INTERESTING TIMES

In the field, some practitioners will pack an open wound with black soil to help it heal. You can get black peat that is used for this purpose and others. It is not pasteurized or sterilized in any way; it is full of living organisms. After the battle of Shiloh in the US civil war, soldiers whose wounds glowed in the dark had better survival. The organism (Photorhabdus luminescens) that was growing in their wounds came from the guts of nematodes living in the soil. Presumably this organism outcompeted the pathogenic ones. This kind of antibiotic mechanism cannot be ignored when antibiotic drugs are increasing ineffective.

( More about the biology, and the source, behind cut. )

Only one type of plastic does not float *in salt water at least*, and that is type I PETE plastic, the hard clear kind that drink bottles are made of. It is the most abundantly manufactured kind, and it does not float.

Types of Plastic:
1 PET
2 HDFE
3 PVC (rafts)
4 CDPE (bags)
5 PP
6 PS (polystyrene)
7 Other

I posted once about the Great Pacific Waste Dump, basically just parroting media hype. It turns out the plastic in the ocean is mostly in tiny bits instead of in a big island of capped bottles. It is thickest in the five GYRES on the planet, which appear to me to be doldrums where there are no tradewinds or strong currents. The most directly alarming thing about the litter of plastic bits is that it is covered in life that is migrating in a whole new way. Barnacles, biofilm and plankton all hitch a ride or get tangled in the mess. We had NO IDEA what this is going to mean in the long run. A new name has been coined for all the microorganisms on the polypropylene and polyethlene in the ocean: the Plastisphere. The only organism named by Emelia DeForce PhD in last night's Science Pub talk was Vibrio, the same genus as cholera. I was dying to ask if MRSA was on the plastic around Hawaii but we left because the line was long and we were done. All the factoids in this post are courtesy of Dr DeForce.

Plastic is made from crude oil into nerdles (sp?), which are small balls of hard petroleum product. Those can then be shipped to the manufacturers who combine them with additives and make their product.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent,
but the one that is most responsive to change.
-—Charles Darwin

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and, especially important, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion that emerges out of a train follows from the premise of starting point and whether that premise is true.
--Carl Sagan in his Baloney Detection Kit
( if you want more )

A recent amber discovery in India contains over 700 kinds of arthropods including bees, ants, termites, crustaceans and spiders. Apparently the amber was from a Gujarat province open pit mining operation, and contains at least 100 previously unknown species of insects. The history recorded in this batch of amber is from approximately 53 million years ago---just before India, which had broken off from the subcontinent called Gondwana, collided with Asia. That collision was supposed to have happened about 50 million years ago, and formed the Tibetan plateau. About 150 million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate separated from the African plate and began its 100 million year journey to Asia. During that long journey the subcontinent was isolated from all other continents, giving its wildlife the chance to evolve in distinctly different ways (much like the evolution of marsupials in Australia). So this data is a sample suspended in geological time, before the species on one floating block of land merged with the established biome of Asia. As such it is much more important that just being a bunch of bugs in pretty yellow stone. It helps us further map the biological history of many species.
( links, sources )

...we humans are just another primate species: a terribly neurotic, screwed-up, overly self-conscious one with some fancy thumbs, but still just another primate.
--Robert M Sapolsky in The Trouble with Testosterone and other Essays on the Biology of the Human, p14