Science and Pinatas: A more natural combination than you would think...

So it would seem my last post on pinatas needs to be corrected on two fronts. Firstly, my piece at McSweeney's and its marriage of science and pinatas is not such a unique concept, and secondly, after doing a bit more homework, it's clear that the best blogging category to unite these two terms is "Life Science." (and not "Humanities and Social Sciences" as previously suggested.

Why is this? Well, the term "pinata" (apologies for not including the little squiggle over the "n" - everytime I try, it comes out garbled) does crop up when you do literature searches. In fact, whilst the hits are few, they are tidy in the sense that pinata turns up as 1) a protocol, 2) a syndrome and 3) an organism.

In fact, here are the actual three hits when queried using PUBMED.

The first paper (Detection of nano-second internal motion and determination of overall tumbling times independent of the time scale of internal motion in proteins from NMR relaxation data. abstract/full paper), describes a computation algorithm used to analyse relaxation in protein NMR data (I dare you to use that sentence when, say, dating or something). It has a lot of math - which is pretty confusing to me, which makes it all the more fitting to bash with a stick at children's party ("That right, children, hit the algorithm to get the candy!"). Anyway, the authors do try to clear things up for us non-mathematical types by including the following handy dandy flowchart.

Next up (Inheritance of unique fruit and foliage color mutation in NuMex pinata. abstract), is a paper on a particular variety of jalapeno: specifically, one that is noted for being tasty throughout its colour transformation (from green to yellow to orange to red). This is what they look like, and clearly these would be great fun to hit with a stick:

Lastly, we have a syndrome as describe in The Pinata syndrome. (abstract/full paper).

This paper apparently discusses how physicians are generally felt beaten upon by the rigors of their profession, and how they collectively feel dissatifaction with the whole thing. Admittedly, when I read "The Pinata Syndrome", I got a little excited, thinking that there was some neurological disorder where individuals felt compelled to hit things with sticks, or perhaps something to do with unwanted aggression against paper-mache products, but, no, it's more to do with getting down because of work. Frankly, if this were the case, I'm surprised that this syndrome wouldn't also reach out to other (all) professional, including our own sciency ones.

Anyway, now, we all just have to wait for that next dinner/party conversation where some poor unsuspecting individual will bring up the term "pinata" and we can now let them have it and unlesh our new found authority on the matter.