Trees, Forests & Fungi

Mark Trail

'Talk' is a bit of a misnomer, but there is some kind of communication going on. Several kinds of molecules are being transported between trees by fungi. Trees that have a surplus are emitting molecules that the fungi pick up and shuttle over to trees that are in need. I suspect that where these molecules are delivered is modulated by a chemical imbalance of some sort, so it's not intelligence as we normally think of it. It's system that has apparently evolved and seems to work, just like the chemical systems at work in all living creatures.

Anyway the comic bestirred me enough to go looking for more, and because I'm lazy, I'll give you this video:

How trees talk to each other | Suzanne Simard
TED

Suzanne's speech is a little woo-woo, but maybe that's how you have to present science to the masses. She does get into the nuts and bolts of how trees 'communicate', and those parts are pretty good.

Brains

4 arteries supply blood to the brain
Sam Webster

That is quite the model.

Random Thoughts

White Privilege

I was talking to some people and it occurred to me that I had some serious advantages in my life. My parents were both college graduates, I also got a degree and I got a job at a big, important company. So now I'm wondering if I compare myself to an indigent immigrant, or shoot, anyone who didn't have my advantages, how much money would it take to put us on an equal footing? I'm thinking that today it would be about $500 thousand dollars. So maybe White Privilege just means having money in the bank.

Women Drivers

These days driving takes a lot out of me. A drive to the airport and back takes about two hours which is okay, but then I need a day to recover. If you just follow the rules, stay in your lane, and don't drive aggressively, you are pretty safe, you are unlikely to have an accident. From watching YouTube videos I'm learning that weird stuff can happen at any time and at any place. Being aware of your surroundings helps, but sometimes stuff just comes out of left field. When that happens, there is often nothing you can do, but sometimes if you are quick enough and can grok the situation, you might be able to avoid disaster. So now I am wondering if men are perhaps, statistically speaking, slightly better at these reactions. This is not where I intended to go with this, but I think I kind of lost whatever idea I originally had.

Genetics Part A - Women, babies and war

Birthrates are down worldwide. I'm wondering if maybe the lack of wars that kill zillions of people has someone affected people's brains so their urge to make more babies just isn't as strong.

Genetics Part B - Fat, weight, famine, ornery

Likewise, I wonder if famines in the past tended to select for people who had built up enough fat that they could weather the storm. Not so many famines, especially in the West, and maybe that's why we have so many fat people. Likewise, Americans are known as brash, maybe that's because emigrating from Europe to the USA selected for people who "aren't going to take it anymore".

Fever

Does the body temperature go up because the higher temperature helps kill invading microbes, or does the temperature go up because the body is burning more energy because fighting infections takes more energy?

Dragons

Some of the biggest—and most iconic—flying animals in all of history. And non-history. From
How Dragons Fly: When Biology Trumps Physics - Naturalist

House of the Dragon got me wondering about whether you could actually have a dragon. What would it take? I'm going to assume they are carnivorous being as they've got a reputation for eating people and large animals. You also get more energy from eating meat than from eating grass, and if you are going to be flying you are going to need a lot of energy. Like other large predators, they probably spend a lot of time lazing around and sleeping and only go hunting when they are hungry. Given their large size, they probably wouldn't have any difficulty finding something to eat, so they would not need to be airborne for long. Pop up in the air, take a quick look around, spy a fat cow, swoop down and chomp it up, pop back up into the air and head back to the cave for a week long nap.

If you have a tame dragon, as long as you gave it a cow every week or so, it would probably be very happy just hanging out in its cave, dreaming ferocious dragon dreams. You need it to go on a mission, you give it a couple of pounds of amphetamines and a barrel of sugar water or alcohol and he'd probably  be good for an hour. If you can't complete your mission in an hour with a dragon you probably need to rethink your strategy. You can probably only ask them to fly a mission maybe once a week, and for a large, old dragon, maybe only once a month.

As for the fire breathing, digestion produces methane, so dragons might have a special bladder where they can store methane. All you need is to belch out that methane and a little spark and you've got a natural flame thrower. Striking a couple of rocks together should be enough to get you a spark to ignite the methane. Or maybe dragons grow special teeth that spark when struck together.

Dragon bones are going to need to be very light, like bird bones. And that armored skin is going to need to be something light weight, not thick and heavy like a crocodile. I dunno, maybe make the armor out of same thing as space shuttle tiles, but grow it organically. I don't know how you could grow such tiles, but I don't know how we grow teeth either. In any case, dragons are totally possible. Nobody is going to create one any time soon, but maybe in a thousand years we will have learned enough biology that we would be able to. Then we could have the nine zillionth season of Game of Thrones, but for real.

Update - Stu did some math on this.

Screw You, Worm

Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week
Half as Interesting

The trouble with the news is you only hear about disasters, you never hear about the systems that are working properly. It's like the politicians and anyone who wants to influence policy gets up and starts screaming about something and 'the people', being easily panicked, panic and run screaming in whatever direction they are being herded, kind of like sheep. Huh. Psychopaths and morons, that's the way it's always been and likely the way it will always be.

COPEG N62V Beechcraft A90 King Air

N62V Recent Flight

The Atlantic has the same story, but it's a little calmer.

Locusts

It's the Matrix, but for locusts.
Tom Scott

I don't see how this research is going to help, but I guess that's what science is about. You go digging into something, trying to understand how it works and maybe you learn something useful. Maybe you don't, but you don't know unless you try.

If you've got your tinfoil hat on, you might notice that bugs 'marching in unison' is basically herd behavior, something that happens with many (all?) animals including humans. So this research into locust behavior is just the first step on the journey toward total mind control of all humans. Bwaa ha ha ha ha hah!

On the downside, there are bug farms now in operation that are growing zillions of bugs to feed any critter willing to eat them. I wonder how long it will be until one of these bug farms has a major breach and an escaped swarm devastates the surrounding area. Unlikely to be as devastating as a real swarm, but it will be enough to make the news and panic the easily panicked, which is the main goal of all media.

Via Ross and Harvard

Venom and Anti-Venom

How Horses Save Humans From Snake Bites
Veritasium
Some people are terrified by snakes, some people enjoy killing them, others are enthralled by them. I think they are kind of cool, but not cool enough that I would have one in my house. There are a couple other posts about snakes and venom here.

How Adding Iodine to Salt Boosted Americans’ IQ

Aluminum reacts with iodine. The reaction produces a lot of heat so that the iodine sublimates and produces the characteristic violet vapor.

I vaguely remember hearing about how iodine was good for you when I was a kid. It impressed me enough that I still buy iodized salt. I didn't know that it had any effect on intelligence until Iaman sent me a link.

How Adding Iodine to Salt Boosted Americans’ IQ

I've seen several maps recently that show that people from temperate zones are more intelligent than people from the tropics. I wonder if iodine is a factor.

That's Disgusting

Yesterday it was the kind of vehicle you drive, today it's what you eat that tells us whether you are conservative or liberal.  Well, sort of. How disgusted you feel by disgusting things seems to be the gating factor.

No doubt your own political allegiances will heavily influence what you extract from the bulk of this research. If you’re liberal, you may be thinking, So this explains some of the other side’s nativism and hostility to immigration. But it’s just as easy to flip the science on its head and conclude, as conservatives might, that the left is composed of clueless naïfs whose rosy-eyed optimism about human nature—and obliviousness to various dangers—will only lead to trouble. - Kathleen Mcauliffe in The Atlanic 

Via The Unwanted Blog

Reelin

Crystallographic structure of the reelin protein based on the PDB: 2DDU​ coordinates. Boghog

Reelin is a complicated chemical found floating around in your body. Near as I can tell, it has some influence over the central nervous system. I got onto this from a Reddit link to a Wikipedia passage about schizophrenia, one of my least favorite diseases.

I'm not very good at chemistry. Oh, I understand the basics well enough, water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but once you get past the basics there is an endless profusion of chemical compounds and I quickly become lost. It's almost like the English language, you can stick words, or atoms, together in a limitless number of ways. If you use it every day, those combinations will become familiar to you, like the books you have read. But if you don't immerse yourself in this sea of arcane knowledge it will always be gibberish.

Bees and Neonicotinoids

Neonicotinoids: What We Know - OklahomaGardening
Detroit Steve sends us a couple of links:

I thought Slate was on the up and up,  I now wonder.
Nature article points out that all but Germany had declines.

A giant study costing zillions of dollars, but what exactly did it measure? I have no idea. I wonder if anyone else does.

Let me just say this about that:

• Bees are having problems. Of course, bees are wild animals and wild animals have all kinds of problems. Are their current problems worse than usual? Some people seem to think so.
• Neonicotinoids are new. The did not used to exist, at least I don't think they did. I got it in my head that this chemical was invented in a lab somewhere, but that might not be the case. It might be an extract from a common plant, or from a Peruvian sea slug's gall bladder, I have no idea.
• One thing I read said that 'if the chemical was applied according to directions, it would have no effect on bees'. Well, that's nice, but I somehow doubt whether everyone is following directions. I can easily imagine someone along the distribution chain getting it wrong by a factor of ten or even a hundred. Normally, I would consider this unlikely. Chemicals cost money, farming is a marginal business, so in order to minimize costs you don't want to use any more of that chemical than you need to. On the other hand, if you have a particular nasty problem, you might think it worthwhile to spend a little extra and increase the dose by maybe half or even double to be sure that it takes care of the problem. You don't want to have to come back and do it again, that costs more money, and any delay can mean more damage to the crop. Depending, of course, on just what you are spraying for.

Take those three together and my conclusion is that this new chemical is causing the problem with the bees and the new study is a smokescreen.

Lastly, the new stuff for controlling fleas on cats and dogs uses the same chemical and it's really expensive, like $20 a dose. It's also a little scary, but it seems to work and I ain't dead yet.

Lastly plus one, I looked for a picture and came up with the above video, which kind of slants it the other way. So it might be a case of the know-nothings hollering because that's all they can do. Previous posts here, here and, if you want more, here.

Vanilla

Are We Running Out of Vanilla? — Speaking of Chemistry
My mom was always a stickler for using real vanilla. I am not surprised that vanilla is in a bit of a crisis, that seems to be how our whole economy works: by lurching from one crisis to another. Occasionally someone will organize a small part of the economy and that segment will stabilize, usually just in time for it to become obsolete. Food, though, is an ongoing deal, but we still don't have a good handle on it. Production is at an all time high, profits are at an all time low, and we are only a couple of months away from starving if this year's crops fail. That's not likely, but did anyone forecast the vanilla crop failing?

How did milk help found Western civilization?

The Most Spectacular Mutation in Recent Human History By Benjamin Phelan|Posted Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012, at 8:20 AM

A fine story that raises as many questions as it answers. Via Roberta X. I included the banner at the top because I like to see people putting money into things I approve of, Statoil is a Norwegian company and I've been hearing a lot of good things about Norway lately (including an anti-anti-biotic program), and well, younger son is headed over there looking for work soon, and Statoil is one of the big drivers in employment.

Grass

So I'm looking over the latest posts on Graham Hancock's website, and I come across one talking about "Mysterious Fairy Circles":

Walter Tschinkel may not have solved the mystery of the fairy circles, but he can tell you that they’re alive. Tens of thousands of the formations — bare patches of soil, 2 to 12 meters in diameter — freckle grasslands from southern Angola to northern South Africa, their perimeters often marked by a tall fringe of grass. Locals say they’re the footprints of the gods. Scientists have thrown their hands up in the air. But now Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has discovered something no one else has.

Hmmm, somebody has figured out something new. Let's take a look, so I do and I see green grass:

Well, something like that ought to visible from a satellite, so I look up NamibRand Nature Reserve on Google Maps:

NamibRand Nature Reserve

Area shown is about 75 miles by 50.

That doesn't look like grass, that looks like sand. I poke around for a bit and I find some scrub brush, but I don't find anything that looks like grass, so I complain to the author, who promptly replies with this useful tip: "zoom down to about 300 m eye altitude". Could that really be? But I do as I am bid, and the "fairy circles" do indeed appear:

Red grass. Hmmph. Where are we? Mars?

Update December 2016. Added this line so anyone searching for Namibia will find this post.

Update November 2021 replaced missing map.