The Guardian: The magic liquid that keeps us alive and promotes sexism
Rose George
Fascinating mix of science, history, and sociology
Blood has always been thought magical. Homer wrote of a dead woman who came alive by drinking the blood of a sheep. Outside poetry, the sight of blood meant death and injury. The only people who bled and survived were women, so they must be witches: many men have believed that women exude powers when they menstruate. We could scare the leaves off trees or strip ears from corn. We could reduce the power of dough rising by 22% (an actual study), and make roses wilt. This is not an ancient belief. Throughout the world, the bleeding woman is still thought to pollute temples and kitchens or to curdle milk. I’ve met smart young women who are convinced they can rot nail polish by menstruating. Don’t dismiss these taboos as barbaric; they are everywhere. It took until last year for the feminine hygiene industry to dare to show a liquid the colour of blood in a sanitary pad advert, rather than the usual blue windscreen fluid.
Yet another thing that proves women are tougher. If men saw quantities of their blood escaping once a month, not only would the official work month include only three weeks, there would be an optional week for those who had trouble recovering. Or just couldn’t stop screaming.
For most of history, blood went on a one-way journey: it was spilled, or it was removed. Bloodletting was used to regulate the body’s humours, but also to fix everything, including severe haemorrhage. It was not until the 17th century that any serious attempts were made at putting blood back into an ailing body. Any blood: dog, sheep, cow. Calves and lambs were popular, as they were thought to transmit their sweet natures along with their proteins and usefulness. Samuel Pepys wrote of a madman, “cracked a little in his head”, who was given 12 ounces of sheep’s blood.
Biology
PNAS: Wildlife are dying from a deficiency of vitamin B … no one knows why
Natasha Gilbert
A genuine mystery with horrific results.
Lennart Balk, an environmental biochemist at Stockholm University, witnessed a dramatically different scene when he visited Swedish coastal colonies during a 5-year period starting in 2004. Many birds couldn’t fly. Others were completely paralyzed. Birds also weren’t eating and had difficulty breathing. Thousands of birds were suffering and dying from this paralytic disease, says Balk. “We went into the bird colonies, and we were shocked. You could see something was really wrong. It was a scary situation for this time of year,” he says. …
Scenes such as the one in Sweden, seen again and again in recent years in a variety of species in Europe and North America, have Balk and other researchers worried that something in the environment is causing widespread thiamine shortages, which could explain these specific episodes—as well as possibly larger-scale wildlife population collapses. “This could be a very serious source of mortality,” says Stephen Riley, a fish ecologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, MI.
A seriously interesting read. Is this a cause of wildlife mortality or a symptom? Is it triggered by chemicals? Climate?
Nature: Cuttlefish wear their thoughts on their skin
Sara Reardon
Cuttlefish are masters at altering their appearance to blend into their surroundings. But the cephalopods can no longer hide their inner thoughts, thanks to a technique that infers a cuttlefish’s brain activity by tracking the ever-changing patterns on its skin. The findings, published in Nature on 17 October1, could help researchers to better understand how the brain controls behaviour.
I love these things. There was once a pet store near me that had somehow obtained European cuttlefish. Whenever I would pass near their tank, several of the cuttles would scoot out to meet me, even raising tentacles in apparent greeting. Staring in at the bright eyes framed by pulsing colors, there was a perception of intense interest and alien curiosity. I would have purchased one, except that keeping them healthy took quite an extensive set up. Besides, keeping a cuttlefish in a tank, cut off from its world and from others of its kind, seems rather cruel. A cruelty not lessened by the animal’s brief lifespan.
Previous studies have shown that each chromatophore is controlled by multiple motor neurons that reach from the brain to muscles in the skin, and that each motor neuron controls several chromatophores. These in turn group together into larger motor systems that create patterns across the cuttlefish’s body. …
The ability to see the inner workings of the cuttlefish’s brain reflected on its skin — without cutting the animal open, attaching electrodes to it or training it to behave in a certain way — could also help researchers to understand the links between brain activity and behaviour. Right now, Laurent says, the link between what the cuttlefish sees and what it sends to the motor neurons is a mystery.
Nature: Dandelion seeds fly using unique ‘impossible’ method Jeremy Rehm
Researchers thought that an unattached vortex would be too unstable to persist in nature. Yet the light, puffy seeds of dandelions use vortices that materialize just above their surfaces and lift the seed into the air.
A controlled, unattached vortex is one of those things that’s difficult to produce in the best of conditions. Finding that it’s a standard feature of something almost everyone has witnessed from childhood is a rather large surprise hiding in a small space.
Researchers were curious about how these bristly seeds stayed in the air because they looked so different from the wing-like seeds of other plants, such as maples. Those structures act like the wings of a bird or aeroplane, generating pressure differences above and below the wing to fly. To find the answer, Nakayama and her colleagues put dandelion seeds in a vertical wind tunnel and used a laser to illuminate particles that helped to visualize the airflow around the seed.
That’s when they saw the vortex floating above the seeds. The amount of open space between the seed’s spokes seems to be the key to the stability of these detached vortices, says study co-author Cathal Cummins, an applied mathematician at the University of Edinburgh. Pressure differences between the air moving through the spokes and the air moving around the seed creates the vortex ring.
Political Science
PNAS: How do democracies react to the threat of terrorism?
Laia Balcells and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa
Does terrorism turn voters against governments, or do citizens “rally around the flag”? Understanding the relationship between terrorist attacks and electoral behavior is key to comprehending how terrorism impacts democracies. We estimate the causal effect of terrorist violence on electoral behavior by leveraging data from nationally and regionally representative surveys that were being fielded when Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) perpetrated terrorist attacks in Spain. We find that attacks are likely to increase individuals’ intent to participate in democratic elections but not to change their vote choice as reported in the surveys. These results are relevant because they imply that terrorists may have less leverage on electoral results than previously thought. Our research design and methodology may prove useful in future studies on the impact of terrorism.
This strikes me as more of a specific instance than a broadly applicable theory.
Bloomberg: A map of how America uses land Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby
Absolutely fascinating. Follow the link above to see the more detailed version.
Seriously. Click through and look at this. Highly informative and interesting.
Meta-Science
Nature: Harvard researcher wins science’s most lucrative prize
Zeeya Merali
Sure. A Nobel is cool and all, but does it come with a check for $3 million?
A picture might be worth a thousand words — but inventing a way to take nanoscale pictures is worth US$3-million. The inventor of a ‘super-resolution’ microscopy technique that biologists are using to reveal the hidden molecular structures of cells is one of six big winners of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes — the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. The winners were announced on 17 October.
The microscopy method’s lead inventor, Xiaowei Zhuang, is a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was awarded one of four prizes in the life sciences for developing stochastic optical-reconstruction microscopy — known as STORM1 — just over a decade ago. The technique was one of the first to break a fundamental resolution limit of conventional light miscroscopy and is now used widely in the biology community.
Her technique is also the source of many, many of those amazing pictures of microscopic features that appear in both science and popular articles.
Nature: National Institutes of Health ponder the fate of sick and elderly research chimps
Sara Reardon
The NIH announced in 2015 that it was retiring all of its chimpanzees from active research and moving them to Chimp Haven. The relocation process has been slowed by logistical problems, a lack of space at Chimp Haven and debate over the fate of animals who are frail or who will suffer if separated from their social groups.
Nature: Legal Canadian weed offers new opportunities for research
Elie Dolgin
On 17 October, Canada became the second country in the world, after Uruguay, to legalize cannabis for all uses. And although a few other countries, most notably Israel, have made a concerted effort to support agricultural research into cannabis, full legalization in Canada has brought with it unparalleled access to money for basic research on the plant.
Most of the country’s 129 licensed cannabis producers are now clamouring to work with scientists on everything from gene mapping and metabolic engineering to optimal drying techniques and growing practices. And as part of an effort to corner the global legal cannabis market — one that’s conservatively forecast to top US$57 billion within a decade — federal and provincial governments in Canada are putting up millions of dollars to support research.
That’s research that should be valuable as marijuana is almost inevitably approved across the US and elsewhere.
Climate
PNAS: Using different varieties of corn to overcome losses due to climate change
Boris Parent, Margot Leclere, et. al.
The consequences of climate change on European maize yields may become positive if farmers in 2050 use the decision rules they currently follow for adapting plant cycle duration and sowing dates to the diversity of environmental conditions. Experiments and simulations show that the current genetic variability of flowering time allows identifying a cycle duration that maximizes yield at every maize field in Europe. The assumption that farmers use this optimal cycle length in each site was supported by comparison with historical data. Simulated European production for 2050 was stable under the hypotheses of unchanged practices but was increased if farmers continued adopting the decision rules they currently use for adjusting sowing date and crop cycle duration to local environment.
So, with great trial and perfect timing, we can come out ahead. And all it takes is every farm moving through a series of varieties timed to match changing climate regimes that won’t stabilize for decades, or centuries. And persuading the farmers to constantly hurl away last year’s grain and plant something new. And persuading consumers to switch varieties as they come and go.
No, seriously this is important work and represents an extensive experiment over a large area and several years. It’s vital that work like this be done. It’s just frightening to think how many things have to go right for this to work.
Archaeology
Ars Technica: Collapse of infrastructure may have doomed ancient city of Angkor
Jennifer Quellette
The Cambodian city of Angkor was once the largest in the world... then the vast majority of its inhabitants suddenly decamped in the 15th century to a region near the modern city of Phnom Penh. Historians have put forth several theories about why this mass exodus occurred. A new paper in Science Advances argues that one major contributing factor was an overloaded water distribution system, exacerbated by extreme swings in the climate.
Angkor dates back to around 802 CE. Its vast network of canals, moats, embankments, and reservoirs developed over the next 600 years, helping distribute vital water resources for such uses as irrigation and to help control occasional flooding. By the end of the 11th century, the system bore all the features of a complex network, with thousands of interconnected individual components heavily dependent on each other.
Image
This week’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit his site for a larger, easier to read version.