strange thing, especially if reproduction is a cornerstone of evolution. So why do we have it? Well, one recent study suggests that men may be to blame.

Research in the journal PLOS Computational Biology turned to some computer simulations to figure out why any species would set up a system to shut down reproduction long before death. After all, it’s hard to see how a genetic predisposition to sterility would be helpful.

The most common hypothesis out there about menopause is called the “grandmother hypothesis.” The premise here is that when we started living together in groups it became useful for the older females to stop having their own babies, and start helping the younger females raise theirs. But there’s a problem with that hypothesis, says Rama Singh, the lead author of the new study. The Los Angeles Times explains:

But the problem with the grandmother hypothesis, Singh added, is that it doesn’t explain how the mutation causing sterility in older women came to be so common in the first place.  Genes that suppress reproduction shouldn’t be able to thrive — if an individual can’t pass them to offspring, they should die out.

So Singh’s work suggested a different hypothesis. Men tend to prefer younger females as mates. They have for thousands of years. When Singh and his colleagues added that factor into their computer models they suddenly saw an increase of mutations that harmed the fertility of older women. After a while, these accumulating mutations stuck. The women still shared the longevity genes that their male counterparts had, so they were living just as long, but they no longer reproduced.

Of course, this whole thing is really hard to prove. The Los Angeles Times spoke with Cedric Puleston, who has also researched menopause but wasn’t involved in this study. While he said the work was “really compelling” he also noted that it wasn’t conclusive:

“[T]hat’s as far as you can go with this … although the paper provides a powerful argument in favor, it’s not proof that male mate choice caused menopause.  Showing that an explanation is compatible with reality is sometimes the best we can do.”

Now, humans aren’t the only species that has menopause. Some primates like rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees get it. And some other species further removed from our own might get it, like elephants and some whales, but no one is certain. For the most part, menopause is, as the authors put it “almost uniquely human” and we might have men to blame. But we might not. As the LA Times puts it, “thanks a lot, guys.” Maybe.

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Image: Wikimedia

Image: United States Navy Historical Center

But there’s a curious picture in the Library of Congress that caught one librarian by surprise. It’s this one:

Image: Library of Congress

It looks a lot like an ironclad, but its sides are made of wood. “I’ve long admired the efficient design of the single or double turreted ironclads,” Gay Colyer writes. “In striking contrast, this vessel looked like a clumsy barge—a wood crate, too heavy for river travel.”

It turns out that these wooden ships were known at the time informally as “timberclads.” They were used as escorts to transport troops and supplies up and down the Mississippi. Normally, the Union would have used ironclads to do the job, but there were a shortage of those around and so one enterprising general bought three steamships and converted them into these clunky timberclads. “Gone were the white paint, glass pilot-house, and decorative railing. Now, five-inch thick bulwarks provided protection against small arms fire, and oak planking covered the paddle wheel,” Coyler writes.

There were only three timberclads ever made. One of them is the USS Tyler, which was 178 feet long and had six 8-inch guns. And while it might have had humble steamship beginnings, the Tyler wasn’t just a lowly transport crate. It fought in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, as seen in this image here:

Image: Library of Congress

So while the timberclads might look like weird, wooden boxes compared to their sleek ironclad cousins, they got the job done.

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Maat Mons, on Venus. Image: NASA

Space is a crazy place. It’s full of incredibly hot stars, deep cold space, black holes and supernovae. Now add this fact to the list of crazy things about space: on Venus, it snows metal.

At the very top of Venus’s mountains, beneath the thick clouds, is a layer of snow. But since it’s so hot on Venus, snow as we know it can’t exist. Instead, the snow capped mountains are capped with two types of metal: galena and bismuthinite.

Markus Hammonds at Discovery explains:

As we now understand it, the snow on Venus’ surface is probably more similar to frost. On the lower Venusian plains, temperatures reach a searing 480°C (894°F). This is hot enough that reflective pyrite minerals on the planet’s surface are vaporized, entering the atmosphere as a kind of metallic mist, leaving only the dark volcanic rocks like basalt in the Venusian lowlands.

At higher altitudes, this mist condenses, forming shiny, metallic frost on the tops of the mountains. And Earth’s simmering sibling has plenty of high altitude terrain. Maxwell Montes, the tallest peak on Venus, stands at an altitude of 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) — 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) higher than Mount Everest.

Probably not the best place to take a vacation.

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At this point, it seems clear that we’re all just slaves to microbes. Our microbiome, in many ways, makes us who we are, and microbes can even turn their victims into zombies. Here’s one recently discovered example—a particularly weird way in which bacteria alters the way a squid lives.

The bacteria Vibrio fischeri has a symbiotic relationship with the Hawaiian bobtail squid. The squid is nocturnal and relies on the bacteria bioluminesce. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The bacteria gets a place to live, food and help reproducing. The squid gets a nice light show that helps to camouflage it from predators.

But it turns out that the lights from V. fischeri do more than just mask the squid from hungry peers. Apparently these lights might have something to do with the squid’s circadian rhythm, helping to regulate when it gets up and when it sleeps. Holly Bik at Deep Sea News explains:

This is crazy but totally cool biology – its akin to us humans being required to drink probiotic yogurt in order to sleep. In this hypothetical scenario, our own body wouldn’t know when it should sleep on its own, since sleep would only be cued after our body detected the correct signals from bacterial proteins.

It gets even weirder. According to Discovery News, the squid and the bacteria have a strange daily cycle. Biologists think that every morning, the squid spits out 95 percent of the bacteria, and some of its own cells to feed them. The expelled bacteria are taken up by younger squid, while the adult settles back into the sand to sleep and grow a new batch of V. fischeri, which only glows when it reaches a certain concentration.

While we humans are dependent on our microbes, the squid can live without their bacterial friends for light. But who doesn’t prefer to be sparkly when they go out for the night?

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Most of us remember the classic LEGO dude. Small, yellow, smiling. He had a few basic poses and a single, smiling face. But as LEGOs have gotten more and more varied, the company has given the little yellow dude more expressions. One recent study looked at those expressions, and found that more often than not the new LEGO faces are angry.

Here’s the basic setup of the study, from Research Digest:

[Christoph] Bartneck obtained images of all 3655 Minifigure types manufactured by LEGO between 1975 and 2010. The 628 different heads on these figures were then shown to 264 adult participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online survey website. The participants’ task was to categorise the emotions on the heads in terms of the six main human emotions, and to rate their intensity.

What they found was that there’s been a huge increase in the variety of faces, and while the majority of them are happy (324), the next most common expression is angry (192). Then, in order, you get sadness, disgust, surprise and fear. But the trend is towards angrier faces and away from happy ones.

This probably has to do with the increase in themed collections that go along with action movies and video games, many of whom are fighters. The researchers also found an increase in the amount of weaponry LEGO characters come with. Bartneck and his team express concern about how this shift to angry faces might impact children, writing “We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts how children play.” Their research, though, didn’t attempt to investigate any links between angry LEGOs and angry kids.

Image: Daniel Novta

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In 1961, Alan Shepard’s flight to space took a bit longer than expected to get off the ground. Instead of sitting there, strapped into his suit and chair for five hours, he was there for eight. And after eight hours, the guy had to pee. So he did. In his space suit. The accident would later cause some of his sensors to short circuit, but it was pretty much unavoidable. While there was a container for “liquid waste” near the entrance hatch, Shepherd couldn’t get up out of his seat.

Of course, people had indeed thought about how astronauts might pee before Shepard. The idea of using catheters wasn’t so popular, according to Real Clear Science. But Shepherd’s little piddle prompted NASA to try to invent something else. The agency hired B.F. Goodrich to come up with some sort of urinary collection device that was integrated into the suit itself, for situations like Shepherd’s. They came up with what they described as a Roll-on Cuff. The National Air and Space museum describes the cuff this way:

They consisted of a wearable containment belt, latex roll-on cuff, plastic tube, valve and clamp, and a plastic collection bag. Connected carefully, this device was generally effective but sometimes messy.

John Glenn used the bag just once, filling it with 27 ounces of fluid. This is notable, because that’s a full seven ounces more than the capacity of the average human bladder. And it’s not just because John Glenn is better than the average bear. Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars explains that in space, the body’s sensors that tell you when you have to pee, get all out of whack. Because urine isn’t filling the bladder from the bottom, by the time you realize you have to go, your bladder might actually be so full that it’s pressing the urethra shut.

So it wasn’t just Shepard who had a hard time with his bladder. In the wonderfully titled paper “Forgotten hardware: how to urinate in a spacesuit”, researcher Hunter Hollins writes:

Space is a very hostile environment for human beings. Our complex bodies function well, for the most part, within the habitable zone of the Earth’s atmosphere. When we merge our bodies with machines in efforts to investigate new places beyond where our bodies can function, there will always be difficulty. Humans can tolerate less than ideal environments. The body can weather discomfort, and even pain, but at some point, damage occurs, and this point varies from individual to individual. In a survey done in 2010, 60% of pilots flying for the U.S. Air Force U-2 Reconnaissance Squadrons operating out of Beale Air Force Base in California reported problems with the UCD that they wore, including poor fit, leaking, and skin damage from extended contact with urine. It is the job of the engineer/physiologist to ensure that the man-machine interface promotes the health and safety of the human body.

Of course, once women joined the space-going community, the whole “roll-on cuff” strategy had to be updated, and today they have pretty sophisticated ways to pee. But it wasn’t always that way.

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You might not see so much of a similarity between your dog and a majestic tiger (and if you do, you’re probably just kidding yourself) but the two animals do share one important threat: distemper virus. Canine distemper virus (CDV) is incurable and causes high fever, watery eyes, lethargy, vomiting and diarrhea, progressing to seizures, paralysis and death. For a long time, CDV was limited to canines, but in recent years it has jumped from dogs to other pets and even wildlife.

Today, CDV can infect ferrets, foxes, raccoons and even tigers. Some think that the virus contributed to the decline and extinction of the thylacine (also known as the Tasmanian wolf). In the 1990s, 30 percent of the lions who died in the Serengeti had succumbed to CDV. And in the past few years, it seems like the disease has jumped to tigers.

Reports of tigers behaving strangely was the first tip off, but a diagnosis of CDV requires brain tissue for analysis. In 2011, a confused and tired Amur tiger wandered into a town in Russia and had to be put down. She was the fourth radio-collared Siberian tiger in less than a year to be found confused, wandering into towns and villages, displaying strange behavior. An analysis of her brain tissue confirmed everyone’s fears: CDV had left her too weak to hunt, disoriented and willing to risk a human village to look for food.

“Since 2000, in the Russian Far East, there have been a few cats reported as behaving strangely and coming into villages, apparently not showing much fear towards people,” John Lewis, the director of Wildlife Vets International, told the BBC. “In the past few years, tissue from at least a couple of those cats have now been confirmed as showing the presence of CDV infection.”

These tigers are probably getting CDV directly from dogs, as tigers often will prey on the canines that stray too far from villages. And Lewis says it’s not just death from CDV that they’re worried about. Tigers infected with CDV show strange behaviors, like losing their fear of people. This puts them at greater risk of hunting from poachers and being hit by cars on roadways. And there’s not a ton people can do to stop it, says John Platt of Scientific American:

Now that canine distemper has been identified, the next step, according to WCS Chief Pathologist Denise McAloose, is to identify the source of the infection, which could be coming from domesticated dogs or other local carnivores such as wolves, badgers, red foxes or raccoon dogs. “From a vaccination perspective, vaccinating dogs would be a good first step,” she says. “If this were to be a recommended strategy, decisions about the safest vaccine for dogs and tigers that might eat the dogs would need to be made.” Distemper vaccinations are required for most pet dogs in the U.S., but not in Russia.

But even before that, Lewis says, researchers need to understand how to figure out the scale of the problem. He’s bringing together vets from all over the world who deal with tigers to try and nail down a strategy for understanding just how bad CDV is, what tests need to be done, and how. “We need to work out where we can send these samples for laboratory testing. We need to work out how we are going to store and move these samples. Once we have got that nailed down then we start work and try to design some sort of mitigation strategy, and that won’t be easy.”

The question is whether or not the scientists can keep up with the virus before it’s too late.

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Re-entering normal life after a stint with the legendary Japanese Yakuzas can be tough. And while gangsters can cover huge tattoos with business suits, one sign of yakuza life is harder to cover up: missing pinkies.

In the yakuza world, those who commit an offense are often required to chop off a finger. The pinky is usually the first to go. And while many things are easy to hide, a missing pinky isn’t. Since everybody in Japan knows what a missing pinky means, many pinky-less former yakuza find that they have trouble getting jobs as soon as a potential employer notices their absent digit.

Enter Shintaro Hayashi, a prosthetics maker who builds silicone body parts. He never planned to get into the pinky business, but about 10 years ago, according to ABC, he noticed a sharp uptick in people ordering custom pinkies. Here’s ABC:

Hayashi sums up his clientele in three categories: Those who are dragged into his office by girlfriends worried about their reputations, ex-members who are eager to move up the corporate ladder but worried about the repercussions of their past being exposed, longtime yakuza who have no intention of getting out, but need to cover up for a child’s wedding or grandchild’s sporting event.

The pinkies Hayashi makes cost his patients about $3,000 each. They’re paying for a custom finger, painted to look just like the rest of the hand. And he says that former yakuza often have a few different fingers for different occasions and visit Hayashi every so often for touchups on the painting of the prosthetic.

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There are less than 350 Siberian tigers still alive in the wild. The beast has only been caught in fleeting footage, a tail here, a nose there. The BBC Natural History Unit, the department of the BBC that films documentaries like Planet Earth and other famous programs mostly hosted by David Attenborough, has never caught one on camera. Until now.

To put the situation of the Siberian tiger into perspective, here’s an oft-quoted statistic: more people have been in space than have seen a Siberian tiger in the wild. But whether or not that’s true is hard to say.

To date, about 530 people have been in space. That’s certainly more than the number of living people who have seen a Siberian tiger. In the 1940s, the population of these tigers dropped to about 40 animals living in the wild.

But these tigers didn’t used to be so rare. The Global Tiger Forum estimates that in 1840 there were about 1,000 Siberian tigers in Russia. And there are all sorts of stories about tigers, who probably hunted people before people learned to hunt them. They feature prominently in the myths of the Chinese, the Tungusic peoples and the Manchu. The book Tigers in the Snow covers some of this mythology:

These Tungus peoples considered it a near-deity and sometimes addressed it as “Grandfather” or “Old Man.” The indigenous Udege and Nanai tribes referred to it as “Amba” or “tiger” (it was only the white strangers—the Russians—who translated that word as “devil”). To the Manchurians, the tiger was Hu Lin, the king, since the head and nape stripes on certain mythic individuals resembled the character Wan-da—the great sovereign or prince. “On a tree nearby fluttered a red flag,” Arseniev wrote, “with the inscription: `San men dshen vei Si-zhi-tsi-go vei da suay Tsin tsan da tsin chezhen shan-lin,’ which means `To the True Spirit of the Mountains: in antiquity in the dynasty of Tsi he was commander-in-chief for the dynasty Da Tsin, but now he guards the forests and mountains.’”

No one knows just how many people have seen a Siberian tiger in the wild before, but chances are, back when there were a thousands of them roaming about, it wasn’t nearly as uncommon as it is today. Of course, back then, no one had been in space, so this statistic didn’t make sense at all. Whether or not it’s true that more people have been in space than seen a Siberian tiger in the wild isn’t really all that important. Conservationists are simply trying to point out that if we do nothing to save the tiger, they will be extinct far before we reach Mars.

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Making tea might seem pretty easy; you just heat up some water and add some tea leaves. But apparently there are a lot of things us novice tea makers are doing wrong. A big one is using the microwave to heat up our water.

It seems like no big deal. Tea requires hot water. Microwaves make things hot. What’s the problem?

It turns out that tea requires certain types of hot water. That is, water at a certain temperature. Green tea, for example, should be steeped at 176º F; herbal tea requires 210º F. When you stick your mug in the microwave, you have no idea how hot your water is. Tea kettles, on the other hand, are designed to heat tea to 212º F, according to Slate.

There are a lot of other theories about why nuking your mug isn’t the best. Slate says that the microwave will result in unevenly hot water:

Microwave ovens shoot tiny waves into the liquid at random locations, causing the water molecules at those points to vibrate rapidly. If the water isn’t heated for long enough, the result is isolated pockets of very hot or boiling water amid a larger body of water that’s cooler. Such water may misleadingly exhibit signs of boiling despite not being a uniform 212 degrees. For instance, what appears to be steam rising from a mug of microwaved water is only moist vapor evaporating off the water’s surface and condensing into mist on contact with cooler air—it’s the same principle that makes our breath visible on frigid days.

But Lifehacker says that this isn’t quite right:

That’s not true—after all, microwave wavelengths are about 4-inches, so unless you have a really huge teacup, you’re getting pretty even heating, especially if you remember to put it on the edge of the carousel, so we don’t think that’s much of a problem, especially if you stir after heating.

The two do agree though, that the right temperature of water is really important. Overheating your water can make your tea taste bitter and weird, says Slate. But those without a kettle shouldn’t despair just yet: as long as you’re willing to drink only green tea, the microwave is the way to go.

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