What you may have missed in my absence

Here's a list of some interesting stories from the last week:

Let me do the panicking for you: If the Large Hadron Collider or an asteroid does not get humanity first, a series of supervolcanoes will make life miserable enough sooner or later again anyway. Here's a Christmas Day story that did not attract much attention:

Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought...

Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.

But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.

They have published in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America evidence that the eruption in the Taupo Volcanic Zone was actually two supervolcanoes 30km apart which erupted within days or weeks of each other.

What's worse:

Last year, other research at Taupo - on the more recent Taupo supervolcano of only 26,500 years ago - changed accepted theories that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the reservoir of molten rock, or magma, beneath a supervolcano to build up to an eruption.

They showed the period between super-eruptions can be much shorter, perhaps a few tens of thousands of years.

Dr Bruce Charlier, from Britain's Open University, showed the build-up at Taupo was no more than 40,000 years - a relatively short time period in geological terms.

A happy pre-Christmas report: having a drink before your head injury is a good idea. The trick is in making sure your drink does not cause you to have the injury in the first place.

Everyone's favourite cat borne disease gets noticed again: The Australian media noticed a toxoplasma story that talked about possible behavioural changes in people infected with it. (Funny, this was covered thoroughly in blogs, including mine, in August.)

But in fact, Science Daily notes recently that has been a cluster of new papers about toxoplasma. This part of their report was interesting:

Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Symptoms usually appear only in people with weakened immune systems, but on rare occasions, healthy people suffer serious eye and central nervous system problems from toxoplasmosis. Their babies can have birth defects. White said toxoplasmosis also may be linked to some cases of schizophrenia and bipolar disease. It can kill livestock and has devastated efforts to restore sea otters near Monterey, Calif. Because it's common, yet complex, toxoplasmosis is a potential weapon for bioterrorists.

Bioterrorism, when nearly half the world has it already? Sounds a little unlikely. But then again, it they gathered a ton of cat poo and put it in the local water supply, I guess it would put me off drinking water for some time.