Today I'll attempt to be more concise once again with each day of learning. Writing is easy, keeping it short and informative is a whole 'nother ball game...
Monday: Don't stop, engineering
Something like this
This week's journey (lol) starts with battling climate change. There are many ideas and solutions to this, and the only thing really holding us back is politics. Or so you'd think.
Climate Engineering is a concept that sounds great in theory, but in practice, potentially devastating. We have more to learn than just figuring out which colour we want our political parties to wearing.
Climate engineering can come in many ways, but the most common idea is to spray sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere which would create clouds, thus cooling the earth.
The study looking into this assumed, when the technology is ready in a decade or two, that about 500 million tons of sulphur dioxide would be dumped into the atmosphere every year for about 50 years, creating sulphuric acid clouds.
This sounds scary but by comparison that's about 1/4 of the amount a large volcanic eruption throws into the air, and the exchange would be a temperature drop of about 1°C.
But each dump would only last a year. The problem is if we stop. If halting this process was abrupt, the effects on wildlife and plantlife would be devastating. It would be like throwing a polar bear into a sandy desert, with temperatures rapidly rising pretty much immediately.
For animals it would force animals that can to rapidly migrate, and for plants, well, they can't do anything at all. The complications would be great. The solution? To make sure we stop gradually. And we would stop. climate engineering is only a temporary measure while we stop using fossil fuels and generally buck up our ideas.
Tuesday: Airborne Algae
Deadly stuff
During my post about the dead sea, I demonstrated how the lake actually harbours quite a bit of life. Microscopic individuals for the most part, but once every decade or so, algal blooms would burst into action, leaving a blanket of red life.
Well, these blooms are common everywhere, but they're not great, especially in the case of blue-green blooms. They suck oxygen from the water, block out sunlight and perhaps worst of all, release toxins. All of this is exacerbated by run=off from agricultural waste material that helps them thrive and bloom all the more.
The toxins they release are a type of aerosol similar to spray can aerosols and a study shows that around wave-breaking areas like the shoreline, they can indeed be launched into the air causing atmospheric pollution - though it only really needs wind speeds of about 7 miles per hour.
Once in the air, the toxins can travel thousands of miles, so everyone near coastlines have both drinking and breathing to worry about! Come to life, my pretty hypochondriacs!
Wednesday: Georgetown, Canada
Outta the way, Great Barrier Reef
When you look at the world map, you might understand that South America was once in contact with Africa among other ancient connections before the continents started drifting apart.
One that you might not expect, however, is Australia being connected with North America. Evidence?
Well, in Georgetown, Australia, a bunch of rocks there do not identify with any rocks found in the rest of Australia, but strike an uncanny resemblance to those in Canada.
The story is pieced together as such: Rocks from Georgetown, Canada were deposited in shallow waters about 1.7 billion years ago, in the age of the supercontinent Nuna. This Georgetown then broke off from North America and floated over to Australia, colliding with the region of Mount Isa some 100 million years later.
This also created a small, perhaps now imperceptible mountain range, of which there is some evidence.
So Australians, if you ever want to secede, just move to Georgetown and point out that it has belonged to Canada since Ancient times!
Thursday: Break a Leg
The older you get, the more bones you happen to break. It's a fact of life. I've never come close to breaking a bone however, so the very thought of that level of pain terrifies me daily.
But we're still actually figuring out how they actually occur. In the elderly, we have been told by new research to re-think what's actually going on.
Typically, we think of old people being slow and weak before buckling over, landing funny and snapping a leg in half or something. But Engineers show that this might be in the wrong order.
What seems to be the case according to one study is something more like the collapse of a bridge. Microcracks within the bones grow slowly over time from constant loading - like trucks over a bridge. At some point, that crack gets to such a point that there's more crack than bone, and to risk mixing metaphors here, the bridge gives way.
In this case, a fall might actually be the result of a broken bone, rather than the other way around.
I can see some benefit to growing this understanding. Perhaps, like bridges, we can learn to patch up the microcracks, or better yet, prevent them by emphasizing and increase in bone quality. With up to 30% of elderly suffering major injuries from such falls, well... I don't wanna break a bone! Save me!
Friday: Gut bakterien ist schlecht
Bilingual puns? There's no stopping me. This is one of those studies where I can't help but wonder how on earth they even conjured up the idea to get them into this position of discovery in the first place.
Much of our gut bacteria is either beneficial or just harmlessly chilling out.
Enterococci is one such bacteria, and is known to be quite resilient. These bacteria are found in all mammalian guts including our own and has recently been noted as problematic, since its increasing toughness has lead to resistance of multiple drugs.
This wouldn't usually be an issue in the case of Enterococci, but recently when looking at cow dung (as you do), they found a new strain carried a toxing strikingly similar to that which causes botulism. For those who don't know, botulism can kill.
This new Botulism toxins the 9th discovered so far, and comes along only a few months after the same team discovered one in August. It's another 50 years into the past before we come across the previous one.
Now before we panic, I did say drug resistant, but this bacteria still succumbs to several antibiotics. Not only that but it was only found in one sample, from an animal that was not suffering from botulism. Furthermore, deliberately inserting it into rats had no effect until the researchers deliberately manipulated it to become the effective neurotoxin we fear so much.
There is concern though. It seems that gene transfer could more easily send this toxin to more dangerous, antibiotic resistant bacteria via plasmids, the same way it would have passed on to enterococci. When that day comes, it could be a real problem.
Well, let's just hope it's designed to target some annoying, unimportant animal like, I dunno, humans.
And that's all for now! Lessons learnt: All good bacteria should be wiped out, the lazier I am, the less chance I have of breaking a bone in the future, Australia is merely a district of Canada, Algae will kill us all and climate engineering will kill us all.
Thanks for reading!
All images CC0 licensed