March 06, 2016 at 09:13PM

Today I Learned: 1) There are anti-fouling paints for oceangoing ships that use capsaicin or chemical analogues to keep molluscs off. Clinging to a ship covered in hot sauce is apparently Not Very Fun. There's something odd about this, though -- why is it that capcaisin is painful to mammals and to molluscs but not to birds? Maybe it's a matter of delivery, so that if you rubbed capcaisin on a bird wound it would hurt just as much, but bird mouths don't absorb it? 2) I've heard wildly varying reports about the profitability of vaccines. On one hand, I've heard conspiratorial claims that companies make a lot of money off of vaccines, and are therefore trying to hide any evidence of deleterious effects of vaccination. On the other hand, I've heard that vaccines essentially don't make any money, and the companies that make them do so as a service more than a means of profit. Which is true? I'm not *completely* sure, but a little Googling suggests to me that it's... kind of both. First off, it seems that, for a number of reasons, vaccines have historically been wildly *un*profitable, particularly compared to drugs and other medical tech. The number of vaccine-producing companies has been shrinking since the 50s as companies have gotten out of the business, resulting in frequent vaccine shortages since the late 1990s. Source: http://ift.tt/16EogQd. However (and be aware that the following information is based off a single Atlantic secondary article (http://ift.tt/1TCF4Nm), making this paragraph one of the most poorly-researched paragraphs I've put out to date), vaccines have become a LOT more profitable since 2000, largely because of massively expanded access to vaccines in developing countries. So now there's a lot more money involved. 3) Wedding rings are not risk-free. According to a report by the Commission de la Sécurité des Consummateurs (http://ift.tt/1I1C865 WARNING: due to the nature of the report there's some highly disturbing imagery here) wedding rings are responsible for something like 300 cases per year over a roughly 60 million person population, which some quick estimates of mine (and some numbers off wiki) suggest is about TEN TIMES more than the rate of shark attacks in Australia. Most occur during everyday activity, and most cause serious damage requiring some form of microsurgery. Related, for all of you out there considering being doctors (*cough* Caroline Golino *cough*): http://ift.tt/1TCF2oJ