Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally
'Nuff Said!
Today is March 3, 2023
Today is: Dress in Blue Day
In 1921CE: Toronto's Dr Banting & Dr Best announce discovery of insulin.
Ain't That The Truth
Friday, March 3, 2023
The Daily Drift
Editorial Comment
The weather gods said it would be raining today - so far ... they lied. El Sol is positively glowing.
We do want to give a shout out to our readers in Brazil and Germany and say thanks for stopping by to read Carolina Naturally.
Remember to have fun and enjoy life.
Editorial Staff
Examples of "caste discrimination" in the U.S.
Academic Prem Pariyar was one of them. He says he fled to the US from Nepal in 2015 after his family was brutally attacked by a group of upper caste people for speaking up against atrocities.
But that didn't stop the discrimination he faced because of his caste. Once, he says, he was invited to lunch at a friend's house in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
"I was hesitant [to go] as caste dictates where you sit and eat, but I thought it will be different here as people are educated, in a country where human rights are valued," Mr Pariyar says.
But just as he was about to serve food for himself, he was asked not to touch anything. Instead, someone else handed him a plate of food.
The caste system is one of the oldest forms of surviving social discrimination in South Asian countries, including India and Nepal. In India, Dalits (formerly untouchables) and other lower castes are seen as historically disadvantaged groups and offered constitutional protections in the form of quotas and anti-discriminatory laws...
Mr Pariyar says the incident at his friend's house reminded him of something from his childhood in Nepal: his teacher spat out the water he gave her after finding out he belonged to a lower caste...
San Francisco Bay Area resident Bhim Narayan Bishwakarma says his attempt to rent a room fell through after the South Asian owner heard his full name - surnames are often indicators of caste. "I could see in his eyes that he really felt uncomfortable," Mr Bishwakarma says.
After coming up with excuses to opt out of the deal, the landlord finally admitted that his other tenants had threatened to move out if a Dalit person was allowed to stay...
But not everyone supports the legislation. Several Indian-American groups had strongly opposed the ordinance before it became a law, arguing that it singled out Indian and South Asian communities for unique legal scrutiny... But she adds that the new law sent a message "that our community, which makes up less than 2% of the population, is so uniquely bigoted that we need a special category under the law to police us, reinforcing xenophobic stereotypes we had hoped the US had moved beyond".
Continued at the BBC.
Invention Lets People Kiss Each Other Using Their Phones
This invention does require a second person to function properly. I'm sorry if this news brings you disappointment.
The South China Morning Post reports that the invention, who is named Jiang, developed his idea to allow him to be intimate with his long-distance girlfriend. Plug in paired smartphones and you can virtually smooch your partner with plastic lips that are close enough to resembling a human pair. Each one costs about $38.
Redesigning the Nipple
Plastic nipples commonly have just a single hole perforating the top, unlike the more porous human nipple. Emulait's design more closely resembles milk ducts--an approach that the company calls "biomimetic." The plastic nipples themselves come in one of five shapes that reflect the five major shapes that a study of 1,000 scanned nipples determined the most common.
Five different colors are available to reflect different skin tones and the bottles themselves are available in a variety of shapes that reflect actual human breasts.
The end result is a bottle-feeding experience that, Emulait speculates, will be more successful because it closely replicates natural breastfeeding.
Are Tiny Homes From Shipping Containers Sustainable?
Now, we can probably see more tiny homes made from these containers as extra shipping containers were made during the pandemic due to supply chain issues. Approximately, there are around 4.3 million containers left in ports in the United States. So here’s the question: is this kind of material really sustainable?
The general answer is yes, but there’s something else here– the builders need to have enough knowledge, resources, and money to make it a sustainable home. While they can be bought second-hand, people still need to retrofit the containers to create a home. “There are still many alterations that need to be made in order for [them] to be habitable,” architect Alex Gore shared. “You need to frame out the walls, floors, and ceilings in order to run electrical and plumbing lines, as well as insulate.”
Provided that these revisions will be made with eco-friendly materials, then these structures can be more sustainable. However, these materials aren’t really commonly used.
In addition, the architect also believes that these containers are not the right housing material. “Containers are scaled to house goods, not people,” Gore said. “Their proportions make it hard to accommodate human activities.”
Is Jack Daniel's Destroying This Tennesse Community?
Local residents in Lincoln County, Tennessee are now complaining about an out-of-control black “whiskey fungus” in their area. Also known as Baudoinia compniacensis, it is capable of smothering homes, porches, and cars. The fungi’s spread is fueled thanks to the ethanol vapor coming out from the popular liquor maker Jack Daniel’s facilities. The company actually built six barrel houses in the County in 2018 and still has plans to build 14 more.
With the spread of the fungi and the announcement of more barrel houses, residents are enraged with the company. They are currently demanding the local government and Jack Daniel’s to answer for the damage and the sinking property values thanks to fungi and the ethanol-filled air.
According to Patrick Long, one of the residents of Lincoln County, the community has two main demands: an air-filtration system for blocking the ethanol, and an environmental-impact study evaluating the amount of ethanol emanating from the barrel houses and any health risks it poses.
"I'm extremely concerned. My wife has breathing problems. One of the neighbors got cancer," Long said. "It's in the air. And you really, probably don't want to be breathing that in. But nobody has done a test to determine if it's poisonous."
Read more about the issue here.
Touring Europe's Corpse Roads
Of course, when the purpose of the road is to transport the dead, there will be superstitions that grow up around them. There will also be stories of lights and apparitions. Messy Nessy Chic tells us about those traditions and superstitions, as well as the "rules" for building and using a corpse road. Oh yeah, there are plenty of pictures, too.
The Far-Reaching Consequences Of Child Abuse
Higher risk of asthma, ADHD, autism, and depression
In the newly published study, a team of researchers headed by Dr. Claudia Buss, a professor at the Institute of Medical Psychology at Charité, shows that health problems are more common in children of mothers who experienced maltreatment themselves as children. The researchers define maltreatment as physical, emotional, or sexual abuse or neglect by a parent or guardian leading to physical or emotional harm or the threat of harm to a child. They analyzed data on more than 4,300 American mothers and their children from 21 long-term cohorts. Mothers reported on their childhood experiences and provided information on health diagnoses in their biological children up to the age of 18, or this information was collected during visits conducted as part of the study. This valuable trove of data extending across two generations of the same family allowed researchers to identify meaningful connections.
They found that children of mothers who reported adverse experiences were at higher risk of asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism. These children also have a higher incidence of symptoms and behaviors associated with depression and anxiety disorders, which are known as “internalizing” disorders. Daughters of mothers in this group are also at higher risk of obesity than their sons. “All of these connections are independent of whether the mother has the same diagnosis,” explains Buss, the study’s lead author. “That suggests that the risk of that particular health problem is not being transmitted genetically.”
First study to cover multiple health outcomes
Researchers have not yet fully decoded the exact mechanisms by which the risk is passed on to the next generation. There are indications that adverse childhood experiences could affect maternal biology during pregnancy, as for example stress hormones. This can affect fetal development in a way that the offspring become more vulnerable for impaired health. There is evidence that biological changes like these are more pronounced in mothers who have developed mental health problems, such as depression, as a consequence of their traumatic experiences. If the mother’s mental health is affected by her childhood experiences, this may also impact on how she interacts with her child once it is born, which is likely to be just as important a factor in these multigenerational effects.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine multiple health problems at once in relation to early trauma in mothers in a large, sociodemographically and ethnically diverse sample. That has been done primarily for individual diseases in the past,” explains Dr. Nora Moog, also from the Institute of Medical Psychology at Charité and first author of the publication. In keeping with this approach, the researchers showed that children of mothers exposed to early trauma are at greater likelihood of developing multiple physical and mental health problems. The risk is also greater the more serious the mother’s childhood experiences were. “At the same time, I should stress that our findings do not mean that all children of mothers with adverse childhood experiences automatically end up with health problems,” Buss says, providing context for the group’s findings. “The risk is elevated, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a specific health problem.”
Early identification and support for those affected
“I assume that appropriate support for mothers who suffer from the consequences of childhood maltreatment can have a positive effect on their health and well-being and that of their children. That means it’s very important to identify these mothers and children early on,” Buss points out. One way to do this would be to have doctors address parents’ own childhood experiences during prenatal or pediatric checkups and provide information on how to contact various support programs or counseling services. This kind of early intervention could help two generations: the parent, who experienced maltreatment and may be suffering from health consequences; and the child, who could be prevented from developing health problems.
Developing new, targeted therapeutic measures will depend on better understanding the exact mechanisms by which the elevated risk of health problems is passed on to the next generation. The research team is currently working on that. The researchers also plan to conduct follow-up studies to investigate which children remain resilient, meaning they do not suffer consequences beyond one generation: What makes them, their mothers, and their social environment different? Beyond that, the father’s childhood experiences have received relatively little attention so far, but there are indications that these experiences can also be passed on to the next generation, albeit in some cases by different mechanisms than those involved in mother-child transmission. The researchers plan to explore these research questions in further detail in future projects as well.
Flavonoids improve performance
All that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Xmas crossword over the seasonal period. According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.
The team from Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).
Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests. Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition.
The role of micronutrients in age-related cognitive decline is being increasingly studied. Fruits and beverages such as tea, red wine, cocoa, and coffee are major dietary sources of polyphenols, micronutrients found in plant-derived foods. The largest subclass of dietary polyphenols is flavonoids, and it has been reported in the past that those who consume lots of flavonoids have a lower incidence of dementia.
More at Science Daily.
Living Close To Parks, Water Better For Your Brain
Researchers defined serious psychological distress as mental health problems that require treatment and have a moderate to severe effect on a person’s ability to participate in work, school and social situations.
“Since we lack effective prevention methods or treatments for mild cognitive impairment and dementia, we need to get creative in how we look at these issues,” said Solmaz Amiri, DDes, of Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine in Spokane, Washington. “Our hope is that this study showing better mental health among people living close to parks and water will trigger other studies about how these benefits work and whether this proximity can help prevent or delay mild cognitive impairment and dementia.”
The study involved 42,980 people age 65 or older living in urban areas in the state of Washington.
Researchers looked at data from the U.S. Census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to identify how close participants lived to green and blue spaces. Green space was defined as public parks, community gardens and cemeteries. Blue space was defined as water bodies such as lakes, reservoirs, large rivers and coasts.
Participants completed a questionnaire to assess psychological distress. They answered six questions on how often they felt depression and anxiety symptoms using a five-point scale ranging from zero, meaning none of the time, to four, meaning all the time.
Questions included items like how many days they were unable to work due to psychological distress, how many days their productivity was at least halved by distress, and how many times they sought professional help. Scores ranged from 0 to 24, with an average score of 2. Participants who scored above 13 on the test were considered to have serious psychological distress.
Researchers reported that around 2% of the participants had serious psychological distress.
Of the total participants, 70% lived within half a mile of a green space and 60% lived within half a mile of a blue space.
People living within half a mile of green or blue spaces had a 17% lower risk of experiencing serious psychological distress compared to people living further than half a mile from green or blue spaces.
Of the people who lived within a half mile of parks and water, 1.3% had serious psychological distress, compared to 1.5% of the people who lived further than half a mile.
“Our hope is that this study may help inform public health policies in the future, from where residential facilities are located to programs to improve mental health outcomes of people living in long-term care centers or nursing homes,” Amiri added.
A limitation of the study was that people reported on their psychological distress and may not have remembered and reported all details accurately.
Psychedelics May Help People Reinvent Themselves
Researchers from the University of Cincinnati examined the post-treatment journals kept by participants in a 2014 smoking cessation study that found psychedelics were effective in helping some people quit smoking for years.
In a new paper published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, researchers analyzed the participants’ own words and found that psychedelics combined with talk therapy often helped longtime smokers see themselves as nonsmokers. This new core identity might help explain why 80% of participants were able to stop smoking for six months and 60% remained smoking-free after five years.
The 2014 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that participants who wanted to quit smoking and used psilocybin, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, combined with cognitive behavioral therapy were far more likely to succeed than those who try other traditional quit-smoking methods.
Lead author and University of Cincinnati postdoctoral researcher Neşe Devenot said the results demonstrate the potential psychedelics have to reshape self-perceptions to help people break free of old habits or addictions in the face of life’s daily triggers and temptations.
“We saw again and again that people had this feeling that they were done with smoking and that they were a nonsmoker now,” Devenot said.
She studies the science, history and culture of psychedelics in UC’s Institute for Research in Sensing.
Devenot said this new sense of self might help arm people against temptation or old triggers.
“If you want to give up meat but you smell a delicious steak, it might be hard to resist,” she said. “But if you identify as a vegetarian and your sense of who you are is someone who does not eat meat, that identity helps encourage a different choice.”
During the smoking cessation study, therapists gave participants guided imagery exercises in which they were asked to envision smoking as a behavior external to their core identity. The participants documented their experience in writing.
One guided imagery exercise from the study framed nicotine addiction as an external force, manipulating behavior for its own ends like the zombie-creating fungus in HBO’s popular series “The Last of Us.”
“Like the Cordyceps fungi that functionally transforms insects into ‘zombified’ marionettes to serve the fungi’s own reproductive purposes, smoking behavior is characterized as a form of parasitic manipulation,” the study found.
Albert Garcia-Romeu, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, said psilocybin could serve as a catalyst to help motivate and inspire people to make a change with the help of cognitive behavioral therapy.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy asks us to tune into the thoughts and feelings that we experience in our day-to-day lives and how those relate to our behaviors,” Garcia-Romeu said. “In turn, people often tend to build a narrative or sense of self around those cognitions and behaviors.
“This sets the stage for actually having the psilocybin experience, which can both provide novel insights and perspectives as well as serve as a marker of that identity shift like a rite of passage, signifying the change for instance from smoker to nonsmoker.”
Devenot said the experiment’s sample size was relatively small at just 15 participants. But the results are encouraging.
“I feel that I am somehow fundamentally different to yesterday,” one participant wrote. “I guess I feel like some sort of metamorphosis has taken place!”
Some participants said the treatment with psilocybin made quitting feel easy compared to past experiences. Another said the cravings for nicotine used to be unbearable. But during the dosing session, the participant was unable even to imagine craving a cigarette.
“The concept seems firmly cemented into my reality even today, that cravings are not something that are real,” one said.
How do psychedelics help with this transformation?
Devenot says people often get stuck in the same ruts of behavior, responding the same way to stressors or other triggers. She likens it to a downhill skier who uses the same grooved path down the mountain that they have used a thousand other times.
“It’s not that simple, but it’s a metaphor for how we talk about psychedelics,” Devenot said.
“Psychedelics have been compared to skiing in fresh snow. Some researchers suggest that you might have more freedom to maneuver your skis anywhere down the mountain,” she said. “The entrenched grooves of bad habits might not have as much pull on our skis, so we can lay down other paths.
“We’re looking for ways to help people shift behaviors and overcome the inertia of their habits that are more in line with their goals and aspirations,” Devenot said. “That’s why psychedelics are of wider interest to researchers.”
Ayahuasca, 'source of knowledge' in the heart of the Amazon
Here, they call it "yage" and consume it for health and wisdom.
Extracted from the "Banisteriopsis caapi" vine that has grown in the Amazon for thousands of years, ayahuasca has also gained a reputation in the outside world.
Becoming increasingly fashionable and even punted as a treatment for drug addiction, ayahuasca can be dangerous for people who take antidepressants or suffer from heart or psychotic problems, epilepsy or asthma, according to medical experts.
Its active ingredient dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is illegal in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and in other countries.
Ayahuasca, 'source of knowledge' in the heart of the Amazon
The Loudest Sound in Recorded History
Try to guess what would be the loudest sound on record for the earth we know. Those qualifications discount prehistoric events and celestial events like exploding stars. Would it be a nuclear explosion? A Who concert? The Tunguska Event? Your toddler throwing a tantrum? How about none of the above? Great Big Story reveals what experts consider to be the evengt that caused the loudest sound in recorded history, an eardrum-splitting 310 decibels that really did split eardrums for some folks who managed to live through it. More than 39,000 people did not.
But first they explain the decibel scale so we can get an idea of how very loud it was. Spoiler for those who can't wait for a two-minute video: you can read more about the deadly event at Wikipedia.
But first they explain the decibel scale so we can get an idea of how very loud it was. Spoiler for those who can't wait for a two-minute video: you can read more about the deadly event at Wikipedia.
Is This An Actual Elf?
In an interesting turn of events, it’s not a group of scientists sharing a photo of what looks to be an elf. It’s the president of Mexico. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador posted a photo of what looks like an elf on his social media. He didn’t seem to be joking in the caption of the photo too. According to him, this was a sighting of an “aluxe,” a woodland spirit in Mayan folklore. “[the photo] was taken three days ago by an engineer, it appears to be an aluxe,” he wrote. “Everything is mystical.”
The political figure is known for having a deep respect for indigenous cultures and beliefs. Do you think this is an actual aluxe, or is it just a trick of the light?
A New Find Suggests That Other Dimensions And Parallel Universes Might Really Exist
The book described itself as an encyclopedia, but the collector was baffled. Old books are filled with secrets, and this collector is determined to uncover the mysteries hidden in this one.
A New Find Suggests That Other Dimensions And Parallel Universes Might Really Exist
Turning the Tables: Shellfish That Catch Fish
Mussels are shellfish that spend almost all their lives attached to rocks and filtering the passing water for food particles. But before that, in their larval stage, they are parasites, and grow up inside a fish that their mother has caught for them. Yeah, nature is metal. Some species of mussel mothers snatch up a fish for this purpose, while others arrange their eggs and/or larva into a sort of pod that's shaped like something a fish would want to eat, which achieves the same purpose in the end. There's no one better to explain this weirdness than Ze Frank in his True Facts series. I mean, admit it, you wouldn't be exploring the reproductive habits of a mussel if it were from any other source. There's a one-minute embedded ad at 4:30.
The Many Ways Bees Can Make Green Honey
The most common reason for odd colored honey is sweet industrial waste that the bees feed on. You might remember the 2012 story in which French bees produced green and blue honey. It was discovered that the bees had been feeding on uncovered candy waste from a nearby Mars plant that was making M&Ms. Then there was the 2015 case of Arthur Mondella, whose marijuana growing operation came to light after bees started producing red honey by eating illegally discarded syrup from his maraschino cherry factory.
An expensive honey from Borneo is green due to chlorophyll in the exotic flowers found on the island of Banggi. Another study on the same type of claim for green honey from the Palawan Forest of the Philippines found no hives, hinting that this type of honey is faked.
Beekeepers in Greece found their honey green in 2016. They believed it was because of kiwi plants, but kiwi plants do not produce nectar, which is what honey is made from. An investigation found that the bees had been feeding on the juice of mature kiwi fruits that were unharvested after a hailstorm damaged the crops. What bees make can't officially be called honey unless it is made from flower nectar. While the "fruit juice honey" was delicious, it was not good for the bees, and they didn't survive the next winter.
As for the honey pictured here, Ok_Journalist120 has been eating it a little at a time for a year now and hasn't suffered any ill effects. But there's no definite answer yet for this particular case of green honey.
Insect Has "Superpropulsion" and Uses It for Peeing
Wouldn't it be cool to be granted a super power? But then you find out that power of "superpropulsion" is the ability to fling drops of urine at high speeds. Comic book editors are going to love that. Although they've come up with worse.
The glassy-winged sharpshooter is a kind of leafhopper and an agricultural pest. It sucks fluids out of plants. Since the sap is 95% water, they drink a lot to get the nutrients they need, and have to expel a lot of water. Lucky for them, they have an anal catapult that expels a drop of water, and when it reaches a certain size, flings it away with a lot of force for a tiny insect. The physics and fluid dynamics of this pee-shooter are explained at Ars Technica. The upshot of this complicated mechanism is that it actually uses much less energy than just streaming urine like civilized animals. Flinging urine far away makes it harder for predators to smell their exact location. A study out of Georgia Tech gives us the visual above.
Other insects are "frass-shooters," "butt-flickers," and "turd-hurlers," but the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only insect we know of that is blessed with superpropulsion.
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The Drift
Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally 'Nuff Said! Today is June 21, 2023 Today is: World Music Day On This Day In History...
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Rainforests are dense forests in tropical regions inhabited by a variety of unusual species you won't find anywhere else on the planet. ...