Posts Tagged ‘health’
“Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed”*…
Colonoscopies are a right of passage into late middle-age. One dreads getting a “surprise”– the finding of a polyp. But one doesn’t anticipate other kinds of surprise…
Doctors in Missouri were baffled to spot a fly inside a man’s intestines during a routine colon screening.
Images taken during the colonoscopy and published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology show the intact fly inside the man’s colon.
Matthew Bechtold, the chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Missouri, told The Independent that he had prodded the fly and confirmed it was dead.
The 63-year-old patient told doctors that he had only consumed clear liquids the day before the procedure and had no idea how the fly had gotten into his colon.
He said he had eaten pizza and lettuce for dinner two days before the procedure but did not remember a fly being in his food.
The finding was described as “a very rare colonoscopy finding and mystery on how the intact fly found its way to the transverse colon.”…
Wonder never cease: “Bizarre Discovery of Intact Housefly in Man’s Intestines Shocks Doctors,” in @ScienceAlert, via @BoingBoing.
* Charles de Lint
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As we investigate intrusive insects, we might spare a thought for Seymour Benzer; he died on this date in 2007. A physicist, molecular biologist, and behavioral geneticist, he developed a method for determining the detailed structure of viral genes, did much to elucidate the nature of genetic anomalies (called nonsense mutations), and identified mutant genes useful for studying Creutzfeld-Jacob (CJ) disease and other human brain degenerative disorders… all using the ubiquitous cousin of the housefly– the fruit fly– as a research subject.
Benzer was awarded the National Medal of Science (in 1982), among many other major awards and recognitions.
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”*…
Our lives are spread across range of ways that we spend our time. A newly-published study tracks time-use around the world…
How do you spend each day? Researchers sought answers to that basic question from people of various ages living around the world. They report that on an average day, people spend more than a third of their time focused on matters of health, happiness and keeping up appearances.
“We found that the single largest chunk of time is really focused on humans ourselves, a little more than 9 hours,” explained study author Eric Galbraith, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “Most of this—about 6.5 hours—is doing things that we enjoy, like hanging out, watching TV, socializing and doing sports,” he said. Reading and gaming also fall within this rubric.
The other 2.5 hours (out of the 9) are spent on hygiene, grooming and taking care of our own health and that of our kids, said Galbraith, a professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences.
Sleep and bedrest occupy the next largest chunk of time: more than 9 hours on average. That sounds like a lot of shut-eye, but Galbraith stressed this number reflects the average across the full age span, so it includes kids who might sleep up to 11 hours a day. “It also includes time in bed and not sleeping, which can be as much as one hour per day,” he said…
The remaining minutes? They seem to go toward getting organized, moving about or producing, creating and maintaining things and spaces…
For more findings and background on the methodology: “Sleep, cleaning, fun: Research reveals the average human’s day worldwide,” in @physorg_com.
* Albert Einstein
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As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that the Swedish game design house Mojang Studios released the first full version of Minecraft. A sandbox game created by Markus “Notch” Persson, it has become the best-selling video game in history, with over 300 million copies sold– and countless hours consumed…
“The most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria”*…
Jennifer Kahn interviews biochemist Jennifer Doudna (who won the Noel Prize for the gene-editing engine Crispr) on her new focus– our microbiomes, tackling everything from immune disorders and mental illness to climate change—all by altering microbes in the digestive tract…
… what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the rage for the past few years, with scientists hoping it could help treat everything from immune disorders to mental illness. How exactly that will work is something we’re just starting to explore. This spring, the effort got a boost when UC Berkeley biochemist and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for coinventing Crispr, joined the pursuit. Her first order of business, spearheaded by Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute: fine-tuning our microbiome by genetically editing the microbes it contains while they’re still inside us to prevent and treat diseases like childhood asthma. (Full disclosure: I teach at Berkeley.) Oh, she also wants to slow climate change by doing the same thing in cows, which are collectively responsible for a shocking amount of greenhouse gas.
As someone who has written about genetic engineering in the past, I have to admit that my first reaction was: No way. The gut microbiome contains around 4,500 different kinds of bacteria plus untold viruses, and even fungi (so far: in practice we’ve only just started counting) in such massive quantities that it weighs close to half a pound. (Microbes are so tiny that 30 trillion bacteria would weigh roughly 1 ounce. So half a pound is a lot.)
Figuring out which ones are responsible for which ailments is tricky. First you need to know what’s causing the problem: like maybe something is producing too much of a particular inflammatory molecule. Then you have to figure out which microbe—or microbes—is doing that, and also which gene within that microbe. Then, in theory, you can fix it. Not in a petri dish, but in situ—meaning in our fully active, roiling, squishing stomach and intestines while they continue to do all the stuff they usually do.
Until recently, it would have seemed insane—not to mention literally impossible—to edit all the microbes belonging to a species within a vast ecosystem like our gut. And to be fair, Doudna and her collaborator, Jill Banfield, still don’t know quite how it will work. But they think it can be done, and in April, TED’s Audacious Project donated $70 million to support the effort. My own gut feeling (right?) was that this was either brilliant or terrifying, or possibly both at once. Brilliant because it had the potential to head off or treat diseases in an incredibly targeted and noninvasive way. Terrifying because, well, you know … releasing a bunch of inert viruses equipped with gene-editing machinery into the vital ecosystem that is our gut microbiome—what could go wrong? With that in mind, I invited Jennifer Doudna to my house for a chat about the future of microbiome medicine…
Fascinating– and encouraging: “Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome,” in @WIRED.
(Image above: source)
* Stephen Jay Gould
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As we investigate our intestines, we might spare a thought for Guido Pontecorvo; he died on this date in 1999. A geneticist, he discovered the process of genetic recombination in the common soil fungus Aspergillus— and as a result the parasexual cycle— in what became the model for the genetic studies in many other fungi. This cycle gives rise to genetic reassortment by means other than sexual reproduction; its discovery provided a method of genetically analyzing asexual fungi…. which, as noted above, populate our microbiomes.
“Dust to dust”*…
Back in 2016, we visited Jay Owens and his fascinating newsletter on dust… which went silent a couple of years later. Those of us who missed it, and were worried about its author were relieved to learn that he’d pulled back in order to turn his thinking into a book. That book is now here: Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, and The Guardian is here with an excerpt…
… Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.
Before we go any further, I should define my terms. What do I mean by dust? I want to say everything: almost everything can become dust, given time. The orange haze in the sky over Europe in the spring, the pale fur that accumulates on my writing desk and the black grime I wipe from my face in the evening after a day traversing the city. Dust gains its identity not from a singular material origin, but instead through its form (tiny solid particles), its mode of transport (airborne) and, perhaps, a certain loss of context, an inherent formlessness. If we knew precisely what it was made of, we might not call it dust, but instead dander or cement or pollen. “Tiny flying particles,” though, might suffice as a practical starting definition…
…
Dust is simultaneously a symbol of time, decay and death – and also the residue of life. Its meaning is never black or white, but grey and somewhat fuzzy. Living with dust – as we must – is a slow lesson in embracing contradiction: to clean, but not identify with cleanliness; to respect the material need for hygiene while distrusting it profoundly as a social metaphor…
A fascinating sample of a fascinating book: “Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world,” from @hautepop in @guardian.
Pair with: “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand” and “In every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”
* from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer
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As we examine the elemental, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt; he was born on this date in 1769. The younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander was a geographer, geologist, archaeologist, naturalist, explorer, and champion of Romantic philosophy. Among many other contributions to human knowledge, his quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography; he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants.
As a geologist, Humboldt made pioneering observations of geological stratigraphy, structure (he named the Jurassic System), and geomorphology; and he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. His advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
For more, see: The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World.
“Leaves of Three, Leave Them Be”*…
Gabrielle Emanuel on the one of climate change’s winners– the hiker’s scourge, poison ivy…
Over a decade ago, when Peter Barron started removing poison ivy for a living, he decided to document his work.
“Every year I always take pictures of the poison ivy as it’s blooming,” said Barron, who is better known as Pesky Pete, of Pesky Pete’s Poison Ivy Removal.
He still remembers the photos he took of the very first tiny, red, shiny poison ivy leaves popping out in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.“
When I first started, it was May 10 or May 11,” he remembered. “I was so excited. I was like, ‘Wow, the season is here’.”
Now, if he lines up all his photos from 14 years, the first sighting comes almost a month earlier. In 2023, his first glimpse was on April 18.
Barron may have unwittingly documented an effect of climate change.
Poison ivy is poised to be one of the big winners in this global, human-caused phenomenon. Scientists expect the dreaded three-leafed vine will take full advantage of warmer temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to grow faster and bigger — and become even more toxic.
Experts who have studied this plant for decades warn there are likely to be implications for human health. They say hikers, gardeners, landscapers and others may want to take extra precautions — and get better at identifying this plant — to avoid an itchy, blistering rash…
Ugh: “Bigger, earlier and itchier: Why poison ivy loves climate change,” from @gabrieman and @WBUR.
* Adage
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As we cache cortisone cream, we might send carefully-calibrated birthday greetings to Guillaume Amontons; he was born on this date in 1663. A physicist and scientific instrument inventor, he developed the air thermometer – which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature – and used it (in 1702) to measure change in temperature in terms of a proportional change in pressure. This observation led to the concept of absolute zero in the19th century.
Deaf from childhood, Amontons worked on inventions for the hearing impaired, among them the first telegraph, which relied on a telescope, light, and several stations to transmit information over large distances. And Amontons’ laws of friction, relied upon by engineers for 300 years, state that the frictional force on a body sliding over a surface is proportional to the load that presses them together and is independent of the areas of the surfaces.
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