Plume

I was really taken with this picture of Mt Cleveland having a quiet smoke. It is exceedingly remote - about halfway along the chain of the Aleutian Islands which extend in a swooping arc for nearly 2,000km from the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. There are more than 100 separate islands in the chain which together make an area of 17,500sq.km of 'dry' land about half the size of Belgium but with a human populations of only 8,000. We had a brief foray through the trash on Kiska in January.  Kiska is part of the Aleutians too but 870km further West - that's about the distance between Bruxelles and Firenze. There's plenty of space in and off Alaska.

Mt Cleveland is one of four quintessential conical volcanoes [striking picture] which give the name Четырехсопочные Острова The Islands of Four Mountains to the group of 8 islands with a mix of local and political names: Amukta, Chagulak, Yunaska, Herbert, Carlisle, Chuginadak, Uliaga, and Kagamil.  For scale Carlisle and Herbert are about 7km across. Mt Cleveland has been quite active in the last 5 years: blowing its top 3 times in 2009, twice in 2010 and again in 2011 and most recently in Nov 2014.  Maybe that's all for now folks, but remember Eyjafjallajökull in 2010? My girls were caught in Switzerland by that close-down of European air-travel and had to overland themselves home. Even having a quiet smoke has potential to disrupt air travel but an eruption by any of these volcanoes would spew so much static dust into the air that planes would have to be expensively re-routed. But nobody lives in the Aleutians you cry.  Turns out that the great circle shortest path route from San Francisco 37.7^oN to Tokyo 35.7^oN flies right over Chuginadak 52.8^oN.
The archipelago is currently under scientific investigation studying who and how made a living out of this inhospitable region.Wet as they are, getting access to fresh water is often a significant logistical problem: it rains . . . there are roaring floods . . . there is nothing left.  I think I'll put the Aran Islands higher up on my list of archipelagos to visit: easier of access.

Hiking in

Last time they came visiting from England, The Boy and his team urged us all off our sofas at Bunmahon in Co. Waterford and into the wilds to the other end of the River Mahon where it can be said to begin 15km N at Mahon Falls [R].  In the picture you can see shadows, which implies that the sun is shining.  On the day we were there, at least it wasn't raining.  You can see the alien gravel pathway which the County Council has decided is the best way to handle the level of people who come to visit this reasonably delicate site. Dry is a bonus when you consider that most visitors have the walking-in-clouds experience of visitors Bret and Emily. They seem remarkably upbeat about the colour of wet heather and the way wet sheep loomed out of the mist. We met a couple who were pushing a buggy with an infant child, that looked as if it was able to walk but preferred to be a penance to its parents - therefore the path is wheel-chair accessible almost to the base of the falls.

Today on metafilter someone has clagged together a few posts about the Cirque of the Unclimbables [R looking a little like Mahon Falls and a little like Mordor] on the borrrder between Yukon and Northwest Territories in N Canada.  It's more difficult to get there than Mahon Falls, if you fancy a bit of remote rock climbing. The nearest you can get by commercial scheduled flights is Yellowknife 500km to the East. We know someone in Edmondton which is only an inch away on the map but that's 1500km or a two day hammer up the MacKenzie Highway.  When you get to Yellowknife to have to rent-a-car or get driven to a distant lake where you can board a small float-plane which will deposit you on another distanter lake which is an 8hr hike from the base-camp of the Cirque.  If you are made of money and have a tremendous carbon footprint you can hire a helicopter to deliver you, your canvas bath, your tiffin-trunk and your wind-up gramophone to the base camp.

What I like about the tales is that no matter how well-heeled and limber you are, your access to the rock is likely to be severely limited by the weather. Although the Cirque is only 61^oN [about the same latitude as Helsinki], even in the height of Summer in July you are advised to allocate three weeks to your stay in the hope of getting 2-3 days of weather dry enough to be safe on the walls. If you get one day when the weather is really pleasant - nobody has mentioned midges and biting flies - then you are fortunate. If you are going to spend days in a tent then you want to have it big enough to turn round in, but if every gram (and gramophone) of comfort you have on site has to be carried in on your own stout pins, you'll think twice about how big the tent should be . . . and cut the tags off all the tea-bags.  And there are bears!  You are advised to hang your food on a bear-line at least 4m above ground and at least 50m away from your tent. I think I'll stick to Mahon Falls and home to tea and scones immediately afterwards.  Or maybe just stop at home and work my way quiet and intense across my own back-yard like Louis Agassiz.

Brain drain

It's not often that The Blob is hot off the press.  In my relentless drive to provide copy for the interweb, I don't devote enough time to browsing what's already there to tell you about that. I've deprecated filling the interweb with re-churned material from other websites rather than putting some added value out there.  Last night The Beloved's sister asked me about a recent Nature paper (not out yet, it's that hot) [not that sister, another one in the pantheon]. One aspect of this research's interest is the everybode kno fact that all the anatomical parts have been named 100+ years ago, some of which I listed last week.

I talk a bit in my Human Physiology course about the BBB the blood brain barrier, a curious phenomenon that makes drugging some diseases difficult.  Only a very few sorts of molecule can pass from the circulatory system into the brain - clearly those need to include glucose and oxygen because the brain is an enormous consumer of energy: blurfing out 100W of heat from the skull from this activity.  If we could only turn that heat into light actually and metaphorically. But wonderdrugiamab cannot, by any trick, be induced to get into the brain and start kicking Alzheimer ass, for example.

Antoine Louveau, a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Virginia UVA lab of Jony Kipnis is clearly a good pair of hands. The lab has been studying the meninges, the multi-layer envelope of the brain that is integral to the BBB. Inflammation of the meninges causes meningitis, which causes parents and community health people to go weak at the knees because the symptoms are so distressing and they particular affect the young.  The Blob has only mentioned meningitis in passing, I'll have to give it some more attention in the future.  Louveau's key technical insight and application was to "fix" the meninges while they were intact on the inside of the skull of a mouse . . . and then dissect them out and stain them.  Because the lab is interested in the connexion between the brain and the immune system, he stained his preparation for a T-cell specific marker and then looked at his prep under the microscope. He was stunned to see the T-cells lining up across the prep. Our mind is really well-tuned to see patterns in the environment: the early humans who could see 'tiger' in a patch of jungle shadow are our ancestors, the lads who couldn't were dinner.  But psychologists know that we over-interpret random blips in our field of view to see faces so often that we've given the phenomenon a name pareidolia and this ability is key to all the optical illusions that amused us as kids.  So Louveau and Kipnis the boss forced themselves to be skeptical but eventually they convinced themselves and an editor at Nature and three referees that they had discovered an extension of the lymphatic system deep into the brain.  This is big because before this week everybode kno that the lymphatic system stopped at the neck.  The publicity people at UVA are talking large about a cure to Alzheimer's - just drain those plaques out down to a lymph node in granny's arm-pit.  But the real impact is the shake up to our certainty about how the body is constructed - that opens the shutters of our minds to think different solutions to our many problems.  I'll have to do some reading about PNI psycho-neuro-immunology over the Summer, so that my Human Physiology classes next year are up to date.

Pasteurellosis

On Sunday we had Mike the Vet to lunch and while he was on site, he looked at A for Annabelle on whom he had performed some extremity surgery two weeks ago. When the bandages were removed, the stump of the excised toe still looked a little raw but she is not favoring it as much as she did the day after the operation. In the interim, we have trotted the whole flock down and up the lane from their sunny field a few times for dosing and then delousing and to give a heptavac-P jab to the lambs.  This immune-booster is a mix of bacterial toxins from several species of Clostridium as well as formalin-killed Mannheimia haemolytica and Pasteurella trehalosi.  These are about as different taxonomically as you can get within bacteria. M.haemolytica used to be called Pasteurella haemolytica and they are both members of the gamma-proteobacteria which also contains old intestinal favorites like Escherichia coli, and serious pathogens like Vibrio cholerae.  Clostridium, otoh, includes the generators of botox and tetanus toxin and the troublesome C. difficile. I guess the lambs get treated for these disparate potential pathogens because they are the most likely suspects as lamb-killers.

On one of the trips up and down the lane, I noticed that H for Harriet [our flock is beginning to sound like a Squadron from Dambusters come in Red Leader] was a little limpy and when she made the trip two days later she was clearly favoring her right fore-foot. Accordingly we tipped her over, trimmed her hooves and gave her a generous spray of Footmaster which is bright violet in colour and seems to work as a cure-all for sheepy-feety problems. But on the way back to the field after treatment, she seemed to be quite weak-in-the-wind and had to stop to rest <pant pant> on the 100m journey. The foot-treatment seemed to have induced some improvement but we had Mike look at her anyway. He immediately concentrated on her other symptoms, noted the labored breathing, took her temperature (40.4^oC, not good) and said "Pasteurellosis". That confidence of diagnosis, supported by decades of experience, is why we pay vets the big bucks.  He gave her a whack of anti-biotic but a very poor prognosis because Pasteurella does irrecoverable damage to the lung tissue, so it no longer has a tennis-court of surface area for gas exchange - hence the labored breathing.  We were advised to get her two lambs weaned asap and H for Harriet off to the factory because we were not going to get another year of breeding out of her despite her teeth being in working order ["full mouth"].  Dang!

With all this in mind I was primed to cry "synchronicity" when I heard [wikipedia In The News] that Saiga antelopes Saiga tatarica [R looking like an escapee from a Star Wars film], an endangered species of Central Asian antelope, are going through a Pasteurellosis crisis that has killed half of the remaining members of this species in May.  There used to be millions of these animals, extending all the way across Eurasia, with fossils being found in Pleisocene Britain and North America. In the same way that Cuvier could infer a whole animal from a single bone, and Buckland could understand a lot about food pyramids from dissection of coproliths, we are able to deduce what the climate and vegetation was like 2m to 10,000 years ago.  If Saigas were members of that megafauna, then the conditions were most likely like the dry grasslands in which present members of the species thrive.

We've lost the quagga Equus quagga quagga, a half-striped zebra from South Africa, the last example of which died in captivity in Artis Zoo in Amsterdam in 1883. That's a tragedy, but not a disaster because molecular evolutionists have extracted enough DNA from preserved Quagga skins to show that they are probably the same species as the plains zebra that used to be called Equus burchellii, but is now Equus quagga burchellii. It is another example on a tighter time scale of the whales-are-hippos story where the distinctive look of a species turns out to be caused by a very few, almost trivial, genetic changes. Like white folks, hmmm?

A little more worrying was the lost and found story of the Arabian Oryx Oryx leucoryx.  This striking creature was put on the IUCN Red List in 1986 after too many poor little rich kids from Saudi started to amuse themselves by fitting machine guns to their jeeps and roaring over the dunes playing budda-budda-budda with the helpless antelopes. Oryx have now been re-introduced to the wild from an Omani captive breeding programme and number 1,000 individuals. That population, coupled with 6,000+ more in reserves, parks and zoos around the world allowed the IUCN to reclassify Oryx leucoryx as merely vulnerable.  That's progress but the species has been forced through a serious genetic bottle-neck and its reduced diversity will make it more sensitive to the next pathogenic assault.

Pathogenic assault is what is happening to Saiga tatarica. It looks like the mortality among affected herds is close to 100% [like our own Ebola, hmmm?] and perhaps 50% of the documented 250,000 world population has died in the month of May.  Epidemiological results aren't properly in yet but it looks like the lungs of the dead animals are fritzed and that symptom is putting the smart money on Pasteurellosis. The genetic diversity in Saiga has collapsed since the Pleistocene and this will not have helped the species as a whole fight off a pandemic. A similar epidemic swept through the Russian Saiga population in May 2010, but the numbers slowly recovered. Each time death comes swinging his scythe wholesale, the genetic diversity slumps, making the species more susceptible to the next pathogen. Despite its weird proboscis, the Saiga is closely related to the Springbok Antidorcas marsupialis [R for phylogeny]. There is no suggestion that A. marsupialis is particularly susceptible to Pasteurella spp.; that is what makes comparative immunology so interesting.  You'll have to forgive me if I become an artiodactyl-bore over the Summer, it looks increasingly likely that I'm going to do my new 4th Yr course at The Institute by working through the cetartiodactyla.

Mary Anning's dog

The palaeontologist known as Georges Cuvier was born in 1769 and christened Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier.  His younger brother Georges-Frédéric Cuvier was known as Frédéric Cuvier, he was also a zoologist but not so well known nowadays despite being head keeper of the menagerie at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. J.L.N.F "Georges" Curvier was the father of comparative anatomy. He is famous for his statement of universal connectivity "À la vue d'un os, d'un seul morceau d'os, je reconnais et reconstruis la partie de l'ensemble dont il provient". Conan "Sherlock Holmes" Doyle reflected on this "As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after". What are the consequences of this knowledge?

The humerus of a whale or a hippo is chunkier than the humerus of a bat - obviously in absolute terms but also relatively, that means that the whale ribs are going to be more massive as well.  Actually the hippos rib cage is relatively stronger than a whale's because the latter passes of some of the function of ribs (supporting the wobbly bits in the thorax) onto the surrounding water. You can infer a lot about the mating structure in a species if the males are bigger than females or if they have massive horns; you know what a fossil ate from the shape of its teeth, you know if it has seven cervical vertebrae it is likely a mammal. A single grinding molar, a single elongated neck bone and one femur will tell you that the animal ate leaves not rodents.

Cuvier sat in his majesty in his office in the Jardins des Plantes in Paris much is Darwin lay on his chaise-longue in Downe House farting and reading and dictating letters to a world-wide network of collaborators.  The Frenchman described and named an ark of miscellaneous creatures, so where did he get the primary data - the bones and skins? From among others, Mary Anning [below R with the distinctive headland of Golden Cap in the background], a poor but determined woman from Lyme Regis on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset in Southern England.

Mary Anning was born 30 years after Le Grand Cuvier on 21 May 1799. Her father Richard Anning was a cabinet-maker who died of TB when Mary was 11.  Only herself and her brother Joseph survived to adulthood, another 8 siblings fell by the wayside from the illnesses and accidents that used to scythe through the population in those days before reliable clean water and effective vaccination.  Richard used to display "curiosities" in the window of his show as a way of catching the passing trade.  These were heavy on fossils which washed out of the local cliffs, particularly after storms. Shen their father died, Mary and Joseph continued to earn a few shillings finding fossils along the sea-shore and selling them to collectors.  Their most famous contribution to palaeontology was to recover, over two successive seasons, the complete skeleton of an Ichtyosaurus communis, a dolphin-sized aquatic dinosaur which they sold on for £23: about a year's wages for an agricultural labourer in those days.  But that didn't last long when the family couldn't keep a pig and grow their own spuds. Solvency came when another professional collector Colonel Birch sold part of his collection to raise £400 for the Annings.   In 1824, Anning found the skeleton of a Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, another aquatic dinosaur with a very different anatomy - having a tiny head at the end of  an immensely long neck. That fetched £100 and drew the, initally skeptical, attention of Georges Cuvier. Her third claim to fame was to identify the fine partial skeleton of Pterodactylus macronyx a flying dinosaur. These three species are familiar to any child who has a Big Book of Dinosaurs and any one of which would have secured lasting fame to the discoverer.

I think her insight and imagination are more tellingly revealed by her explanation of bezoar stones which were spheroidical masses believed by medieval doctors to be antidotes to all poisons. Anning found a number of them in situ in the abdominal cavity of the marine fossils that she was preparing for pay or display.  The juxtaposition was too frequent to be coincidental and she concluded that they must be fossilised turds.  One of her blokey collaborators William Buckland wrote up her conclusions, citing her, and called them coprolites. The name and the explanation have stuck to this day. Bezoars are still being exploited nowadays "by practicing occultists, pagans, wiccans, shamans; including New Age, magick, and Hoodoo practitioners" but few of them refer back to Anning's theory of intestinal origins.  Buckland, on the contrary, exploited coprolites for science.  Just as Cuvier could reconstruct the entire animal from a single bone, Buckland had a shot at explaining an entire ecosystem, as in who ate what, from a systematic study of the make-up of bezoars.  Nifty!

The list of Anning's correspondents and visitors reads like the pantheon of early 19thC geology and palaeontology: Charles Lyell, Darwin's mentor, Adam Sedgewick, Roderick Murchison all benefitted from her material and her own interpretations of what they indicated.  Louis Agassiz crossed the Atlantic especially to solicit her help to locate key fossil fish from the era whose rocks are exposed on the Dorset coast. It is clear that Anning was regarded as a "curiosity" herself, contemporary opinion suggested that her formidable intellect and diligent pursuit of scientific evidence were the result of being struck by lightning when a child. Several of the men who benefitted from her knowledge plagiarised her work and made money from its publication. It is striking how often collectors would pay Anning £X and sell the material on for £2X shortly there after, like rather aristocratic fences - they had better connexions than she did and had no compunction about profitting thereby.

An exception to this exploitation was Henry de la Beche, who had known Anning since they were teenage friends tearing into the cliffs and sifting through the debris after Winter landslips. It was an unlikely pairing: she was only a carpenter's daughter whereas he was independently wealthy and could afford to live on his money. He later became the Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. In 1830, he painted Duria Antiquior [L] an extraordinarily busy and crowded imagining of what it was like in the shallow seas of 180mya.  It was later made into a lithograph, prints of which were sold and the profits donated to his friend in Lyme Regis.  And what about the dog?  Mary Anning had a dog called Tray which used to accompany her when she was out in the weather collecting. He was almost as important a tool as the geological hammer and the collecting basket which are also shown in her portrait above.  She trained him to sit next to interesting finds while she trudged back home to bring another basket . . . or a wheel-barrow?: some of her finds were far to heavy to lift.  You could imagine never finding the same place again against the featureless length of the beach.  The dog was crushed by an unexpected fall of cliff-face which almost swept Mary Anning to oblivion as well.  She didn't die in the field, she died in agony from breast cancer at the age of 47. She chugged down a lot of laudanum to deaden the pain and the local gossips were happy to bitch this into "she took to the dhrink and died".  The cliffs are notoriously unstable and a young woman was killed by a fall as recently as 2012. 

 You can go fossilling with a local expert this morning at 0900hrs and indeed most mornings of the month.  Indeed I've been out along the Dorset coast myself washing a world of invertebrate fossils out of grey clay boulders that litter the beach.  I wouldn't have Mary Anning's patience to preserve and process anything substantial.  She featured 10 days ago on the Guardian as one of 10 unsung women of science. Hank Green summarises her whole life in 5 minutes in his characteristically shrieky babble.

The Blob's Women in Science List.

Health and Safety

It's a Bank Holiday in Ireland today. Here's a few video links.  I restlessly surf the interweb for such things so that you don't have to  . . . because you have better things to do with your time . . . sleep, have friends round, go jogging.

Don't do this at home, section.

• Why you shouldn't puncture a Lithium-ion battery and possibly why they shoudn't be in Dreamliner aircraft?
• What happens when you chug a half gallon of milk and then "au contraire, as the man said while crossing the Bay of Biscay and the asked him if he'd had a good lunch"
• After a good barf, there's nothing like a good BLEVE which we met before on The Blob in far grimmer circumstances. via Tywkiwdbi.
• Oh the pain, the pain . . . 150x

Science is when someone asks "I wonder what happens when . . .", records the results and then publishes them so we all know.

Marriage referendum wrap

It may seem like a distant memory but the resounding, if far from unanimous, Yes in the Marriage equality Referendum is only last week.  Before we move on to free other dispossessed groups in our society, I'd like to share a few images and ideas in case you missed them. I am partial to a touch of irony and I reckon that satire is one of the most powerful forces in a free political society. Satirical irony is about the only vehicle for public dissent in un-free societies: it depends on The Man being too pompous and dense to get the joke. One of the key posters in the No campaign was a pious nonsense about what children deserve [Top L] as if a happy family is joined at the lip. They might reflect on Ecclesiastes ch10v16 "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child". The actual family whose idealised image was used by the No-people, turned out to be decisively Yes-people and had a new image [Top R] generated in the same colours as the original.  The message is opposite and the relationship looks healthier - they are all looking in the same direction and the child is getting only 1/3 of the attention. [Below L] is another take on the colour-scheme, privileging food and love above the precise quota of the adults in the household: "children deserve a decent meal and loving parents: gay or straight" And you have to love the angry multilayer of the last message [Below R]: you can't think of a better reason to vote No than that you have no time for Elton John. It's the sort of logic that comes down the hot-line from heaven to announce that God says No. Here is a useful archive of election literature on the Mar-Ref which also hosts a backlog from Ireland's previous trots into democracy.
There was a huge response from the Irish diaspora, with people loading themselves on trains, planes and boats to come home to vote because they wanted to be part of a movement. It was caught and displayed on a twitter trendmap illustrating the number of people on their way home. I can't get a figure on the actual numbers of vote-eligible returnees that is higher than 60,000, about the same as the number of new voters like Dau.II on the supplemental register.  Those groups together wouldn't have made a difference to the result, but it makes a fine story about what people will do for issues they care about. And I think a great many people were affected [using the word unmanned in this context is a little edgy?] by the door-step campaign of Ross Golden-Bannon so that no child, no teen, would have to go through the misery he experienced growing up gay in Ould Ireland. Read it if you haven't done so already - it is painful but redemptive.

That same Dau.II will be leaving her teenage years behind this September two years after leaving home to become a tax-paying, financially independent citizen working in the catering trade.  She got herself on the register, got all her pals on the register and got her ass down to City Hall on Friday at 0700hrs to vote before opening up the restaurant for first shift.  On the way across town to work, she encountered a group of three Yes campaigners handing out leaflets and urging folks to vote Yes. Dau.II pointed to her Tá badge and said "I gave already".  They were just delighted [if tears weren't shed at least lips trembled] to see their hopes and hard work canvassing in the drizzle for weeks vindicated by this democratic first-timer carrying a sunnier and warmer future in her hands so early in the day.  When she told me this story I said "You must have made their day", but she replied "The Day made our day".

The Beloved is still wearing her Tá and her Yes badge and was very taken with the cartoon by Annie West [L] of the diaspora coming home to vote. Then she heard that it was available in a limited edition, with the proceeds going to support SpunOut, a group with a brief to listen to and empower the 16-25 youth.  I've tribbed SpunOut before for their direct and accessible approach to talking about sexually-transmitted diseases. ANNyway, TB ordered up a copy of the print and it arrived on Thursday last with a limited edition authentication number of 51/1,201,606.  They are clearly anticipating that all the Yes voters will want a copy!

In 1990, in the wake of Italia '90, Ireland elected their first ever female President, Mary Robinson, who was not only a woman but also a well-known civil rights activist who had campaigned for birth-control and defended David Norris in the European Court of Human Rights in an action that led to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts. After 7 years of that Mary, the people elected Mary McAleese, another Constitutional lawyer who was also qualified in Canon Law, and who goes along with the legalistic details of church doctrine to be clearly against abortion and divorce. But bucking the temptation to pop her into the Catholic Right bin, it turns out that she is a founder member of the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform. Here she talks, briefly, about her position on Marriage Equality - driven by her long embrace of gay people and their rights . . . but also by the fact that her son came out at the age of 21 after a decade of painful soul-searching.  Here she is talking at greater length to the BLT youth group BelongTo. And for balance, here is Breda O'Brien, [home-educator, catholic apologist, Panti-basher, Irish Times columnist and prominent talking head for the No campaign] pointing out that to have McAleese speaking out on either side of a Constitutional Referendum was, if not a constitutional crisis, at least counter to convention among ex-Presidents. Fairy nuff, but then she segues seamlessly into her comfort zone of casting up lurid and irrelevant images about the consequences of marriage equality for surrogacy and the future [probably bad] of gay children raised without a mother AND a father. Of all the images cast up by marriage equality, we now have to find head-room for an Irish girl lost in Copenhagen looking for a Danish sperm-donor to complete her family - thanks a bunch, Breda, but that's just weird.

This is standard propaganda from her Rückschrittlichgruppe the Iona Institute. They have a handy cartoon to help simple ordinary people get to grips with the key issues. This was mercilessly . . . pilloried by Tara Flynn. I dunno, mate, but if having a mother is so important for child development (another theme in the Noes heads) how much better to have two mums?!
It turns out that, in the end, even Hitler voted Yes.

Anyway, it's all over - even the post-result shouting "fix!" has died down - a week has passed and the sky hasn't fallen.