Salad du jour? How about poinsettias?

The annual Christmas (2008) issue of the British Medical Journal is out!

It turns out that:

• Poinsettias are not poisonous after all. Reports from poison control centers do not support the warnings. Animals fed with the plant don't keel over.
• The suicide rate in the US is actually lower during the winter than the summer. Not true that suicide rates go up during the holidays.
• Children who consume large amounts of sugar don't get more hyper. Let's hope grandmothers don't get a hold of this study.
  
• Not wearing a hat does not cause you to lose excessive amounts of body heat.
  

See the summary.

Cannibal zombies

The baddest thing in the ocean is not the shark or one of those floating blobs of stinging tentacles (Mr. Jellyfish to you!), it's the sea squirt! The cretin eats its own braaaaaaainz.

Actually, the boring way biologists put it is that the sea squirt digests its own notochord (some proto-brain) once it settles on a rock.