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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - In the South, where some joke that the four basic food groups are barbecued, baked, broiled or fried, state fairs are filled with booths that sell everything from corn on a stick to club-like turkey legs.

Phil Dickson of Hot Springs has sold about 1,000 of the batter-dipped, deep-fried goodies topped with powdered sugar since the Arkansas State Fair opened Friday.

"It's amazing to me," Dickson said Monday. "The response has just been tremendous."

Each Twinkie, at 160 calories and five grams of fat a pop, is impaled on a stick and frozen until firm, then dipped in a batter similar to that used to fry fish.

Deep frying adds more calories and fat, and the powdered-sugar coating apparently complements the Twinkie's altered state.

"The inside creamy part stays cool, while the outside is warm," said Rhonda Yates, a postal worker spending her vacation helping Dickson with the Twinkie booth.

Fairs in Arizona, California, Kansas and Washington also are expected to roll out fried Twinkies this year.

Suzanne Hackett, the general manager of an English restaurant in New York City called The ChipShop, said the fried Twinkie was born in her eatery out of boredom.

"We had a very slow night in the restaurant so we decided to buy a bunch of junk food and deep fry it," Hackett said Monday. "And the Twinkies just tasted so good."

Interstate Brands Corp., the firm that owns Twinkie-maker Hostess, doesn't object to the new creation - it actually promotes the idea - though it doesn't suggest a steady diet of the culinary concoction.

"It's one of the beauties of having a brand that is an American icon," said Mike Redd, a vice president of Interstate's cake marketing division. "It's fun ... and it's taken on a life of its own."

Frances Price, a clinical nutritionist with Arkansas Children's Hospital, said parents should be cautious about their children's diet, but that eating treats is just part of being kid.

"There is room in the diet for some treats, you can't exclude it completely," Price said. "And at least fair food is part of a family activity where families walk up and down the midway."

Joel Counts, a tourist from the Los Angeles area who tried his first fried Twinkie on Monday, said it was excellent.

"It tastes like a Twinkie but it has a little extra flavor because of the frying," Counts said. "And the powdered sugar just tops it off."

Scientists Discover Gene Responsible for Eating Whole Bag of Chips

ITHACA, NY—In an announcement with major implications for future generations of big fat hogs, Cornell University geneticists announced Monday that they have isolated the specific DNA series that makes an individual susceptible to eating a whole bag of chips.

"We have long known that the tendency to sit down and eat the whole bag runs in certain families," said team leader Dr. Edward Alvaro. "However, until we completed our work, we weren't sure whether the disposition to cram chips down your greasy gullet was genetic or whether it was a behavioral trait learned from one or both fat parents. With the discovery of gene series CHP-48/OZ-379, we have proof positive that single-case serial chip-eating is indeed hereditary."

For years, scientists have been aware of the numerous health complications linked to a person's predisposition to plop down and mow through a whole bag of chips, but it wasn't until now that they were able to isolate the gene that carries the trait.

According to the Cornell team, series CHP-48/OZ-379 is a set of "alleles," or collections of genetic material, that cause chip-eaters to develop a markedly larger number of chip-responsive nerve endings in their cerebral material.

"People with this gene have up to four times the amount of fritoceptors normally found in a human," Alvaro said. "This increases their pleasure response to snaxamine-2, the human body's principal chip-eating hormone, which is released in response to giant handfuls of chips being shoveled into the mouth. This tends to promote entire-bag-eating behavior in those individuals who possess the series."

One of the most interesting characteristics of the newly discovered series, researcher Dr. Paul Bergleiter said, is its tendency to appear more than once in the gene strands of a human subject.

"Series CHP-48/OZ-379, because it is a fairly large, or 'fat-assed,' allele, tends to just lie around at convenient sites on the DNA sequence," Bergleiter said. "Though many subjects exhibit only one instance of this gene, on others we have found as many as four. This, of course, led these rather rare subjects to eat four times as many whole bags of chips as those in our control group."


	According to Cornell researchers, the tendency to eat a whole bag of chips (above) may be genetic.

Though many more fatsos must be studied to determine CHP-48/OZ-379's transmission pattern, conventional wisdom seems to indicate that the gene is recessive.

"Who would want to pass on their own intact genetic material to someone who just sat around eating chips all day?" Bergleiter asked. "Unless, of course, that was the only person you could find because you were such a big lard-ass yourself. That would probably be the only source of friendly RNA-transcriptive culture you could find."

Carriers of the CHP-48/OZ-379 gene are hailing the Cornell find.

"It is about time science took steps to help people like me—people who eat bags of chips like it's friggin' popcorn," said 370-pound Erie, PA, resident Russell Roberts. "I can't even get jogging pants in my size anymore."

The discovery is considered the most significant advance in gene-mapping since a University of Chicago team isolated the DNA strand that causes people to shovel spoonfuls of ice cream into their mouths while standing in front of the friggin' freezer with the door wide open.

INDIANAPOLIS—The National Science Foundation's annual symposium concluded Monday, with the 1,500 scientists in attendance reaching the consensus that science is hard.

"For centuries, we have embraced the pursuit of scientific knowledge as one of the noblest and worthiest of human endeavors, one leading to the enrichment of mankind both today and for future generations," said keynote speaker and NSF chairman Louis Farian. "However, a breakthrough discovery is challenging our long-held perceptions about our discipline—the discovery that science is really, really hard."

"My area of expertise is the totally impossible science of particle physics," Farian continued, "but, indeed, this newly discovered 'Law of Difficulty' holds true for all branches of science, from astronomy to molecular biology and everything in between."

The science-is-hard theorem, first posited by a team of MIT professors in 1990, was slow to gain acceptance within the science community. It gathered momentum following the 1997 publication of physicist Stephen Hawking's breakthrough paper, "Lorentz Variation And Gravitation Is Just About The Hardest Friggin' Thing In The Known Universe."

This weekend's conference, featuring symposia on how hard the Earth sciences are, how confusing medical science is, and how ridiculously un-gettable quantum physics is, represented a major step forward for the science-is-hard theorem.

"We now believe that the theorem is 99.999% likely to be true, after applying these incredibly complex statistical techniques that gave me a splitting headache," Farian said. "A theorem is like a theory, but, I don't know, it's different."

"To be a scientist, you have to learn all this weird stuff, like how many molecules are in a proton," University of Chicago physicist Dr. Erno Heidegger said. "While it is true that I have become an acclaimed physicist and reaped great rewards from my career, one must not lose sight of the fact that these blessings came only after studying all of this completely impossible, egghead stuff for years."

Dr. Ahmed Zewail, a Caltech chemist whose spectroscopic studies of the transition states of chemical reactions earned him the Nobel Prize in 1999, explained in layman's terms just how hard the discipline of chemistry is, using the periodic table of the elements as a model.

"Take the element of tungsten and work to memorize its place in the periodic table, its atomic symbol, its atomic number and weight, what it looks like, where it's found, and its uses to humanity, if any," Zewail said. "Now, imagine memorizing the other 100-plus elements making up the periodic table. You'd have to be, like, some kind of total brain to do that."

As hard as chemistry and other traditional sciences may be, scientists say such newer disciplines as quantum physics are even more difficult.

"Quantum physics has always been a particularly tough branch of science," UCLA physicist Dr. Hideki Watanabe said. "But in addition to being some of the smartest Einstein-y stuff around, it is undeniably a really stupid, pointless thing to study, something you could never actually use in the real world. This paradoxical dual state may one day lead to a new understanding of physics as a way to confuse and bore people."

"I guess there's cool stuff about science," Watanabe continued, "like space travel and bombs. But that stuff is so hard, it's honestly not even worth the effort."

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From November 13

• We're not sure what this is or what it means.. is it a taste bud or a kidney bean? •