Memo to badgers: You really need to hire a publicist.

Case in point: an ad for a car that claims to have superduper soundproofing. A dude is locked in the car with a nursing badger mom and her tykes. The badgers are described as “ferocious.” And they’re all asleep. Awww. The car windows are rolled up. An announcer says: “If awakened, the badger will gnaw [the human’s] face off.” A cannon is fired repeatedly. The soundproofing appears to work. Then dude-in-the-car’s cell phone goes off. Mother Badger snarls and lunges.

Not a good moment for the badger image.

It turns out badgers have a history of bad P.R. That’s what I learned from Roger Packham, a senior ecosystems biologist at the British Columbia Ministry of Environment. He’s been studying them since 2003 because of their endangered status in B.C.

Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, British Columbians were trapping 300 to 400 badgers a year. Today, says Packham, “we feel we have fewer than 400 left in B.C.”

“Persecution” was probably the main reason for their decline, Packham says. In other words, people kill them. “There’s a big myth that livestock fall into badger burrows and break their legs. So the only good badger, as far as a lot of farmers are concerned, is a dead badger.” Hence the trapping. Badgers were also pursued for their fur pelts. And nowadays, they often end up as roadkill.

As for the accuracy of the ad, Packham makes two Very Important Points:

1) “I don’t think you want to mess with any nursing mother, badger or human or anything else.”

2) “Let’s just face it: Badgers nursing their babies are not going to end up in a car in the first place.”

But what if a human came into close contact with a badger. Would it gnaw off the human’s face?

Packham says he’s had his nose fewer than 10 inches from a badger’s nose and never been threatened. (Ground squirrels and marmots, staples of the badger diet, would likely say otherwise.)

What’s more, Packham once worked with a vet who was implanting radios in badger body cavities to track the animals in the wild. And the vet made a comment about how easy the badgers were to handle. “His comment was, ‘If this was a house cat, we’d all be bleeding by now.’ ”

Meowr.

You can check our Packham’s badger work at www.badgers.bc.ca.  

-Marc Silver

In the new film Be Kind Rewind, two ne’er-do-well New Jerseyans reshoot popular movies on a shoestring budget, put the results on VHS tapes, then foist them on Passaic’s unsuspecting video renters—who unexpectedly love the low-tech versions and rally 'round, DIY–style.

Why the initial reshoot? To cover their tracks after one of the pals (played by Jack Black) erased all the tapes with his “magnetized” brain, the aftermath of a failed attempt to sabotage the local power plant.

Paid to ask the tough questions, we at Pop Omnivore wondered: Could a person’s brain really become magnetic—assuming that person isn’t named Uri Geller?

No way, says Jerzy Bodurka, a Polish physicist who works at the National Institute of Mental Health. “Overall,” he told us via e-mail, “soft brain tissue has weak diamagnetic properties and cannot be magnetized to [that] level. If it could, then the kitchen, the mechanical shop, the hardware store, and many other places would be very dangerous environments for all human beings. So the answer to that question is NO.”

“However,” he adds, helpfully, the human-magnet concept isn’t so far-fetched. “In a few dozen years, or perhaps sooner, when nanotechnology, robotics, and power-generation technologies advance into something like a human-machine hybrid … such a hybrid [could] have a part of its body—say, an arm—equipped not with a deadly gun or flamethrower (like that cute-but-dangerous lady aka Terminator 3) but with a magnetic conduit.”

OK, got it. But what about a magnet erasing a videotape?

No again, says Linwood Lothrop, resident magnetician at Lothrop Technologies in Oklahoma and son-in-law of noted biomagnetic expert William Philpott. “It would take a pretty good size [magnetic] field to erase a tape. Magnets certainly damage tapes, but erasing them entirely would take something really, really big.”

Meaning something bigger than Jack Black?

Or the Earth. According to Bodurka, “Our home planet’s magnetic field is not strong enough to erase a VHS tape. To erase [one] you could use something like this handy device."

Surely there’s a better way for Black (or anyone else) to use his head and get the job done, right?

Bodurka again: “1) Wrap the VHS tape around the subject’s head, 2) Place the subject in an MRI scanner, 3) Do some MRI/fMRI scans, 4) Get the subject out. Congratulations! Your VHS tape has been erased.”

We’re sold. But will Hollywood buy it?

We’re not saying foreign films get no respect. After all, they are nominated for Oscars. But be honest: Have you heard of this year’s five nominees? And do you personally sit through movies with subtitles? Here’s a rundown of Oscar’s foreign favorites, a generally grim and foreboding quintet, screened last week at National Geographic headquarters as part of the All Roads Film Project.

Katyn

From: Poland

Plot: In 1940 in Katyn Forest, the Soviets massacred 12,000 Polish soldiers. In the five years of war that follow, their families of the soldiers, and the few survivors, struggle to make sense of their lives while trying to learn the truth about what happened at Katyn.

Oscar-worthy moment: The events of that awful day are revealed in a flashback, prompted when the wife of Lieutenant Andrzej receives his journal in 1945. As his words are read aloud, the movie shows the confusion of the soldiers as they're herded onto a train, presumably bound for a labor camp; the bureaucracy of the Soviets, who process each new arrival as if there's some future ahead; and the brutal crime itself.

Subtitles: 100 percent readable.

Will it win: It certainly deserves to. The movie vividly depicts the physical and mental torments that afflict families coping with the aftermath of a massacre. And the Academy usually admires movies whose multiple storylines collide in a powerful conclusion. -William E. Barr

12

From: Russia

Plot: Twelve angry Muscovite jurors ponder the case of a young Chechen boy accused of killing his adoptive Russian stepfather. Scenes of armed conflict in Chechnya are interspersed with the boy’s personal history and the jury-room efforts to determine the truth.

Subtitles: Easy to read—and native Russian speakers who sat next to me praised the translation. Chechen dialogue is also subtitled in both Russian and English.

Oscar-worthy moment: As the accused paces in a small cell, the foreman of the jury tries to explain how they cna save the boy's life if they dig in and uncover the truth about the case. He breaks down mid-sentence. Then the camera pulls back from the boy’s feet to show that he's not pacing; he's performing a traditional Chechen dance–a way to express his ties to his lost family and the homeland he loves and misses.

Will it win: A bit too heavy-handed and didactic to take home the statue, but the actors deserve a special award for their staggeringly impressive work. -Nicholas Mott

The Counterfeiters

From: Austria

Plot: Instead of making  money by making art, Salomon "Sali" Sorowitsch, a Jewish artist in pre-World War II Germany, makes money by making fake money. He’s caught, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp but ends up leading Himmler's secret operation to flood the U.S. and Britain with counterfeit bills.

Oscar-worthy moment: A table-tennis match between two of the pampered counterfeiters is disrupted when a prisoner in the camp collapses and is shot to death. Adolf Burger insists that the game continue and sends a volley across the table to Sali—a not-so-subtle flash of anger at Sali’s willingness to print counterfeit money for the Nazis. Sali responds with his fists. (For Burger's story, as told by him, check out this Wall Street Journal article.)

Subtitles: Easy to follow, except for the occasional scene when the camera pivots sharply, or when white text is printed on a white background.

Will it win: Unlike many Holocaust films, The Counterfeiters reveals both the courage and cowardice of camp prisoners who must decide at what cost they will risk their lives and honor. With that kind of scenario, The Counterfeiters is likely to cash in with an Oscar. -Ben Block

Beaufort

From: Israel

Plot: In a matter of weeks, Israel will withdraw troops from Lebanon, but that's not soon enough for the soldiers guarding a lonely outpost near the Crusader fortress Beaufort. Bombarded by rocket fire and hemmed in by an explosive device on the road, they mark their final days in Lebanon with an impending sense of doom and dark, nihilistic humor (after a visitor says no thanks to an offer of “deluxe Beaufort toast” with pesto, cherry tomatoes, and Dijon, the toast offerer says, “Good, because we’re out of all three.”)

Oscar-worthy moment: "Ziv [from] the bomb squad," 'coptered in to defuse the explosive device, gets ready to check it out. The early-morning sky is an eerie silver-gray. Protective suit in place, visor down, salty licorice from his mom in his mouth, Ziv taps with a cane, as a blind man would, to look for tripwires—then falls to his knees as if in prayer to inch up to the gadget.

Subtitles: No problems.

Will it win? Beaufort deserves to be honored for its depiction of the absurdity of war. But maybe two hours of the absurdity of war is a bit too much for the Academy. –Marc Silver

Mongol

From: Kazakhstan

Plot:  This movie could be called Genghis Khan: the Early Years. At age nine, Temudgin (birth name of the great Khan) rides with his aristocratic father to select a wife.  On the return trip, a rival tribe poisons dad, and his own tribesmen ransack the family home. Temudgin is locked up until he escapes as a teenager, when he is able to marry Börte. His dedication to her, and the force of his personality, leads him into conflicts with a powerful tribe, his blood brother’s sizeable army, and neighboring China.  In the process he unites the Mongols under a new code of laws and builds an army poised to conquer most of Asia.

Oscar-worthy moment: Carrying torches and wearing fearsome masks, a feuding tribe attacks the home of the now-grown Temudgin. Their goal is to steal his new bride, just as his mother was stolen from their tribe years ago.  An enemy arrow wounds Temudgin as the couple tries to escape. Börte gives herself up after spurring a horse to carry her wounded husband to safety—an act that symbolizes the extraordinary bond between husband and wife.

Subtitles: Straightforward and easy to read, with a touch of poetry: “Look for a wife with a face as flat as a salt lake, and eyes that are narrow. Evil spirits dive into wide eyes and drive them to madness.” 

Will it win? Awkward transitions aside, Mongol impresses with breathtaking scenery and strong performances. Boyish yet stoic, radiating a calm far beyond his years, young Odnyam Odsuren is utterly convincing. So … not your typical foreign-film winner, but a definite dark-horse candidate. -Brad Scriber

Tyra Banks is talking to one of the contestants on the first episode of the new season of America’s Next Top Model and it is like no conversation that has taken place on that show before – or, for that matter, on any prime-time entertainment program.

Fatima, a beautiful young woman from Somalia, says, “When I was seven, I was circumcised. It’s a very traditional positive thing where I’m from.” But it quickly becomes clear that when she used the word "positive," she was not endorsing this practice. She goes on to say: “Female genital mutilation is removing the entire clitoris and sewing the two labia together. I’m going to dedicate my life to making sure no one goes through what I went through. As we are talking right now, young girls are being circumcised and some are dying in the process.”

Later, when she shares her story with some of the other contestants, one of them asks, “So do you feel less of a woman?”

The other contestants accuse her of asking an “ignorant and inappropriate” question.

And so, the controversial issue of female genital mutilation will be introduced to the show’s millions of viewers. [Note: this interview contains graphic details about female genital mutilation and its impact on sexuality.]

Did ANTM do a responsible job in presenting information about this topic? To find out, I spoke with Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of Equality Now, a human rights group that works to end violence and discrimination against women. One of the practices it is fighting is female genital mutilation, or FGM. Here’s what Bien-Aime had to say.

How widespread is FGM?
It is practiced in 28 countries in Africa and some countries in central Asia.

Is it a religious practice?
That’s a misnomer. Take a country like Ethiopia. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and animists all practice FGM. It is a 5,000-year-old harmful traditional practice. Throughout the ages, people have adopted it as a religious facet. You’ll hear it is in the Koran, which it is not. Nothing in the Koran dictates FGM.

Why is it done?
The reason is to guarantee marriageability in a girl, to guarantee her chastity and virginity until marriage.

How many girls undergo this procedure?
Six thousand girls a day are still subjected to the practice. That’s two to three million every year.

Is there any effort to lessen the pain?
No. It is generally done without anesthesia.

Do girls die from this procedure?
There are no statistics on mortality rates. But a girl can die immediately from hemorrhage or from shock a week later, or three years later from a renal infection, or much later during labor.

Was the description on America’s Next Top Model an accurate depiction of FGM?
There are three types. Clitoridectomy is the removal of the clitoris.

The most pervasive is type two: excision, which is the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora and majora.

The third is the most extreme form, probably what Fatima was subjected to: infibulation. It’s the removal of all of the above. The remaining tissue is sewn together so that only a small hole is left, the size of a pencil eraser, for menstruation, sexual intercourse, urine, childbirth. You have to tear the tissue to deliver the baby, it’s just a nightmare, and then re-sew it.

Are efforts to end FGM meeting with success?
The good news is that groups all across Africa are working in their community against the practice. Survivors of FGM are working at great risk to their lives. And we are making inroads. It is very slow, but things are moving in the right direction. Equality Now is working with grassroots groups because you can’t stop it unless people from the community work to end it.

And the question for Fatima about the impact on her womanhood – was that an inappropriate question?
People ask that question a lot. I think it’s a very legitimate question. These are questions that come up within the community. Am I less of a woman? Some women say I can find sexual pleasure in my head, it doesn’t define me as a woman, I’m still a mother and a wife. Other women will say I’ve been mutilated for life, I can’t find sexual pleasure.

Was Fatima overstating the case when she said she could not have sex with a man?
Maybe she meant that she can’t find pleasure, which is what women sometimes say when they’ve been mutilated to that extent. Some men bring a knife or a goat horn to the wedding bed to open the woman up [for intercourse]. So probably that’s what she means.

Is this an appropriate topic for America’s Next Top Model?
It’s a good thing. Fifteen years ago, nobody talked about FGM, even here in the States. We went to the Geraldo Rivera show in the mid '90s, and they said it was to controversial to talk about FGM on their show.
-Marc Silver

A Coen Brothers movie means many things, including weird killers and weirder killings. From laconic Upper Midwesterners shoving victims into wood chippers to Prince Valiant–coiffed psychopaths offing folks with cattle stun guns, these brothers’ films are plenty grim.

The angel of death in this year’s Oscar-nominated No Country For Old Men is one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who’s on the trail of $2 million in stolen drug money (and the guy who stole it). While his weapon of choice is a sawed-off semi-automatic shotgun, he’s got something else—equally odd and cumbersome—up his denim sleeve: a captive bolt pistol, aka a cattle stun gun, which he uses to kill a person and knock locks out of doors.

“Stunners,” as they’re sometimes called, are pneumatic devices for euthanizing large livestock. Big meat plants employ two basic kinds, penetrating and non-penetrating. The penetrating ones are more popular, especially in the U.S. (and Hollywood—this is Chigurh’s choice, and one was also used in the 1997 film The Butcher Boy). The non-penetrating type, though less precise and harder to operate, is big in Europe, because no blood-and-brain spillage means no chance of mad-cow disease.

Here’s how a stunner works:

• The muzzle of the gun is placed against the forehead of the “subject”—cattle, goats, sheep, or (in No Country’s case) a hapless motorist.

• The trigger is pulled.

• Pressurized air—stored in an attached tank weighing some 20 pounds—pushes the pointed bolt, usually about 3 centimeters long and 1 in diameter, out of the muzzle and into the subject’s forehead.

• The bolt goes through the skull, damaging or destroying the cerebrum and part of the cerebellum while knocking the subject unconscious and/or dead.

• At the same time, the brain stem is left intact, which means the subject’s heart keeps beating for a while even as internal bleeding occurs, which is necessary to prevent meat spoilage.

• The bolt then retracts back into the barrel of the gun.

According to Temple Grandin, an animal-science professor at Colorado State University who also designs livestock-handling facilities, most U.S. plants have four stunners in operation at any given time. The technology, invented sometime in mid-20th-century Europe, caught on big in England and Germany before spreading to the U.S. Today’s versions are highly exacting, she says, with the best ones killing the subject 99 percent of the time on the first shot.

Nevertheless, animal-rights groups have cried foul and called these guns inhumane. Grandin scoffs. “That is just rubbish,” she says. “A captive bolt pistol works extremely well, provided it’s cleaned regularly. It’s a tool with precision machine parts, like a high-powered hunting rifle. And just like with a hunting rifle, if you don’t keep it clean, it won’t work. If you take care of it, it’ll work beautifully.”

As a film critic, though, she has her doubts: “The killer uses a captive bolt pistol? That’s just stupid. He’d have to carry around that tank, all that air … Using a Koch magnum [a smaller stun gun] would make a lot more sense. That’s just stupid.”

It’s a cavil that’s been voiced by professional-critic types, like the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter and the New Yorker’s David Denby (though others still, like the New Republic’s Christopher Orr, have taken an opposing view).

While all that’s probably best settled by a critical rumble in the alley, it’s interesting to note that the sound made in the movie came not from an actual captive bolt gun but from a pneumatic nail gun. “I wasn’t looking for authenticity, so I didn’t even research cattle guns,” sound designer Craig Berkey recently told the New York Times. “I just knew it had to be impactful, with that two-part sound, like a ch-chung.”

La Vie En Rose follows French singer Edith Piaf from her birth in 1915 to her death in 1963. There are extraordinary highs, like the huge success of her signature song, "La Vie En Rose." There are devastating lows, like the untimely death of the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan. But there is nothing – rien -- about Piaf's greatest accomplishment: saving lives.

During World War II, when Germany occupied France, French citizens could not move around freely, either within their country or without. But the Germans made exceptions for musicians they loved—and no one was more beloved than Edith. In fact, as University of Wales history professor Julian Jackson writes in his book France: The Dark Years, the Germans loved Piaf so much they allowed her travel to Germany to sing for French prisoners of war.

During that visit, says Piaf's sister-in-law Christie Laume, the "Little Sparrow" gained permission to have her picture taken with the prisoners. Piaf returned to France with the photos of the prisoners and, with the help of some unknown Resistance members, quickly had the images enlarged and used for passports. Within weeks, Piaf returned to perform at the camp again, smuggling these passports to the prisoners.  Laume could not say exactly how the scheme was hatched, or how the passports were used. It seems Piaf took more than one secret to the grave with her.

That being said, Piaf did explain to Laume why she risked her life to save others.

"She said, 'It's nothing. It was the normal thing to do, and I was one who could do it,'" recalled Laume. "She was very human, and she had a big heart for the French people."

In the intervening years, some critics attacked Piaf for entertaining the German forces. Laume dismisses such criticism. "I know she was not with the Germans," Laume says. "She was with the French people."

-Amy McKeever

Daniel Day-Lewis has earned plenty of acclaim already for his amazing transformation into corrupt American oil prospector Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, so why not give some love to the other star of the film: the arid, gritty landscape of early 20th-century California where all the action takes place.

It turns out that West Texas—the area around a town called Marfa—stands in for California for most of the movie. Before Blood, Marfa’s claim to fame was its contemporary art scene, including an installation called Prada Marfa (featuring 20 left shoes) and a stint as the setting of Giant, the James Dean 1956 classic. This place clearly specializes in putting on big shows.

To find out how much of a stretch it was for Marfa to play oil-boom California, I contacted Stephan Graham, a geologist at Stanford University whose roots are deep in the rocks—and oil—of the Golden State.

So was West Texas a good stand-in for Central California’s San Joaquin Valley—geologically speaking?

“Not really,” says Graham, “It’s only a reasonable stand-in in terms of local topography, climate, and vegetation. Basically, the rocks in the part of California where the movie is set are younger than 30 million years. The rocks in West Texas are on the order of 250 million years old or older.”

Hmm.

But did the movie get the petroleum geology right?

Pretty much. In California, explains Graham, seepages of oil trapped by the folding of rocks near the earth’s surface guided early exploration. And just like in the film, the early wells were hand-dug, since oil pooled at shallow depths. Explosions and gushers like the ones shown so dramatically in Blood were common in the old days too. Nowadays the goal is to avoid such things, says Graham. They're dangerous, damaging to the environment, and expensive.

I will confess that my main motivation for going to see Blood was to ogle Daniel Day-Lewis. But in the end, I developed a strong attraction for Marfa. So did the film's director Paul Thomas Anderson, who, in an interview, talked about how melancholy he and his crew felt after leaving West Texas and how much they had loved being in that rocky, barren landscape. It’s a very American kind of love affair—the attraction of men to what used to be known as the Great West. A place celebrated by landscape painters like Thomas Moran, writers like John Muir, and filmmakers like John Ford.

A veteran of field work in the area, Graham understands the area's appeal. “It's a funny thing.  Most people would view the San Joaquin up into the Temblor Range as unlovable. But it gets under your skin and you develop a real affinity for it.  Probably something to do with open space and a sense of remaining untamed, but hard to put into words that anyone without the experience would appreciate.”

How about “mineral magnetism?”

-Shelley Sperry

The first thing I thought when I heard about the movie Ratatouille was, "Brilliant! More people need to know about this great vegetable dish from the south of France whose name comes partly from the verb, touiller, which means to stir or mix."

But that's just me, the francophile foodie...

Anyhow, there's another, perhaps more surprising reason this film is genius--the fact that the hero, Remy, is a rat. True, "rat" is in the name of the dish that he makes so well it brings the snooty French food critic to tears in a Proustian denouement. This choice is clever because a rat is one of the last things you want to see in a kitchen. But so is a roach...so why not Remy the roach? Because rats really can taste food.

Rats have taste buds and a sophisticated sense of whether or not something is safe to eat. Remember the scene where Remy saves his family from being poisoned? As omnivores, rats eat everything, and would eat poison if it weren't for their keen taste buds, which can pick up on its bitter flavor. Once they eat something that triggers this sense and makes them sick, they will remember to avoid it so they don't repeat the experience. (Good thing, too, because unlike humans, rats can't vomit.)

And while the soup Remy rescues from the clumsy hands of the garbage boy, Linguini, wouldn't have killed the customers, it would have certainly sent them away with a bad taste in their mouths. And this epicurean rat will do whatever he can to prevent that from happening.

So, the Omnie for smartest choice of critter in a leading role goes to....Pixar, for Remy the rat in Ratatouille.

—Catherine Barker

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for those who haven’t seen it, is not about sea life or wildlife. The diving bell is an old-fashioned diving suit. It’s a symbol of the way French fashion editor Jean-Dominique Bauby felt trapped in his own body after a stroke in his brain stem in 1995. And the butterfly is his brain. It knows what it wants to say and do. It can create and soar as it always did. Only the connection between the cerebral cortex (it coordinates motor and sensory information) and brain stem (which connects the brain to the spinal cord) has been broken. Bauby is paralyzed, unable to move anything but his eyes. He communicates by listening as an aide reads the alphabet, then blinking at the letter he has in mind. And so the spelling begins … ending with the 1997 publication of his memoir.

Why could his eyes still move? And is the blink method still the way locked-in patients communicate?

Here’s what I learned. Leigh Hochberg, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the VA, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and Brown University, explains that a patient with locked-in syndrome  as a result of a stroke can often move his or her eyes. A brain-stem stroke commonly affects the middle of the brain stem. But the nerves that control up-and-down eye movement exit from the top of the brain stem and can still function after such a stroke. One way that doctors determine if a patient is awake and alert after a brain-stem stroke is to say, “Move your eyes up or down,”

The spell-by-blinking method is still a reliable, if torturously slow, way to communicate. Another low-tech method is the use of a see-through board with letters of the alphabet. The observer watches the patient’s eyes move to the letter of choice.

But Hochberg and others are trying to develop new ways to aid in communication. In one model, letters would flash on a computer screen, and electrodes attached to the scalp would sense the brain wave of recognition when the patient sees the letter he wants. Implanting micro-electrodes in the brain might let a patient control a computer cursor by thinking about moving the mouse with his hand. That’s what Hochberg and his colleagues are working on now. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, is conducting trials with monkeys with the goal of adding movement to the mix. He hopes electrode implants could recognize the firing of neurons, and then decode the signal to move a motorized arm with a gripper.

An important point in the movie is that all is not lost even after such a cataclysmic event. That is not farfetched, reports Hochberg. A few studies have been done on people who have locked-in syndrome or something close to it. “They often report a good quality of life,” he says. Even without the potential benefits of electrodes and implants.

-Marc Silver

It's award season! Glitz! Glamour! Swag bags! Well, we don't have a red carpet over here at National Geographic, and the only swag we've got is free copies of the international editions of the magazine. But we here at Pop Omnivore are getting in on the action anyway with some awards of our own. They're called the Omnies, and they're awarded to Oscar-nominated movies in categories of our own devising. The winners get...well, nothing, but if the stars or directors of any of these movies would like to present themselves at my office, I'd totally buy them lunch at the NG cafeteria. None of us belong to the Writers Guild of America, so you know our ceremony won't be canceled. Or wouldn't, if we were having one. Look for the winners to be announced in this space between now and Feb. 24.

—Helen Fields