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Science

Bird Hospital

Why do I like my Leberwurst so much….. was my first inane thought about one of the most fascinating articles I read last week. I don’t know what your reaction will be to the mix of science reporting, journalistic adventure story and non-didactic teaching about an Indian religious sect that goes to extreme length to protect animals, but mine was awe mixed with apprehension. And yet another thought about trying to curb my meat consumption.

We have discussed animal cognition here before, but the description of the Jains’ reverence and a discussion of new scientific data about animal consciousness goes way beyond anything I’ve previously integrated. This is not just about eating or not eating one’s prey. It is about a pretty radical new understanding of what took place during evolution.

The article starts with a description of a bird hospital in Old Delhi run by devotees of Jainism,” an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals.” It’s the setting to delve into the history of that religion followed by a comparison of it’s tenets to what modern science has to say about consciousness in species other than humans.

Ross Anderson, the author, is careful: Many orthodox Jain beliefs do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The faith does not enjoy privileged access to truth, mystical or otherwise. But as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend mercy to animals, the Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination. The places where they worship and tend to animals seemed, to me, like good places to contemplate the current frontier of animal-consciousness research.

You can read the list of scientific developments in the article attached below. What particularly lingers with me was this one fact: fish – like mammals of course – are conscious in the sense that they experience pain. Unlike us, they do not have the capacity to know that pain will end, either by healing or by the bliss of (permanent) unconsciousness and so are stuck in seeming eternity. Imagine. No, don’t. It’s given me nightmares.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/

Photographs today are of robins in my icy garden, photographed through the window last week.

Music from Respirghi’s The Birds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZzpcnYy1jQ

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Things to be grateful for: Science

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Wheat

I am always thankful when there is a scientific explanations for things that I find troubling. And never more so than when the explanation packs a surprise while simultaneously making you slap your head along the lines of “Of course… why didn’t I see that one coming.”

Consider the following, for example. If we took a soil sample from every county in the American South and analyzed it for mineral deposits, which make the soil rich, we would get a map that shows a “black belt.” These stretches of land across the South have dark soil, more fertile than others, and are thus amenable for producing certain nutrient dependent crops, like cotton, tobacco, indigo and rice.

If you superimpose a map of every county election outcome across the South on the soil map, you find that they perfectly overlay – the darker the soil, the more conservative the vote. And that does not go only for the vote per se – if you research attitudes across all those counties, the ones with richer soil have culturally more conservative views and are more (openly and latently) racist, assuming a value differential between white and black people and agreeing with legal, institutional or social measures to prevent the progress of Blacks.

Sun Flowers

Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics is a scientific exploration of this phenomenon. Avidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history, in a book written during the Obama years, no less.

Here is the full argument: https://art19.com/shows/why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes/episodes/1c01f809-2331-4d1f-97be-7320c96af997

 

 

 

Corn

And here is my distillation in a nutshell: Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose. What the authors add, though, is a mechanism called behavioral path dependence: Generation after generation passed down and reinforced beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learned from their parents and taught their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoed the value judgments and created spaces for segregation.

Rape seed

When slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relied increasingly on cultural mechanisms:

MAYA SEN: I think things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.

.. to be able to kind of preserve the same structure, economic structure that we had  with slavery it required a lot more kind of local vigilance to kind of enact these policies. So you had a kind of creation of a culture, a maintenance of a culture that required things like extrajudicial violence, it required basically training and indoctrinating young children into thinking about the world in certain ways.

And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (what’s left of it…,) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.

Grapes

Berries and fruit trees

Here is the full introductory chapter to their book:

https://books.google.com/books?id=zKtADwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=maya+sen+soil&source=bl&ots=d6EGFYepGL&sig=MSHEo1H07y9bSAicq6AWPPwEWT4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAuvuI59zeAhXKilQKHe1FBrE4ChDoATAIegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=maya%20sen%20soil&f=false

It has nothing to do with what is happening in the present, or how you could rationally argue about economic interests in the present. It is about pervasive prejudiced beliefs instilled through generations, not likely to be eradicated by external education unless they are systemically tackled over the long haul.

Photographs are of crops grown in my immediate vicinity….

Cabbage

And last but not least: hazel nuts and tulips!

 

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93 Degrees

Hot enough to flee the city and go to the beach. A long and leisurely drive along US Highway 30, the Old St. Helens Road,  gives you enough time to listen to a Radiolab podcast that reveals the most amazing story.

(I, by the way, usually do not listen to podcasts or books on tape. Part of that has to do with the fact that I associate taped narrative with all the times I was hospitalized as a child or teenager and could not even hold a book. So they would set me up with tape recordings, TVs were not present in pediatric wards. These days I also find that I am just impatient – I read fast, and admit to skipping, and listening slows me down to a degree that makes me twitchy.)

In any case, I make exceptions if I am told by a trustworthy source, now paddling his canoe, that I HAVE to listen to this or that recording. And so I stumbled onto this modern medical miracle, a feel-good-story if there ever was one.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/fronads

Here is the short version: Women who undergo chemotherapy or radiation usually lose their fertility, the ovaries get poisoned, fried or otherwise shut down. Freezing eggs beforehand is not an option – they contain so much liquid that gets crystallized by freezing that it bursts the ovum.

Several years back a doctor in NYC experimented with the removal of one of the ovaries of a young woman about to undergo serious chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her survival chances were slim, but she clung to the promise that if she was cancer free 2 years after treatment, they would re-implant the ovary. Which she was and they did – putting it for easy access right under her belly button, assuming that they would harvest eggs for IVF from there, should it kick back into action. In other instances they implant the tissue into your arm. Go figure.

Imagine everyone’s surprise when she got pregnant the old-fashioned way.  Not once but three times across the next several years. And she is not the only one; by now there are over 100 children born with this type of implantation, all without IVF.

So what’s happening here? They still don’t know, but two major theories are offered, one stranger than the other. Either the implanted ovary starts ovulating and somehow the egg migrates into the bloodstream and finds its way to the niche where it belongs, locating the fallopian tubes and moving into the uterus. Or the hormonal set-up from the implanted ovarian tissue triggers something in the system, bringing the seemingly destroyed ovary that is still down in the original  place back to life and pumping. In either case, it is miraculous.

Once you are at the beach you can photograph crabs (the German name Krebs denotes both the crustacean and cancer), cool off, and think about the mysteries of science……

….or about the fact that if all these miracle children learn not to giggle, they can partake in Haydn’s Kindersynfonie  ….

 

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100 Degrees

Heat is above us, within us, around us and seemingly here to stay for the next weeks. Since there are too many things to list about it that are not good, I thought we’ll look at one thing that is: droughts are a boon to archeology. At least that’s what they find in the United Kingdom, particularly Scotland and Wales.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/uk-heatwave-revealing-ancient-sites-wales-180969601/

Ditches that were dug 100 years ago, or 500, or 100os of years, around burial sites, or fortifications, for example, hold more moisture than the surrounding landscapes, even if they are covered up (and thus usually invisible.)

Plants who happen to grow on top or alongside these ditches have more access to moisture than everyone else in the vicinity and thus stay green longer or grow taller when everything else is withering on the stalk.

 

All you need is an airplane, an experienced eye and a sense for archeological shapes, and you are good to go. Surveys from above will reveal ancient configurations that are not standing out when nature is evenly green.

I am not sure if this translates to the U.S. – and frankly am too hot to check that out. But I did have some music by Mendelssohn in mind  that describes the Hebrides, the island chain in front of Scotland, and the rolling waves – providing a bit of cool relief.

Montages are views from an airplane window while approaching San Francisco.


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Inconsistencies

I plead guilty. I am utterly inconsistent when it comes to doing the right thing: reducing my carbon foot print.

I was thinking about this this morning when doing my weekly drive to one of my favorite places around Portland to walk the dog: 1000 acres in the Sandy River Delta. It is a 23 miles (37 km) drive mostly on the Highway, to a large natural area with meadows, forests, ponds and rivers. Dogs are allowed to roam there unleashed, and my 2 year-old German Shorthair Pointer goes crazy just by hearing the name of the park, much less during our arrival there at the parking lot.

 

I have a set route there which takes a good hour during the summer and twice as long during the rest of the year because I waddle in my rubber boots through the puddles and try not to slip on the mud that covers the paths. The parts of the parks closest to the parking lot see a good amount of foot traffic, but soon those unafraid of mud baths have all of nature to themselves. As a regular visitor you can observe the change in seasons, and as a dog owner you can rejoice at the pure joy emanating from the creature when he charges through the meadows in the everlasting, never fulfilled hopes of catching the swallows and the meadow larks.

 

 

So I compromise by making up for that insane Schlepp by taking the bus at least once a week for other errands, and try to walk as much as I can instead of using the car in the neighborhood.

Other contemplations of foot print reduction are guilt-inducing as well:

(the whole lot is listed here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/19/how-to-reduce-carbon-footprint)

1.Biggest culprit: air travel. Guilty as charged.

2.Eating meat: Yes, our household is trying to reduce meat quite a bit, but man, I can’t give up the Leberwurst.

3. Home Heating – here we are several steps ahead. House got insulated, and daytime temps are 66, nighttime 58.

4. Boilers – by default, yes – we needed a new one and now have a responsible model.

4. LED lights – yes, installed. Grudgingly.

5. Home appliances: using laundry line inside and out, most of the time. Check. No extra freezer, either, don’t blow-dry hair.

6. Buy less – working on it, I swear. Without too much success. You know me and clothes…. But we still have furniture from 30 years ago, so that’s a start.

7. Buy local – increasingly so. Not enough, though.

 

 

Well, we leave it at that.  Inconsistency, unresolved.

Today’s book recommendation is a fitting look at the godfather of environmentalism, Alexander von Humboldt.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/0115/The-Invention-of-Nature-positions-Alexander-von-Humboldt-as-the-godfather-of-environmentalism

I think I wrote about it here shortly after it came out, but I strongly recommend it to all interested in nature, South America and a portrait of a man who became a staunch abolitionist, but still could not quite jump over his Euro-centric shadow. An enlightening read.

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Monday’s Question

I came across a sentence today in the LA Review of Books that I HAD to quote: The fundamental question for writing today is how to make the world less stupid. That is also the fundamental political question of our time. The review tackled an older book by David Shields, Reality Hunger, which was ahead of its time in predicting the problems with facts and truth in contemporary society.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-shieldss-reality-hunger-age-trump-write-now/

The reason this sentence resonated is because I often think while reading contemporary science writing that it is making the world MORE stupid. Here is a perfect example, culled, via RAWstory,  from the International Business Times of August 5th.

Can marijuana cure cancer?

Let me take a shot at it, just for kicks, ok? So, the title asks if weed can cure cancer. If you look at the article, nowhere is that questions answered. The intro talks about recreational use, legal in some states (which is different from medical marihuana and not meant to introduce it as a medical drug, claimed by the author. It’s meant to bring recreational use out into broad daylight where it can be taxed and, major benefit, no longer criminalized as to decrease prison populations.) The article mentions California as one of the states, which, as it turns out will only legally allow recreational pot in 2018. (Illegal growing is a major problem, in addition to whatever one thinks of illegal use. It poisons the lands in ways not seen before – and the clean-up of the toxic sites, hundreds at the size of an average of 50 acres a piece in California alone, is a huge problem.) http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/toxic-waste-from-us-pot-farms-alarms-experts/

The article then talks about the benefits of the substance for cancer patients, citing chemo induced seizures and nausea, weightloss, pain, anxiety and depression, sleep issues, constipation, itching. Those are effects on symptoms, that very well are or might be alleviated by smoking or ingesting THC products, but not a cure for cancer. My favorite here are his musings on constipation: Chemo induces it, and weed helps to reduce bowel movements….

Eventually it mentions Cancer Treatment: saying there are preclinical trials showing that pot may be capable of killing some cancer cells. NO Reference. (Preclinical also means rats and mice…)

The author  immediately turns to studies of patients suffering from MS that show pot might improve muscle function, and that it helps with sleep for people suffering from chronic pain. The End.

This is one of the reasons why people, already not particularly educated  in the sciences, turn away from it or do not trust it. There might indeed be studies that approach the question of THC attacking cancer rather than its symptoms – although when I checked the National Cancer Institute Site it was slim pickings. Approaching zip. Much talk, again, though, about combating side effects.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/cannabis-pdq 

 

So how DO we make the world less stupid?

(The OR State Government website, by the way, showed 100 medical dispensaries in 2017, and recreational dispensaries outnumber McDonalds franchises – 281 weed shops vs 205 burger joints….. Let’s hope all the tax revenue gets used for medical research or writing education!)

PS: And the there is always the Willamette Week with news from Potland…

.http://www.wweek.com/cannabis/2017/04/18/seven-portland-cannabis-trends-were-excited-about-right-now/

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Critters

I wonder if a hike report is boring to those who have not been on it.  Yeah, some pretty flowers, some spectacular snowscapes, some cute wildlife.  Maybe working your body hard to get to the sights makes them more special when you take them in?

For me, it’s not just the body that gets a needed work-out on a hike, it is also my mind. As you can possibly predict, my brain will react less to the tranquility of nature and focus more on the thoughts that are provoked by seeing the developments encroaching on these pristine spaces of our state, the ravages of the wildfires and, yes, the decline of the bird population.

This, in turn, had me read up on ecological issues, and what I learned is actually quite encouraging. The Nature Conservancy website alerts to a new project called SNAPP – Science for Nature and People Partnership. This enterprise is looking to promote “evidence-based, scalable solutions to global challenges at the intersection of nature conservation, sustainable development and the well-being of people.”

Their working groups are amazingly diverse and led by some remarkable people across fields.” Experts, scientists and practitioners convene from around the globe to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges, in ways that no single organization could accomplish alone. SNAPP builds a collaborative web — consisting of some of the foremost conservation and humanitarian organizations, academics, government agencies and multilateral institutions — to develop cutting-edge solutions. Solutions that can make a real difference for nature and the people who rely on it.”

Just look at the projects they tackle – including biodiversity issues in North America. http://snappartnership.net/?intc3=nature.science.lp.splash3 

(If you open this link and scroll down, it gets you to a table of content that can be read at a glance)

Fire Research Consensus, Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity, and Forest Sharing or Sparing are the three working groups that invite further scrutiny after coming home from Mt. Hood, hot, tired, achey and happy.  In the meantime, I’ll delight in the images of the critters I encountered.

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Sound: seen and felt

When I taught Perception to undergraduate and graduate students it was often like pulling teeth.  Most had signed up for psychology assuming it would be soft on the science end and long on the “let me understand what makes me and others tick” dimension. Not many were interested in learning the admittedly hard details of how our visual and auditory systems function, and the minute they realized that physics, chemistry and biology were involved, as well as some aspects of neuroscience, panic set in.

I am exaggerating, but only a little. To keep them going I often had to add something that augmented the physiological details by some human interest story or some such. We watched a lot of movies …. we looked at a lot of fun illusions; we discussed the implications for hearing families with deaf children to learn ALS or providing cochlear implants. We talked about the psychological consequences for blind people of regaining vision (you’d be surprised, it does not make them happy.)

The links I am attaching today are just such material – one is simply a demonstration from one of those Dance TV shows that people who are deaf can dance as IF they hear the music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVv6VgBF5Hc

The others are more scientific: one describes a suit that allows deaf people to experience music. The other explores how augmentation with soundscapes allows blind people to recognize familiar objects. “The augmented reality system allowed blind people to accurately classify 78 percent of objects they were presented in one of three groups: people, everyday objects, or textured patterns. Moreover, the soundscapes emitted by the system also portrayed information about a person’s position, for example, among other details.”

All are interesting and would have been fair game in class – whatever it takes to stimulate interest and helps to overcome fear of science.

A Wireless Vibration Suit Helps the Deaf “Feel” Music

http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/new-insight-into-how-blind-people-see-with-sound/article/376479

And so we close this week on sound – you heard all about it…..

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Sound Mysteries

Ever heard the space roar, or at least of it? The sky quakes? A persistent low pitch hum that people complain about from Taos, NM to Bristol, England? Mysterious squeals in Forest Grove, OR? The link below describes these and other sound phenomena and claims there are not real scientific explanations. Hm.  Not wasting my time to scour the internet for alternative claims, but rolling my eyes at the usual internet sensationalism. Still a fun read, though,  if you need small talk topics for your next awkward-at-a-party situation.

 

10 Intriguing Mysteries About Sound-Related Phenomena

Here is a mystery related to sound that grabbed my personal attention on a hike this week.

Why would anyone place a piano, dressed up as a raccoon, in the middle of the beginning of a trail? Inviting “play”, no less?

A: Irritated mothers, having dragged kids off the computer/TV couch for a walk during summer break, now have to drag them away from endlessly banging on the piano, which is much more fun for them than huffing up the hot hills.

B: Why would you disturb the sound of birds singing, wind swooshing, bees humming or coyotes howling by kids banging on a piano? All the “music” of a summer meadow blared out?

Are my photos making the point?

Here is a truely wonderful link that can be used to cheer oneself up when needed, raccoon pianos be d….mned.

Go to any place in the world that they display on their maps and listen to recorded sounds from that very place, from nature to urban landscape. It transports you as if on a flying carpet…..

http://freesound.org/browse/geotags/

 

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Leaf color, leaving

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What could affect fall foliage as we know it? I had to introduce you to today’s link, an article about the impact of global warming on fall color, if only for the fact that the author cites the Bard: Let me count the ways…..

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(1) higher temperatures, (2) altered timing and/or amounts of precipitation, (3) changes in humidity, (4) changes in cloud cover and light striking the trees, (5) increases in the length of the growing season and displacement of the timing of leaf out and leaf fall, (6) higher levels of nitrogen inputs to ecosystems from agricultural practices such as fertilizing and hog production, (7) acidic deposition that causes nutrients to leach out of the soil, (8) migration of trees farther north to escape the heat, (9) extirpation of trees that can’t migrate for one reason or another, and finally, (10) changes in competition due to greater pest loads or invasive exotic species.

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The majority of these changes will mute the color we are so fond of seeing in autumn. Not the biggest thing to worry about regarding climate change, but, as the author puts it, another canary in the coal mine. Paler colors have a kind of “Death in Venice” beauty, but only if you ignore what they might imply.

http://biology.appstate.edu/fall-colors/will-global-climate-change-affect-fall-colors

 

All the more reason to go out today and photograph more leaves as historical evidence for our grandchildren what the world once was – and could have remained, if we only acted in time.

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And as proof that I am not all doom and gloom here is something completely unrelated that made my heart sing:

http://www.rimonthly.com/Blogs/ridaily/March-2016/Video-Good-Night-Lights-at-Hasbro-Childrens-Hospital/

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