Crafty Buggers, part III

Bedbugs. Icky, icky, bedbugs. While they are undoubtedly becoming more resistant to pesticides, just like the corn borers that Monsanto has tried to thwart with GMO seeds, they also undoubtedly utilize the hearing-body-hair that all other insects and spiders have to help them locate predators and prey.

In case you were wondering about the superpowers of YOUR OWN leg hair, wonder no more. Body hair has been shown to help protect against bedbug bites. The bugs disturb your hairs as they crawl across your skin in the night, and you will twitch and flick them away in your sleep, apparently. This is also why bedbugs apparently have an evolved liking for the wrists and ankles, as these areas have less body hair on pretty much all humans (even Robin Williams). The BBC reports:

Hairy limbs keep bed bugs at bay

Crafty Buggers, part II

Recent work has shown that the hairs on spiders' and insects' legs act in the same way as the cilia in the cochlea of the mammalian inner ear - they pick up vibrations in the air, allowing the animals to hear each other. Wired has a great post on the story, including video of the laser and camera setup the researchers used to capture ultrafast images of the hairs doing their vibrational work.

Spiders’ Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears

Crafty Buggers

Via Grist, a report on the burgeoning failure of Monsanto's GMO pesticide-resistant and pesticide-producing crops. Basically, in an evolutionary race against insects we will never win on any permanent basis by poisoning them, because their life cycles are so short that they can simply evolve around the obstacle.

The bugs that ate Monsanto

Frankl on Attitude

Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and respected psychiatrist, discusses the value of holding ourselves and others to a high standard of ethics and compassion. Footage is from 1972, via TED.




Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others

Flight from Death

"To have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression...and with all this...yet to die."

Being alive and self-aware, to be aware that at some point in the future you will cease to be, this is a tremendous burden. We don't talk about how difficult it is - we just go about with our lives, ignoring this enormous elephant in the room. Yes Virginia, one day even you will also die.

The presence of our mortality provokes anxiety in us, and that anxiety pushes us to isolate ourselves within our sociocultural groups, to become xenophobic, to maim and kill and war upon those we consider to be dangerous either physically or ideologically.



Yet the future is not entirely dark. For one thing, this documentary was made in the first place, so we are at least becoming aware of the problem! I see a great awakening of the understanding that WE are the ones who run our lives. We can choose compassion and empathy over fear and rejection. We are, indeed, in the midst of doing so on a grand collective scale.

Also watch "Flight from Death" commercial-free on Netflix streaming.

Gratitude

It's so important to be grateful.

What Is The Purpose Of Life?

This question has been debated by people throughout the ages, but here's a novel answer:

The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.

Say what? The chemical equation is a little complex, but in short: The atmosphere of the primeval earth had a LOT of carbon dioxide in it. The interior of the planet had (and still has) a lot of free hydrogen in it. These two molecules would "prefer" to get together as hydrocarbons (such as methane) because they would be in a state of higher entropy if they did so. This is kind of like saying that two marbles put in a bowl would prefer to roll together at the bottom of the bowl...but there's a catch. In order for CO2 and H2 to combine, they actually need a little boost of energy first - imagine that there's a little lip on the bowl, and one of the marbles is stuck in the groove of it, so that the bowl needs a little jostle for the marble to hop over and roll to the bottom to join its companion.

CO2 and H2 can combine inorganically via a geochemical process called serpentinization (producing a kind of rock known as serpentine) - but biological processes are MUCH more efficient. Witness: all the hydrocarbons we've been pumping out of the earth's crust and burning were once living organic matter. And the carbon dioxide crisis we're creating by burning oil and coal is, essentially, running the evolution of our planet's atmosphere in reverse. Way back at the beginning of life on this planet, the air was great for trees but not so hot for animals to breathe. Yet another reason to pay attention to how we play around with the chemical balance of our environment.

Read more here: How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down via scientificamerican.com