Desenrascanco

People living in the world’s tropical zones in 2010 had an average life expectancy of 64.4 years — 7.7 years less than those living in non-tropical areas, according to a broad-ranging research project initiated by Australia’s James Cook University.  Overall mortality in the region was affected by disease, conflict, poverty and food insecurity.  Investment in social services, such as health and education, as well as access to water, sanitation and medical technology, were also important factors.  Central and Southern Africa have the worst adult mortality rates, with 377 in every 1,000 people who live to 15 years old dying before they reach 60.  That compares with an average of 240 in every 1,000 across the tropics and 154 in every 1,000 for the rest of the world.  All continents except Europe and Antarctica are partly in the tropics and 144 nations or territories are either “fully or partly in the tropical region”.  Life expectancy in the tropics has increased in the past 60 years, with people living 22.8 years longer than in 1950, and infant mortality has decreased from 161 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1950 to 58 per 1,000 in 2010 (though this is still much higher than the 33 per 1,000 rate in the rest of the world).

• History’s legacy created divisive issues between Palestinians and Israelis.  Judea, home of the Jews in ancient times, was conquered by the Romans and renamed Palestine.  Palestine was later conquered and inhabited by Arabs for over 1,000 years.  The Zionist movement arose to restore the Jews to Israel, largely ignoring the existing Arab population.  Following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Palestine was granted to Britain as a League of Nations mandate to build a national home for the Jewish people.  The Arabs resented the Jews coming in to take their land.  Led by Grand Mufti Hajj Amin El Husseini, they rioted repeatedly and later revolted, creating a history of enmity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.  Britain stopped Jewish immigration to Palestine.  Following the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, pressure on Britain increased to allow Jewish immigration to Palestine.  In 1947, the UN partitioned the land into Arab and Jewish states.  The Arabs didn’t accept the partition and war broke out.  The Jews won a decisive victory, expanded their state and created several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees.  The Arab states refused to recognise Israel or make peace with it.  Wars broke out in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, and there were many terror raids and Israeli reprisals.  Each side believes different versions of the same history.  Each side views the conflict as wholly the fault of the other and expects an apology.
• In September 2000, the then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon entered the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem on foot.  According to several sources, Sharon had been assured by the Palestinian authorities that his visit was fine, but this act is generally seen as the starting point for the current situation.  Incredibly, Sharon was possibly the only politician strong enough to enforce an Israeli agreement to a new truce, and he had just launched a new centre-right party to achieve this when in early 2006 he lapsed into a coma.  He remains alive but in a permanently vegetative state, a grimly prescient symbol of what would then happen to the peace process.
• Since 29 September 2000: 126 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,476 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis; 1,096 Israelis and at least 6,568 Palestinians have been killed; 10,792 Israelis and 59,575 Palestinians have been injured.  During Fiscal Year 2011, the US provided Israel with at least $8.2 million per day in aid and provided $0 in military aid to the Palestinians.  0 Israelis are being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 5,604 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel.  0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 24,813 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since 1967.  The Israeli unemployment rate is 6.4%, while the Palestinian unemployment in the West Bank is 16.5% and 40% in Gaza.  Israel currently has 236 Jewish-only settlements and “outposts” built on confiscated Palestinian land.  Palestinians do not have any settlements on Israeli land.

Of the current 193 countries that are UN member states, the British have invaded all but 22 of them at some time or other.  The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus.  The US currently has military personnel stationed in all but 43 countries.  For instance, as of 30 September 2011, there were 53,766 military personnel in Germany; 39,222 in Japan; 10,801 in Italy; and 9,382 in the United Kingdom.  There were also 9 troops in Mali; 8 in Barbados; 7 in Laos; 6 in Lithuania; 5 in Lebanon; 4 in Moldova; 3 in Mongolia; 2 in Suriname; and one in Gabon — but their presence in most of these countries is merely due to diplomatic usage of military personnel.  Only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 US military personnel.

In his farewell address, then-US-President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, calling for a better balance between military and domestic affairs in economy, politics, and culture.  He worried that a defense industry’s search for profits could warp foreign policy; too much state control of the private sector could cause economic stagnation; unending preparation for war (or combating terrorism) could suck up national life and have a bad effect on spiritual health.  The US spent over $700 billion on defense in 2011, half of all global military spending (though less than 5% of GDP).  Defense-related research yields beneficial technologies (the Internet, civilian nuclear power, GPS navigation).  But Eisenhower’s least-heeded warning concerning spiritual effects is more important now than then.  US culture has militarised a lot since his era — lawmakers tout supporting troops to justify defense spending; opportunistic political and commercial agendas bring tv programmes and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland,” “Call of Duty,” and NBC’s shameful unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes” to Americans — a daily diet of military valour.  Sure, vets should be thanked for serving the country (police, emergency workers, and teachers too) — but no institutions should be immune from thoughtful criticism.  Look no further than the furor over sequestration — automatic cuts, evenly divided between Pentagon and nonsecurity spending, will go into effect in January if a debt/deficits deal isn’t reached.  Both parties frame sequestration as an attack on “the troops” (though provisions protect military pay).  It’ll also devastate education, health, and children’s programmes — but fewer people seem alarmed about that.  Eisenhower understood tradeoffs between guns and butter: “Every gun made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned.  “The cost of one new heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities or 2 electric power plants each serving towns of 60,000 people, or 2 fine, fully-equipped hospitals.  We pay for a single fighter plane with 500,000 bushels of wheat, a single destroyer with new homes that could house 8,000 people.”  Today, it takes a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that America’s ballooning debt is its biggest threat to national security.  Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at the debt, deficits, still-expanding military-industrial complex, and “insidious penetration of our minds” by video games and tv.  He knew first hand the “lingering sadness of war” and “certain agony of the battlefield.”  Today, it’s hardly more than entertainment.

• Con: How is it, exactly, that corporations have been able to acquire so much power?  Two ideas of the 19th century — both sanctioned by British law and rapidly copied around the world — have had unintended consequences.  One is the joint stock company, the other limited liability.  These two social inventions spurred unprecedented economic innovation and growth but also effectively separated theoretical ownership of a company from its management.  The joint stock company turns shareholders into something like punters at a racecourse.  Using shares as betting slips on the horses of their choice, they behave like neither trainers nor owners.  Further, as a result of limited liability, managers gain their own license to gamble at no personal cost.  It was to correct these flaws that in the 1970s another idea was put forth — that managers are effectively the agents of shareholders and should work for them.  To reinforce this principle managers’ rewards would be linked to those of the shareholders.  Stock option bonuses tied to share prices became managers’ compensation of choice; not unnaturally, many massaged those share prices in their own interests, all too often to the longer-term detriment of the business.  Thus another good idea was undone by unexpected consequences: while earnings of managers soared, those of shareholders generally declined.  In the midst of this, people forgot (or never realised) that shareholders don’t actually own the company; they own only its stock, which entitles them to residual assets upon the breakup of the company.  Also, they can vote on resolutions at annual meetings and appoint directors — but not tell the firm what to do.  A company is in law an independent person and the directors of the company have a fiduciary duty to that company as a whole — including its workers, customers, and investors.  As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, when ownership is separated from management (that is the actual production process required to obtain the capital), the latter will inevitably begin to neglect the interests of the former, creating dysfunction within the company.  Some maintain that recent events in corporate America may serve to reinforce Smith’s warnings about the dangers of legally protected collectivist hierarchies.
• Pro: What explains the relatively rapid development in the mid-19th century of a recognisably modern corporation and, in turn, that entity’s emergence as the dominant form of economic organisation?  The answer has to do with new technologies — especially the railroad — requiring vast amounts of capital, the advantages such large firms derived from economies of scale, the emergence of limited liability that made it practicable to raise large sums from numerous passive investors, and the rise of professional management.  For the most part, these advantages remain true today.  The corporation remains the engine of economic growth, both at the level of giants like Microsoft and garage-based start-ups.  The rise of the corporate form thus has improved the living standards of millions of ordinary people, putting the luxuries of the rich within the reach of the man in the street.  The rising prosperity made possible by tremendous new wealth created by industrial corporations was a major factor in destroying arbitrary class distinctions and enhancing personal and social mobility.  Many of the wealthiest businessman of the latter half of the 19th century and on into the 20th century began their careers as labourers rather than scions of coupon-clipping plutocrats.  Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote: “The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times.  Even steam and electricity are less important.”
• Neutral: Corporations are, overall, the most efficient way to produce products and services that meet people’s wants and needs.  The existence of a corporation requires a special legal framework and body of law that specifically grants it legal personality and typically views it as a fictional person, a legal person, or a moral person (as opposed to a natural person).  A corporation is an abstraction — it has no mind of its own any more than it has a body of its own; its active and directing will must consequently be sought in the person of somebody who is really the directing mind and will of the corporation, the very ego and centre of its personality (like Steve Jobs or Rupert Murdoch).  The nature of the corporation continues to evolve in response to new situations as existing corporations promote new ideas and structures, as the courts respond, and as governments issue new regulations.  A question of long standing is that of diffused responsibility.  For example, if a corporation is found liable for a death, how should culpability and punishment for it be allocated among shareholders, directors, management, staff, and the corporation itself?  Laws differ among jurisdictions and are in a state of flux.  Some argue that shareholders should be ultimately responsible, forcing them to consider issues other than profit when investing — but a corporation may have millions of small shareholders who know nothing about its business activities.  Moreover, traders — especially hedge funds — may turn over shares in corporations many times a day.  But the issue of corporate repeat offenders raises the question of the so-called “death penalty for corporations.”  Nevertheless, 67% of Americans apparently believe that corporations need to be reined in somewhat.

• This was reportedly taken from atop the Burj Dubai (later renamed the Burj Khalifa) on 3 March 2008.  No one seems to know who actually took this photo (that I can find, anyway).  You’ve no doubt seen it many times — and popularity can obscure origin.  The road the buildings are on is the E11, the longest road in the UAE.  It stretches from Al Silah in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and ends in Ras Al Khaimah emirate at the Oman border, running roughly parallel to UAE’s coastline along the Persian Gulf.  The road forms the main artery in some emirates’ main cities, where it assumes various alternate names — Sheikh Maktoum Road in Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, and Sheikh Muhammed bin Salem Road in Ras Al Khaimah.  The highway was completed in 1980.  On 12 March 2008, a series of accidents occurred on this highway: 3 people were killed & 277 injured, of whom 15 were critically injured.  Thick fog and poor visibility caused the accident.  Around 200 vehicles crashed into each other before going up in flames.  In fog like this — so, for those who thought this may have been photoshopped, the answer is no.
• The owners of Willis Tower in Chicago have installed 4 glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up.  The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and jut out 4 feet from the building’s Skydeck.  They’re 4×10×10, made of solid 1.5-inch-thick glass (floor included) and can hold 5 tons.  The Skydeck attracts 25,000 visitors on clear days.  They each pay $15 to take an elevator ride up to the 103rd floor of the 110-story office building that opened in 1973.
• The Flying Dutchman is a sailor’s superstition, a ghost ship doomed to sail forever.  Leaving Melbourne in cloudy conditions, photographer Meredith Banhidi was thrilled to look across “magical, freakish” sea fog when she stopped half way up Arthur’s Seat, a 305-metre bayside hill.  “There was bright blue sky above, with the roofs of bayside houses peeping from the fog,” she says.  “Spectacular… then the ship appeared, apparently floating in the clouds.”  This photo was selected to be May in the Australian Weather Calendar 2013.

• Australian Weather Calendar 2013: March Sunset highlights streets of stratocumulus over Buninyong, central Victoria.  Keith Day lives with his partner and their 7 horses on a property at Mt Egerton, not far from Buninyong, scene of one of the great 19th Century gold rushes.  He was feeding horses late on a February evening in 2007 when the colours on the cloud layers over the old Durham Lead goldfields started changing.  Fortunately he always keeps a camera handy.
• Australian Weather Calendar 2013: July This is a squall line associated with a thunderstorm over Era Beach, south of Sydney.  Bruce Cooper’s camera invariably carries a macro lens for targeting wildflowers in Royal National Park south of Sydney.  He and his wife often spend a couple of days a week bushwalking there.  On 11 December 2011, after a “poor morning’s wildflower photography”, they raced back to their car to beat a storm front and avoid a drenching.  “There was a lot of thunder rumbling out to sea.  We drove to the nearby ocean lookout above Era Beach to have a look, switched to the regular zoom lens I keep in the boot, and started shooting in the rain.  I got lucky with what we now call the ‘elephant’s foot’ picture.”
• Altocumulus undulatus clouds at Abruzzo national park, Italy.  This cloud formation consists of parallel bands of cumulus clouds, which occur when wind shear affects a layer of altocumulus.

• These are cirrus clouds in the jetstream over the Sahara Desert, Egypt.  The jetstream is a high-altitude, fast-moving air current a few thousand kilometres in length.
• A steam ring is being blown from the Bocca Nuova vent of Mount Etna, Sicily.  Steam rings are generated when a pulse of steam is ejected from a near-cylindrical volcanic vent.  The steam in the centre of the pulse is propelled by thermal forces, whereas the steam at the edge of the ring suffers drag from the surrounding air.  This results in an annular rotation, which in correct conditions can become stable over a span of a few minutes and produce a steam ring.  The process is similar to blowing smoke rings.
• Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a way to create clouds indoors by carefully regulating the space’s humidity, temperature and light.  The fluffy white clouds are summoned up temporarily using a fog machine, creating a surreal experience in the middle of a room.  Smilde has created his clouds inside different types of locations, ranging from corridors and hallways, to bedrooms and common spaces.  [The important thing to me would be how long the cloud would be visible — what does “temporarily” mean?  If it disappears after only a minute or two, I’m not all that impressed.  But that information wasn’t given.]

• A group of 400 (probably pitch pine) trees in Pomerania, northwest Poland take a sharp turn toward the sky, rounding into little J shapes as they make their ascent.  There’s no definitive answer for these bizarre shapes — the most grounded theory is that the trees may have simply been buried beneath a terrible snowstorm in their infancy.  The most intriguing explanation suggests that a group of farmers manipulated the trees after planting them.  The thought is that they hoped to make bent-wood furniture, ribs for boat hulls, or yokes for ox-drawn plows from the bent shapes.  Pitch pine is a very durable wood and suitable for boats used in salt or fresh water because of resistance to rot and decay.  Farmers would likely have intervened when the trees were between 8 and 10 years old.
• A tree rests on Mike and Kelle Barry’s home in Annapolis, Maryland as the storm named Sandy ripped through the East Coast of the US.  In every other photo I saw of a house on which a tree had fallen, the house suffered extensive damage.  This one?  Merely a dented roof.  I presume the builder of this house will be able to use this as a strong selling point to his future customers.
• This huge piece of driftwood washed up on the beach at La Push, a small community in Clallam County, Washington.  La Push, surrounded by the lush forest of the Olympic National Park, is located on the northwest coast of Washington’s most westerly peninsula, at the mouth of the Quillayute River.  But this tree is a Sequoia semper virens, or costal redwood, of which the most southerly grove is in Monterey County, California, and the most northerly groves are in extreme southwestern Oregon.  Thus, it travelled hundreds of miles before making landfall.

• Eucalyptus deglupta is a tall tree commonly known as the Rainbow Eucalyptus, the Mindanao Gum, or the Rainbow Gum.  It’s the only Eucalyptus species found naturally in the Northern Hemisphere.  Its natural distribution spans New Britain, New Guinea, Ceram, Sulawesi and Mindanao.  The unique multi-hued bark is the most distinctive feature of the tree.  Patches are shed annually at different times, showing a bright green inner bark which matures to give blue, purple, orange and then maroon tones.
• The Black Spur is located about 60 kilometres east northeast from Melbourne on the Maroondah Hwy in the Yarra Valley between Healesville and Marysville.  The road gained its name from the route taken by displaced aboriginal people from northern Victoria on their way to a mission settlement at Corranderrk.  It’s twisty, with a series of hairpin turns punctuated by short straights.  A few corners are prone to dampness due to the ferny rainforest surroundings.  Scenery is beautiful tall trees and ferns typical of temperate rainforest.  (Unfortunately, 2/3 of the Black Spur was burnt from the Black Saturday firestorm in 2009.)  Known as the Tasmanian Oak, Mountain Ash, Stringy Gum or Victorian Ash, these majestic Eucalyptus regnans trees are limited to southeastern Australia, Tasmania and Victoria.  They grow quickly, a metre per year, and are the largest of Australia’s distinctive eucalypts, with typically no branches until near the crown.  From summer to winter its small white flowers blossom and if the tree isn’t taken by fire it can live up to 500 years before succumbing to old age.
• Clover path, Avenue of the Giants, Humboldt, Northern California.  Maybe one of these is related to the dead body above that washed up on a Washington beach?

• Rough buckeye boards were milled and built up into several layers that could be disassembled — in all, maybe 13 pieces which were joined before carving.  Almost all the work was done using a bandsaw and a couple of Arbortech power carvers (with a few areas worked with hand tools).  The position of the wall studs dictated where the branches should touch the wall.  Site work included coats of water-based finish, with an assistant one day and solo work for 3.  The client rested two white birds on a cozy branch — near an incoming black snake.  Artist: Sabiha Mujtaba.  Cost: around $15,000.
• The Singing Ringing Tree is a wind-powered sound sculpture resembling a tree set in the landscape of the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire.  Completed in 2006, it’s part of the series of sculptures created by the East Lancashire Environmental Arts Network, a project set up to erect a series of 21st-century landmarks, or panopticons (structures providing a comprehensive view) across East Lancashire.  Designed by architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu of Tonkin Liu, the tree is 3 metres tall, constructed of pipes of galvanised steel, which use wind to produce slightly discordant and penetrating choral sounds covering a range of several octaves.  Some pipes are structural and æsthetic while others are cut across their width enabling sound.  The pipes are tuned according to their length via underside holes.  The architectural team says, “As wind passes different length pipes in different layers, the tree sings different chords.  Each time you sit under the tree you’ll hear a different song.”  [Though they’ll all apparently be discordant.]
• Nikau is one of 15 stylised nikau palm trees designed by New Zealand architect Ian Athfield; they’re made from copper, zinc, and steel.  The sculptures were originally conceived as a way of covering up unsightly structural-support pillars, but have since become iconic symbols of Wellington City.  Nine of the trees are structural supports for the Wellington City Library and 6 stand free from architectural burden.  The free-standing nikau palms in different parts of Civic Square help integrate the buildings and the space as a whole.

• This Oak Tree sculpture is 6 metres high and positioned at the Llangunnor roundabout at Carmarthen.  In local tradition, Carmarthen is said to be the birth place of the mythical magician Merlin, claiming that the origin of the name Carmarthen, or Caerfyrddin comes from Myrddin, the Welsh name for Merlin.  Merlin is said to have made a prophecy regarding the old oak tree: “When Merlin’s Tree shall tumble down, Then shall fall Carmarthen Town.”  Other versions of the prophecy state that when the tree falls, the town will drown or flood.  Merlin’s Oak was probably planted by a schoolmaster in 1659 or 1660, to celebrate the return of King Charles II of England to the throne.  In the early 19th century, a local man appears to have poisoned the tree, with the intent of stopping people from meeting under it, and the oak is believed to have died in the year 1856.  In 1951, a branch was broken off from the tree and placed in Carmarthenshire County Museum.  In 1978, the last fragment of the tree was removed from its original place and is now located in Saint Peter’s Civic Hall in Knott Square, Carmarthen.
• In his early 20s, Wisconsin artist Kevin Iris became obsessed with growing small bonsai trees; over time, he amassed a miniature forest of over 20 trees in his home.  One aspect of shaping bonsai trees is learning how to properly “train” the branches to grow in a certain direction.  This is often accomplished by using stiff wires wrapped around the branches to slowly guide them in the right direction.  At one point Iris had a particularly stubborn tree nearly encased in wire when he suddenly realised he could make things a lot easier for himself by removing the tree completely.  Years later he’s made dozens of wire trees that have appeared in galleries and juried shows, some of which are even available for sale online.
• In La Pineda, most of the action is centred around the beaches and modern, palm-fringed seafront promenade, the Passeig de Pau Casals, which extends for 2.5 kilometres and is one of the longest in Catalonia.  Its most prominent feature is the Pines de Mariscal, an extensive pine tree sculpture with fronds created out of huge metal dishes.  I couldn’t find anything about the artist.

Who knew that fruit flies make great photographer’s models?

• Floral primordia of Allium sativum (garlic).
• Pistil of Adenium obesum (desert rose).
• Single optical section through the tip of the gut of a Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) larva, expressing a reporter for Notch signaling pathway activity (green) and stained with cytoskeletal (red) and nuclear (blue) markers.

• Section of a Coccinella (ladybug) leg.
• Eye organ of a Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) third-instar larvae.
• Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) visual system halfway through pupal development showing retina (gold), photoreceptor axons (blue), and brain (green).

• “The fire was moving about 200 yards (183 metres) a minute with flames 200 feet (61 metres) tall.  When I saw it coming up the valley and heading for the highway, the fire safety officer and I took off to beat it before it closed off the road.  We were one of 3 vehicles to make it out.  When we looked back, shortly before this shot was taken, the fire was still only burning on the south side of the road — the left side of the picture.  Then, suddenly, all the trees on the right side of the road exploded into flames — even though there was no fire contacting them.  That’s when I grabbed the camera.  There are about 100 fire engines on the other side of that flame.  An ABC News van was completely demolished.  The fire melted all of their equipment.  Molten aluminium was running down the road.  Remarkably, no one was injured.” — Troy C Whitman, Cypress, California.
• Summoned by scientists who launched a 3-foot-high rocket toward the belly of a passing thundercloud, a bolt of lightning crashes into Mosquito Lagoon near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.  From the rocket’s tail a spool of copper wire unwound, triggering the strike and creating an artificial path for the cloud’s electric charge.  [When I first saw this photo, I thought lightning had struck the mast of a sailboat.  Luckily, that proved untrue.]
• Burra is a pastoral centre and historic tourist town in the mid-north of South Australia, only 154 kms north of Adelaide.  When the mine was exhausted and closed, the population shrunk dramatically.  For the next 100 years, the townships supported pastoral and agricultural activities.  Today, the town continues as a centre for its surrounding farming communities and, being one of the best-preserved towns of the Victorian era in Australia, as a historic tourist centre.  This abandoned farmhouse was first photographed by famous Australian landscape photographer Ken Duncan.  After that, a lot of photographers have gone on a pilgrimage to there.  The house is located 3 km north of Burra, on the Barrier Highway, just next to the road.  The best time for photographing it is the second part of the day and sunset (of course).  Because of its popularity, the owner had to put “Private Property — Trespassers Prosecuted” signs on the fence.  (You’ll probably not be able to find such sign elsewhere in that region.)  So please don’t go over the fence in order to get better viewpoint!

• There’s no doubt that planetary surface material is continually being shipped around between rocky planets and moons in our solar system.  Ejected by high energy asteroid or comet impacts, chunks of stuff follow a range of orbital trajectories that result in both eventual return to their origins or transferral to the surfaces of other worlds.  Increasing evidence suggests that a variety of (typically microbial) organisms could be carried along, surviving the extremes of pressure and acceleration, as well as the exposure to thousands to millions of years of interplanetary space.  They need not do this in stasis — tucked well inside the interstices of rock and ice, it’s not inconceivable that microbes could be passengers in the natural equivalent of the generation ships of science fiction.  It means that there’s a real possibility for life to both cross-infect, and even to be “seeded” from planet or moon to planet or moon.  Discoveries about the remarkable abundance and diversity of so-called pre-biotic chemistry (the stuff that represents all the underlying building blocks of bio-chemistry) in every nook and cranny of our solar system, and even in the proto-stellar nebula of other stars and the wilds of interstellar space –— swings the pendulum back to Earth.  Nature seems very adept at making all the pieces for life, apparently raising the odds of local bio-genesis.  But this doesn’t mean that interstellar, galactic panspermia isn’t still relevant.  It might be happening.  The sequence of events involved in panspermia will weed out all but the toughest or most serendipitously suited organisms.  Life driven by cosmic dispersal will probably end up being completely dominated by the super-hardy, spore-forming, radiation resistant, chemical-eating, and long-lived but prolific type of critters.  Billions of years of galactic transferral will have whittled it down to only the most indelicate and non-fussy microbes — super efficient, super persistent, and ubiquitous — the galactic top dogs.  If evolved galactic panspermia is real it’ll be capable of living just about everywhere.  There should be stuff on the moon, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus, even minor planets and cometary nuclei.  Every icy nook and cranny in our solar system should be a veritable paradise for these ultra-tough lifeforms, honed by natural selection to make the most of appalling conditions.  So if galactic panspermia exists why haven’t we noticed it yet? There are all sorts of plausible reasons.  The simplest is that we’ve not yet managed to look very hard in all those places.  We should do so.  (Or, another explanation is that we may live in a simulated universe, which only has the computational resources to model the development of a complex living world on just one or a few planets.  Extra-solar planets may only be generated as we develop the skills to image them, and only in the detail we are capable of observing.)
• A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone.  That’s 10 times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents.  These bugs, moreover, are diverse.  Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes.  The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3 million.  Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not.  Many of them add something to the body’s genetic mix.  And it really is a system, for evolution has aligned the interests of host and bugs.  In exchange for raw materials and shelter the microbes that live in and on people feed and protect their hosts, and are thus integral to that host’s well-being.  Neither wishes the other harm.  In bad times, though, this alignment of interest can break down.  Then, the microbiome may misbehave in ways which cause disease.  That bacteria can cause disease is no revelation — but the diseases in question are.  Often, they aren’t acute infections of the sort 20th-century medicine has been so good at dealing with (and which have coloured doctors’ views of bacteria in ways that have made medical science slow to appreciate the richness and relevance of people’s microbial ecosystems).  They are, rather, the chronic illnesses that are now, at least in the rich world, the main focus of medical attention.  For, from obesity and diabetes, via heart disease, asthma and multiple sclerosis, to neurological conditions such as autism, the microbiome seems to play a crucial role.  One way to think of the microbiome is as an additional human organ, albeit a rather peculiar one.  It weighs as much as many organs (about a kilogram, or a bit more than two pounds).  And although it is not a distinct structure in the way that a heart or a liver is distinct, an organ does not have to have form and shape to be real.  The immune system, for example, consists of cells scattered all around the body but it has the salient feature of an organ, namely that it is an organised system of cells.  Known genetic diseases are often hard to treat and always incurable.  The best that can be hoped for is a course of drugs for life.  But the microbiome is medically accessible and manipulable in a way that the human genome is not.  It can be modified, both with antibiotics and with transplants.  If the microbiome does turn out to be as important as current research is hinting, then a whole new approach to treatment beckons.  (And perhaps some members of that microbiome had ancestors that travelled very very very long distances to get there.)
• In the mud of the Danish seafloor are bacteria that appear to function as living power cables, transmitting electronic currents across a number of centimetres.  Researchers at the Aarhus University in Denmark and at the University of Southern California were surprised to find that Desulfobulbus bacterial cells, measuring only a few thousandths of millimetre across, were responsible for a seemingly inexplicable electrical source emanating from the seabed.  After conducting experiments on the bacteria (which are invisible to the naked eye) the team found that the current was in fact generated by the bacteria themselves.  “The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane,” says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University.  It was previously thought to be impossible to move electrons over those distances in an entirely biological system, but by linking together into multicellular filaments, the bacteria can transmit current over distances as long as a centimetre. Bacteria living in marine sediments power themselves by oxidizing hydrogen sulfide.  Cells at the bottom live in a zone that is poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulfide, and those at the top live in an area rich in oxygen but poor in hydrogen sulfide.  The solution?  They form long chains that transport individual electrons from the bottom to the top, completing the chemical reaction and generating life-sustaining energy.  At first, scientists thought that the electrons were being generated by external networks among different bacteria.  But in a single teaspoonful of mud, they found up to one kilometre’s worth of living power cables.  In an undisturbed seabed there are tens of thousands of kilometres of cable bacteria under a single square metre of the sea floor.

• In a recent study, researchers had a female go to a mall and request people fill out a survey.  On the day she wore a Tommy Hilfiger sweater with a visible label, 54% complied.  On the second day, when she wore the same exact sweater but with the label removed, only 13% took the survey.  In another study, researchers wearing designer clothing collected twice as much in charitable donations as those wearing plain clothing.  In another, subjects judged a job applicant in an interview as more worthy of the job, recommending a 9% higher salary for the one with the label.  The label always won.  (Always?  And there were no experiments that failed?)  It’s not that labels make people think the wearers are wealthy or stylish; it makes people trust them more.  On one hand, the labels do exactly what manufacturers hoped they would, only to a greater (and crazier) degree: if the brand is one of quality, the person who knows to buy it must have good judgement.  Blame evolution — most animals can tell at a glance if other members of the species are healthy, fertile, or just plain awesome — a peacock with perfect feathers can get them only by being a healthy specimen.  Humans are different what with clothes, makeup and accessories — the shortcuts for judging aren’t as reliable at a glance.  Life would be simpler if people just had “trustworthy” stamped on their chests.  So, in the absence of that, we pick the people who spend twice as much on their clothing based on a brand name.  Makes sense.
• Studies show that if you really want people to like you as a person, you’re actually better off ignoring their pleas for help — make them do favours for you instead.  Just remember, really go over the top thanking them for it.  It has to do with how people don’t like feeling that they owe you something, but like feeling that you owe them.  The problem with doing minor nice things for people is that they forget about it much faster than the person doing the favour does.  A few days later, that girl has long forgotten the coffee you brought her while you get annoyed that she didn’t appreciate it enough.  A month later, you’re still thinking, “BUT I GAVE YOU THAT COFFEE!”  While the value of the gift decreases in the recipient’s mind, it actually gets inflated in the giver’s mind.  The innocent favour turns into a kind of power play.  The Ben Franklin effect, so called after an offhanded quip he once made regarding the favourer/favouree relationship, goes like this: “If you can convince a person who doesn’t really think much of you to do a favour for you — even a small one — this tricks him into suddenly believing that he likes you.  All you need to do is remember to thank him enough.”
• We devote a huge amount of our time, money, and energy to not looking stupid in public.  For some of us, this leads to a level of self-consciousness that threatens a nervous breakdown whenever we do something that’s labelled “wrong” in public.  Fortunately, this general aversion to public humiliation offers a neat little shortcut to aspiring ascenders in popularity rankings: Scientists have found that when people see you get openly embarrassed, they tend to think of you as a nicer person.  Berkeley psychology researchers set up an experiment where participants were filmed while they described an embarrassing moment in their lives.  Other participants watched the videos and rated how embarrassing the situation was while assessing how kind they felt the people telling the stories were.  The participants who were consistently rated as nicest were the ones who were visibly affected by their embarrassing situations, writhing in front of the camera as memories tormented their brains.  What’s more, it worked the other way around, too: the people who did have embarrassing stories, yet chose to maintain a careful poker face while telling them, got labelled as selfish and untrustworthy.  Several other experiments verify that our brains indeed have a tendency to associate visible embarrassment with kindness and trustworthiness, whereas the shame-free end up filed in the same “do not trust” folder as used car salesmen.  The person who gets embarrassed easily is likely to be extra nice to others in order to avoid getting a red face — thus embarrassment itself is an indicator of a degree of trustworthiness.

• This little bubble is the brainchild of Pierre Stephane Dumas.  It serves as a compromise for those who like to sleep under the stars but would rather not be exposed to everything that Mother Nature might throw at them.  BubbleTree, a French company, delivers and inflates these totally transparent igloos to the camping site of your choice.  It’s a bit like an air mattress, but bigger and comes decked out with beds, chairs and occasionally wooden floors.  It’s inflated and kept rigid using a silent pump and an airlocking door.  The downside?  If you’d like to stay in one (the allowed locations are all in France), the price is about $600 a night.  If you’d prefer to buy your own, the price tag is about $12,000.
• Is a plastic igloo too flimsy for you?  Check out I-gloobox designed by Georgi Djongarski.  This super sturdy tent is made of waterproof materials and has thick padding to keep you warm through even the harshest winter.  The downside?  This is supposed to be “easy to carry”.  By how many people?  It comes on a little wheeled cart — whose tiny wheels are supposed to go through snow or over tree roots?  I really rather doubt that.
• Specially-coated solar threads woven into conventional fabric allow a new way of capturing the sun’s energy.  The heart of Orange’s Concept Tent is a central wireless control hub which displays energy generated and consumed as well as providing a wireless internet signal; all information is displayed on a flexible, touchscreen LCD display screen.  Integrated into the hub is a wireless charging pouch which powers mobile phones and other portable devices without the need for messy wires and multiple chargers.  The “magnetic induction” technology passes an electric current through a coil embedded in the charging pouch.  This in turn generates a magnetic field which creates a charge and powers the battery.  Also controlled by the central hub is an internal heating element embedded within the tent’s groundsheet; this underfloor heating is triggered automatically once the interior temperature falls below a set level.

• The northern lights and the Milky Way captured together by photographer Iurie Belegurschi as he waited patiently for a glimpse of the famous lights over Iceland.
• Lightning illuminates clouds above Monument Peak, Arizona, US.  Lightning is an electrical discharge caused by the accumulation of electrical charge on clouds.
• A mid-country Chinese railway.

• A goose enjoying daisies.
• This is a jumping stick grasshopper, Proscopiidae, in the Jatun Sacha Reserve in Napo, Ecuador.  These grasshoppers are flightless and rely on camouflage for their protection.  They are, however, able to jump considerable distances.
• Spotted locoweed is a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug.  Apparently locoweed is to horses what nicotine is to people — an extremely addictive drug that kills them slowly over the course of several years.  During the lean winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in some pastures.  Horses first seek it out for its nutritious goodness, but keep coming back for its psychoactive effects.

• Fum the cat and Gebra the owl are old friends, having met when they were one month old (they’re now about 2 years old).  Fum is a Catalan whose name means “smoke”.  Gebra is Andalucian; her name in Catalan (Gebre) means “frost”.  She allows no human contact but the hand that feeds her; however, she visits her friend Fum nearly every day.
• Nemo the short-clawed otter lives in Germany at the Aquazoo Löbbecke Museum in Düsseldorf.  He seems to really like dogs and greets each canine visitor eagerly.  (I presume there’s some pre-screening of the canine visitors.)
• Around 1 in 3 people worldwide and as many as 80% of people in some countries have antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii, indicating they’ve previously been infected.  After infection, the parasite doesn’t go away — it forms cysts inside muscle cells and neurons where it is able to avoid its host’s immune system.  These cysts don’t seem to cause the host any immediate trouble.  Toxoplasma undergoes the sexual part of its life cycle in one host and a period of asexual reproduction in another.  The all-important sexual stage happens inside the gut of a cat, whereas the asexual stage can happen in any mammal or bird.  Most often this intermediate host is a rodent that’s eaten food contaminated by cat fæces.  So how would a protozoan find a cat to infect and thus complete its life-cycle?  How about by turning the normally cat-averse rodents that act as the intermediate hosts into cat-seeking rodents?  There is, apparently, so much taxoplasma drifting about in the Pacific off the coast of California that it’s a major cause of death in migrating populations of otters.  Some 16% of dead sea otters autopsied between 1998 and 2002 were found to have been killed by a meningoencephalitis linked to the virus.

• I found where a polar bear made friends with some huskies on the coast of the Hudson Bay near the town of Churchill.  That wasn’t, however, this bear or this dog.  I don’t know any of the circumstances surrounding this photo.  But I liked it better than the photos of the other bear-dog friendship.  There must be something about some dogs that some polar bears are attracted to (other than taste).
• Two years ago in a Russian zoo, a female chimpanzee for some reson abandoned her baby.  When one of the employees of the zoo took the little chimp home, her dog (a mastiff), adopted the baby and raised it with her puppies.  No word on how the chimp gets along with the dogs today.
• I couldn’t find out any particulars about this photo.  Living in a heavily wooded area of North Carolina, we were frequently visited by raccoons who came by regularly to steal our pets’ food.  They walked around like they owned the place.  Our cats avoided them (probably with good reason).  The dogs barked at them — from a distance.  They aren’t as cuddly as they look.

This is the Embassy Theatre, where the first Hobbit movie ( Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ) just premiered.  I live rather close by — streets were closed and people were everywhere (about 100,000 showed up).  Great party atmosphere, though.  Click the photo for an establishing shot — at the very end of the street shown is the Embassy.