Make you Fink on Friday

Heart disease present in ancient mummies

The mummified remains had signs of heart disease

Fatty arteries may not just be a curse of modern unhealthy lifestyles, say researchers who used scans to look at the heart health of mummies.

A study in The Lancet of 137 mummies up to 4,000 years old found a third had signs of atherosclerosis.

Most people associate the disease, which leads to heart attacks and strokes, with modern lifestyle factors such as smoking and obesity.

But the findings may suggest a more basic human pre-disposition.

Previous studies have uncovered atherosclerosis in a significant number of Egyptian mummies but it had been speculated that they would have come from a higher social class and may have had luxurious diets high in saturated fat.

To try and get a better picture of how prevalent the disease was in ancient populations, the researchers used CT scans to look at mummies from Egypt, Peru, southwest America, and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

They found that 47 or 34% showed signs of definite or probably atherosclerosis.

Where the mummies’ arterial structure had survived, the researchers were able to attribute a definite case of atherosclerosis by looking for the tell-tale signs of vascular calcification.

In some cases, the arterial structure had not survived but the calcified deposits were still present in sites where arteries would have once been.

Age-related

As with modern populations, they found that older people seemed to be more likely to show signs of the disease.

The researchers said the results were striking because they had been able to look at the disease in people living in disparate global regions, with different lifestyles and at different times.

Read more

Opinion:

Contradicts a lot of things.

All along we are told that heart problems are a modern curse caused by our diets and habits, and now we find that it existed before our junk food and cigarettes.

Nothing ‘new’ at all.

Making Trash Mean Something

Artists are usually ahead of the curve when it comes to being green.

From: Non-Trashy Recycled and Trash Art

Read and see more, lots more.

Change the World Wednesday – 29th May

Running late today, although when you get to my age, it’s more like a fast hobble.

Doing things, not doing the things I should be doing, but doing other things.

My mean green leaf eating machine from Sunday’s Nature Ramble is doing fine. He wasn’t very active in the clip I posted, so I shot an action movie yesterday, you can see that on my post Day Off. Could be inline for an Oscar here.

I have resigned myself to the harsh white light of the eco-bulb. Every time I turn it on I am reminded of the line in the song… ‘Blinded by the light….’

Click on the banner for the full post

This week’s CTWW is about water, again, but with a difference.

This week challenge others to reduce water. You might write a post, asking your readers to take shorter showers or to wash full loads of laundry. Perhaps you ask your Facebook or Twitter followers to let their lawns go dry for a week. This will be your challenge … you may make it as broad or specific as you wish and on any platform that suits you. The goal is to expand our circle and get more people reducing water use.

 

OR … If you’d rather not challenge others, then please find additional ways to conserve water in your household.

The botequim nextdoor

The botequim next door, my favourite watering hole, has a hose for the players and kids from the praça to use as a free shower or drink. It’s a service that the bar does for the praça, because the bar has to pay for the water used.

Many times the kids forget to turn of the water, or waste it with horseplay. I began policing the use, and reminding the forgetful ones to turn of the spigot. Since I started now many of the fregües (regulars) have adopted the same role.

It’s not so often now that we have to remind kids, they’ve got used to the idea and have become self-policing.

It’s a small thing, but the word has spread.

This is the type of thing that I do as a matter of course, not just because it is a CTWW challenge.

Simple Green Ideas

I am sure that some of you have a wreck, a clunker, or an old car stashed in the yard. Something that has seen better days and is too old to sell, the wreckers want to charge a fortune to tow away, so you’ve just left it there.

Try this…

Get some more mileage from it.

 

Monday Moaning

Laudable or not?

This story disturbs me. Once gain we are meddling with Mother Nature and history tells us this is just plain wrong and will end in disaster.

Scientists hope glowing trees will one day replace street lights

Could bioluminescent plants one day replace light bulbs?

That is the goal of a group of California scientists who are looking to genetically engineer bioluminescent plants that could eventually be used as streetlights or bedside reading lamps.

“We are using Synthetic Biology techniques and Genome Compiler’s software to insert bioluminescence genes into Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant and member of the mustard family, to make a plant that visibly glows in the dark,” the scientists write on their Kickstarter page, where they are raising money for the effort.

The process is done using the so-called Agrobacterium method, meaning that specially designed DNA derived from the luminescent compounds in fireflies will be inserted into a special type of bacteria that can inject its DNA into the plant.

“Flowers of the plant are then dipped into a solution containing the transformed bacteria. The bacteria injects our DNA into the cell nucleus of the flowers which pass it onto their seeds which we can grow until they glow!” write the scientists.

The group touts glowing plants as a potentially environmentally friendly source of light that is relatively cheap, easy to dispose of and doesn’t require an external power source such as polluting batteries.

The idea of glowing plants is not new. Back in the 1980s, scientists developed a glowing plant, but it required the injection of luciferin, a compound found in many bioluminescent organisms.

The scientists say that strongly luminescent plants are still a way off.

“We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow in the dark paint) but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0.,” they write. “The more money we raise, the more we can refine our designs and the stronger the effect we will get.”

The project is not without controversy.

According to the New York Times, two environmental organizations have asked Kickstarter and the Agriculture Department to shut down the project.

In their letter, the groups said the project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” according to the New York Times.

Go see the video clip

Opinion:

This messing with nature does not bode well.

Laudable or not, trying to reduce the need for electricity and resources, but at what cost?

We all know that when we modify organisms, they tend to ‘escape’ into nature and begin unbalancing the environment.

Then these plants may cross-breed into the food chain, our food chain.

How do you tell your kid to turn out the light and go to sleep, when it’s him glowing?

Yeah, go on, laugh!

But who’s to say it can’t happen?

Everything they do in the cause of technology is scary!

Nature Ramble

This week, not even leaving the backyard.

It’s surprising what you can see if you keep your eyes open, even if it is before you get to your gate.

This morning I found this bicho (any insect or bug) chewing on the leaves of my goiaba branca (white guava) tree.

A better, but fuzzier view

This caterpillar was at least 4+ inches long, here he is stretched out.

Having lunch

Not an action movie, but there’s a lot of eating going on.

By googling, I believe he is a Hawk Moth of some description. There’s many different types… elephant, oleander, lime, eyed, death’s head, private, popular, etc.

I am going to leave him and follow his/her progress, hopefully with photos.

 

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

We think we can outsmart nature.

But we are wrong, so terribly wrong. Nature wins every time. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about floods, erosion or even the smallest things like cockroaches.

Yes, that ghastly insect we all love to hate.

They make women scream, men stamp on them at every turn, we poison them and try to eradicate them, but they are still with us; and Mother Nature is making sure they will be with of us for a long long time yet.

Cockroaches lose their ‘sweet tooth’ to evade traps

Dr Coby Schal: The cockroaches spit out the glucose “like a baby rejects spinach”

A strain of cockroaches in Europe has evolved to outsmart the sugar traps used to eradicate them.

American scientists found that the mutant cockroaches had a “reorganised” sense of taste, making them perceive the glucose used to coat poisoned bait not as sweet but rather as bitter.

A North Carolina State University team tested the theory by giving cockroaches a choice of jam or peanut butter.

They then analysed the insects’ taste receptors, similar to our taste buds.

Researchers from the same team first noticed 20 years ago that some pest controllers were failing to eradicate cockroaches from properties, because the insects were simply refusing to eat the bait.

Dr Coby Schal explained in the journal Science that this new study had revealed the “neural mechanism” behind this refusal.

Jam v peanut butter

In the first part of the experiment, the researchers offered the hungry cockroaches a choice of two foods – peanut butter or glucose-rich jam [known as jelly is the US].

“The jelly contains lots of glucose and the peanut butter has a much smaller amount,” explained Dr Schal.

“You can see the mutant cockroaches taste the jelly and jump back – they’re repulsed and they swarm over the peanut butter.”

In the second part of the experiment, the team was able to find out exactly why the cockroaches were so repulsed.

The scientists immobilised the cockroaches and used tiny electrodes to record the activity of taste receptors – cells that respond to flavour that are “housed” in microscopic hairs on the insects’ mouthparts

“The cells that normally respond to bitter compounds were responding to glucose in these [mutant] cockroaches,” said Dr Schal.

“So they’re perceiving glucose to be a bitter compound.

“The sweet-responding cell does also fire, but the bitter compound actually inhibits it – so the end result is that bitterness overrides sweetness.”

Highly magnified footage of these experiments clearly shows a glucose-averse cockroach reacting to a dose of the sugar.

“It behaves like a baby that rejects spinach,” explained Dr Schal.

“It shakes its head and refuses to imbibe that liquid, at the end, you can see the [glucose] on the side of the head of the cockroach that has refused it.”

Read more

So, we’re not about to be rid of these horrid creatures anytime soon.

Mother Nature is winning the battle.

 

What happens when you steal from nature

The last two hundred years technology has gone ahead in leaps and bounds, but now some are paying the price.

An example, we have always considered water to be plentiful, but now we are finding it’s not.

I read a post yesterday, that shows how we waste when we have plenty, then cry when the plenty runs out.

Turning Kansas into a desert

“In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.” – Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly

The farmers have used nature’s reserve water supply and now they have nothing. The water from the aquifers is not to be used, it is what keeps the planet healthy and once it’s gone, it’s gone, for good.

This is not only happening in Kansas, but in Colorado and Texas as well.

Change the World Wednesday – 22nd May

The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, ‘Go!’ -a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’. – E. M. Kelly

— Daniel (@QuotePlayground) May 22, 2013

You could of course extrapolate that to “Go green!” and Let’s go green!” and then it has a lot of meaning for the whole process of CTWW. The people who participate in CTWW challenges are leaders. The ‘goers’ are the politicians. The leaders get things done, the politicians wait for things to be done.

So, stealing Small’s thunder for a bit; let’s get more things done!

My torre serving more as a liquor cabinet

Moving along…

My torre arrived and is installed; as predicted it came wrapped in plastic and had some thin polystyrene pieces protecting the layers. The main package was cardboard, so the pollutant waste was less than I had thought.

On Thursday, I bought a new coffee table. I won’t bore you here with the whole story, should you feel the need to be bored click on the link for the full saga; I can assure you that the first half of that post is less than boring, you may be shocked or indeed it may pique your interest.

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Having got this far… I need more coffee.

BRB

Out of yesterday’s coffee for a quick fix; have to brew some more.

Oh, so you’re just going to have to sit there and wait.

If you think I am going to write something of interest before the coffee is ready, then you’re wrong; with a capital WR!

I don’t care, it’s just the way things are.

If you try to get anything tangible from me at this point, you are wasting your time and placing your life in danger.

And, don’t start with that “you’re addicted to coffee routine” again… I am NOT!

The crisis has been averted, coffee is ready, resume your places everybody, the post can continue.

*as if nothing untoward happened*

Yesterday, I bought one of those economic lightbulb thingies. Basically, it was in a fit of pique because my last incandescent burned out in less than two months. I also gave a fleeting thought to economising.

It wasn’t one of those squiggly ones, they are terrible; everytime I see one, I want to reach for another bottle of wine.

Gone is the soft warm glow of my 60w incandescent. Instead, this post is being brought to you by the harsh white glare of austerity; I feel like a Greek… maybe I could get an EU bailout, they seems to be all the fashion.

Click on the banner for the full post

This week’s CTWW.

Level 1 (The Green Novice) – This week, for at least one full day, disconnect from the Internet except as needed for work (this includes hand-held devices).

 

OR …
Level 2 (The Advanced Greenie) – Disconnect from the Internet, except for work, for the entire week.

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There are more Levels, but in the need to economise, you’ll have to click on the banner to see them, that is should you feel the need to seek a higher plane than us lowly beings down here.

A blathering wreck

This one is terrible. In 24 hours I would be a blathering wreck without even considering the consequences of a whole wekk. (Typo left to show how nervous I am) I would feel like Oklahoma, devastated. I don’t want to look like Hilary Clinton!

Seriously, my PC is 24/7, even when I am sleeping my PC is working. How else am I going to pirate English textbooks like a responsible teacher? Of course, I can do without the movies and music, but my pursuit of perfecting the English language is my greatest virtue… in fact, it is my only virtue.

I am going to have to claim ‘work’, not because of the overnight downloads, but because of my blogs. I drink coffee, I am a serious blogger. Many of you may/may not be aware that I have eight blogs and they take a lot of work to maintain my target of a daily post on them all; as it is I don’t always achieve my tally.

Probably more important is the high possibility of a systems failure if I switch the PC off; sometimes it restarts good, but other times I have a bitch of a job. You see my PC is a girl and suffers from PMT = PC mental tantrums.

Not Lixo, but you get the idea

I do, however, switch off the monitor physically overnight because Lixo can’t sleep; he sits up all night in my chair trying to catch the status bars on the downloads as the creep across the screen.

Then he spends all day sleeping on my clean shirts. He says he is ironing them, but I don’t believe it, because an iron doesn’t leave cat hairs over the black one.

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Some of this post has been serious, some parts not so serious. That’s what happens when you overcaffeinate.