Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Each one of the "read more" is a link to the balance of the article. All about rethinking laundry in the 21st century, even in prisons.

Just letting you know, I'm all "clicked" for the day!

Me too clicked, teeny........

sumac, great articles. I grew up at a time when almost everyone used 'clothes lines' outside to dry their clothing. It was the only way at that time. The clothing and especially the sheets for the bed came out smelling great - but - every piece was hard as a rock. There are good things about sun drying and there are bad things about sun drying.

By the way, when I was a kid about 4 or 5 - my grandparents did NOT even have electricity!! Yep, I'm getting on in years. To preserve food they canned stuff. And to preserve meat products they dried and smoked stuff. To have soap, they lit two fires in the back yard - one to make ash from a hardwood tree and the other to heat the iron pot to render the lard from the hogs. Then the hardwood ash was put in a large tin pot with small holes in the bottom and water was slowly poured through that - the result was Lye!!! The lye was added to the lard and cooked until it was just right and left to harden. The resulting mass of "soap" was broken into smaller pieces and that was lye-soap!! It would burn the skin off you if you let it!!!!!!!

Ahh, the good old days............

It was a good thing to sit on my great grandma's lap and watch the fire in the fireplace. And, with a couple of coal-oil lamps it was cozy. Of course, bed time came early in those days. And, to keep us kids quiet - we were warned that "Bruno" the bear could hear us if we talked......!!!!!!!! So, sleep came quickly.

Ahhh, the good old days...........

Late start today

Pine cones pelting the neighborhood - sounds like a firing range - Fall's fallin'

Beautiful weather though

Hope Beth's comp feeling better soon.


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Late start here too, but clicked. Danon, your memory of early life events is staggering. And with such detail.

October 27, 2009
The Life Span of a Rodent May Aid Human Health
By NICHOLAS WADE

They live in underground colonies with a queen, her harem of favorite males, soldiers to defend the tunnel system and workers to keep excavating in search of food. But despite having the social structure of an ants’ nest or beehive, naked mole rats are mammals about the size of a mouse. And among their many peculiarities are features that could, if understood, be of great relevance to human health and longevity.

Their life span is of extraordinary length for a rodent. Mice live a couple of years but mole rats can reach the venerable age of 28. The long life is probably a consequence of their protected existence. Mice have a short life span because they have many predators. Better to breed fast and young than prepare for an old age none will never live to see. Gray squirrels, on the other hand, have fewer enemies and can live for more than 20 years.

The naked mole rat lives an even more protected lifestyle than do squirrels. The queens never come to the surface. Even the workers are exposed only when they need to shovel dirt to the earth’s surface.

A colony’s principal danger is other mole rats who may break into the tunnel system, testing the soldier caste’s defenses. Another risk to life is a kind of civil war that breaks out when a queen dies. Other females, intimidated into staying barren while the queen lived, regain their fertility and fight until one emerges victorious. But casualties are generally low, and presumably because of this relative safety, mole rats have evolved the ability to live more than 10 times longer than mice.

Mice are very prone to cancer; in some strains, 90 percent of them die of tumors. People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal: the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality. But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all. “These animals have never been observed to develop any spontaneous neoplasms,” Vera Gorbunova and colleagues said in an article in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Gorbunova, who works at the University of Rochester, has taken a first step toward understanding the genetic basis of the mole rat’s surprising immunity to cancer. She and her colleagues have found that the rats’ cells have a double system for inhibiting irregular proliferation, compared with the single system in human cells.

Normal human cells grown in a lab dish show behavior known as contact inhibition. Once the cells come in contact with one another, they form a single layer and stop dividing. Cancer cells, however, have thrown off that restraint and keep proliferating, forming one layer on top of another.

Dr. Gorbunova has found that both mole rat and human cells have the same system of contact inhibition, mediated in both species by a gene known as p27. But mole rats, in addition, have an early acting version of the same system and presumably use the p27 system just as a backup.

When mole rat cells in glassware make just a few contacts with one another, they stop growing and dividing. This early contact inhibition system is mediated by a gene called p16-ink4a. People also have the p16-ink4a gene, but it seems to play almost no role in contact inhibition of cells. The mole rat’s double system may be part of the reason for its remarkable immunity to cancer.

Another cell-level difference between the species is that mole rat cells maintain an active system for letting cells divide. Called telomerase, this system is switched off in mature human cells, presumably as a defense against cancer. Dr. Gorbunova believes the mole rat can afford to keep telomerase switched on, because its anticancer defenses are so good, and that the active telomerase may confer longer life on stem cells, which are responsible for repair and maintenance of the body’s tissues.

But Ronald da Pinho of Harvard Medical School, an expert on cancer and telomeres, disagreed, saying that inactive telomerase can be a cancer risk for human cells because it leads to genetic instability.

Increased life span in rodents is usually associated with caloric restriction, a diet with 30 percent fewer calories than usual. Laboratory mice and rats placed on such a diet at birth can live 40 percent longer than usual. Many other species have much the same reflex, and some biologists believe this is an ancient survival strategy, in which during times of famine the body’s reserves are switched to tissue maintenance, with the hope of riding out the bad times and breeding later.

Mole rats seem to lead something of a food-and-famine lifestyle. They live on tubers, the underground larders of nutrients laid down by plants in desert environments. One tuber can feed a colony of 100 mole rats for months. But even though they are careful to gnaw away at the tuber without killing the plant, the time comes when they must find another. Because the rats do not venture above ground, they must rely on the skill of their tunnel-digging work force to locate other tubers in the neighborhood.

The mole rats, presumably, get pretty hungry between tuber finds. Yet another of their quirks is that they have pushed the concept of recycling to extremes and will eat their own excrement. The continual alternation of food and famine might set off the same life-extending mechanisms in mole rats as does caloric restriction. But an expert on the genetics of caloric restriction, Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted that mole rats enjoyed long lives in captivity, where they were presumably well fed all the time.

Dr. Gorbunova plans to set up a colony of mole rats in her laboratory with plastic piping connecting a network of cages to serve as a tunnel system and carrots standing in for desert tubers. To understand human longevity and cancer, she said, “it’s important to study species other than mice.”

“I think,” she continued, “this is the beginning of a long journey.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/27/science/27rat_CA0/articleLarge.jpg

Yeah, sumac, I remember things that happened when I was around 4 yrs old - according to my Mom.

Interesting about the cancer resistance in the Mole Rat population. Hmmm, 28 yrs huh? No wonder I have so many Mole mounds in my yard.

I'm all clicked, too!

We need another Manhattan Project.



October 28, 2009
White House Steps Up Climate Efforts
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON " The Obama administration and some Senate Democrats expressed fresh urgency on Tuesday about the need to address climate change and refashion the nation’s energy economy.

But they faced determined opposition from Republicans, new concerns from some Democrats and reminders of the financial, technological and political hurdles in remaking the way the nation produces and consumes power.

In a Senate hearing on a new climate change and energy bill and in coordinated appearances by President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the administration promoted measures to cap greenhouse gas emissions and support new means of fueling homes and vehicles with far less carbon dioxide intensity. Mr. Obama appeared at a solar energy installation in Florida and Mr. Biden at an auto plant in Delaware that will produce electric vehicles, talking about the potential of alternative energy to create jobs.

On Capitol Hill, five senior administration officials appeared before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to speak in support of a bill to address global warming and encourage development of nonpolluting energy sources. They said such measures were important not only to the environment but to the nation’s economic competitiveness.

“When the starting gun sounded on the clean energy race, the United States stumbled,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Senate panel, saying that spending on green energy technology in China and several European nations was far outstripping that of the United States. “But I remain confident that we can make up the ground.”

He added, “When we gear up our research and production of clean energy technologies, we can still surpass any other country.”

The climate change measure, sponsored by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, aims to cap emissions of the gases linked to the warming of the planet by setting up a program under which industries can buy and sell emissions permits.

The measure also provides a variety of incentives for new energy technology, including billions of dollars in subsidies for research on capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Republicans on the committee dismissed the bill as an overly complex one that will harm the economy, kill jobs and favor some parts of the country over others. Democrats generally defended it as a market-based approach to a serious environmental problem that will create jobs by spurring energy innovation.

Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is the second-ranking member of the environment committee and chairman of the Finance Committee, warned his fellow Democrats that the Kerry-Boxer bill went too far and could end up delaying any action on global warming for months or years.

“The legislation before us today is about our economy,” Mr. Baucus told the committee. “Montana, with our resource-based agriculture and tourism economies, cannot afford the unmitigated impacts of climate change. But we also cannot afford the unmitigated effects of climate change legislation.”

He said the bill’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 2005 levels was too ambitious. He criticized the measure’s failure to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to impose additional regulations on carbon dioxide emissions beyond those in the bill.

And he warned Senator Boxer against using her committee’s 12-to-7 Democratic majority to pass a bill without some support from moderate Republicans and Democrats.

“We could build that consensus here in this committee,” Mr. Baucus said. “If we don’t, we risk wasting another month, another year, another Congress without taking a step forward into our future.”

Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, considered by some a potential Republican vote for climate change legislation, also said the committee was moving too quickly on a complex bill that few understand.

“Why are we trying to jam down this legislation now?” asked Mr. Voinovich, who is retiring at the end of next year. “Wouldn’t it be smarter to take our time and do it right?”

In Arcadia, Fla., Mr. Obama stood in the midst of the nation’s largest solar power generation array to highlight $3.4 billion in stimulus spending for projects to modernize the electric grid through projects across the country.

“At this moment, there’s something big happening in America, when it comes to creating a clean-energy economy,” Mr. Obama said. “But getting there will take a few more days like this one, and more projects like this one.”

Biodiversity, habitat protection, food production for all critters. A hard nut to figure out and apportion.

October 28, 2009
Editorial Observer
Food, Humanity, Habitat and How We Get to 2050
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, feeding humanity in 2050 " when the world’s population is expected to be 9.1 billion " will require a 70 percent increase in global food production, partly because of population growth but also because of rising incomes.

The organization hopes that this increase can be brought about by greater productivity on current agricultural acreage and by greening parts of the world that aren’t now arable. It is also “cautiously optimistic” that, even with climate change, there will be enough land and probably enough water to do so. It’s important to look at this projection in light of another United Nations goal " preserving biodiversity " and ask whether the two are compatible.

In 2003, 123 nations committed themselves to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss” by 2010. According to scientists at a recent United Nations-sponsored biodiversity conference, that target will not be met. Biodiversity loss keeps accelerating, and extinctions are occurring at a rate that’s 100 times what it was before humans dominated the earth. Species are going out like candles in the dark.

The “cautiously optimistic” authors of the United Nations food report believe that humanity will somehow be able to produce more food while still honoring the value of other species by protecting their habitat. And it’s true that this is not a zero-sum game. A 70 percent increase in food production doesn’t necessarily mean a 70 percent reduction in habitat.

But the Food and Agriculture Organization also warns that agricultural acreage will have to grow by some 297 million acres, a little less than three times the size of California. Add to this the ongoing rate of habitat destruction " including deforestation, often for fuel but usually for producing more food " and other threats like the growing production of biofuels, and it is hard to argue that there isn’t a profound conflict between what our species will need to survive by 2050 and the needs of nearly every other species on this planet.

The question isn’t whether we can feed 9.1 billion people in 2050 " they must be fed " or whether we can find the energy they will surely need. The question is whether we can find a way to make food and energy production sustainable in the broadest possible sense " and whether we can act on the principle that our interest includes that of every other species on the planet.

The only way to do that is to think about the habitat of all other species as the frame of our activities. Unless habitat is part of the equation, we’re simply not talking realistically about the character, much less the future, of our planet. We have no idea what the “right” amount of biodiversity on this planet should be (although we seem at times to be running an ill-judged experiment to see how little we need). And we struggle to find reasons why other species and ecosystems are important, searching mostly for utilitarian arguments (their value as medicines, for instance) that specify their usefulness to us.

My own answer is less utilitarian: They have the value of their own existence. I adhere to a conclusion reached long ago " by James Madison in 1818, who said, simply, that it cannot be right for all of Earth’s resources to “be made subservient to the use of man.”

We need to act on that principle.

That will mean more than simply roping off habitat. It will mean among other things, a new and far more modest idea of food prosperity, more limited and almost certainly less meat-driven than the present American model.

It will mean a new idea of food equity, a fairer and far more balanced way of sharing and distributing food to reduce the devastating imbalance between the gluttony of some nations and the famine of others. It will mean that we all have to do what we can " wherever we live " to localize and intensify food production. Above all, it will mean restraint, in order to protect, and perhaps one day increase, the remaining biodiversity.

Off-topic, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.

October 27, 2009, 9:30 pm
A Language of Smiles

Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.”

Maybe I’m easy to please, but doing this a few times makes me giggle. “Eeee.”

Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.” And, I think, it’s why I don’t get the giggles from “aaaa” or “oooo.”

The mere act of smiling is often enough to lift your mood; conversely, the act of frowning can lower it; scowling can make you feel fed up. In other words, the gestures you make with your face can " at least to some extent " influence your emotional state.

(The notion that facial expressions affect mood isn’t new. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his story “The Purloined Letter”: one character reports that when he wishes to know someone’s mind, he attempts to compose his face to mimic the expression of that someone " then waits to see which emotions arise. And the idea was developed, in different ways, by both Charles Darwin and William James. But telling stories and developing arguments is one thing. Showing, experimentally, that making a face can make a mood is harder; it’s only in the past 30 years or so that data have started to accumulate.)

Exactly how frowns and smiles influence mood is a matter of debate. One possibility is classical conditioning. Just as Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the expectation of food, the argument goes, so humans quickly come to associate smiling with feeling happy. Once the association has been established, smiling is, by itself, enough to generate happy feelings. Another possibility is that different facial gestures have intrinsic properties that make them more or less pleasant, perhaps by altering the way that blood flows to the brain.

But here’s what interests me. As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose " in a subtle way " their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?

As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn’t mean no one has; it just means I haven’t been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea’s not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl " the German vowel sound ü, for example " you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music " sounds and rhythms " that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

Separating these various factors will be difficult, and the overall impact on mood through the facial gestures of a language may well be small, if indeed it exists at all. Nevertheless, I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it. In the meantime: have a giggle with “meeeeeee.”

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

I'm all done clicking for the day! I am just so happy to be back!

Teeny, great to see you here, clicking and all - welcome back! Thanks to - relentless - reminding by Stradee I go to extremes clicking daily for darling wolfies - and of course for the rainforest, this being the subject of this thread. From Care2, picture of wolfie:

Hi High Seas and all.........

sumac, I read many yrs ago that it takes fewer muscles in the face to smile than it does to frown. It also is supposed to make one happier. Teeny must be the happiest of us around. !!

We are a happy bunch of wildclickers!

Hi Hoft! Glad you stopped by to say hi to all and welcome Teeny back to the thread (and clicking)

Beautiful wolfie pic - poor babies need all our help...

My God the weathers cold...Fall is definitetly happenin'.

Stay warm wildclickers

Hi to all. Clicked and on the hunt for interesting articles.

Early cricks today - we are in for some really bad WX down here. Lots of rain - as if we needed that - and high winds expected - up to 60 mph. The ground here is so saturated with water now we expect many trees to be blown over and subsequent loss of power. I serviced the generator and have an extra 5 gal gas ready. Hopefully, we will get through ok.

'Happy traails to you - Until we meet again' ((my Roy Rogers takeoff.....grin))

Dan, sending hot chocolate for happy and bear paws for feetsies.

Stay safe and warm.

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Danon,
I will certainly check out the weather you are anticipating. We are 9.5" down from a year ago. While sometimes we receive Texas weather, sometimes the energy and moisture is dissipated before it reaches here, or is directed up the valleys of the Ohio River and ends up in the NE, bypassing us altogether.