Sunspots 938

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

Computing: Gizmodo reports that a TikTok official may have lied to the US Congress (which is a crime), when he said that TikTok doesn't send user data to China.

Gizmodo on how artificial intelligence can do bad things.

NPR on detecting Artificial Intelligence creations from real ones.

Environment: The National Weather Service has released a video of major air pollution in New York City, mostly from fires in Canada.

History: (and Politics) A Conversation writer describes situations somewhat like the race to become President, with a Vice President running against a previous President.

Another Conversation writer discusses Cleopatra and the rulers (at least some were female) of Nubia.

Humor: (or something) Gizmodo reports that Ikea has developed a couch that folds up for a one-person carry, weighs about 22 pounds, and doesn't require screws, etc., to put together.

Politics: A Conversation writer sets us straight on the Espionage Act.

Science: An exhaustive study, reported in Nature, finds that people all over the world believe that there is a continuing moral decline. But the study reports that this decline is merely perceived, not actual.

A fascinating article in Science Alert discusses how parasites may alter the behavior of their hosts.

Sci-Tech Daily reports that curly hair may have helped early humans to survive.

A Conversation writer tells us all sorts of things about glass.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 865

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

Computing: Gizmodo tells us that an 8K TV may not show a picture any better than a 4K one.

Environment: Listverse discusses wildlife bridges, which are supposed to make it much less dangerous for animals to move around in populated areas.

Health: (and Politics) Gizmodo describes the worst COVID lies on Fox News, 2021.

Science: Gene editing has worked, on a case of sickle-cell anemia, according to NPR.

Gizmodo reports on the discovery of parasite eggs in a toilet used about 2700 years ago.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 642

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: (Sort of) SmokyMountans.com has a fall foliage prediction map, for the entire United States. As of September 1, there are only a few regions which are expected to have even minimal color, namely, a part of New England, some of the Rockies, and Michigan's northern Upper Peninsula, and Northern Minnesota.

Christianity: (or, at least, good behavior) A CNN crew stopped what they were doing to rescue some people during the Houston flood.

An article on burdens pastors face, and which they often can't tell anyone about.

Listverse has an article on the excruciating types of suffering induced by crucifixion.


Food: (and hurricanes) FEMA uses the Waffle House Index to measure the impact of large storms. How Waffle House (almost always) keeps open.

Health: Listverse suggests that 10 different types of parasite could be infected me (or you) right now.

Humor: (Or geography!) Relevant reports on a couple who have visited all 645 Cracker Barrel restaurants in the US.
 

Politics: Scientific American details how the Trump administration is acting in ways that damage our National Park System, and National Monuments.

A statement from a retired official of my own church, The Wesleyan Church, on ending DACA, in The Huffington Post.

Science: Listverse reports on 10 strange planets (all outside the solar system).

Wired reports that fire ants have been clumping together and floating around, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Scientific American on the same subject.

Listverse reports on strange caterpillars, including one that jumps (video included) and one with hair that looks like that of the current US President.

Scientific American on the many possible "sexes," that is, people with more or less sex chromosomes than most of us, or with various anatomical aberrations, such as indeterminate sex organs, and more.

Sports: (And Christianity) A Southern Baptist minister and denominational official, who is a football fan, warns that football can take the place of God, in Relevant.


Image source (public domain)

Parasite Rex

Carl Zimmer is an important communicator of science, perhaps the most important such communicating in English, at the present time. I have read a few dozen of his articles and blogs, but had never read one of his books. Now I have. That book is Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures. Here is the book's Amazon page, Kindle version.

Quick summary: Most animals, at least the vertebrates, arthropods, and molluscs, are parasitized by several other animals. (The book also considers plants a little. It says very little about fungal parasites. Zimmer couldn't cover everything.) Most biologists don't consider the effect of this massive amount of debilitating interaction nearly enough. Parasites are hard to study. They usually are hidden, and often pass through more than one host animal during their lifetime. Humans, until recently, were as prone to parasites as other animals. Some humans, in primitive conditions, still are. Even though parasites harm their hosts, they seldom kill them, at least not until they have had offspring with a good chance of reaching another host. If they did kill immediately, they would be destroying their own chances of survival.

Some interesting ideas:
There are probably more parasitic species than free-living ones.

Parasites have seldom been found as fossils, mostly because they are almost all soft-bodied.

The discovery of parasites caused some theological concerns:

Parasites seemed to arise by spontaneous generation. If God created everything in the first six days, then all organisms living now should be descendants of those first organisms, not just appearing suddenly, as it were, from nowhere. Eventually, it was shown that parasites came from previous organisms, often from their eggs.

It seemed that parasites were a dead end -- they just got into a host and died there. But a scientist named Friedrich Küchenmeister doubted that that was the full story, and found that those parasites, in at least some cases, were not dead ends. If the host was eaten, they went into a new stage of development.

"[Darwin] found that parasitic wasps are a particularly good antidote to sentimental ideas about God. The way that the larvae devoured their host from the inside was so awful that Darwin once wrote of them, 'I cannot persuade myself that a beneficient and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [one group of parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.'"

I have posted on questions related to whether germs, and by extension, parasites, were present before the Fall.

Some parasites can control the gene activity of their hosts, or control the behavior of their hosts, in bizarre ways, generally to the benefit of the parasite, usually somehow helping the parasite to reach another host animal. To put it another way, they create zombies.

Parasites may be responsible for the development of sex and mating. (It is, of course, possible for many animals to reproduce without sex, although most vertebrates require some sort of fertilization to reproduce.) Often, animals display to attract females. Parasite-ridden animals usually aren't as colorful, or as active, and observing these males allows females to select the more healthy and less parasite-ridden, mates, who, usually, have better genes, perhaps genes that give resistance to parasites, or genes which cause behavior which is less likely to lead to being parasitized.

 IgE, an immunoglobulin that our own bodies produce, and that causes allergies and other problems, isn't just a nuisance. For most of human history, and in many places on earth, IgE helped to repel parasites. Some experiments indicate that ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease (an intestinal problem) can be cured by introducing parasites into the people that have these problems.

There are other fascinating ideas, and many descriptions of how parasites live, and of the scientists who have made discoveries about them, and how these discoveries came about. A fine book!

Thanks for reading!

Sunspots 436

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:
Computing: Time, National Public Radio, and many other news outlets report on Internet neutrality. Can, say, Charter, make, say, Netflix download more slowly, because they want to promote their own competing service? There's a court case.
Education: The Atlantic tells us why we should ignore the U. S. News & World Report annual college rankings.
Health: Fecal transplants are becoming an accepted treatment for some intestinal problems, says the Voice of America. Yes, inserting someone else's poop into your gut.
Politics: It's true -- the wealthiest are getting wealthier, and the rest of us are not, reports NPR. That's the wealthiest, as a group.
Science: Some great stuff this week. Wired has an article, with photos, about zombie ants, ants which are infected by fungi, which enter their brains and then alter the behavior of the ants.
National Public Radio tells us about insects that have gears that mesh -- see the photos and videos, if you don't believe this.
NPR has an article on how gelada baboons are closer to using speech than other primates. There's a "Listen to the Story" link, which you should use, on this page.

Image source (public domain)

Malaria vaccine?

The World Health Organization says that malaria is one of the six most important infectious diseases, killing about a million people a year, mostly children in third world countries. The Wikipedia says that the disease is not only more likely among poor people, but that it causes poverty.

Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post, has written a recent column on the successful development of an anti-malaria vaccine. He points out some of the amazing difficulties that had to be overcome, and those that will have to be overcome in the future, to make this a practical medical treatment. One such difficulty is that it was necessary to do surgery on individual mosquitoes to obtain cells for use in developing the vaccine. Malaria parasites are transmitted by mosquitoes, and some stages of the microbe live in human blood cells.

Thanks for reading! Thanks to God for this step toward eradicating this terrible scourge.

The best science of 2012, from Nature

One can make a good argument that Nature is the most important science periodical in the world. Among the articles published in it was the famous less than two-page article by James Watson and Francis Crick, announcing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. That article includes this priority establishing sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Nature has done us a service, by selecting from the developments in 2012. The journal has published several items, as follows:

The most scientifically interesting photos of 2012, including the crystal structure of caffeine, the smallest reptile ever known, and others.

Reports, in Nature, of work reported in other periodicals, but interesting, including:

A study indicating that birds line their nests with cigarette butts as a means of repelling parasites.

The construction of a jellyfish-like entity from rat muscle cells, complete with a video of the entity swimming.

The discovery of some unusual sponges in the Mediterranean, with a video.

A study, indicating that dark matter actually exists. See here for the Wikipedia's article on the subject.

How it has proved possible to communicate with people in a vegetative state.

Articles in Nature, itself, on interesting subjects, such as:

What we have learned from 50 years of studying people with the two halves of their brains separated. (Lots!)

There's a lot more. Thanks for reading. Read Nature!