Las ratas ayudan

Fascinating piece in El Universal's website about drainage in the Valley of Mexico City.

Sun, Stimulus and a Sneeze

The tendency to sneeze when suddenly exposed to sunlight or other bright light may be caused by an extra-sensitive visual cortex, the part of the brain that receives visual signals, according to a study in PLoS ONE. The so-called "photic sneeze reflex" or ACHOO (Autosomal Cholinergic Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst) syndrome affects an estimated one in four people. The study, which compared the reactions of 10 photic sneezers and 10 control subjects, appears to be the first to examine the condition. The researchers measured the electrical activity of the participants' brains while they were shown a shifting pattern of white and black squares. At around 60 milliseconds after each shift and again 140 milliseconds later, the visual cortices of sneeze-prone subjects showed significantly higher activity than those of the control subjects.

Caveat: A larger study is needed to verify the findings. More precise measurements are needed to identify which particular areas of the visual cortex drive the response.
 
Read the Study: When the Sun Prickles Your Nose: An EEG Study Identifying Neural Bases of Photic Sneezing

Weymouth JournalWeymouth Journal

A man who was stopped for not wearing a seat belt discussed the matter with Sgt. Lee Savage, left, and Police Constable Graham Pinney on Thursday in Britain’s Dorset County.

The officers cautioned another Dorset driver against tailgating.

One after the other, the motorists were caught blatantly violating the law. One after the other, they tried to talk their way out of it with elaborate diversionary narratives.

Though he had been spotted exiting his driveway with no seat belt, the man in the Isuzu Trooper stated that he had unbuckled the belt just that instant, in preparation for entering a gas station. Though his cellphone registered an outgoing call, the man in the Mitsubishi L200 Animal claimed that he had merely answered the phone, almost as an afterthought, as he rounded a traffic circle. And the woman in the silver Vauxhall boldly asserted that she had left her BlackBerry at home and that anyone who observed her typing while driving was sorely mistaken.

Oops. “I’m sure your mum told you never to lie to a policeman,” said Sgt. Lee Savage, a traffic officer with the Dorset Police Department, casting doubt on her credibility by locating the BlackBerry — open to Facebook — on the passenger seat and fining her £60, about $90.

Special pleadings are not acceptable in the “No Excuse” initiative being run here in Dorset, a largely rural county on Britain’s south coast. The yearlong, $1.25 million project — a combination of advertising, education and increased police patrols — is an effort to reduce the number of accidents caused by driver inattention, a common problem across the car-driving world.

The New York Times - In Dorset County, inattentive drivers are being watched. 

violations include things like changing CDs, fiddling with the radio, folding maps, programming GPS navigation devices, dialing hands-free phones, looking for stray French fries in fast-food bags and steering with one’s elbows while pouring a cup of coffee.

I'd like to see that one: pouring coffee whilst steering with one's elbows.

The drivers caught that day tended to employ the “I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy” defense, admitting only to part of the misdeed. Stopped for making a call while driving to his job as a window repairman, a man in a dusty Vauxhall tried to claim in mitigation that he had just bought his phone and had not yet had time to activate his plan to install a hands-free system. His assertion was undercut by the obvious elderliness and grubbiness of the phone.

It gets better.


Mr. Smith, the road safety manager, said that the campaign’s name was a homage to motorists’ endless litany of fruitless rationalizations. “I was out about a year ago and we stopped a lady who had three children in the back of the car,” he related. “The officer said, ‘Why aren’t these children belted in?’ and she said, ‘They’re not my children.’ ”

Or worse.

The Body as Bacterial Landlord

Utterly fascinating article.

The human body teems with so many microbes that they outnumber our own cells ten to one. Vast schools of bacteria are in us and around us, like fish nuzzling a coral reef. "They are not simply along for the ride," says Stanford University microbiologist David Relman. "They are interacting with us."

10-1 ratio. Interesting.

As many as 500 species of bacteria may inhabit our guts, like H.pylori. Maybe 500 or so other species make themselves at home in our mouth, where each tooth has its own unique bacterial colony, Dr. Relman recently determined. No one knows how many species we contain in all. This past August, researchers at Kings College London identified yet another new species of oral bacteria between the tongue and cheek.

Just identified? Amazing.

"By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent Type 1 diabetes," Dr. Chervonsky says.

The diversity is more than anyone expected. Dr. Segre, who specializes in the study of the skin, found one set of microbial communities thriving in the bend of the typical elbow and an entirely different set of colonies on the average forearm. In all, she identified 113 different kinds of bacteria living in concentrations of about 10,000 per square centimeter on the surface and, just beneath the skin, in densities of one million microbes per square centimeter, she reported last May.



Bacterial colonies growing in a petrie dish.

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A Library Encounter

An encounter such as this one makes me wonder why I went to library school; luckily, there are offsetting encounters that balance things out.

Telephone rang; it was around 10am. I picked it up and said, "Reference Desk."
"Could you help me out, my computer's down."
Recognized her voice instantly. Her computer has been down for weeks.
"I'm looking for the telephone number of a John Conner in Westhampton. That's c-o-double n-e-r."
"Sure; hold on a minute." I was remembering all the reference courses I took in Library School, all the research I had to conduct, the papers I had to write (using APA citation protocol), the exams I had to take, the money I had to pay, the grief I had to suffer, the long hours and long months.

I went to library school and took a bucketload of reference courses so I could look up a phone number for a person who refuses to do the work herself (or pay directory assistance, which is understandable, for these days each call is a buck, or more). I have two master's degrees, and I'm looking up phone numbers?

Found a John Conner in the Suffolk County White Pages. C-o-double n-e-r, but in East Quogue, not Westhampton, but it was the only John Conner in the Suffolk County. Research told me I'd found not the requested item, but a close approximation, and intelligence and experience told me this was the only one.

"I found a John Conner," I told the patron, holding the phone a couple of inches away from my ear, for this is a loud-voiced patron. "But in East Quogue, not Westhampton."

"Oh," she said. Loudly. "You're sure there's no other John Conner?"

"Yes, I am. He's the only one."

"That's C-o-double n-e-r, right?"

Holding the phone half a dozen inches from my ear, I answered, "yes, as you said. He's in East Quogue, not Westhampton. Would you like the number?"

"Oh, okay." She continued speaking loudly, and I continued to hold the phone away from my ear.

"That number is," I intoned, and hesitated. Wait, wait until I get a piece of paper is one of the comments she's made in the past. The woman calls looking for a telephone number of a person in Suffolk County, of a pharmacy in Hempstead, of a restaurant in Mineola, and she does not have a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil ready. I went to get a second master's degree for this.

"Yes," she said, indicating she was ready.

The number was, say, 744-6610; I began slowly. "Seven-four-four."

"Wait, now, that's seven-four-four?"

"Yes, that's right," I said, and paused.

"Yes?"

"Six, six."

"Six, six?"

"Yes, six-six."

"Okay."

"One."

"Yes?"

"Zero."

"One, zero?"

"Yes, that's right: one-zero."

"So, that's 744 ..." she said, and paused.

"Right, seven-four-four."

"Six, six, one, zero?"

"Right, 6610."

"And that was Conner: c-o-double n-e-r?"

"As you said, yes."

"And there's no other Conner in Westhampton?"

"No, there is only the Conner in East Quogue."

"And his number's 744-6610?"

"Yes, it is?"

"Thank you dear," I heard her voice saying as I returned the phone to its cradle. Another successful research project completed.