Category: learning curve

Germs, Disease, Infection!

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Three health related things for you to know about:

Firstly: Dead reindeer!
You know that awkward feeling when you thought that chronic wasting disease (CWD) was restricted to deer, elk (Cervus canadensis) and moose (Alces alces) in North America and South Korea, but then researchers announce that the disease has been discovered in a free-ranging reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) in Norway.
Yeah. Exactly. Bad news for free-ranging reindeer in Norway. Glad I’m not going there any time soon.

It is a mystery how this disease arrived on a mountaintop in Norway. Researchers think it unlikely that it was it imported. They suspect that it might have arisen spontaneously, or jumped the species barrier from a prion disease in sheep called scrapie, although such a jump has never been seen before.

Now that it’s there though, history has shown us that it will be hugely difficult to eradicate.
Not great.

Secondly: A comeback!
Scarlet fever struck fear in the hearts of Victorian-era Americans and Europeans. In the late 19th century, it was a leading cause of death in children—killing as many as a third of those who caught the infection.
Not great.
Then suddenly, <sparkly lights>antibiotics!</sparkly lights> and we humans were saved as the Streptococcus spp. succumbed to Alexander Fleming’s penicillin. But now…

…the disease is making a comeback. In 2011, Hong Kong experienced an outbreak that quadrupled in the number of scarlet-fever cases. And, since 2014, England and Wales has been hit by a big outbreak, too. This season, the number of scarlet-fever cases reached a 50-year high.

And no-one knows why. There is no vaccine for Scarlet Fever, so it’s not foolishly impressionable parents making poor decisions based on dodgy “science”. It’s as much a conundrum as CWD in free-ranging reindeer in Norway.
(That’s my new goto metaphor for mysteries now.)

Thirdly: Talking of crimson!
Science, as an entity, was 0-2 down in this post so far, but there’s hope of a late comeback as we snatch a point against the run of play in the treatment of red scrotum syndrome. I’m no expert on this particular condition, but – if pushed – I think I could come up with a guess at both the area affected and the signs and symptoms on said area.
Not great.

We report two cases of red scrotum syndrome responding to oral pregabalin, an anticonvulsant medication commonly used for neuropathic pain. These two cases suggest pregabalin as an effective means for treating red scrotum syndrome and endorse a neuropathic etiology.

Serendipity with the assist on that one, it seems. But either way, I’m sure that anyone suffering with red scrotum syndrome will be relieved to learn that a potential cure has been discovered – by whatever means.

Fake plastic…

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Trees No! Puffins!
Fake Plastic Puffins!

Wait, what?

Remember Radiohead telling us about Fake Plastic Trees?

Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

Here they are doing it at Glastonbury in 2003. (You may remember that I was there.)

And let’s not knock it, because it’s a great song.
But we’re not on about Fake Plastic Trees. Fake Plastic Trees are so passé.
You want to know about the puffins; the Fake Plastic Puffins.

w704

The FPPs are being deployed on the Calf of Man – that’s the small uninhabited island off the southwest coast of the Isle of Man (just next door to the Chicken Rock, actually). And they’re being deployed with a purpose – to encourage Real Meaty Puffins (RMPs) to come and breed again on the island.

Puffins are both gregarious and notoriously unadventurous; they won’t try new nesting sites (technically, puffins live in burrows, not nests, but still…) if there aren’t already some puffins there. But it seems that they don’t need to be RMPs – they can be FPPs and still have the same effect.
Puffins aren’t ever so observant and are a bit daft, it would seem. Aukward.

Manx National Heritage are pretty excited about being involved in the project, and have promised to keep us updated on its progress. I follow them on Facebook, so I’ll pass any news on to you. I know you’ll be interested.

(Thought: Maybe I need to install some Fake Plastic Blog Readers here…? Hmm…)

Meanwhile, here’s another great post about Puffin recipes.
You’re probably best to use RMPs rather than the FPP version for these though.

Mantis

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We had a large visitor to our backyard this lunchtime:

This one was ever so edgy, so was quite difficult to photograph. His skittishness is probably how he’s managed to get so big.

Despite using a really decent camera, to be honest, I don’t think that this compares with some of my other photos of mantises (mantii?) such as this one on a football, this one on a wall and – infamously – this one devouring a gecko:

Ah, happy days (though obviously not for the gecko).

Going critical

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Nothing good comes from things going critical. Nuclear power plants are probably highest up the list of things which are bad when they go critical, with toddler tantrums pretty close behind.
Critical isn’t good situation to be in. Critical is… well… critical.

Unless something rather remarkable occurs very shortly, when their capacities are measured again on Monday, Cape Town’s dams will have fallen below the “critical” level of 30%.

Fullscreen capture 2016-04-14 100229 AM.bmp

It’s obviously an arbitrary level that they’ve chosen to call “critical”, and quite what happens when we cross that threshold is unclear, although we have been told that we shouldn’t panic. But then, that begs the question, why bother having a “critical” level in the first place if nothing changes once you find yourself below it?

After all, very little happened when we crossed the legendary “careful now” 70% margin, nor the distinctly worrying “er… guys…?” 50% line.

I do hope that the city council have got this all in hand…

Barry Wood, the city’s manager of bulk water supply, told the council’s portfolio committee “We don’t have to be too concerned, provided that it starts to rain.”

Ah. That’s all ok then.
Colour me completely reassured.

First & Last

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Nice idea this. The very first and the very last frames of popular series.

I’m not a big fan of these sorts of dramas – I’ve only ever watched one of these (Twin Peaks), and I can confidently say that I’ve never watched a single episode of any of the others. Too much commitment.

[vimeo clip_id=”161613650″ width=”680″ height =”382″]

You’ll have to watch it at least twice, because you miss details from either one or the other when you watch it first time.

You can see that Lost and Sons of Anarchy knew that someone was going to do this one day.
Good call.