Scanning Electron Microscopic images of the Honeybee - Rose-Lynn Fisher

link to website

Social Hymenopterans are characterized by reproductive females (queens) that only mate at the beginning of their life, typically during one or very few nuptial flights . Afterward, sperm is stored within a specialized organ of the queen (the spermatheca), where it survives and keeps its viability for years. The absence of re-mating later in life implies that pairs are permanently committed, so that – in contrast to most other insects – mating does not interfere with normal colony life.

Queens of the honeybee Apis mellifera can survive for up to eight (8) years and lay around 200,000 eggs a year. Consequently, to complete a successful colony cycle a honeybee queen must be able to lay 1.0– 1.6 million fertilized eggs throughout her life.

In A. mellifera, the entire mating process takes less than 5 seconds , often no more than 1 or 2 seconds. Females can copulate with other drones in quick succession.

The drones of all Apis species die during their first and only copulation, because the eversion of the males endophallus is irreversible and results in the paralysis of the male. After the ejaculation the male separates from the queen, but leaves a mating sign consisting of several gland secretions and a chitinous plate.. As a consequence, males can copulate only once and mating is lethal, so that he commits his entire reproductive effort to a single queen.

source

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Blowing smoke: the lost legacy of the surgeon general's report | Alan Blum | TEDxTuscaloosa - 20 min. video - 7/7/2015

link to website: numerous articles regarding history of tobacco use

Surgeon General Scolds Docs for Failing to Help Patients Quit Smoking - theHeart.org Medscape Cardiology - 1/23/2020

*** full 700-page report - 2020 ***

UAB Smoking Cessation Service - website

link to website

book info

Appalachian Train Conservancy website

link to interactive map of A.T.

cyanosis

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Atherosclerosis is the underlying cause of most cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in affluent Western societies. It contributes to the progression of coronary artery disease and cerebrovascular insufficiency, which lead to ischaemic heart dis- ease, myocardial infarction, and stroke. The results of several large clinical trials have demonstrated that elevated high density li- poprotein (HDL) levels correlate strongly with reduced risks of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease. The importance of HDL to the prevention of atherosclerosis is consonant with its role as the mediator of reverse transport of cholesterol from peripheral tissues to the liver for catabolism. HDL is a heterogeneous collection of lipoprotein particles. Nascent HDL is a discoidal particle composed of protein, phos- phatidylcholine, and small amounts of cholesterol. In contrast, mature HDL is a spherical particle that consists of half lipid (mostly phosphatidylcholine, cholesterol, cholesterol esters, and triglycerides) and half protein by weight.

Apolipoprotein A-I (apo A-I) is the major protein in HDL. In addition to its structural role, apo A-I has a functional role in the reverse transport of cholesterol: it promotes the reversible efflux of cholesterol from peripheral cell plasma membranes into HDL; it activates lecithin-cholesterol acyl transferase, the enzyme that traps cholesterol within HDL by converting cholesterol to cholesterol esters (6); and it is responsible for the recognition of HDL by liver (and adrenal cell) HDL receptors.

Of all the apolipoproteins, levels of apo A-I alone correlate with the protective effect of HDL against atherosclerosis.

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1991

1991

source - full article

The refined structure of nascent HDL reveals a key functional domain for particle maturation and dysfunction - Nature Structural and Molecular Biology - 2007

The APOA1 gene provides instructions for making a protein called apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I). ApoA-I is a component of high-density lipoprotein (HDL). HDL is a molecule that transports cholesterol and certain fats called phospholipids through the bloodstream from the body's tissues to the liver. Once in the liver, cholesterol and phospholipids are redistributed to other tissues or removed from the body.

ApoA-I attaches to cell membranes and promotes the movement of cholesterol and phospholipids from inside the cell to the outer surface. Once outside the cell, these substances combine with apoA-I to form HDL. ApoA-I also triggers a reaction called cholesterol esterification that converts cholesterol to a form that can be fully integrated into HDL and transported through the bloodstream.

HDL is often referred to as "good cholesterol" because high levels of this substance reduce the chances of developing heart and blood vessel (cardiovascular) disease. The process of removing excess cholesterol from cells is extremely important for balancing cholesterol levels and maintaining cardiovascular health.

source

NCBI: apo-A1 gene

This gene encodes apolipoprotein A-I, which is the major protein component of high density lipoprotein (HDL) in plasma. The encoded preproprotein is proteolytically processed to generate the mature protein, which promotes cholesterol efflux from tissues to the liver for excretion, and is a cofactor for lecithin cholesterolacyltransferase (LCAT), an enzyme responsible for the formation of most plasma cholesteryl esters. This gene is closely linked with two other apolipoprotein genes on chromosome 11.

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Production of high density lipoprotein (HDL) requires ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) to drive phospholipid (PL) from the plasma membrane into extracellular apolipoprotein A-I.

Unregulated accumulation of cholesterol from atherogenic lipoproteins is a central feature of atherosclerosis. In contrast, many lines of evidence suggest that high density lipoprotein (HDL) is cardioprotective, in part because it promotes cholesterol export from macrophages of the artery wall1,2. The underlying mechanism involves ABCA1, an ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter that uses energy derived from ATP to export phospholipid (PL) out of the plasma membrane.

source

“My Kind of Town” - video - 3min.

“My Kind of Town” - audio …

full article - interactive, with videos

link to website

link to video

link

link to volume

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link to 30 min NASA video

The Linux Command Line  - 3rd Internet Edition - 2016 (full text)

Why I Don't Call It “GNU/Linux”

In some quarters, it's politically correct to call the Linux operating system the “GNU/Linux operating system.” The problem with “Linux” is that there is no completely correct way to name it because it was written by many different peo- ple in a vast, distributed development effort. Technically speaking, Linux is the name of the operating system's kernel, nothing more. The kernel is very important of course, since it makes the operating system go, but it's not enough to form a complete operating system.

Enter Richard Stallman, the genius-philosopher who founded the Free Software movement, started the Free Software Foundation, formed the GNU Project, wrote the first version of the GNU C Compiler (gcc), created the GNU General Public License (the GPL), etc., etc., etc. He insists that you call it “GNU/Linux” to prop- erly reflect the contributions of the GNU Project. While the GNU Project predates the Linux kernel, and the project's contributions are extremely deserving of recognition, placing them in the name is unfair to everyone else who made significant contributions. Besides, I think “Linux/GNU” would be more technically accurate since the kernel boots first and everything else runs on top of it.

In popular usage, “Linux” refers to the kernel and all the other free and open source software found in the typical Linux distribution; that is, the entire Linux ecosystem, not just the GNU components. The operating system marketplace seems to prefer one-word names such as DOS, Windows, macOS, Solaris, Irix, AIX. I have chosen to use the popular format. If, however, you prefer to use “GNU/Linux” instead, please perform a mental search-and-replace while reading this book. I won't mind.

Linux and the GNU System - by Richard Stallman - 2019

GNU/Linux FAQ - by Richard Stallman - 2020

The GNU Project - history of the project

Dr. Widger's Library  -  **extensive collection of literary works from Project Gutenberg**

gutenberg.org

archive.org

The Early Years: French Colonialism

In 1699, France established its first permanent colony in the Gulf Coast. Based first in Mobile, the colony sought to exploit the area around the Mississippi River for trade and natural resources. In 1718, Bienville founded the city of New Orleans on a small crescent-shaped area of land in a bend of the Mississippi, in order to better take advantage of trading with the area the mighty river traversed.

Health of the nascent city soon became a primary concern. Early on Bienville noted “the inclemency of the air” surrounding New Orleans, and soon colonists were dying of tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. In 1731, the private company that had been granted rights to the resources of the city failed. Bienville, the city’s founder, was blamed for the company’s financial failure and returned to France disgraced. The colony returned to control of the French king.

The first record of any medical facility in the city comes in 1722, with the founding a small military hospital known as the Royal Hospital, located on Ursuline Street in what is now the French Quarter. Early medicine was ill-prepared to face the realities of living in a tropical climate: infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies were rampant. In 1726, some much needed relief arrived in the city, with the arrival of Ursuline nuns and the founding of a convent. They also contracted to run the hospital and provide care. The nuns were dissatisfied with running a hospital and convent in the same small building, and continually pressed the colonial government to build a larger hospital. In perhaps an example of foreshadowing, in August 1732 a fierce hurricane struck the city and completely destroyed the existing Royal Hospital. A new hospital was built and completed in 1734.

In spite of poor conditions and limited medical knowledge, Royal Hospital still provided better care than that received by the city’s poor and indigent. By decree, Royal Hospital could only care for French military personnel and those in the King’s service. Appalled by the plight of the poor in trying to obtain care, a well-off shipbuilder named Jean Louis bequeathed his estate to the founding of a Charity Hospital for the poor. He died in January 1736, and on May 10, 1736, the first Charity Hospital opened its doors in a house at Chartres and Bienville Streets.

Charity Hospital has taken the form of many buildings in different locations. The second hospital, built in 1743, and the third, in 1785, were located near a ship-turn basin at the edge of the French Quarter. At that time, boats entering the port of New Orleans did not sail up the Mississippi; rather, they came through an inlet from the Mississippi sound to Lake Pontchartrain, sailed down Bayou St. John and the now-defunct Carondelet Canal to a large basin where the ships could turn around and proceed back to the lake after discharging passengers and cargo. The location of this ship-turn basin is the present-day Basin Street. The fourth building, built in 1815, was on Canal Street at the present location of the Fairmont Hotel. The fifth, built in 1832, and the sixth and current hospital, built in 1939, were located in the same location on Tulane Avenue.

In 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Spain took control of New Orleans and all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi. Spanish control resulted in few changes for the French inhabitants, who naturally felt tension towards their new government. In 1779, Charity Hospital was again reduced to rubble by a hurricane, resulting in much suffering among the poor of the city. However the Cabildo, or Spanish town council, took no steps to rebuild the hospital. Only in 1782, after a full three years with minimal care for the poor in the city, did a wealthy Spanish patron named Almonester donate a then-fortune of 114,000 pesos for the construction of a new Charity Hospital. Almonester also set in motion plans to have a hospital generate some form of revenue, as up until this point it had relied entirely on donations. Plans included a cattle ranch, a lime factory, a brick factory, and slaves he donated to the hospital, including a mulatto named Domingo who was learned in surgery and given authority to “exercise the function of head of the surgery ward.”

The Founding of Tulane University School of Medicine

In 1834, the Medical College of Louisiana was founded by three American physicians new to the city: Dr. Thomas Hunt, of South Carolina, Dr. Warren Stone, of Vermont, and Dr. John Harrison, of Washington, D.C. All three men were twenty-six years old or younger. The announcement of the founding of the school created quite a stir among the establishment French and Creole physicians. Three young Americans, new to the city, had announced they would found a new medical college with lectures entirely in English. In addition, Stone and Hunt became house surgeons at Charity, shaping medical practices during their tenure and giving more weight to the commonly held impression of Americans “taking over” medical education in the city.

The school opened in January 1835. The first lecture was delivered by Dr. Hunt in the Strangers Unitarian Church thanks to the kindness of Parson Theodore Clapp. Classes were taught in a variety of locations including Charity Hospital, which was “open every day for the attendance of the students.” The first course of study ended in April 1835, to high acclaim. The first medical degrees granted in the South were conferred in April of 1836 by Dean Charles Luzenberg.

In 1840 a house was rented next to Charity Hospital that allowed for all the medical lectures to take place in one room. A prospectus from this time brags a fact that has held true for all of Charity’s history: “In the Surgical Department, the advantages of this College rank those of all others in the Union. The number of wounds, fractures, dislocations, and other injuries, and disease requiring the frequent exercise of Operative Surgery, admitted into the Wards of the New Orleans Hospital, will be found on examination to exceed that of any other in America.”

1843, the relationship between the medical college and Charity was cemented even further. In that year the college petitioned the Louisiana Legislature to grant them land in order to build a medical school building, with the provision that the faculty would care for the patients of Charity free of charge for ten years. Thus began the Tulane’s official involvement with Charity Hospital. The tradition of providing attending physicians to Charity free of charge continued into the 1960’s. The request was granted, and the first permanent medical college building was erected at a cost of $15,000. It contained a lecture room, a chemical laboratory, a library and reading room, a museum, an amphitheater, and a dissecting room on the top floor.

In 1847, the Louisiana Legislature established the University of Louisiana, and the Medical College of Louisiana was assumed into the school, becoming the Medical Department of the University of Louisiana. The reputation of the new medical school grew quickly, and enrollment continued to accelerate over the years leading up to the Civil War.

The faculty relations of the young physicians in these early years were not without tumult. Dr. Hunt, the first dean of the medical school, criticized a newspaper editor named J. W. Frost in 1851 over a political affair. Frost subsequently challenged Hunt to a duel, to which he agreed. The men met south of the city and fired shotguns at each other. Hunt’s second round wounded Frost in his chest, and he died that day. The dean was never prosecuted. In 1856 two Charity Hospital physicians entered into another acrimonious debate. The argument surrounded a medical student named Weems, who had been shot by a law student at a Mardi Gras ball. Dr. Samuel Choppin, a surgeon at Charity and medical school faculty member, had Weems sent to Charity for care. While there, Weems was seen by Charity’s house surgeon, Dr. John Foster. Foster, as house surgeon, had the right to operate on Weems, and summarily ordered Choppin’s prescriptions for the student discarded. Choppin and Foster had the misfortune to meet at the dying Weem’s bedside while rounding that day. They began to shout and had a “severe fist encounter,” later dueling in the yard of Charity with shotguns. Luckily both missed. Three years later, Foster and Choppin again quarreled over rights to treat a patient, this time a man with a carotid aneurysm. Foster eventually sought out Choppin. Their exchange, described by Salvaggio, is informative:

“Are you looking at me, sir?” asked Choppin, and Foster replied, “Yes, sir, I am looking at you.” “And what do you think of me?” continued Choppin. Foster responded, “I think you are a God-damned scoundrel.” At that instant, both physicians drew their pistols.

Foster shot Choppin through the neck, shearing his jugular vein, and in the hip. Choppin responded by charging Foster with a Bowie knife, at which point medical students stormed both men and broke up the fight. Choppin miraculously survived, and did not press charges against his old rival.

Charity Hospital’s reputation continued to grow, mostly based on the reputation of the medical college’s physicians. A journalist from Harper’s Weekly wrote in 1859 of the “commodiousness of its buildings … the superior skill of its attending physicians, the admirable neatness of its domestic appliances, and the impartial catholicity of its administration…” Visitors marveled at the sight of medical students witnessing surgery in the amphitheatre. The Harper’s Weekly journalist described Dr. Stone, “that veteran man of the knife” and one of the founders of the medical college, as he performed an amputation for medical students: “with cuffs thrown back, eye all ablaze, and lips firmly clinched, he prepares to make the adroit thrust… the sudden flash of polished steel; the dull, muffled sound of the yielding flesh, the spirt of blood… the sharp cry of the patient… these are the outlines of a picture that thrills and terrifies the uninitiated beholder."

Charity at this time was probably the largest hospital in the world, with 1,000 beds, 200 more than the eminent Hotel Dieu in Paris.

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The Huey P. Long Years and Louisiana Politics

These years also set the stage for the creation of the LSU School of Medicine. In 1920 Dean Isadore Dyer died, and Charles Bass was appointed dean in 1922. Frequently Bass did not see eye to eye with the administrators of Charity hospital regarding staffing and political decisions. In 1928, Huey P. Long, the “Kingfish,” was elected governor of Louisiana. He promptly punished those who had opposed him and rewarded his patrons by politicizing the Charity Hospital administrative system. Some good did come of this, however. In 1929, Bass and renowned Tulane internist John Herr Mussner argued to Long that clinical teaching at Charity was “absolutely rotten,” and that a separate Tulane service was needed. Long approved this request, and in July 1929 500 beds at Charity were assigned specifically for the training purposes of Tulane School of Medicine.

In 1930, relations between Charity and Tulane soured. Alton Ochsner, who would later first publish the association between smoking and lung cancer with Michael DeBakey, had come to Tulane in 1927 to chair the Department of Surgery following Dr. Matas’ retirement. In a letter to another surgeon friend, Ochsner wrote, “…the outlook at Tulane as far as building up a department as concerned is absolutely hopeless. The university is dependent upon Charity Hospital, a state institution which is in the control of politics. The university is merely tolerated in the hospital and there is no cooperation at all.” Ochsner was also disturbed that Tulane had no say in appointing residents to Charity; that was accomplished solely by the hospital. A copy of this letter, under unknown circumstances, eventually found its way into the hands of Huey Long. Long promptly banned Ochsner from practicing at Charity for two years.
Two other incidents fueled the fire between the governor, Charity and Tulane. First, Long made no secret of his animosity towards Tulane, predicated on Tulane’s denial of him for a honorary doctor of laws degree he desired. Second, the superintendent of Charity, Dr. Arthur Vidrine, wished to be made chair of the otolaryngology department at Tulane School of Medicine, in spite of no formal training in ear, nose, and throat diseases. When Bass and Ochsner refused, Vidrine likely passed on his disappointment and anger to Long.

In December 1930, a short three months after Ochsner had been dismissed from Charity, Long announced that Louisiana State University would have its own medical school that would open in 1931. He bragged that “Honest boys with good records come out of LSU and can’t get into that medical school… We’re a-going to fix that.” In 1931 the LSU School of Medicine opened its doors on the grounds of the Charity complex along Tulane Avenue. Long appointed Vidrine the new president of the school, and Vidrine promptly began to siphon off qualified Tulane professors to teach at LSU. Dean Bass characterized Vidrine as having a “brazen, defiant, dictatorial attitude.” However, this animosity at the administrative level soon subsided. Vidrine recruited the eminent New Orleans surgeon, Urban Maes, to head LSU’s Department of Surgery, and Maes agreed under the condition that Ochsner be reinstated. Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, and Vidrine subsequently lost his post as the powerful superintendent of Charity, retiring to Ville Platte, Louisiana to start a small general medicine practice.

Leonardo - humanist

full article

frontispiece depicting Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio with the arms of the Medici-Toledo family on top

Renaissance humanism - source

Renaissance humanism was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term humanist (Italian: umanista) referred to teachers and students of the humanities, known as the studia humanitatis, which included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. It was not until the 19th century that this began to be called humanism instead of the original humanities, and later by the retronym Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later humanist developments. During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to "purify and renew Christianity", not to do away with it. Their vision was to return ad fontes ("to the sources") to the simplicity of the New Testament, bypassing the complexities of medieval theology.[Protestant bias?] Today, by contrast, the term humanism has come to signify "a worldview which denies the existence or relevance of God, or which is committed to a purely secular outlook".

Renaissance humanism was a response to what came to be depicted by later whig historians as the "narrow pedantry" associated with medieval scholasticism. Humanists sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity and thus capable of engaging in the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. Humanism, whilst set up by a small elite who had access to books and education, was intended as a cultural mode to influence all of society. It was a program to revive the cultural legacy, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity.

There were important centres of humanism in Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino.

Re: Renaissance Humanism

Re: Petrarch

Re: Erasmus

Re; Dante Alighieri

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full article - NYT - 11/21/22

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book info

link to videos

link to collection of brief videos

full text

sugarcane

Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Austronesian and Papuan people. It was introduced to Polynesia, Island Melanesia, and Madagascar in prehistoric times via Austronesian sailors.

It was also introduced to southern China and India by Austronesian traders around 1200 to 1000 BC.

The Persians and Greeks encountered the famous "reeds that produce honey without bees" in India between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. They adopted and then spread sugarcane agriculture.

Merchants began to trade in sugar, which was considered a luxurious and expensive spice, from India.

In the 18th century, sugarcane plantations began in the Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean, and Pacific island nations.

Christopher Columbus first brought sugarcane to the Caribbean during his second voyage to the Americas, initially to the island of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves.

Sugar, often in the form of molasses, was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was used to make rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were then used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves.

The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe.

See *slavery* webpage.

When the Europeans conquered America, they opened gold and silver mines and established sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. These mines and plantations became the mainstay of American production and export. The sugar plantations were particularly important. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century.

However, growing cane and extracting its sugar was a labour-intensive business. Few people wanted to work long hours in malaria-infested sugar fields under a tropical sun. Contract labourers would have produced a commodity too expensive for mass consumption. Sensitive to market forces, and greedy for profits and economic growth, European plantation owners switched to slaves.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable. Most slaves lived a short and miserable life, and millions more died during wars waged to capture slaves or during the long voyage from inner Africa to the shores of America. All this so that Europeans could enjoy their sweet tea and candy – and sugar barons could enjoy huge profits.

article re Louisiana Sugar and Rice Exchange

info

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When Did Hemocyanins Originate?

Because arthropod and molluscan hemocyanins seem to have evolved independently from somewhat different (but related) proteins, we should consider their origins as separate events.

On the basis of these results, we can propose a very tentative scenario for the evolution of the hemocyanins. Very early in the evolution of life, the environment was anaerobic. Under these circumstances, the oxygen production produced by photosynthesis must have been toxic to many creatures.

A variety of enzymes were evolved to neutralize oxygen by carrying out oxidation reactions. For this two metal ions were used, iron and copper. In the case of copper, a type 3 copper center evolved, in which two coppers reversibly bond oxygen as a peroxide.. The resulting tyrosinases and other phenol oxidases must represent an extremely ancient class of binuclear copper proteins, predating the emergence of higher metazoan phyla. It is possible that these all originated from a single protein whose function was to protect primitive organisms from the new toxin, oxygen.

By the time the major metazoan phyla began to emerge (700 – 800 MYA) oxygen levels were close to those at the present, and aerobic metabolism had been well established. An increase in animal size, as well as the development of impermeable integuments, made simple diffusion inadequate for oxygen supply. Therefore, a circulating oxygen transport protein became essential to utilize the advantages of aerobic metabolism.

We postulate that such transport proteins developed in several independent ways, hemoglobins from myoglobins, hemerythrins from myohemerythrins, and the two kinds of hemocyanins from two different classes of phenol oxidases. The development of such diverse transport systems, from different roots, strongly suggests that it occurred after the divergence of the major phyla. This in turn argues that the phylogenetic divergence occurred before 750 MYA.

That hemocyanin evolution occurred earlier in the molluscan line is indicated by both the earlier dating of molluscan functional unit divergence and by the apparent greater evolutionary distance between molluscan hemocyanins and their tyrosinase cousins.

source : JBC Minireview - 2001

Richard Rhodes website

book info

book info

book info

book info

book info

excerpt:

Neither optimism nor pessimism alters the fact that we live in an extraordinary moment. The choices that we’ll make—that we are making right now, without necessarily being aware of them—will determine the future of life for our children and their children and all the other species on earth for generations to come.

This is the situation we’re in, and there’s no avoiding it, because, in the end, this marvelous, fragile planet is all we’ve got.

link to 2 min. video - Why Half?

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full article

Summary

1. The following categories of social behaviour among fire ant workers are known to be mediated principally by chemical releasers recruitment in mass-foraging, recruitment in colony emigration, alarm, grooming, and ele- mentary attraction leading to clustering. Each behaviour pattern can be induced, wholly or in part, by the experimental presentation of chem- ical substances removed from the bodies of the workers.

2. Colony emigration is organized by odour trails in a manner nearly identical to that employed in mass-foraging. Incipient emigration

has been induced with massive doses of ex- tracted trail substance.

3. Alarm behaviour is released principally by a volatile cephalic substance and intensified secondarily by the attractant component of Dufour's gland secretion.

4. Grooming behaviour is characterized as glossal licking of objects unaccompanied by trail-laying. It has been induced artificially with certain fractions of fat-soluble extracts made from whole worker bodies.

5. Workers separated from the nest can be induced to orient toward the air removed from around other groups of workers . Indirect evid- ence has been obtained that one or more simple gaseous excretory products are adequate to produce the response. Carbon dioxide has been used to produce it artificially.

source

book info

excerpts:

Chapter 5. Aggression

Are human beings innately aggressive? This is a favorite question of college seminars and cocktail party conversations, and one that raises emotion in political ideologues of all stripes. The answer to it is yes. Throughout history, warfare, representing only the most organized technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society, from hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states. During the past three centuries a majority of the countries of Europe have been engaged in war during approximately half of all the years; few have ever seen a century of continuous peace.

…

Although the evidence suggests that the biological nature of humankind launched the evolution of organized aggression and roughly directed its early history across many societies, the eventual outcome of that evolution will be determined by cultural processes brought increasingly under the control of rational thought. The practice of war is a straightforward example of a hypertrophied biological predisposition. Primitive men cleaved their universe into friends and enemies and responded with quick, deep emotion to even the mildest threats emanating from outside the arbitrary boundary. With the rise of chiefdoms and states, this tendency became institutionalized, war was adopted as an instrument of policy of some of the new societies, and those that employed an autocatalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally was to fall victim. A new mode of natural selection was operating at the level of entire societies.

…

To recapitulate the total argument, human aggression cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of safety. Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens, in the same sense that birds are inclined to learn territorial songs and to navigate by the polar constellations. We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression. These learning rules are most likely to have evolved during the past hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and, thus, to have conferred a biological advantage on those who conformed to them with the greatest fidelity.

link to article and audio interviews

book info - published: 11/9/21

excerpt:

Finally, Ed Wilson was on his way, twenty-five years old, tall and lanky, the upper range of his hearing gone since his teens, his right eye ruined in a childhood accident: half deaf and half blind. Outwardly, he was a polite, soft-spoken product of Gulf Coast Alabama, the first in his family to graduate from college. But behind the well-mannered finish he was as tough as nails, as bright as the evening star, and no man’s fool. He would become one of the half-dozen greatest biologists of the twentieth century. In the new century now advancing, he would lead the charge to save what’s left of wilderness—half the Earth, he said—not only for the experience of wilderness but also for the millions of species large and small, many of them not yet even named, in danger of going extinct, forever. If they did, he taught, they would take with them their supporting strands of the great web of life, unraveling the world. Trees can be replaced; species, having evolved into being across millions of years, are irreplaceable.

For now, a fresh-minted Ph.D., just setting out, his lifework before him, young Wilson was bound for the South Pacific to collect ants. Entomology was his field—insect biology—and ants were his specialty. No one had ever systematically collected ants across the vast sweep of the South Pacific. For ant specimens, many Pacific islands had never been explored.

The new frontier in 1954, after James Watson and Francis Crick’s great 1953 discovery, was the structure and function of DNA. Biologists everywhere had run to their labs to inform their science with chemistry and physics. Wilson was deliberately running the other way. “If a subject is already receiving a great deal of attention,” he explained his strategy later, “if it has a glamorous aura, if its practitioners are prizewinners who receive large grants, stay away from that subject.”

Wilson was an explorer at heart, had been since he was a small boy. Rather than focus his work on one species, as most of his peers would do, he preferred to break new ground, find the big nuggets, assay them, and move on. If he’d started his life as an only child in the Gulf Coast South, chasing down snakes and butterflies, he’d arrived at Harvard for graduate study in 1951 as a certified prodigy. In a vacant lot in Mobile, Alabama, when he was only thirteen years old, he’d been the first collector in the United States to spot the invasion of the pestilential red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, transported from Argentina as a ship stowaway. Seven years later, as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, he’d published his first scientific paper.

link to 8 min. video - PBS - 2016

NYT book review - 11/10/21

excerpt:

SCIENTIST E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

By Richard Rhodes

The scientist and naturalist E. O. Wilson has always reminded me of the great 19th-century German polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt: Both obsessed with empirical observation and detailed field study, they are also great synthesizers. They have the ability to focus on the tiniest detail — the minuscule gland of a fire ant, for example, in Wilson’s case — but can also zoom out to examine comparative patterns across species and global environments. Their minds are microscopic and telescopic at the same time. Their scientific books are sweeping in scope and thoroughly researched but also reveal their deep love for the natural world. And both are driven by what Wilson calls the “amphetamine of ambition.”

Wilson did not have a happy childhood. He was born in 1929 in Birmingham, Ala. His parents divorced when he was 7 and after that he lived an itinerant life with his alcoholic father. Over a period of nine years, Wilson went to 14 different schools. He found comfort in nature because “animals and plants I could count on,” he later explained, “human relationships were more difficult.” The young boy spent as much time outdoors as possible — Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., Wilson remembers, “became Uganda and Sumatra writ small.”

He was a lanky teenager who crawled on forest floors in search of the fascinating “netherworld” of ants. A childhood fishing accident left him partially blind and so he turned his healthy eye to small things that could be picked and brought up close to be inspected. At the age of 13, Wilson decided to survey a vacant plot of land next to his family’s house to find every nest and species of ant there. He made, in his own words, “the find of a lifetime” when he discovered an ant he had never seen before: an invasive red fire ant that had arrived from Argentina. In 1942, when he spotted it, no one had yet reported the presence of the invasive species in America. He also became a dedicated member of the Boy Scouts, an organization that brought his favorite pursuits together: outdoor life and natural history.

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NBC News interview with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  -  May 8, 1967  -  27 min. video

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

[ excerpts - full letter below ]

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work

…

Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

…

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

…

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

…

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

…

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

…

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

…

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

link to audio of MLK, Jr. reading Letter from a Birmingham Jail

BBC Face to Face - Martin Luther King Jr Interview (1961) - video - 31 min.

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full article

source: Chicago Magazine - July, 2016

excerpts:

It was bitterly cold on January 26, 1966, the day Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, moved into a $90-a-month railroad flat on the top floor of a rundown building on the corner of Hamlin Avenue and 16th Street. The North Lawndale tenement, which stood two blocks from a pool hall that served as headquarters for the Vice Lords street gang, had no lock on its front door and a packed-dirt floor in the foyer.

Just 11 days after his 37th birthday—and coming off the history-making triumphs in Birmingham and Selma that laid the groundwork for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, a year later, the Voting Rights Act—King had come to Chicago to make the city the next proving ground for his nonviolent revolution. In the South, King and his followers had taken on Jim Crow segregation at lunch counters, on buses, and in voting booths; in the North, his crusade, called the Chicago Freedom Movement, would confront a less overt but equally insidious injustice: namely, the discriminatory and duplicitous real estate practices, such as steering, redlining, and panic peddling, that kept blacks boxed inside big-city ghettos. “If we can break the system in Chicago, it can be broken any place in the country,” King declared at a summit of community organizations in 1965.

During the sweltering summer of 1966, the campaign—King’s first major one outside the Deep South—culminated with the kinds of demonstrations and marches into all-white neighborhoods he’d employed earlier. They triggered open violence—most famously during a march in Marquette Park, where King was attacked by an angry mob. The marches—which will be commemorated with the unveiling of a permanent art installation in the park on August 5—exposed to the entire world Chicago’s simmering cauldron of racial tensions, which Mayor Richard J. Daley had, until then, managed to keep from boiling over. “I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate,” King said afterward.

…

Much has changed in 50 years. Racial boundaries have fallen, or at least shifted dramatically. In 1966, Chicago Lawn, the Far Southwest Side neighborhood that includes Marquette Park, was 99.9 percent white—mostly Germans, Poles, Irish, and Lithuanians. Today, it is split almost evenly between blacks and Hispanics, with relatively few whites and a small but growing number of families from the Middle East. Institutionalized discriminatory practices like redlining are a thing of the past, and blacks have come to hold positions of power throughout the city and country, including the highest office in the land.

Much has stayed the same, too. Having earned the dubious distinction of being America’s most segregated big city more than five decades ago, Chicago remains deeply split along racial lines. Today, most blacks live, as they did in the 1960s, on the South and West Sides, where they are the majority, often overwhelmingly so; a recent study by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that nearly three-quarters of the city’s black and white residents would have to move to a different census tract to achieve a true racial balance. What’s more, many of the problems that plagued the city’s black neighborhoods in 1966 haven’t gone away and have arguably gotten worse: gun violence, lack of jobs and economic mobility, and struggling schools. Then there’s the issue of police abuse, dragged into the light by a dashcam video.

The Negro Motorist Green Book - New York Public Library digital collection

“The other America” - speech at Stanford University - April 14, 1967 - video and transcript

excerpt:

I'd like to use a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the Other America.

And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. And, in a sense, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.

But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority forming every day in their little mental skies. As we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams. Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America. Some are Mexican Americans, some are Puerto Ricans, some are Indians, some happen to be from other groups. Millions of them are Appalachian whites. But probably the largest group in this other America in proportion to its size in the Population is the American Negro.

The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery. So what we are seeking to do in the Civil Rights Movement is to deal with this problem. To deal with this problem of the two Americas. We are seeking to make America one nation, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Now let me say that the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America, is much more difficult today than it was five or ten years ago. For about a decade or maybe twelve years, we've struggled all across the South in glorious struggles to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation.

In a sense this was a struggle for decency; we could not go to a lunch counter in so many instances and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back and within transportation — transportation within cities — we often had to stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote in so many areas of the South. And the struggle was to deal with these problems.

And certainly they were difficult problems, they were humiliating conditions. By the thousands we protested these conditions. We made it clear that it was ultimately more honorable to accept jail cell experiences than to accept segregation and humiliation. By the thousands students and adults decided to sit in at segregated lunch counters to protest conditions there. When they were sitting at those lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and seeking to take the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Many things were gained as a result of these years of struggle. In 1964 the Civil Rights Bill came into being after the Birmingham movement which did a great deal to subpoena the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of Civil Rights. After the Selma movement in 1965 we were able to get a Voting Rights Bill. And all of these things represented strides.

But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It's more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.

.

A New Sense of Direction - Martin Luther King, Jr. - 1968

“A Knock at Midnight” - 40 min. audio / images

“A Knock at Midnight” - audio and transcript

Sapiens: A Brief HIstory of Humankind - 2018

excerpt:

During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Unrestrained market forces, rather than tyrannical kings or racist ideologues, were responsible for this calamity.

When the Europeans conquered America, they opened gold and silver mines and established sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. These mines and plantations became the mainstay of American production and export. The sugar plantations were particularly important. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century.

However, growing cane and extracting its sugar was a labour-intensive business. Few people wanted to work long hours in malaria-infested sugar fields under a tropical sun. Contract labourers would have produced a commodity too expensive for mass consumption. Sensitive to market forces, and greedy for profits and economic growth, European plantation owners switched to slaves.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable. Most slaves lived a short and miserable life, and millions more died during wars waged to capture slaves or during the long voyage from inner Africa to the shores of America. All this so that Europeans could enjoy their sweet tea and candy – and sugar barons could enjoy huge profits.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit.

This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way. When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe. Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans. The individuals who bought the shares, the brokers who sold them, and the managers of the slave-trade companies rarely thought about the Africans. Nor did the owners of the sugar plantations. Many owners lived far from their plantations, and the only information they demanded were neat ledgers of profits and losses.

It is important to remember that the Atlantic slave trade was not a single aberration in an otherwise spotless record. The Great Bengal Famine, discussed in the previous chapter, was caused by a similar dynamic – the British East India Company cared more about its profits than about the lives of 10 million Bengalis. VOC’s military campaigns in Indonesia were financed by upstanding Dutch burghers who loved their children, gave to charity, and enjoyed good music and fine art, but had no regard for the suffering of the inhabitants of Java, Sumatra and Malacca. Countless other crimes and misdemeanours accompanied the growth of the modern economy in other parts of the planet.

book info

source: Europe - A History - Norman Davies

full text

full text of Chapter XVII - American Notes - Charles Dickens - 1842

Review of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database - National Endowment for the Humanities

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database - website

Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade.

Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then sold or traded for raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the voyage.

The First Passage was the transportation of captives (slaves) to the African ports, where they would be loaded onto ships.

The Middle Passage across the Atlantic were generally organized by companies or groups of investors rather than individuals

The Final Passage was the journey from the port of disembarkation, such as Charleston, to the plantation or other destination where they would be put to work.

Traders from the Americas and Caribbean received the enslaved Africans. European powers such as Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark–Norway, Sweden, and Brandenburg, as well as traders from Brazil and North America, took part in this trade.

The enslaved Africans came mostly from eight regions: Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa and Southeastern Africa

An estimated 15% of the Africans died at sea, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous people to the ships. The total number of African deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million African deaths.

For two hundred years, 1440–1640, Portuguese slavers had a near monopoly on the export of slaves from Africa. During the 18th century, when the slave trade transported about 6 million Africans, British slavers carried almost 2.5 million.

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info

full article

excerpt:

In 1787 the Quakers of Portsmouth made their anti-slavery campaign official by forming The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, joining forces with prominent abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. So organised were they in their methods of activism, such as civil disobedience, research and evidence-gathering, that they set the blueprint for many future lobbying organisations.

One of their most effective actions was to commission an illustration of the Liverpool slave ship the Brookes, named after its owner, Joseph Brookes, and present it to the nation in poster form, appearing in newspapers, pamphlets, books and coffee houses. The horror it showed quickly established the illustration as a hugely influential part of the abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign.

The architect of the use of the Brookes as political propaganda was the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. In The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), he wrote that the ‘print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and was therefore instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it, in serving the cause of the injured Africans’.

Clarkson’s choice of the Brookes proved to be a revelation to large numbers of people. As he travelled around England, galvanising the anti-slavery campaign, he was attacked in Liverpool in 1787 and nearly killed by a gang of sailors paid to assassinate him.

Over 25 years, Brookes’ ship made ten Atlantic crossings, carrying in total 5,163 captured Africans. Of those, 4,559 survived, meaning that over ten per cent of its prisoners died. Records from The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show that on its 1785-86 voyage it carried 740 enslaved Africans, 258 more than the 1788 poster showed. In 1788 The Regulated Slave Trade Act had been passed, the first British legislation to regulate slave shipping. It limited the number of slaves an individual ship could transport.

link to full webpage

The American Slave Coast - 2016

excerpts:

Most enslaved African Americans lived and died without writing so much as their names. The Virginia legal code of 1849 provided for “stripes”—flogging—for those who tried to acquire literacy skills. A free person who dared “assemble with negroes for the purpose of instructing them to read or write” could receive a jail sentence of up to six months and a fine of up to a hundred dollars, plus costs. An enslaved person who tried to teach others to read might have part of a finger chopped off by the slaveowner, with the full blessing of law.

So it was an especially distinguished achievement when in 1897 the sixty-four-year-old Louis Hughes published his memoir, titled Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter. Like the other volumes collectively referred to as slave narratives, it bears witness to a history slaveowners did not want to exist: the firsthand testimony of the enslaved.

By the time Hughes was twelve, he had been sold five times. The third time, he was sold away from his mother to a trader. “It was sad to her to part with me,” he recalled, “though she did not know that she was never to see me again, for my master had said nothing to her regarding his purpose and she only thought, as I did, that I was hired to work on the canal-boat, and that she should see me occasionally. But alas! We never met again.”

The trader carried the boy away from the Charlottesville area that had been his home, down the James River to Richmond. There he was sold a fourth time, to a local man, but Hughes “suffered with chills and fever,” so the dissatisfied purchaser had him resold. This time he went on the auction block, where he was bought by a cotton planter setting up in Pontotoc, Mississippi—a booming region that had recently become available for plantations in the wake of the delivery of large areas of expropriated Chickasaw land into the hands of speculators. Slaves were designated by geographical origin in the market, with Virginia-and Maryland-born slaves commanding a premium. “It was held by many that [Virginia] had the best slaves,” Hughes wrote. “So when Mr. McGee found I was born and bred in that state he seemed satisfied.

The bidding commenced, and I remember well when the auctioneer said: ‘Three hundred eighty dollars—once, twice and sold to Mr. Edward McGee.’” McGee had plenty of financing, and he was in a hurry; he bought sixty other people that day.4 A prime field hand would have commanded double or more, but even so, the $380 that bought the sickly twelve-year-old would be more than $10,000 in 2014 money. Like the largest number of those forcibly emigrated to the Deep South, McGee’s captives were all made to walk from Virginia to Mississippi, in a coffle.

Southern children grew up seeing coffles approach in a cloud of dust. A coffle is “a train of men or beasts fastened together,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed Louis Hughes referred to the coffle he marched in as “a herd.” The word comes from the Arabic qafilah, meaning “caravan,” recalling the overland slave trade that existed across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the greater Islamic world centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

With the development in the late fifteenth century of the maritime trade that shifted the commercial gravity of Africa southward from the desert to the Atlantic coast, coffles were used to traffic Africans from point of capture in their homeland to point of sale in one of Africa’s many slave ports.

But the people trudging to Mississippi along with Louis Hughes were not Africans. They were African Americans, born into slavery and raised with their eventual sale in mind.

Force-marched through wilderness at a pace of twenty or twenty-five miles a day, for five weeks or more, from can’t-see to can’t-see, in blazing sun or cold rain, crossing unbridged rivers, occasionally dropping dead in their tracks, hundreds of thousands of laborers transported themselves down south at gunpoint, where they and all their descendants could expect to be prisoners for life.

Freedom - Richie Havens - video

The World That Made New Orleans - 2009

excerpts:

THE SENEGAMBIAN PERIOD

Here are the warrior men, the farmers,

They farm the rice, they farm the millet that we eat.

When it is hot, they await the rain

Witness, witness the warriors.

New Orleans was a dissolute town from the beginning.

With such unpromising personnel, it seems unlikely that [frontier Louisiana] would have survived at all had it not been for another group of forced emigrants who began arriving in numbers in 1719: African slaves.

From a cultural point of view, it might be appropriate to refer to the French period alternatively as the Senegambian period. The French kept careful records, so there is high-quality information about how many Africans were brought to the colony … during the period France governed Louisiana, a total of 5,951 Africans arrived on twenty-three slave ships.

…

The first two slave ships arrived in 1719, and by 1721, seven had come. All but one had arrived by January 1731; the final one, a private venture by planters, brought 190 captives in 1743. After that, no more Africans would come to Louisiana for over thirty years, with the single known exception of a slave ship captured from the British in 1758.

…

The first two slave ships to arrive in Louisiana were from Ouidah, on the so-called Slave Coast; by then under the control of the Dahomeyan empire, in what is now Benin, it was a slaving port whose captives included people from nearby Ardra. But the bulk of the captives brought to Louisiana—3,909, or about two-thirds of the total, on sixteen out of the twenty-three French slave ships, including the final ship of 1743—embarked from Senegal.

Of the seven non-Senegambian ships, six were from Ouidah, and one ship came from Cabinda (Angola). All the non-Senegambian ships, except for one of the ships from Ouidah, arrived by June 1721. The captives on these earliest ships suffered the highest mortality rates, not a few of them starving to death. Two of the Ouidah cargoes were criticized by Bienville for being old and sick. The Cabinda cargo arrived sick, and had the misfortune to arrive during a period of famine; twenty-eight of the captives died after landing.

The Africain, which arrived on March 17, 1721, from Ouidah, had 180 captives out of 280 that had embarked; the Duc de Maine, arriving six days later, had 338 out of an original 394. A November 1721 census found only 680 Africans in the colony. But at that, the blacks seem to have survived in Louisiana better than the whites did. Despite the many distinct African subgroups and languages that have been identified for every part of Africa and in the New World, the distribution of Africans in the Americas was not random.

For obvious logistical reasons, there was a tendency for slaves from the northern reaches of slaving territory to be taken to the more northern parts of the New World (the British colonies), and for those from the south to be taken to South America (Brazil).

…

French Louisiana took representatives of all three of these broadly defined regions, but not in equal proportion: Upper Guinea, represented by the Senegambians, dominated; Lower Guinea was a minority, with the ships from Ouidah; and there was one ship from the Angola coast.

The Senegambians came from a culture of artisanship. Among them were goldsmiths and silversmiths, ironworkers and farmers. They were sophisticated: their African territory, directly to the south of the Sahara and long crisscrossed by trade routes, was a place where cultures met and interpenetrated one another.

… they knew how to work indigo, which grew wild in both the Senegambia and Louisiana, and which the Europeans did not know how to process into dye; it became an important crop in Louisiana.

At the request of the French colonial slave buyers, the first two slave ships to come to the colony brought hogsheads of rice seedlings from Africa, along with captives who knew how to cultivate it. Rice became, and remains, a staple of the Louisiana diet. In other words, Africans brought not only necessary manual labor, but also came with knowledge, skills, and foods that were crucial to keeping the white settlers of Louisiana from starving.

Maspero's Exchange - Its Predecessors and Successors - 1989 article from Louisiana Historical Association

What is Liberty? - James Baldwin / Ken Burns - Our monuments are representations of myth, not fact - 6 min. video - 6/23/20

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John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.

As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy. Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and he learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was 11, an uncle took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, making him more acutely aware of Troy's segregation.

In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio, and he closely followed King’s Montgomery bus boycott later that year. Lewis met Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.

Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and then received a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University. As a student, he was dedicated to the civil rights movement. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and took part in many other civil rights activities as part of the Nashville Student Movement. The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. Lewis was arrested and jailed many times in the nonviolent movement to desegregate the downtown area of the city. He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality.

While a student, Lewis was invited to attend nonviolence workshops held at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church by the Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith. There, Lewis and other students became dedicated adherents to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he practiced for the rest of his life.

In 1961, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. There were seven whites and six blacks who were determined to ride from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in an integrated fashion. At that time, several southern states continued to enforce laws prohibiting black and white riders from sitting next to each other on public transportation. The Freedom Ride, originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by James Farmer and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that declared segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. The Freedom Rides also exposed the passivity of the government regarding violence against citizens of the country who were simply acting in accordance with the law. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. The Kennedy Administration then called for a cooling-off period, with a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

In the South, Lewis and other nonviolent Freedom Riders were beaten by angry mobs, arrested at times and taken to jail. At age 21, Lewis was the first of the Freedom Riders to be assaulted while in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He tried to enter a whites-only waiting room and two white men attacked him, injuring his face and kicking him in the ribs. Nevertheless, only two weeks later Lewis joined a Freedom Ride that was bound for Jackson, Mississippi. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal. We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back," Lewis said towards the end of his life in regard to his perseverance following the act of violence. Lewis was also imprisoned for 40 days in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi, after participating in a Freedom Riders activity in that state.

In an interview with CNN during the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Lewis recounted the amount of violence he and the 12 other original Freedom Riders endured. In Birmingham, the Riders were beaten with baseball bats, chains, lead pipes, and stones. They were arrested by police who led them across the border into Tennessee and let them go. They reorganized and rode to Montgomery where they were met with more violence, and Lewis was hit in the head with a wooden crate. "It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious," said Lewis, remembering the incident. When CORE gave up on the Freedom Ride because of the violence, Lewis and fellow activist Diane Nash arranged for the Nashville students to take it over and bring it to a successful conclusion.

In 1963, when Charles McDew stepped down as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis, one of the founding members of SNCC, was elected to take over. Lewis's experience at that point was already widely respected. His courage and his tenacious adherence to the philosophy of reconciliation and nonviolence made him emerge as a leader. By this time, he had been arrested 24 times in the nonviolent movement for equal justice. He served as chairman until 1966. During his tenure, SNCC opened Freedom Schools, launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and organized some of the voter registration efforts during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign. As the chairman of SNCC, Lewis had written a speech in reaction to the 1963 Civil Rights Bill. The planned speech denounced the bill because it did not protect African Americans against police brutality or provide African Americans with the right to vote, describing it as "too little and too late." But when copies of the speech were distributed on August 27, other chairs of the march insisted that it be revised. James Forman re-wrote Lewis’s speech on a portable typewriter in a small anteroom behind Lincoln's statue during the program. SNCC’s initial assertion "we cannot support, wholeheartedly the [Kennedy] civil rights bill” was replaced with “We support it with great reservations."

In 1963, as chairman of SNCC Lewis was named one of the "Big Six" leaders who were organizing the March on Washington, the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, along with Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins; Lewis was the youngest of the Big Six. Lewis also spoke at the March. Discussing the occasion, historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence." At 23 he was the youngest speaker that day, and, at the time of his death, he was the last remaining living speaker.

In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for "Mississippi Freedom Summer", a campaign to register black voters across the South and expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote. Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches when, on March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as "Bloody Sunday" – Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis's skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge to Brown Chapel, a church in Selma which also served as the movement's headquarters. Lewis bore scars on his head from the incident for the rest of his life.

The First Time John Lewis and I Integrated the Buses - link to article

We just got on and sat in the front row. The bus driver insisted that we move to the back. But we didn’t move.

NYT Opinion - July 18, 2020 - by Bernard Lafayette (see: here)

Remembering John Lewis, American Politician and Civil Rights Leader - PBS - 7 videos - aired 7/20/20

CODE SW!TCH : Word Watch - NPR

mumbo jumbo

full text

Map Shows How Humans Migrated Across The Globe

full article: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

link to Smithsonian website

full issue - April 1959

Rate control of the ventricular response to AF is achieved with medications that limit conduction through the AV node such as diltiazem, β-adrenergic antagonists, and digoxin .

*** Digoxin can be useful in controlling the resting ventricular rate in AF in the setting of LV dysfunction and CHF when other agents fail. ***

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book info

excerpts:

This is the story of Tinsley Randolph Harrison—one of the most important and pivotal medical doctors in U.S. history—but it’s also the story of the practice of medicine in America in the 20th century, and more specifically about the practice of medicine in the Southern United States. Harrison was born in 1900 with the hope and fear of the new century; he died in 1978 just as the century was beginning to sense its looming end. His life affords an opportunity to look at the explosive progress that took place in medical research, education, practice, and administrative arrangements in the 20th century, which has been called the greatest period for medicine in all history.

…

link to full article here

Paul Dudley White

1st edition - 1950

21st edition - 2022

full essay with active links here

See *pump* webpage for extensive cardiiovascular history

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- from Kenneth B. Storey and Janet M. Storey - Storey Lab, Carleton U., Canada

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full text

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Physiological components and molecular mechanisms of thermogenesis

Energy expenditure comprises combustion of substrates by oxygen and the body’s work (synthesis,maintaining ion gradients, muscle activity, ...). This expenditure is conventionally divided into four types : (1) obligatory thermogenesis related to cellular metabolism, functioning of organs, maintenance of the body’s vital functions; (2) postprandial thermogenesis, or the thermal effect of food; (3) thermogenesis resulting from physical activity; and (4) adaptive thermogenesis. The most variable part of energy expenditure is that corresponding to physical activity (physical exercise and non-exercise activity thermogenesis, see below). Adaptive thermogenesis corresponds to changes in energy expenditure as a function of ambient temperature and diet.

At the molecular level, thermogenesis arises fromreactions that are imperfectly coupled thermodynamically, for example, ion transport and ATP utilization, re-oxidation of coenzymes and ADP phosphorylation. Apart from the particular situation of intense physical exercise, a large proportion of the cellular heat of resting energy expenditure is produced by cellular respiration, which is the re-oxidation of the reduced coenzymes NADH and FADH in the respiratory chain. These oxidations are exergonic and greatly increase the free energy available. In the absence of the coupling of respirationto ATP synthesis, an endergonic process, cellular respiration seems to generate just heat. The coupling of re-oxidation of reduced coenzymes to ADP phosphorylation consumes a large part of the energy released by the oxidations and greatly reduces the proportion of energy released as heat. The molecular mechanism of the coupling of mitochondrial re-oxidation of the reduced coenzymes (via the complexes that form the respiratory chain) to ADP phosphorylation (by ATP synthase) will not be detailed here. Briefly, on oxidation of the coenzymes, three respiratory chain complexes work as proton pumps and expel protons into the mitochondrial intermembrane space, generating there a proton gradient. The energy of this gradient is then utilized by mito-chondrial ATP synthase to phosphorylate ADP (Fig. 1).

In standard conditions, the mitochondrial respiration of all cells is coupled to ATP production and constitutes the main source of ATP. However, as the coupling of respiration to ADP phosphorylation is less than 100% efficient energetically, respiration also releases heat. This mechanism is considered to explain in large part the heat produced by resting thermogenesis (Fig. 1). We will discuss below the question of the contribution of the partial coupling (or uncoupling) of respiration/ATP synthesis to adaptive thermogenesis or to the energy imbalance involved in obesity.

The other thermogenic biochemical reactions principally involve futile cycles and ATPases, which include the energy-dissipating systems ATPase-Na+/K+of the plasma membrane and Ca++-ATPase of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. The Na+/K+-ATPase pump maintains the plasma membrane potential and ATP hydrolysis and contributes to energy expenditure. Intracellular calciumhomeostasis and calcium recycling lead to a high consumption of ATP by the Ca++-ATPase of the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

full article

excerpt:

Normal core body temperature is around 37°C and controlled within a narrow range (33.2–38.2°C).

Abnormal core temperature deviations of even a couple of degrees will challenge the body’s thermoregulatory mechanisms, and swings in temperature outside the normal range can prove fatal.

Beyond a body temperature of 42°C, cytotoxicity occurs with protein denaturation and impaired DNA synthesis, resulting in end-organ failure and neuronal impairment.

If body temperature drops below 27°C, the associated neuromuscular, cardiovascular, hematological, and respiratory changes can equally prove fatal.

link to article

Temperature, metabolic power and the evolution of endothermy - Biological Reviews - 2010

link to Braille educational / learning webpage on Hadley Vision Resources

2018 concept

2018 concept

2018 concept

link to webpage

link to website

link to website

• Commercial production of an affordable viable product is still just a concept (?). *

See “Braille e-book” Wikipedia page here

See: full Buffalo River Guide no. 1

See: full Buffalo River Guide no. 2

See: full Buffalo River Guide no. 3

See: full Buffalo River Guide no. 4

See: full Buffalo River Guide no. 5

Bohemian Apiary: June 2018 hive modification and hivepad construction pics

Grand Bohemian Hotel - image slideshow

Grand Bohemian Hotel - website

Bohemian Honey Harvest - June 2019 - selected pics

excellent video - 12 min.

link to site

link to video

A Few Words on Behalf of Bats - NYT - 12/11/20

book info

book info

See: *wilson* page

full article

This claim was originally made by Harvard University professor Edward O Wilson, and the German biologist Bert Hoelldobler, in their 1994 book Journey To The Ants.

They based their estimate on an earlier one by British entomologist C B Williams, who once calculated that the number or insects alive on earth at a given moment was one million trillion.

"If, to take a conservative figure, one percent of this host is ants, their total population is ten thousand trillion," wrote Wilson and Hoelldobler. "Individual workers weigh on average between 1 to 5 mg, according to the species. When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings."

info

link to full article

link to full documentary video - Bert Holldobler

link to video - 52 min.

link to website

website

Ants of Alabama (species list)

link to full article

ABSTRACT: A 2005 review compiled a list of 155 ant species plus the hybrid fire ant Solenopsis invicta X richteri from Alabama. Here, we add an 38 additional species based on both published and unpublished records and revised identifications raising the total to 193 species and one hybrid. Of these, 32 species and one hybrid are considered exotic to the state. We present county level maps of species richness and collection efforts for native and exotic ants highlighting areas of special concern for conservation and invasion risks.

TRIBUTE:

With the death of Dr. E.O. Wilson announced as we finalized proofs of this work we wanted to pay tribute to him with a note of remembrance, as we were all most eager to share this work and our Alabama ant-biophilia. Wilson grew up in Alabama as a pioneering naturalist, finding his love of ants after a fishing hook accident forced him into the nearsighted but expansive universe of “the little things that run the world.” Although he is famous for his work and career at Harvard as a taxonomist (he described 429 species!), theoretical ecologist, and global conservation advocate, he always remained an Alabama boy.

In the latter half of his life he came back to Alabama at every opportunity —notably as his focus shifted towards conservation. An ever important sentiment shared by Wilson was that we are “still short on saving a large percentage of the species, many unknown mostly to the public” and still in an age of discovery. Wilson stated that “we’ve come to recognize that the fauna and flora are fundamental in continued human existence” and the first step in determining what areas to conserve is understanding each and every species inhabiting those areas. Historically conservation efforts have been prioritized based on charismatic flora and fauna and although the roles of invertebrates have long been known to be important among ecologists, we simply have not had the baseline knowledge of what invertebrates live where to include them in most conservation strategies.

By Wilson’s estimates, ants outweigh the vertebrate fauna wherever they co-occur. Ants are ecosystem engineers, aerating the soil through nest building and planting the herbaceous understory through seed dispersal. There must be concerted biodiversity inventory efforts to understand the distribution of invertebrates in order to steward them and reap their ecological benefits. This small work on the ants of Alabama is at the heart of Wilson’s vision and supports the goals of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s Half-Earth Project.

Dr. E.O. Wilson is known to many of us as uncle Ed for his mentoring role and positive influence in our lives. It is our goal that by updating the ants of Alabama we provide a better base of knowledge that can be used to help prioritize conservation decisions with this most important group of terrestrial invertebrates. This one is for our ur-myrmecologist, uncle Ed.

link to full bulletin

book info

Carpenter ants are found all over the world, where they play a major role in forests as predators of leaf-eating insects. Like all ants, carpenter ants live in large colonies, with workers, the queen, and various other insects that live in the colony as "guests." In the first book entirely devoted to the subject, entomologists Hansen and Klotz reveal these facts and more as they examine every phase of the ants' lifestyle. From mating swarms to the founding of a new colony, foraging behavior, and the construction of nests, the authors' research as well as the extensive literature on these ants is mined for a comprehensive account.

info

Formicarium v.1 … and ant pics - 2023

Two lessons from ant colony organization - Stanford Biology - 1/19/16

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full text

In praise of fire ants - Steven Austad, - Chair, UAB Department of Biology - AL.com - 2019

excerpt:

If you live anywhere south of Kentucky and east of New Mexico, you have probably done a dance I call the fire ant boogie. It doesn't need to be taught. Seconds after you blunder unknowingly through a fire ant mound, which if you live where fire ants live, you will do, your ankles suddenly feel like they have burst into flame. You will do the fire ant boogie, trying to shake off your ant tormenters.

I'm sure we have all wondered whether that fire scorching our ankles was due to ant bites or ant stings. The answer is yes. They bite and they sting. However, the bite is trivial. You probably didn't even feel it. They bite only to anchor themselves to a bit of skin or a shaft of hair, so that they can then repeatedly stab you with their stinger, each time injecting another load of venom.

Each ant will sting you about half a dozen times in quick succession if she gets a chance. Yes, all those stinging ants are females -- sterile female workers. The seldom-seen males are black rather than red and have wings. Stingers evolved from what was originally an egg-laying device, so you wouldn't really expect males to have them. By the way, be thankful that they sting you so few times. Fire ant workers have enough venom to sting as many as thirty times.

website

book info

Excerpts from a reviewer’s comments:

Southerners hate fire ants. Let alone that they are convinced that fire ants ruin land and ravage gardens: fire ants hurt. Anyone stung by just one knows that they deserve their name, but so often people are not stung by just one, but by a cluster. So it is alarming to find a southerner who ardently feels another way about the creatures. "I love fire ants," is the first sentence in chapter one of The Fire Ants by Walter R. Tschinkel, who says he has written it for "professional biologists and for people still open-minded enough to be intrigued, charmed, or fascinated by the many results of biological research on fire ants." Besides, the stings aren't so bad.

…

That sort of writing is typical of the amused, light touch that Tschinkel brings to a 700 page volume which Edward O. Wilson declares in the foreword "a masterpiece". (Wilson was responsible, in 1962, for steering Tschinkel from biochemistry and organic chemistry to his current studies.)

There is much more to the fire ant than just the sting, and it is hard to imagine that this volume has left anything out, except for all the research that there is still to do about still-mysterious details. Fire ants were imported accidentally from South America between 1933 and 1942. They moved out concentrically from Mobile, Alabama, and there is a famous map of their expanding range as the years went by, but it wasn't just a simple matter of expansive growth by a species that liked the new real estate. They had help from the same vector that brought them to the United States, the humans which Tschinkel says fire ants must regard as benevolent gods. Distant foci of infestation were established "when obliging nurserymen unwittingly gave rides to hitchhiking fire ants." Fire ants would have had trouble crossing the desert, for instance, without our help, and so they got to California.

…

Tschinkel is often confronted by people who want him to tell them how to get rid of the ants. If you have a hypersensitive member of the family, yes, it might be time for poison baits, he suggests, but otherwise he advises simply leaving them alone. After all, he says, they don't do any harm. Now, anyone who has been stung by these critters might question that, but Tschinkel provides ample data to show that there is little demonstrable harm done by fire ants, and even some good; Louisiana sugarcane farmers, for instance, recognize that fire ants go after sugarcane borers and thus improve crop yields. There have been efforts, waves of chlordane and Mirex, that humans have used to eliminate the ants, and when that failed, just to control their spread, and when that failed, there was nothing for the humans to do but give up. The Ant Wars were "a complex brew of science, politics, journalistic hyperbole, public hysteria, and legal maneuvering" and the humans lost. Fire ants will be around for at least as long as we keep making them at home, it seems, and in reading this impressive volume, it is hard not to admire the sophisticated ways they have evolved to keep themselves going. Even if you have no chance of becoming a myrmecologist yourself, you will find it hard not to admire the cleverness and hard work of the researchers devoted to them. Tschinkel's volume is a beautiful monument to fire ants and to science.

sample page

sample page

sample page

antweb.org - website … extensive resources

link to website

book info

link to full article

The sophistication that we admire in the behavior of ants is a product of the entire colony and is controlled not by a single brain, but by the sum of all the individual brains of the colony's members. In analogy to the "superorganism", this could be referred to as a "superbrain".

book info

All ants live in societies. They are social insects, and they play a significant role in almost all terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, the ants are the little creatures that run the world. This is how our fellow myrmecologist Edward O. Wilson once characterized these formidable insects. Indeed, ants are among the most ecologically dominant organisms of this planet.

info

M.S. Rau

link to full article

“The greatest piece of art in the world ” - Michelangelo, Italian sculpture, painter, architect and engineer

The Laocoön marble sculpture after which this remarkable bronze was modeled unquestionably influenced the lives and works of countless artists, authors, popes, kings and emperors since it was first discovered in the early 16th century.

Incredibly important to the history of art, this extraordinary work and its handful of replicas are prominently displayed in the most prestigious museums around the world, from the Vatican to the J. Paul Getty.

The story of Laocoön is one of the most famous in all of literature.

Described by Virgil in his epic poem The Aeneid, it is the iconic tale of the famous Trojan horse. The Greeks, after an unsuccessful ten-year siege of the city of Troy, craftily left a giant wooden horse outside the gates of the city with a small Greek contingency hidden inside.

A cunning Greek soldier named Sinon was left to offer an explanation of this unusual gift.

Laocoön, the Trojan high priest who questioned Sinon, was not persuaded and began to warn the people of Troy.

According to Virgil, the Goddess Minerva (Athena), eager to protect her Greeks, immediately sent two sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his twin sons before they could warn more Trojans of this deception.

Insights into the Bronze Laocoön sculpture - 6 min. video - Bill Rau

excerpts:

Broken by war and rebuffed by the Fates

For so many years, the Greek warlords

Built a horse, aided by the divine art   

Of Pallas, a horse the size of a mountain,

Weaving its ribs out of beams of fir.

They pretended it was a votive offering

For their safe return home. So the story went.

But deep within the Horse’s cavernous dark   

They concealed an elite band, all their best,

Stuffing its huge womb with men at arms.

…

And now Laocoön comes running down

From the citadel at the head of a great throng  

And in his burning haste he cries from afar:

‘Are you out of your minds, you poor fools?

Are you so easily convinced that the enemy

Has sailed away? Do you honestly think

That any Greek gift comes without treachery?

What is Ulysses known for? Either this lumber

Is hiding Achaeans inside, or it has been built

As an engine of war to attack our walls,

To spy on our homes and come down on the city

From above. Or some other evil lurks inside.  

Do not trust the Horse, Trojans! Whatever it is,

I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.’

…

What happened next was more horrible still

And threw us into deepening chaos.

Laocoön, serving by lot as Neptune’s priest,

Was sacrificing a great bull at the god’s altar,

When we saw, coming from Tenedos

Over the calm water, a pair of serpents —

I shudder to recall them—making for shore.

Trailing huge coils they sheared through the sea,

And their bloody crests arched over the waves

As they writhed and twisted in the seething surf.

They were almost ashore. Their eyes

 Were shot with blood and fire, and their tongues

Hissed and flickered in their open mouths.

We scattered, pale with fear, as the sea-snakes

Glided through the sand straight for Laocoön.

First, they entwined the priest’s two sons

In great looping spirals, and then they sank their fangs

Into the boys’ wretched bodies and began to feed.

Then they seized Laocoön as he ran to their aid,

Weapon in hand, and lashed their scaly bodies

Twice around his waist and twice around his neck,  

Their heads reared high. As the priest struggled

To wrench himself free from the knotted coils,

His headbands were soaked with venom and gore,

And his horrible cries reached up to the stars.

…

Isis Current Bibliography - website

George Sarton’s European Roots - introduction to his life and times - full text

History of Science Society - website

full notes

link to 30 min. NASA video

Falcon 9 - SpaceX

Live from Space: Video Inside the SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour Spacecraft - video - 5/31/20

SpaceX launched humans to space for the first time - May 30, 2020 - 6 min. video

To Scale: The Solar System - 7 min. video

link to website

Dark DNA Group

The concept of “dark DNA” has been adopted by the field of astrophysics, where cosmologists for many years refer to the part of matter and energy that cannot pinpoint or detect with the existing technology, as dark. However, it has been proven that this dark side of matter and energy is not just very real, but it also makes up more than 90% of the universe.

Likewise, in genetics, dark DNA refers to that part of the genome, whose role is not clear, or seems to do not much in the cellular processes essential to life. Consequently, the role of non-coding RNA and the role of introns in alternative splicing is of uttermost priority in our research.

Keys Emerge to Mystery of ‘Junk” DNA - NYT - 1994

full article

full article

In the now-standard 􏰁 cold dark matter (􏰁CDM) cosmology, more than ∼95 per cent of the energy density in our Universe is in the form of dark matter and dark energy, whereas baryonic matter only comprises ∼5 per cent.

At high redshift (⁠z ≳ 2), most of the expected baryons are found in the Ly α absorption forest: the diffuse, photoionized intergalactic medium (IGM) with a temperature of 104–105 K. . However, at redshifts z ≲ 2, the observed baryons in stars, the cold interstellar medium, residual Lyman α forest gas, OVI and broad Lyman α (BLA) absorbers, and hot gas in clusters of galaxies account for only ∼50 per cent of the expected baryons – the remainder has yet to be identified. . Hydrodynamical simulations suggest that 40–50 per cent of baryons could be in the form of shock-heated gas in a cosmic web between clusters of galaxies.

Seeing the Beginning of Time - 50 min. video - 2017

link to 15 min. video

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Intense Flash From Milky Way's Black Hole Illuminated Gas Far Outside of Our Galaxy - NASA.gov - 6/2/20

About 3.5 million years ago, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy unleashed an enormous burst of energy. Our primitive ancestors, already afoot on the African plains, likely would have witnessed this flare as a ghostly glow high overhead in the constellation Sagittarius. It might have persisted for 1 million years.

Now, eons later, astronomers are using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's unique capabilities to uncover even more clues about this cataclysmic explosion. Looking to the far outskirts of our galaxy, they found that the black hole's floodlight reached so far into space it illuminated a vast train of gas trailing the Milky Way's two prominent satellite galaxies: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and its companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).

The black hole outburst was probably caused by a large hydrogen cloud up to 100,000 times the Sun's mass falling onto the disk of material swirling near the central black hole. The resulting outburst sent cones of blistering ultraviolet radiation above and below the plane of the galaxy and deep into space.

The radiation cone that blasted out of the Milky Way’s south pole lit up a massive ribbon-like gas structure called the Magellanic Stream. The flash lit up a portion of the stream, ionizing its hydrogen (enough to make 100 million Suns) by stripping atoms of their electrons.

Was the Milky Way a Quasar? - PBS Space Time - 14 min. video - 5/29/20

See: *peak* webpage

See: *grand* webpage

The two major works that would mobilize all the attention of Michelangelo’s old age concerned the commissions of Paul III, who wanted to establish Roman supremacy by the reconstructions of St. Peter's and the Campidoglio. Of course, these projects were finished after the artist's death, but the numerous preserved plans and sketches prove that they were completed in accordance with the architect's wishes.

The splendor occasioned by the visit of Charles V to the Eternal City anticipated the replanning of the Piazza Campidoglio. Because of a lack of finances, it was not until 1539 that the Senate, following the will of Paul III, appropriated the first funds for the construction, whose care was soon entrusted to Michelangelo. The first problem was to create harmony and an organic place between the two buildings, the Palazzo Senatorio and the Palazzo Conservatori, from different aspects around the antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, placed in the center of the Piazza from 1538, and whose pedestal Michelangelo reshaped in an oval to lighten the statue itself and then to harmonize it with the new oval plans for the Piazza.

Michelangelo's first concern was to plan the unification of the facades, to make them symmetrii cal, by creating a new building, which would close the Piazza, the fourth side consisting of a t staircase, assuring passage between the Campidoglio and the city. The general plan of the Piazza is composed of a central oval representing the caput mundi surrounded by an open base ; trapezoid with the balustrade of the staircase. Here is an extraordinary theatricalization of the space, consisting of a center towards which the star shaped design of the Piazza converges. The facades of the Palaces represent the tension of embedded monumental forces. Horizontals and verticals fit together violently in the form of Ionic columns and Corinthian pilasters that give an age-old character to the whole of the setting.

The reconstruction of St. Peter's had already been envisaged by Julius II; a contest was then organized, and Michelangelo's rival, Bramante, emerged the victor.

Before his death, Bramante only realized the beginnings of the construction and Raphael succeeded him, proposing new plans. Upon his death, Antonio da Sangallo, the Younger, assumed the direction of the work, as chief architect. In 1546, he died and Michelangelo became the master of Roman architecture and resumed Bramante's initial plan.

Around four central interior columns, Michelangelo created a simple structure in the form of a Greek cross, as Bramante had planned, but simplifying the different successive projects of his predecessors. The central structure is in the shape of a square, open on one side to form a portico of six columns supporting a triangular pediment. Michelangelo had studied the model of the cupola of the Duomo in Florence from which he conceived the soaring dome that overhangs the structure. Faithful to its traditional conception, Michelangelo, for this church, the greatest in all Christianity, created a bond of contradictory forces linked together in the unity of the symbolic heightening of the dome.

While a building of small proportions had already been constructed by Antonio da Sangallo, the Younger, Paul III declared a competition open to the greatest architects of the time for the construction of the largest private palace in Rome, the Palazzo Farnese, for the Pope's son, Pier Luigi Farnese. Michelangelo won the commission. It is recognized today that the part attributed to Buonarroti is relatively modest, Sangallo's plans having prevailed. However, Michelangelo constructed the cornice of the building and it is remarkable. At its summit it accentuates the whole of the building and unifies it like a frame that contains the structure. In the center of the building, the first floor, the work of Sangallo, is broken by a balustrade that dominates the door of the building. This addition by Michelangelo, as well as the coat of arms over the center window, adds some life to the facade, which is relatively austere.

The Palazzo Farnese completed, Michelangelo, near the end of his life, realized several more building plans, such as the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, a religious structure which was supposed to be built between the Via Giulia and the Tiber, in the heart of the Florentine quarter of Rome. Plans have also survived for the conversion of the Diocletian Baths into a church called Santa Maria degli Angeli. Sketches by the master concerning the commission for the Sforza Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Porta Pia have also been preserved.

The architectural work of Michelangelo cannot be separated from the entirety of his artistic problematics. In the same way, two fundamental lines are apparent, which inscribe the artist's own genius in this field. First, his capacity to synthesize elements borrowed from the past, then, his will to produce a powerful work. Forceful and massive architecture, Michelangelo's construction is symbolic; each element is significant in its totality and the direction of a spiritual and cosmic project.

Ἐλθὼν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἰς τὰ μέρη Καισαρείας τῆς Φιλίππου ἠρώτα τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτοῦ λέγων Τίνα λέγουσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι εἶναι τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου

When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?”

Οἱ δὲ εἶπαν Οἱ μὲν Ἰωάννην τὸν Βαπτιστήν ἄλλοι δὲ Ἠλίαν ἕτεροι δὲ Ἰερεμίαν ἢ ἕνα τῶν προφητῶν

They said, “Some say that You are John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Λέγει αὐτοῖς Ὑμεῖς δὲ τίνα με λέγετε εἶναι

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

Ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ Σίμων Πέτρος εἶπεν Σὺ εἶ ὁ Χριστὸς ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος

Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῷ Μακάριος εἶ Σίμων Βαριωνᾶ ὅτι σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα οὐκ ἀπεκάλυψέν σοι ἀλλ’ ὁ Πατήρ μου ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς κἀγὼ δέ σοι λέγω ὅτι σὺ εἶ Πέτρος καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ τῇ πέτρᾳ οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ πύλαι ᾅδου οὐ κατισχύσουσιν αὐτῆς

Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

δώσω σοι τὰς κλεῖδας τῆς βασιλείας τῶν οὐρανῶν καὶ ὃ ἐὰν δήσῃς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται δεδεμένον ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ ὃ ἐὰν λύσῃς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἔσται λελυμένον ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”