Got milk? Got lactase?

During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia...

Young children almost universally produce lactase and can digest the lactose in their mother's milk. But as they mature, most switch off the lactase gene. Only 35% of the human population can digest lactose beyond the age of about seven or eight...

Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide... They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary. Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. 

Lots more interesting information about this at Nature.

Civilian Conservation Corps stonework at Gooseberry Falls State Park - Part IV

This post will finish my tour of the stonework at Gooseberry Falls State Park on Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior.  For newbies to the blog, the previous three posts are here:

Introduction and the "castle"

The old Visitor Center and the Water Tower

Buildings in the campground area

Steps, stairways, and walkways are ubiquitous in the park.  Some are purely functional in design, carved out of existing rock, but often, as exemplified by the top photo, the CCC workers took the extra step of using different colored rocks to add some visual interest to their work.

Elsewhere the "stonework" serves a simple utilitarian purpose, such as lifting woodwork off the ground to delay the onset of water damage and rot, as in this bench -

- or these in an amphitheater

For picnic tables, the stone becomes an integral part of the structure's design; in this case the rather wide cement between stones suggests to me that this project was given to new recruits who didn't have much experience in shaping stones to fit them together tightly:

I presume the workers moved up gradually from paving stones and bench supports until they had enough experience to work on the buildings themselves.  This water fountain and spigot might have been an intermediate step in the training:

Of all the non-building structures, the most dramatic is the chain fence along the edge of a promontory overlooking the lake:

These views show why the fence was considered necessary:

Because they are so close to the lake and are so often wetted with spray, they have accumulated a generous flora of lichens.

I'm in the process of deciding what to do with my category of Civilian Conservation Corps posts.  Life is too short for me to personally document the immense number of projects that were completed around the country.  I'm considering morphing this into some sort of group project, where interested readers might photograph and write up for their own blog a post about CCC stonework in their community or state, and then I could import selected text and images here with appropriate credit and links to the reader's work.  If you have suggestions, feel free to put them in the Comments.

btw, this is another blogcation

Summer is here.  Carpe diem and all that.

A couple more days...

An American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis)

I was weeding the front garden when an orange butterfly, totally ignoring me, settled on the leaf of a nearby Pearly Everlasting.  She dipped her abdomen underneath the leaf, then flew away.  I knew she had oviposited, but I had to get a magnifying glass to identify the beautifully camouflaged egg...

... located in a paramedian position on the underside of the leaf.  In due course a tiny first instar emerged.  Even in their earliest stages, these caterpillars exhibit formidable body spikes -

- although this one seemed to be saying "OH HAI" as I used a fine-tiipped paint brush to transfer him/her to a fresh leaf.  In addition to the spikes, the little caterpillar constructed little "nests" of leaf debris (photos in my 2010 post on the life cycle of this butterfly).

Here it is in full adult regalia:

Several days after that photo, the caterpillar suspended itself from a branch of the Pearly Everlasting and transformed itself into a chrysalis:

A second one is nearby, and some of the "nest" debris is visible above.  When the butterfly eclosed, it hung for a while to pump fluid into the wing veins and let them harden to flight-capable rigidity.  During that time they are helpless, relatively docile and willing to pose for photos. 

I love the top image showing the diagnostic double eyespots on the undersurface of the hindwing (a close relative, the Painted Lady has four spots there), and the delicate coloration and venation pattern.  From the topside the colors are move vivid.

More information on this butterfly is available at Mike Reese's Wisconsin Butterflies website.  Those with more than a passing interest may want to peruse the University of Iowa's Red Admiral and Painted Lady Research Site.

The majestic millennia-old " Mark Twain" giant redwood tree

Cut down in 1892.

Embedded photo slightly cropped from the original at National Geographic Found.

Rubik's cube solved in less time than it takes you to read this post

YouTube link.

At the 2013 Rubik's Cube World Championship, Australian Feliks Zemdegs' fastest solve was a ridiculous 7.36 seconds.  Are you done reading this?  He's solved the cube.

"To protect and to serve"

An Associated Press article yesterday described the increasing militarization of state and local law enforcement personnel.

An Associated Press investigation of the Defense Department program, originally aimed at helping local law enforcement fight terrorism and drug trafficking, found that a disproportionate share of the $4.2 billion worth of property distributed since 1990 has been obtained by police departments and sheriff's offices in rural areas with few officers and little crime...

Known for its speed trap and annual peach festival, Morven [Georgia] also has been one of the most prolific users of the Defense Department program, getting more than $4 million worth of goods over the past decade...  [Morven Police Chief Lynwood] Yates conceded there isn't much crime and acknowledged that his officers spend most of their time on traffic enforcement.  "This is probably one of the last quiet small Southern towns left in this area," he said. "Even my worst drug dealer here, if I was broke down on the side of the road, they would stop and help."...

He says he formed a SWAT team, arming it with surplus military rifles, a Humvee and an armored personnel carrier, before the local sheriff's office had such a unit...

Yates said he could "take my guys and the training they have, the equipment we have, and we could shut this town down" and "completely control everything."

How comforting.

Fleet Street urine deflectors

From an interesting post at The Cat's Meat Shop:

The average (male) Londoner of the early 1800s, out and about, was quite happy to relieve himself in the nearest alley. Urinals were becoming more common - usually outside pubs - but typically one found a quiet corner and had a pee.

Those who lived in said alleys, or who owned commercial property adjoining, were not entirely forgiving of this practice, as this quote from 1809 suggests:  

in London a man may sometimes walk a mile before he can meet with a suitable corner; for so unaccomodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shows of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments.    

Note the photograph was taken this year, so the deflectors are still in place.  Additional photos and discussion at the link (I always leave more at my sources to encourage you to visit them).

Via A London Salmagundi.

A wooden railway discovered in Newcastle

Fascinating; I'd never heard of these.  As reported in The History Blog:

Archaeologists excavating the site of the Neptune Shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne, northeastern England, before development have discovered a 25-meter (82 feet) stretch of an 18th century wooden railway. These rails weren’t transporting trains — they wouldn’t be invented until the next century — but rather wooden wagons, aka chaldrons, pulled by horses. This is a section of the Willington Waggonway built in the 1760s to transport coal from several local collieries to the river Tyne...

...the networks of waggonways were essential to the development of the industry. They enabled collieries to transport far more coal than wagons on traditional roads. One horse could deliver between 10 to 13 long tons of coal per trip along the waggonways, four times more than that same horse could deliver off track. They were built like Roman aqueducts, at a slight downhill incline from colliery to dock, whenever possible so gravity could help drive the wagons...

 It’s a discovery of major historical significance, not just because of its importance to the history of the region, but because the rail gauge is standard gauge, still the most widely used rail width in the world... 

More information at The History Blog, especially re the development of standard gauge.  You learn something every day.

Photo cropped from the original at The Journal.

A healthy baby with harlequin color change

A 4-day-old, full-term, healthy female infant underwent a change in skin color from normal to red over one half of her body... consistent with harlequin color change — the development of redness on the dependent side of the body, with simultaneous blanching of the contralateral side... Up to 10% of infants undergo this color change, which occurs between the second and fifth days of life. The shifts from normal to red color usually clear up completely within 3 weeks. Harlequin color change is thought to be caused by aberrant dilatation of the peripheral vasculature, possibly as a result of incomplete development of the hypothalamus.

Credit: Bethou Adhisivam, D.N.B. (Ped.), and Venkatesh Chandrasekaran, D.N.B. (Ped.), publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A king on a helter skelter, and a duchess with false teeth

George VI at the 1925 Wembley Exhibition in London.  For more information on helter-skelters, see this 2009 post.

Photo via The Oddment Emporium and Educated Insolence.  The latter tumblr also provided me with this photo...

...of a young lady who became world famous after her murder in 1918.  She is...

The history of the word "cracker"

Last week, Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the murder trial of George Zimmerman...  Jeantel said that Martin told her that a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him...

"Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults [is] older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip... Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition...

But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least...

Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator. What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?...

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."

By the early 1800s, those immigrants to the South started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor and a term of endearment...

Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks...

"Just because you lived in the South doesn't mean you're a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "To really call yourself a cracker you have to live the cracker way — you have to start your kitchen at 4 in the morning," he said.

Just like all those touristy, overpriced soul food joints, Ste. Claire said that you can find fancified cracker cuisine for sale at restaurants all over the South. "You can spend $40 on cracker food," he said. "I call that the revenge of the crackers. I'm sure a lot of crackers are rolling over in their graves at that."

More details at the Code Switch blog at NPR, via Sentence First.

Spiders will chase laser pointer dots

YouTube link.

"Smart houses" may pose security risks

Exerpts from a column by a staff member at Forbes:

“I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning.

He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well.

“They just came on and now they’re off,” he said. “I’ll be darned.”...

Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of “smart homes” that had done something rather stupid. The homes all have an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web. The dumb thing? Their systems had been made crawl-able by search engines – meaning they show up in search results — and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now-discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people’s homes into haunted houses, energy-consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.

More at the link, via The Dish.

Emblematic of our modern world

A Mongolian takes a picture of a New Zealander in Edinburgh.

Photo credit: DAVID CHESKIN/PA, via The Telegraph.