The fear of the long word

Do you steer clear of medical dictionaries and high-scoring Scrabble players? Well, then you might be suffering from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia — the fear of very long words.

This is just one of the most curious phobias, catalogued by readers of New Scientist, who learnt about their fears through counselling companies guaranteeing a cure.

The readers’ inquisitiveness brought out a whole dictionary of phobias, including  nucleomituphobia — the fear of nuclear weapons, odontophobia — the fear of dentists, and Francophobia — the fear of the French.

ChangeThatsRightNow.com points out 1,500 phobias, including paraskavedekatriaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th, and offers “one-to-one help” for about 1,200 pounds.

Philip Durkin, principle etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary, gave insight into the roots of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, identifying “sesquipedalian” (having many syllables) as the main component.

“The hippopotomonstro part is clearly someone adding hippopotamus and monstrous. It doesn’t really follow linguistic rules. It’s sort of a joke. The label mocks the sufferer,” he said.

Giant rodent fossil found

A rodent the size of a bull? Well, researchers claim to have discovered the remains of the one-tonne beast that thrived in the estuaries and forests of South America four million years ago.

The giant mouse fossil was found in a broken boulder on the coast of Rio de La Plata in Uruguay. The creature weighed between one and 1.4 tonnes. Its skull is half-a-metre long and reached a length of around three metres.

Rodents are a very successful group of mammals — accounting for four in every 10 species of mammal — but they are usually small, less than one kg, with the capybara only reaching 60 kg.

Eat less or exercise more

If you are overweight, eat less or exercise more to have a youthful heart, a new study in US reiterates.

The scientists examined a group of healthy, overweight but not obese, middle-aged men and women and found that a yearlong regimen of either calorie restriction or exercise increase had positive effects on their heart function.

All the participants of the study were non-smokers between ages of 50 and 60 years and had Body Mass Index (BMIs) between 23.5 and 30, higher than normal. BMI is a statistical measure of the weight of a person according to height.

“If individuals want to do something that’s good for their heart, then my message to them is lose weight by the method they find most tolerable,” study’s senior author Sándor J Kovács said.

Hubble to get more teeth

NASA is all set to carry out a servicing mission for the Hubble Telescope in August 2008, which will make it 90 times more powerful than before.

This mission, designated STS-125, would install two new scientific instruments and replace the observatory’s batteries and gyroscope, which will equip it with far greater capabilities than before to explore the nature and history of our universe.

STS-125 would involve a crew of seven astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis, with equipment, tools and new instruments to service the venerable telescope, which orbits 350 miles above the Earth.

Bored? Go to details

Satiation can cause our favourite things to lose their worth because their repetition can make them monotonous.

But now, a new study has suggested that paying attention to the details might help us avoid boredom from the same old thing.

The study, led by Joseph P Redden of University of Minnesota, made participants eat 22 fruit-flavoured jelly beans (cherry, orange, strawberry, peach, tangerine) while rating their enjoyment, to reach their conclusion.

At the end, volunteers were asked to indicate how well they could distinguish the flavours, how much they noticed the different flavours, how repetitive the eating task felt, how similar the jelly beans seemed to each other, and how much variety they perceived.