Watermelon tourmaline

Specimens from Brazil and Nigeria.   I was confused by seeing the chemical formula listed as:

AD₃G₆(BO₃)₃[T₆O₁₈]Y₃Z

That is explained at Wikipedia (where it is listed as XY₃Z₆(T₆O₁₈)(BO₃)₃V₃W).

The Knobe Effect

In a study published in 2003, [Joshua] Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario:

The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’  The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.

Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did.

But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? -

The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also help the environment.’  The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about helping the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is helped.

Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’.

More at Wikipedia and its links, and at Futility Closet.

Cup made of terra sigillata

Here's the description from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

This cup was made from a special clay from the island of Lemnos in the Aegean, thought to have health benefits including offering protection against poison. The clay was used to make drinking vessels in prehistoric times, and people even ate the clay itself.

The Ottomans conquered Lemnos in 1453, and the Ottoman governor of the island presided over an annual ceremony to dig up the clay on 6 August each year. This may have been a revival of the tradition from Antiquity, or the clay may have been in continuous use on the island. Because it was only excavated for 6 hours per year, the clay was very rare, and so vessels made from it were marked with a special seal to prove that they were genuine. The seal can be seen at the base of the handle of this cup. The Latin word for a seal - sigillum - gave these vessels the name terra sigillata or 'sealed earth'. Wares made from this clay are also known as Terra Lemnia after the island of Lemnos.

Red clay from Lemnos was particularly prized, and was used at the Ottoman court and even shaved into the Sultan's food. Whiter clay was used to make vessels like this for sale in the Istanbul bazaar.

The use of clay to counteract possible poison actually has a very sound scientific basis (although prior to the 20th century the mechanism was not known).  Many clays throughout the world are able to act as a de facto cation exchange resin, absorbing metallic ions.  Having the clay in one's stomach prior to ingesting poisoned food would in fact offer a measure of protection - at least against arsenic and other heavy metal poisons.    I should think it would be less effective when fashioned into a vessel.

The modern relevance is that persons whose cultural background results in their developing the habit of eating clay can put themselves at substantial risk of zinc deficiency.  If I remember correctly, the first clinical reports of zinc deficiency came from Turkey, not far from the region where this vessel was fashioned, but clay-eating is a form of pica which also used to be common in the rural southern United States.

Via A London Salmagundi.

Manta rays

Wow.  Photo credit to Kozy and Dan Kitchens, via A London Salmagundi.

Thorium - a replacement for fossil fuels?

Excerpts from an interesting article by the business editor at the Telegraph -

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years...

(W)ork by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for...

...a tonne of the silvery metal... produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week. Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium...

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays...

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology..." The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a "huge paradigm shift to a new technology".  Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life...

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor..."

I find it telling that the technology was never pursued because the material could not be used for weapons.  Sad.

Predatory and parasitic wasps

To butterfly enthusiasts, wasps are the vespa non grata of the insect world.  The first problems arise from predatory wasps - the kind that pick up caterpillars whole and carry them off.  I had a frustrating summer trying to raise Cabbage Whites on Brassica plants, even up on a balcony away from ants and slugs.  Eggs would appear, then small caterpillars, then bigger ones, then... gone.  They weren't wandering - they were being abducted, presumably by wasps carrying them off to burrows (although I never saw the malefactors, so it's possible that birds or other predators may have been responsible).

To cope with predators of that sort, the cheapest response is to wrap the host plant in tulle - the same fabric used for wedding decorations.  Shown above is tulle covering a flat of milkweed and wrapped over a pot of cabbage.

A much more difficult problem arises when dealing with parasitic wasps.  I posted a gruesome but utterly fascinating video back in January, showing the larvae of parasitic wasps bursting out of the body of a caterpillar, whose brain has been hijacked as well, so that it spins a protective cocoon over the emerged larvae.  And a little over a year ago I posted two photos of the remarkable Ichneumon wasp (click on the lower of those two pix to see her magnificent ovipositors).

I had originally thought that the tulle wrapping of the host plants would keep out the parasitic wasps (it would certainly exclude an adult Ichneumon wasp).   I was therefore somewhat dismayed to see Ed Yong's report earlier this year about the sensory skills of Trichogramma wasps.  The part about anti-aphrodisiacs was interesting, but what opened my eyes was this photo -

- showing the parasitic wasp to be smaller than the eyeball of the butterfly.  I don't think my tulle (or my more recently-acquired paint-straining fabric) has any chance against that little bugger.

The other photo at Ed's article shows that the wasps are smaller than the butterfly's eggs, and that's part of the problem, because even when I bring butterfly eggs in to an enclosure to raise them, it's possible that they were parasitized even before they hatch.  More about that later when I show the havoc wrought by parasitic flies on immature Red Admirals.

"Extreme Honesty" minimizes malpractice litigation

An article at the New York Times several weeks ago referenced some pioneering medical malpractice interventions established at the Lexington (Ky.) Veterans Administration Medical Center two decades ago.

The idea was the brainchild of Chief of Staff Dr. Steve Kraman and Ginny Hamm, legal counsel for that V.A., and is detailed in their report in the Annals of Internal Medicine (Ann Intern Med. 1999; 131: 963-967.)  They noted that medical malpractice claims were much like divorce proceedings, in that the plaintiffs were often angered at what they perceived as a betrayal of trust, and that families of patients often sought financial revenge for what they viewed as cover-ups of inadequate care.

Dr. Kraman and Ms. Hamm therefore set a new proactive policy for the Lexington VAMC.  They asked medical and nursing staff to report to a committee all incidents which might reasonably be considered negligent practice.  Importantly, "when investigation identified an incident of negligence of which the patient or next of kin was apparently unaware," the VA then proceeded to "notify the patient of the committee’s findings."

That proactive component of going up to the patient and his family and saying "we screwed up and we're sorry and we'd like to make it up to you" had apparently never been done before.  They found that even though their policy seemed on the surface to "be designed to maximize malpractice claims," that patients and families expressed much less anger and desire for revenge:

In our experience, plaintiffs’ attorneys, after first confirming the accuracy of the clinical information volunteered by the facility, are willing to negotiate a settlement on the basis of calculable monetary losses rather than on the potential for large judgments that contain a punitive element.

In effect, by avoiding courtroom disputes, they were able to pay out more money to the patients and families, and less to prosecuting and defense attorneys.

Those interested in this subject matter should read the Kraman and Hamm article (pdf).  The broader implications are discussed in the NYT article.

Card Thrower

Video created as part of a Samsung publicity campaign, showing impressive card-throwing skills.  I used to be very good at throwing playing cards across a room - but then I became a blogger.

Found at The Fire Wire, via Neatohub.

Brazilian agriculture

Excerpts from an interesting article at The Economist this week:

In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets. It is the first country to have caught up with the traditional “big five” grain exporters (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union). It is also the first tropical food-giant; the big five are all temperate producers...

Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade, overtaking Australia as the world’s largest exporter. It has the world’s largest cattle herd after India’s...

No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union. And Brazil has done it without deforesting the Amazon (though that has happened for other reasons). The great expansion of farmland has taken place 1,000km from the jungle...

Brazil has more spare farmland than any other country (see chart 3). The FAO puts its total potential arable land at over 400m hectares; only 50m is being used. Brazilian official figures put the available land somewhat lower, at 300m hectares. Either way, it is a vast amount. On the FAO’s figures, Brazil has as much spare farmland as the next two countries together (Russia and America). It is often accused of levelling the rainforest to create its farms, but hardly any of this new land lies in Amazonia; most is cerrado...

When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.

First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. In the late 1990s, 14m-16m tonnes of lime were being spread on Brazilian fields each year, rising to 25m tonnes in 2003 and 2004. This amounts to roughly five tonnes of lime a hectare, sometimes more... So although it is true Brazil has a lot of spare farmland, it did not just have it hanging around, waiting to be ploughed. Embrapa had to create the land, in a sense, or make it fit for farming. Today the cerrado accounts for 70% of Brazil’s farm output and has become the new Midwest...

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture...

Much more at the link.  Very eye-opening for me - especially the revelation that the farming district is separate from Amazonia.  You learn something every day.

A collection and catalogue of rare playing cards

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University maintains the Cary Collection of Playing Cards.

The Cary Collection contains well over 1,000 complete or partial packs of standard playing cards... The Collection contains standard cards from 16 European countries and 6 countries in the Western Hemisphere, as well as nonstan­dard cards from 23 European and 3 Western Hemisphere countries, and its content represents over 500 years of cardmaking...

Among the unique items in the Cary Collection's nonstandard materials are four c.1500 French wood blocks and fifteenth-century tarots of the Este and Visconti families. Well-known rarities include cards designed in Nürnberg by Hans Leon­hard Schäufelein (c.1535), Virgil Solis (c.1544), and Jost Amman (1588); G. H. Bleich's pack engraved on silver (c.1690)...

The essay on the playing card collection then explains the difference between "standard" cards for conventional games and nonstandard cards for other purposes. It then explains the suit systems -

There are sixteen standard suit systems represented in this catalogue. Four have acquired popularly accepted names which refer to the language or peoples of the geographical area of the suit systems' original usage: French (Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs); German (Hearts, Bells, Acorns, Leaves); Latin (Swords, Ba­tons, Coins, Cups); and Swiss (Shields, Bells, Acorns, Flowers).

(Embedded at the top of this post are examples of the King and ten of Swords, the Eight of Cups and the Nine of Coins).  The "nonstandard" cards are grouped into "Adver­tisement, Cartomancy, Educational, Game, Historical, Humorous, Original de­sign, and Souvenir."

I have not found at the library website a simple gallery of images. Individual cards can be seen via this database, and the entire collection is explained in this essay.

Man Tased after using hyperbole

On June 29, 2009 McFarland and his wife Pearl were returning home from a charity fundraiser just before midnight. McFarland injured himself as he stumbled and fell down the long steps to his front door...

His wife called paramedics, who helped him into the house and treated him. As the paramedics were leaving, two sheriff's deputies arrived...

The deputy tells McFarland he is going to take him to the hospital because he may be suicidal.

"We want to take you to the hospital for an evaluation, you said if you had a gun, you'd shoot yourself in the head," the deputy can be heard saying.


McFarland says it was just hyperbole. He was tired and in pain...

Then, McFarland tells the deputies in no uncertain terms to leave.

As he gets up to go to bed, McFarland is Tased. Not once, but three times.

The ABC News link has further details, and a video of the man being Tased.

Early 20th-century "chest pencil"

This invention was made for a man who had lost both arms at the shoulders, an extremely rare injury even among the 41,000 British servicemen who lost one or more limbs during the First World War. For these men, their injuries were so severe that no limb stump remained to which an artificial limb could be attached. In this crude device, a canvas strip which has a pencil attached to a wooden disc at the front was strapped around the chest. Once the pencil was on a sheet of paper, the amputee would write via movements of his torso. This would have been extremely difficult. It was invented by a Major Maclure, an officer in the British Army.

From the archives of the Science Museum London.

Sarcopenia explained

Why muscles wither with age is captivating a growing number of scientists [and] drug and food companies...

With interest high among the aging, the market potential for maintaining and rebuilding muscle mass seems boundless. Drug companies already are trying to develop drugs that can build muscles or forestall their weakening without the notoriety of anabolic steroids. Food giants like Nestlé and Danone are exploring nutritional products with the same objective.

In addition, geriatric specialists, in particular, are now trying to establish the age-related loss of muscles as a medical condition under the name sarcopenia, from the Greek for loss of flesh. Simply put, sarcopenia is to muscle what osteoporosis is to bone...

Researchers involved in the effort say doctors and patients need to be more aware that muscle deterioration is a major reason the elderly lose mobility and cannot live independently...

A task force of academic and industry scientists met in Rome last November and in Albuquerque last month and has submitted a proposed definition of sarcopenia for publication in a medical journal. The meeting received financial support from several drug companies and food companies...

Causes of the loss of muscle mass or strength might include hormonal changes, sedentary lifestyles, oxidative damage, infiltration of fat into muscles, inflammation and resistance to insulin. Some problems stem from the brain and nervous system, which activate the muscles.

Experts say the best approach to restoring or maintaining muscle mass and strength is exercise, particularly resistance training...

“There’s a lot more to the story than simply having a lot of muscle tissue,” said Brian C. Clark, an expert at Ohio University. “Most of the drug stuff has been targeting muscle mass.”

So the definition is shifting to include muscle strength and function. The academic-industry task force recommends testing whether a person can walk four meters, or about 13 feet, in four seconds...

Demonstrating such benefits and cost savings would help counter criticism that doctors and drug companies are trying to turn a natural consequence of aging into a disease.

More at the New York Times link.

60% of the world's oil paintings come from this village

More than you want to know about bedbugs

Excerpts from an article in the New York Times this week:

[V]ery little is known about the creature whose Latin name [Cimex lectularius] means “bug of the bed.”

Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they do not spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”

...bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean... South African researchers have fed them blood with the AIDS virus, but the virus died. They have shown that bugs can retain hepatitis B virus for weeks, but when they bite chimpanzees, the infection does not take...

Why the bugs disappeared for so long and exploded so fast after they reappeared is another question. The conventional answer — that DDT was banned — is inadequate. After all, mosquitoes, roaches and other insects rebounded long ago... Before central heating arrived in the early 1900s, they died back in winter...

Early remedies were risky: igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline, fumigating buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)

Success finally arrived in the 1950s as the bugs were hit first with DDT and then with malathion, diazinon, lindane, chlordane and dichlorovos, as resistance to each developed. In those days, mattresses were sprayed, DDT dust was sprinkled into the sheets, nurseries were lined with DDT-impregnated wallpaper...

One theory is that domestic bedbugs surged after pest control companies stopped spraying for cockroaches in the 1980s and switched to poisoned baits, which bedbugs do not eat.

But the prevailing theory is that new bugs were introduced from overseas, because the ones found in cities now are resistant to different insecticides from those used on poultry or cockroaches...

Many pesticides don’t work, and some that do are banned — though whether people should fear the bug or the bug-killer more is open to debate.

“I’d like to take some of these groups and lock them in an apartment building full of bugs and see what they say then,” Dr. Potter said of environmentalists...

Both Mr. Cooper and Dr. Goddard said they routinely pull apart beds and even headboards when they check into hotels. Dr. Goddard keeps his luggage in the bathroom. Mr. Cooper heat-treats his when he gets home...

More at the link.  Photo credit Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times