Archive for April 2013
The benefits of rarefied air…
From inner-city food deserts to car-centric suburbs, aspects of the physical environment are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the rise of obesity in the developed world. However, new research, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Obesity and summarised online at the Public Library of Science (PLOS) blog, Obesity Panacea, found a surprising correlation between elevation and obesity in the United States.
As the paper’s lead author, Dr. Jameson Voss of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, points out, mapping obesity prevalence in America reveals distinct, and hitherto unexplained, geographic variations:
Obesity appears most prevalent in the Southeast and Midwest states and less prevalent in the Mountain West. Despite significant research into the environmental determinants of obesity, including the built environment, the explanation for these macrogeographic differences is unclear.
Intriguingly, those areas in which less than a quarter of the population is obese map almost exactly onto the more mountainous regions of the country—the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. And, indeed, after controlling for diet, activity level, smoking, demographics, temperature, and urbanisation, Voss and his colleagues found “a four- to five-fold increase in obesity prevalence at low altitude as compared with the highest altitude category”…
Read the full (and filling) story at Edible Geography.
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As we head for higher ground, we might send playful birthday greetings to Joan Miró i Ferrà; he was born on this date in 1893. A painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, who worked over time as a Fauve, Magic Realist, Surrealist, and Expressionist (and pioneered Color Field painting), Miró had a huge influence on artists in the later Twentieth Century (Frankenthaler, Rothko, Motherwell, and Calder among many others), and on design pioneers like Paul Rand.
“Women and Birds at Sunrise” 1946
Carl Van Vechten’s portrait of Miró
Take two and call me in the morning…
A well-known foe of fever, aches, and pains turns out to have a hitherto-hidden additional talent: according to a post by Kratomystic, scientists at the University of British Columbia say they’ve discovered that Tylenol reduces the anxiety associated with “thoughts of existential uncertainty and death.” Their research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that acetaminophen (of which Tynenol is the leading over-the-counter brand) may help to reduce the existential pain that thinking about death can cause us to feel– as they characterize it, ” a sort of existential angst that isn’t attributable to a specific source.”
Other recent studies suggest that acetaminophen can mitigate social anxiety, in particular, “the non-physical pain of being ostracized from friends.”
Never leave home without it.
[TotH to Gawker; photo via Daily News]
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As we keep calm and carry on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that an explosion devastated the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The blast claimed 168 lives and injured more than 680 people, destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, an estimated $652 million in damage. Initially assumed to be the work of “Arab terrorists,” the bombing was conducted by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, with help from Michael Fortier and his wife Lori. The three men were Army buddies who’d become part of the militia movement; they acted out of anger over the FBI’s 1992 Ruby Ridge siege and their 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco (the attack was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the stand-off at Waco).
Oops…
In 1870, a German chemist made a single, simple error in transcribing his data on how much iron was in spinach… and provided an object lesson in the spread and persistence of erroneous information in society:
One of the strangest examples of the spread of error is related to Popeye the Sailor. Popeye, with his odd accent and improbable forearms, used spinach to great effect, a sort of anti-Kryptonite. It gave him his strength, and perhaps his distinctive speaking style. But why did Popeye eat so much spinach? What was the reason for his obsession with such a strange food?
The truth begins more than fifty years earlier. Back in 1870, Erich von Wolf, a German chemist, examined the amount of iron within spinach, among many other green vegetables. In recording his findings, von Wolf accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook, changing the iron content in spinach by an order of magnitude. While there are actually only 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100-gram serving of spinach, the accepted fact became 35 milligrams. To put this in perspective, if the calculation were correct each 100-gram serving would be like eating a small piece of a paper clip.
Once this incorrect number was printed, spinach’s nutritional value became legendary. So when Popeye was created, studio executives recommended he eat spinach for his strength, due to its vaunted health properties. Apparently Popeye helped increase American consumption of spinach by a third!
This error was eventually corrected in 1937, when someone rechecked the numbers. But the damage had been done. It spread and spread, and only recently has gone by the wayside, no doubt helped by Popeye’s relative obscurity today. But the error was so widespread that the British Medical Journal published an article discussing this spinach incident in 1981, trying its best to finally debunk the issue.
Ultimately, the reason these [types of] errors spread is because it’s a lot easier to spread the first thing you find, or the fact that sounds correct, than to delve deeply into the literature in search of the correct fact.
From Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date.
[TotH to the wonderful Delancey Place— from which, the image above]
And lest we think that this kind of mistake has faded into the past, it turns out that the academic research that underpins Paul Ryan’s budget (and the agressive austerity approach that it embodies) contains a simple arithmetic error (not to mention a serious structural flaw)… one that, when corrected, suggests that deficits are not, after all, necessarily an impediment to economic growth and health.
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As we eat our spinach anyway, we might spare a thought for Gerardus Johannes Mulder; he died on this date in 1880. An accomplished organic and analytic chemist, Mulder was the first to use use the word “protein” (drawing on work by Berzelius), the first to propose that animals acquired protein by ingestion (of plants, Mulder suggested), and the first to identify “fibrin,” the clotting protein in blood. (Mulder had an impact in the Plant Kingdom as well: he was first to analyze phytol correctly during research on chlorophyll, and confirmed that theine and caffein were the same compound.)
“Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance”*…
Florida is, famously, a “Stand Your Ground” state. That ground is getting steadily dicier…
First spotted on the peninsula in 2011, Giant African Land Snails (Achatina achatina, AKA “giant Ghana snail” and “giant tiger land snail”) have taken hold in The Sunshine State, and are causing massive agricultural and social problems. Hugely destructive to crops, the creatures themselves are dangerous, in that they are able to gnaw through stucco and plastics, will eat almost any organic material, and have shells hard enough to pop tires on the freeway (and become shrapnel when run over by lawnmowers). Believed to have migrated from Caribbean islands, over a thousand are caught each week in Miami-Dade County; and their numbers are growing as more come out of hibernation. Oh, and they also carry a form of rat lungworm which can cause meningitis in humans, although no human cases have been reported as yet.
[TotH to Slashdot; photo sourced here]
* Lewis Carroll, “The Mock Turtle’s Song” (AKA “Lobster Quadrille”) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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As we watch our steps, we might send send creepy crawly birthday greetings to Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth FRS; he was born on this date in 1899. Perhaps the most exquisitely-appropriately named entomologist of all time, Wigglesworth pioneered in the study of insect physiology; indeed, his Insect Physiology (1934) is often considered the foundation for this branch of entomology. Wigglesworth’s demonstration of the complexity of individual insects and their dynamic relationships with their environments paved the way for using insects – instead of mice or other laboratory animals – for some fundamental investigation of animal physiology and function.
A trick of perspective…
William Hogarth (1697-1764) was a British painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of sequential art in Western culture (by virtue of his series of paintings depicting the rise and fall of a dandy, A Rake’s Progress).
Two centuries before M.C. Escher and his play on perspective, Hogarth created Satire on False Perspective. Subtitled, “Whoever makes a DESIGN without the Knowledge of PERSPECTIVE will be liable to such Absurdities as are shown in this Frontifpiece,” there are in fact quite a few absurdities buried within it. Click here for a larger version of Satire, and see how many you can spot…
Hogarth provided no key, but Wikipedia has accumulated a list of (so far) 22. To get you started: notice that the tavern sign is overlapped by two distant trees.
[TotH to Scientific American, from whence the image above]
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As we train our eyes on the vanishing point, we might spare a thought for Aphra Behn; she died on this date in 1689. A monarchist and a Tory, young Aphra was recruited to spy for King Charles II; she infiltrated Dutch and expatriate English cabals in Antwerp during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. But on her return to London, George II turned out to be a stiff; despite her entreaties, the King never paid her for her services. Penniless, Aphra turned to writing, working first as a scribe for the King’s Company (the leading acting company of the time), then as a dramatist in her own right (often using her spy code-name, Astrea, as a pen name). She became one of the most prolific playwrights of the Restoration, one of the first people in England to earn a living writing– and the first woman to pay her way with her pen. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, where the inscription on her tombstone reads, “Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality.”
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