New England's "town pounds"

"Dozens of these stone enclosures—open at the top, usually square or circular, with a gap secured by a gate—remain scattered across New England. They were once a ubiquitous feature in the region. In fact, they were so necessary to the orderly functioning of a community that they were required by law. They were town pounds.

In 17th-century America, livestock were generally not fenced in as they are today. Back in England, grazing animals were guarded by herders. But in the New World, where labor was scarce, animals like sheep and cattle were turned loose to graze on common lands instead. (The town green, or common, was often used for this purpose.)

If an animal strayed and was found wreaking havoc on private property, it was brought to the pound, where it was corralled with other wayward creatures and watched over by a town-appointed “pound-keeper” (sometimes called a “pound-master,” or “pounder”) until its owner could retrieve it—for a fee...

Today perhaps a hundred town pounds remain across New England. (They exist in other areas too. In addition to having mapped two dozen of New England’s pounds, users of the site waymarking.com have located one in a Nevada ghost town, and several in the U.K.)" 

More at the  always-interesting Atlas Obscura.

Spiders detect electrical fields and use them for ballooning

Everyone knows that spiders fly through the air on strands of their silk.  But it's not just a matter of chance and favorable winds.  The relevance of a surprising factor (earth's electrical field) is explained in a recent issue of Cell:Current Biology:

... the involvement of electrostatic forces in ballooning has never been tested. Several issues have emerged when models using aerodynamic drag alone are employed to explain ballooning dispersal. For example, many spiders balloon using multiple strands of silk that splay out in a fan-like shape. Instead of tangling and meandering in light air currents, each silk strand is kept separate, pointing to the action of a repelling electrostatic force. Questions also arise as to how spiders are able to rapidly emit ballooning silk into the air with the low wind speeds observed in ballooning; the mechanics of silk production requires sufficient external forces to pull silk from spinnerets during spinning...

In the early 20^th century, atmospheric electricity was intensively studied, establishing the ubiquity of the atmospheric potential gradient (APG); from fair to stormy weather, an APG is always present, varying in strength and polarity with local meteorological conditions. Over a flat field on a day with clear skies, the APG is approximately 120 Vm⁻¹... Closer to the tree, around sharp leaf, needle, and branch tips, e-fields easily reach tens of kilovolts per meter... the spider’s unlearned response to e-fields is to engage in ballooning, and, on becoming airborne, switching the e-field on and off results in the spider moving upward (on) or downward (off) [video at the link].

Ed Yong discusses this research in his Atlantic column.

Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

Many of the spiders actually managed to take off, despite being in closed boxes with no airflow within them.

"Yooperlites"

YouTube link.

Next time I visit the North Shore I'm going to take my black-light flashlight.

Predation of Monarch butterflies in Mexico

Readers of this blog will presumably be familiar with the fact that Monarch caterpillars feed on milkweed plants and sequester the toxic cardenolides in their bodies.  Naive birds that eat a caterpillar or adult butterfly will vomit and learn to avoid the species in the future (the nontoxic Viceroy butterfly has evolved coloration and a pattern similar to the Monarch in order to take advantage of this bird-repellant feature.)

Most of the predation of Monarchs that we see in Wisconsin comes from ants, wasps, and other insects attacking the eggs and young caterpillars.  This week I attended the biannual meeting of the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association and learned from a lecture presentation that major predation also occurs in the overwintering sites in the mountains of Mexico.

Overwintering butterflies that fall to the ground in the mountain roosts are eaten by mice:

An individual Peromyscus melanotis [black-eared mouse] consumes an average of 37 Monarchs each night. They feed preferentially on easily accessible butterflies (near the ground) and on "wet" butterflies (dead butterflies that have not dried out). During the winter season, P. melanotis migrate to Monarch roosts where they set up residence and breed intensively... Over the winter season, these mice may consume 4 to 5.7% of the total population of the Monarch colony. This translates into at least one million butterflies each winter in a 2.25 ha roost. 

Up in the trees, the Monarchs are eaten by two species of birds:

Black-headed grosbeaks and black-backed orioles have very different ways of avoiding poisoning when they eat Monarchs. Grosbeaks, which eat the entire Monarch abdomen, are relatively insensitive to cardenolides and can tolerate moderate levels of these chemicals in their digestive tract. Orioles, on the other hand, vomit after consuming much smaller amounts of cardenolides. They avoid poisoning by not eating the cuticle, which is where Monarchs store cardenolides. Orioles slit open the body and strip out the soft insides... Grosbeak and oriole predation causes more than 60% of Monarch mortality at many Mexican roosting sites, killing approximately 7 to 44% of the total population. At one 2.25 hectare colony, for example, birds ate an average of 15,000 butterflies daily and over 2 million for the season, which constituted 9% of the roost's population.

Interesting - especially the adaptive strategy employed by the orioles.

More information at Monarch Watch and Journey North.

Auto-brewery syndrome

A medical condition of which I was previously totally unaware.

The man’s troubles began in 2004, when, having moved from China to attend college in Australia, he got really drunk. That would hardly have been a noteworthy event, except that the man hadn’t consumed any alcohol—only fruit juice.

The bizarre incident soon turned into a pattern. About once a month, and out of the blue, he’d become severely inebriated without drinking any alcohol... his mother cared for him while monitoring him with a Breathalyzer. His blood-alcohol levels, she found, would erratically and inexplicably soar to 10 times the legal limit for driving...

The man was diagnosed with a rare condition aptly known as auto-brewery syndrome, in which microbes in a person’s gut ferment carbohydrates into excessive amounts of alcohol... The microbial culprits are usually yeasts—the same fungi used to brew beer and wine—and the condition can often be treated with antifungal drugs... analyzed the man’s stool samples and found that the alcohol in his body was being produced not by yeast, but by bacteria [Klebsiella pneumoniae].

That is a rare disorder, but this corollary has more clinical relevance:

... people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) build up fatty deposits in their liver in the style of heavy drinkers, despite touching little or no alcohol. This condition is very common, affecting 30 to 40 percent of American adults; the causes are still unclear and likely varied. Yuan wondered if Klebsiella might be involved, and when she analyzed 43 Chinese people with NAFLD, she found that 61 percent had the same high-alcohol strains as the man with auto-brewery syndrome. By contrast, just 6 percent of people with a healthy liver carry those strains.

Continue reading at Ed Yong's excellent article in The Atlantic.

Why Honeycrisp apples are more expensive than other varieties

This is the best time of year to enjoy apples - Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Red Delicious, and the local favorite Honeycrisp (which were developed at the University of Minnesota).  An article in the StarTribune explained why they are more expensive than other apples:

The simple answer to the apple’s high price lies in its prickly, finicky nature. “It’s one of the most difficult apples to grow,” said Mark Seetin, director of Regulatory and Industry Affairs at the U.S. Apple Association in Virginia. “It tends to like to bear fruit every other year and to achieve annual production requires significant additional labor.”

Its thin skin creates a delectable crunch that fans love but growers curse. Most apples produce a “pack out” rate of 80 to 90%, indicating that nearly 90% of the harvested crop can be sold as fresh. But Honeycrisp’s pack out rate is between 60 and 65%. “That means that 35% of your crop is going as juice,” Bedford said. “And juice only captures one-tenth the value of a fresh apple.”

Labor costs for Honeycrisp are higher than other apples because it’s one of the only apples that has to have its stem clipped so it doesn’t puncture the skin of neighboring apples when packed. “Apples pickers are used to picking with two hands, but with Honeycrisp you have to pick with one hand and clip with the other,” Bedford said. “With more labor costs and a 60% pack out, you have to charge more.”

So yesterday at Target I paid more attention to the details.  The close-cut stem of the Honeycrisp -

- versus the standard-length stem of a Granny Smith:

You learn something every day.

The Dies Irae in movies

YouTube link.

Via Neatorama.

This skull was extensively trepanned. For scruples. Updated.

Explained at io9:

Researchers at the University of Pisa, Italy, have solved a longstanding mystery around the honeycombed skull of one of the Italian martyrs beheaded by 15th century Ottoman Turk invaders when they refused to give up their Christian faith...

The skull was later drilled, most likely to obtain bone powder to treat diseases such as paralysis, stroke, and epilepsy, which were believed to arise from magical or demonic influences...

"The perfectly cupped shape of the incomplete perforations leads(us) to hypothesize the use of a particular type of trepan, with semi-lunar shaped blade or rounded bit; a tool of this type could not produce bone discs, but only bone powder," Fornaciari said...

This would make the Otranto skull a unique piece of evidence supporting historical accounts on the use of skull bone powder as an ingredient in pharmacological preparations...

Indeed, in his Pharmacopée universelle, a comprehensive work on pharmaceutical composition, French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645 –1715) detailed how powdered human skull drunk in water was effective to treat "paralysis, stroke, epilepsy and other illness of the brain."

"The dose is from half scruple up to two scruples," Lémery wrote.

"The skull of a person who died of violent and sudden death is better than that of a man who died of a long illness or who had been taken from a cemetery: the former has held almost all of his spirits, which in the latter they have been consumed, either by illness or by the earth," he added.

Yes, I had to look it up too:

Scruple: a unit of apothecary weight, with symbol ℈. It is a twenty-fourth part of an ounce, or 20 grains, or approximately 1.3 grams. More generally, any small quantity might be called a scruple.  

Note this harvesting of bone powder with a trepan tool is a bit different from trepanning to treat disease in the patient on whom it is done.

Reposted from 2015 to add this photo of a trepanned cow skull:

Here's the abstract:

The earliest cranial surgery (trepanation) has been attested since the Mesolithic period. The meaning of such a practice remains elusive but it is evident that, even in prehistoric times, humans from this period and from the Neolithic period had already achieved a high degree of mastery of surgical techniques practiced on bones. How such mastery was acquired in prehistoric societies remains an open question. The analysis of an almost complete cow cranium found in the Neolithic site of Champ-Durand (France) (3400-3000 BC) presenting a hole in the right frontal bone reveals that this cranium underwent cranial surgery using the same techniques as those used on human crania. If bone surgery on the cow cranium was performed in order to save the animal, Champ-Durant would provide the earliest evidence of veterinary surgical practice. Alternatively, the evidence of surgery on this cranium can also suggest that Neolithic people practiced on domestic animals in order to perfect the technique before applying it to humans.

The full study is published in Nature (via Gizmodo).

Editorial comment:  I do wish that people would stop referring to trepanation as "brain surgery."  It is - as the Nature article authors state - "cranial surgery."

Reposted (again) from 2018 to add new information about obelion trepanation:

Archaeologists were excavating a prehistoric burial site close to the city of Rostov-on-Don in the far south of Russia, near the northern reaches of the Black Sea...

Finding multiple skeletons in the same prehistoric grave is not particularly unusual. But what had been done to their skulls was: the two women, two of the men and the teenage girl had all been trepanned...

They had all been made in almost exactly the same location: a point on the skull called the "obelion". The obelion is on the top of the skull and towards the rear, roughly where a high ponytail might be gathered...

The obelion point is located directly above the superior sagittal sinus, where blood from the brain collects before flowing into the brain's main outgoing veins. Opening the skull in this location would have risked major haemorrhage and death.

This suggests the Copper Age inhabitants of Russia must have had good reason to perform such trepanation procedures. Yet none of the skulls showed any signs of having suffered any injury or illness, before or after the trepanation had been performed.

Now Gresky, Batieva and other archaeologists have teamed up to describe all 12 of the obelion trepanations from Southern Russia. Their study was published in April 2016 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The story continues at the BBC.

Blue lava

One of the hydrothermal sites at Dollol (Ethiopia).  The burning of sulfur generates a characteristic blue flame.  Credit Olivier Grunewald.

This tree stump is "undead"

One of the most interesting things I've learned in recent years is the degree to which trees and other plants communicate with one another.  An old Radiolab podcast covered the topic, and more can be found by asking Mr. Google.  Here's more from a Gizmodo article:

A tree stump in New Zealand is very much alive, thanks to an interconnected root system that benefits both the stump and its neighboring trees. Scientists say this unusual symbiotic arrangement could change our very conception of what it means to be a tree...

On some occasions, these elaborate root systems involve a seemingly dead tree stump, an observation first made in the 1830s. Why living trees should expend resources to support leafless cohorts is not fully understood, nor the extent to which resources are shared among living trees and stumps...

These measurements indicated that the kauri stump is inactive during the day when living trees transpire. But during the night and on rainy days, the tree stump becomes active, circulating water—and presumably carbon and nutrients—through its tissues...

For the stump, the advantages of this arrangement are obvious—it gets to stay alive despite not being able to produce carbohydrates. But as the authors point out in the study, this arrangement may actually be symbiotic in nature.  Joined together, for example, the living trees have enhanced access to resources like water and nutrients. This setup also increases the stability of the trees on the steep forest slope, with the firm, healthy roots working to prevent erosion.

It all makes perfect sense.   There is so much to see in the world if you only take the time to look.

The "wide AM" - an uncommon variety of the 1999 Lincoln penny

The US Mint produced two major varieties of the 1999 Lincoln Memorial Cent (Penny). The most common variety for the Philadelphia-minted 1999 is the close "AM" variety...

In the word "AMERICA" on the reverse of the coin: The close "AM" meant that the letters "A" and "M" were very close and almost touching while the wide "AM" had the two letters separated much more. In Addition: The initials "FG" was closer to the Lincoln Memorial Building on the wide "AM" variety and it was further away on the close "AM" variety. The difference between the close "AM" and wide "AM" varieties are shown in the example image below... 

USA Coin Book Estimated Value of 1999 Lincoln Memorial Penny (Wide AM Variety) is Worth $518 or more in Uncirculated (MS+) Mint Condition 

I can't tell what year the source article was written.  Can any readers with numismatic knowledge estimate a current value for circulated coins?

Plastic fibers falling from our skies

The image will be reasonably familiar to anyone who has seen a contaminated specimen through a microscope, but this is a view of rainwater from the mountains of Colorado.

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution...

“My results are purely accidental,” he said, though they are consistent with another recent study that found microplastics in the Pyrenees, suggesting plastic particles could travel with the wind for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. Other studies have turned up microplastics in the deepest reaches of the ocean, in UK lakes and rivers and in US groundwater.

A major contributor is trash, said Sherri Mason, a microplastics researcher and sustainability coordinator at Penn State Behrend. More than 90% of plastic waste is not recycled, and as it slowly degrades it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. “Plastic fibers also break off your clothes every time you wash them,” Mason said, and plastic particles are byproducts of a variety of industrial processes.

The original publication is here (pdf).

I wonder if anyone else is reminded of Morgellons, which was prominently in the news about ten years ago and had its own research foundation.

iBrows

I stole the title of this post from the discussion thread at the mildlyinteresting subreddit, where I encountered this photo [croppped by me for emphasis] of headphones that had been dropped in sand with high iron content.  Two comments from the thread:

"I grind metal at work and its super annoying. I have to wipe the metal off meticulously after every shift or else it starts to stain the airpod case."

Iron sand beaches are fairly common around the world. The ones I've been to have fine grain like a regular beach but it's a lot darker because of the iron mixed in. They get ridiculously hot on a sunny day - as in they will burn your feet if you stand still for more than half a second

How fast can YOU run in deep snow?

YouTube link

Those long legs give the moose access to underwater vegetation in a lake, but also truly remarkable speed going through deep snow. 

If you're short of time, the action really begins at about the 1:30 mark.

"Do you live on This Street or That Street?"

Residents of Porter's Lake, Nova Scotia might live on either one, or on The Other Street.

Via the Crappy Design subreddit, where a discussion thread includes other cities with bad or confusing street designations (Atlanta, Calgary, Grand Junction...), including this monstrosity from New York City:

The "aluminum foil in the keyboard" trick

This morning my wireless keyboard (Apple 2007) died.  I checked the batteries - they were good.  Not only did the iMac not "find" the keyboard, but the green light in the upper right corner didn't light up when the button at the end of the board was pressed.  That meant that the problem was with the keyboard itself, not with the computer.  The batteries were not making proper contact with the circuit; various styles of shaking and bumping and banging the keyboard didn't resolve the problem.

I searched online, finding several recommendations for ways to clean the battery channel, and finally found a suggestion to try wadding up a small piece of aluminum foil and inserting that into the channel before reinserting the batteries.  Nothing to lose, so I tried - and it worked!  The green light smiled at me, and the iMac found the keyboard.  [the piece I inserted was smaller than the one I placed on top for the photo].

You learn something every day.

Hieroglyphic numbers

At the via it was noted that the numbering system is non-positional, so the symbols can be arranged in any order.

Also cited there, and tangentially related, was this rather sad statistic:

A survey by Civic Science, an American market research company, asked 3,624 respondents: “Should schools in America teach Arabic numerals as part of their curriculum?” The poll did not explain what the term “Arabic numerals” meant.

Some 2,020 people answered “no”. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said the numerals should be taught in US schools, and 15 per cent had no opinion.

John Dick, chief executive of Civic Science, said the results were “the saddest and funniest testament to American bigotry we’ve ever seen in our data”.

Seventy-two per cent of Republican-supporting respondents said Arabic numerals should not be on the curriculum, compared with 40 per cent of Democrats. This was despite there being no significant difference in education between the two groups.

“They answer differently even though they had equal knowledge of our numerical nomenclature,” Mr Dick said. “It means that the question is about knowledge or ignorance but [also] something else – prejudice.”

This bias was not limited to conservative respondents and attitudes towards Islam.
Another poll question was worded: “Should schools in America teach the creation theory of Catholic priest George Lemaitre as part of their science curriculum?”

Seventy-three per cent of Democrats answered “no”, compared to 33 per cent of Republicans – with some respondents on either side presumably assuming Lemaitre’s theory was related to intelligent design.

In fact, the Belgian priest was also a physicist who first discovered the universe was expanding and proposed its origins lay in the explosion of a single particle - an idea that became known as the Big Bang theory.

“While Lemaitre is more obscure than Arabic numerals, the resulting effect is almost identical,” Mr Dick said. “Dems are biased against Western religion, if latently."

Tick saliva

It's more complex than one might expect:

Ticks evolved this molecular cocktail because they, unlike virtually any other blood feeder, feed for days at a time on a single host. Most tick species feed only once during each stage of their life cycle (larva, nymph, adult), so they have to get a “voluminous blood meal” out of each host, says Sarah Bonnet, who studies ticks at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. A tick might even wait years between feedings. In the meantime, it must subsist entirely on its previous blood meal...

When a tick starts to feed, it doesn’t suck blood out of blood vessels. Instead, it secretes enzymes in its saliva that destroy a small ring of host tissue. This creates a “feeding cavity,” which Ribeiro likens to a “lake of blood.” “The tick sucks blood from that lake,” he says. For this strategy to work though, ticks also need to make proteins that prevent blood from clotting, as it normally wants to do in an injury site. Over the course of days, a host’s body will try to heal the wound by sending cells that make collagen. Normally, this would allow the wound to scar over, but tick saliva has molecules to counteract this, too...

To start, ticks secrete molecular “mops,” which bind to and neutralize histamine. Histamine is best known for causing itching and redness, but it also plays an important role in opening up blood vessels to allow immune cells to get to a site of injury. Tick saliva prevents this, so tick bites don’t itch and immune cells can’t get to the bite. Tick saliva also degrades pain-inducing molecular signals in a host. That’s why tick bites also do not hurt. Ticks then inject molecules that neutralize or evade a suite of white blood cells that would otherwise be eating or attacking an invader.

The exact cocktail of a tick’s saliva proteins changes every few hours, Ribeiro says. The thousands of proteins in its saliva are highly redundant in function, and the tick cycles through them as a way of circumventing a host’s immune system. Immune systems take time to recognize and react to a foreign tick protein, and this strategy simply doesn’t give a host’s cells a chance to do that. Suppose, Ribeiro says, “Monday a tick starts feeding on you and injecting the saliva in you.” By Friday, when your body can mount a proper immune response against those first proteins, “the tick has already changed the repertoire.”

More information at The Atlantic.

World map of paper sizes (A4 in yellow vs. US Letter in blue)

From the discussion at MapPorn:

For those unfamiliar with A4: the significant advantage of this system is its scaling: if a sheet with an aspect ratio of √2 is divided into two equal halves parallel to its shortest sides, then the halves will again have an aspect ratio of √2. put very simply...

A4 is our standard size for letters, etc. A3 is EXACTLY twice this size, A5 is EXACTLY half this size...

In other words, you can cut an A4 sheet in half to get two A5 sheets, and so on. To put it simply: you can keep cutting it in half midway along the long edge, and the result will be 2 sheets with half the area and the same aspect ratio. No other aspect ratio has this property.

It’s is set so A0 is 1 square meter, and the number increases every time it’s halved. Hence A4 is 1/16 of a square meter.

If you're wondering what to do with your old bras...

The clips on the back of brassieres are used by staff at Carolina Waterfowl Rescue to help wire fractured turtle carapaces back together.

"Freitas says when it’s time to release the reptiles back into the wild, they wear the glue down a little, the clasps pop right off, and they’re good as new."

Details at WLBT News, via Neatorama.  (Image cropped and brightened from the original)