Parasite Puppeteers

Posted on 2013-01-15 by arjaybe

Parasite Puppeteers

Parasite Puppeteers


The effect of a parasite can sometimes go beyond the immediate health of the host. Sure, a tapeworm can steal nutrition, making the host weaker. Wasps sometimes lay their eggs inside other living insects, where they grow while eating their host. But some parasites go even further. Some of them can actually control the behavior of their host. It has to do with the life cycle of the parasite. If it’s presently in an ant and the next stage of its life cycle is in a grazing animal, for instance, the thing to do is make the ant climb to the top of a blade of grass where it can be conveniently eaten.

Half of all humans have in their brains a parasite of the type which is known to control the behavior of other animals. If they can control other animals, can they control humans?

We shouldn’t tar all parasites with the same brush. Some of them are fairly benign, even useful, as in the case of the pig whipworm. While the human whipworm infects half a billion people and can cause some problems, the pig whipworm doesn’t survive long in people. Just long enough to do its job, which is to treat inflammatory bowel disease, where the immune system gets overactive. Treatment involves drinking a concoction of pig whipworm eggs. It works by giving the immune system something to do, something it’s accustomed to doing like dealing with parasites, so it doesn’t attack the body’s own tissues. The results so far have been very encouraging. While drinking worm eggs might seem repulsive, it’s a lot better than an inflamed bowel.

Now back to the mind control parasites. There are hairworms that make grasshoppers jump into water so the worms can continue their life cycle there. There are flukes that make fish attract the attention of predatory wading birds. The flukes need to get into the birds. And there are the grass-climbing ants mentioned before.

The parasite which infects half of us humans is called Toxoplasma gondii. A version of T. gondii lives in rats and cats. Rats which have their brains infected are less likely to be scared off by the smell of cats and are more likely to be eaten. The parasite carries on in the gut of the cat.

Can this parasite affect the behavior of humans? There seems to be a link between it and schizophrenia. And drugs used to treat the disease halt the growth of the parasite in lab dishes. In the rats above, when they got the drug they became properly alarmed by the smell of cats again. It seems as if stopping the parasite also stops the strange behavior.

It’s time to break the strings of our parasitical puppeteers.

rjb

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Dark Flow

Posted on 2013-01-11 by arjaybe

Dark Flow

Dark Flow

The known universe is about 27.4 billion light years across. It’s thought that the universe is bigger than that, possibly a lot bigger, but we can’t see farther than 13.7 billion light years in any direction. Our knowable universe is limited by the speed of light and how far it could travel since the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. Since light travels one light year per year, that limits us to a radius of 13.7 billion light years.

That’s pretty big. If it’s all we can see with no way to ever see beyond, who’s to say there is anything else? If we’re to be limited to this, admittedly enormous, bubble of space and time, is there any point in wondering if there’s anything else out there? Of course there is. Even if it’s impossibly out of reach we will reach for it. We humans, as soon as we’re shown our boundaries, will try to see beyond them.

Astronomers think they might have done just that. How do they infer that there is more to the universe than we can see? They do it by detecting its effect on what we can see. Two ways of doing that seem to show positive results. One is the motion of large swaths of galaxies and the other is a peculiar imbalance in the symmetry of space.

The flow of galaxies is called Dark Flow by some, in keeping with other great unknowns such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy. It was found in a survey of galaxy clusters, huge gravitationally bound congregations of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, in an area about two billion light years across. They all appear to be moving in the same direction at about a thousand kilometers per second. The implication of that much matter moving at high speed toward the same point is that there isn’t enough matter in the observable universe to account for the gravitational attraction required. It suggests huge concentrations of matter beyond the known universe drawing our galaxies away.

The peculiar asymmetry, the second effect, is found in the cosmic microwave background(CMB) radiation that fills space. The CMB is the cold, fading glow left over from the extreme heat of the Big Bang. It’s observed more or less evenly spread everywhere, with small fluctuations. In theory even the fluctuations should be evenly distributed, but they’re not. They’re about ten percent more numerous on one side of the sky than the other. This suggests that the observable universe’s structure is affected, distorted or sloped in some way, by other structures much larger than everything we can see.

The “whole” universe, of which our observable bubble is just a small part, would have to be very big. So much bigger that there wouldn’t be room in this article to write out how much bigger. It’s no wonder it affects the part we can observe.

rjb

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Screws

Posted on 2013-01-08 by arjaybe

Robertson Screws
I believe I’m coming out of my solsticial somnolence now, so it must be time to make a post. It might as well be about something useful.

Some of the first things humans made were likely shelters. Originally they were just fitted together as best as could be. The boughs and fronds, first used for shelter right where they grew, later collected and used elsewhere, had their ways of fitting together. At some point other materials started to be used. Sticks, stones, lengths of vine or root, used as braces, shims and connectors. Then it was possible to construct a shelter that was more than a lean-to, though its form was still largely dictated by the materials used.

When we began to imagine what the dwelling should look like before building it, then we needed to be able to fasten the pieces together in arbitrary ways. And we needed to get systematic about it, instead of always having to improvise. Notches in sticks and logs would help them lock together. They would continue to be tied and notched for ages, then pegs would join the toolkit. It’s known that woodworkers in ancient Egypt used pegs to fasten wood together. It meant drilling a hole with a bow drill, like an archer’s bow with its string wrapped around the drill bit. Pulling it from side to side caused the string to turn the bit.

The Romans improved on that with the auger. They also invented forged iron nails, or at least took credit for it. Until the late seventeen hundreds, all nails were made by hand – forged, beaten or cut to shape. That’s also about the time the metal screw became commonplace, when machines were being developed that could mass produce them. Handmade metal screws first appeared in Europe three hundred years earlier, and wooden ones were used by the ancient Greeks.

robertsonTo turn in a screw takes a screwdriver. Modern screws have specially designed heads to fit a specific type of tool. The most common are the slot, the x-shaped Phillips, the hexagonal Allen and the square Robertson. The best of the bunch is the Robertson. The screw and driver were invented in 1908 by Canadian P.L. Robertson. He got a patent in 1909, but that didn’t help when an English licensee stole his rights. It cost him a lot of trouble and money to get them back and he would never license their production again, even to Henry Ford.

Now Robertson screws are rare in the UK and barely at 10% of the screw market in the US. But in Canada they account for 85% of screws sold.

rjb

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