Some damn serious music by the irrepressible Nina Simone. She is singing about the 1950s and early 1960s, but events in Ferguson this year remind us that rotten-to-the-core racism is still here, loud and proud.
Night Music: Mississippi Goddam
December 30, 2014
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Posted by jakking
Germs ‘R’ Us — Part 2
December 30, 2014A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about how much of “our” body was actually composed of bacteria and similar organisms. Now, it seems, some of those brethren of ours may actually control how long we live, and how (un)comfortable our old age is. The reporting is from sciencedaily.com:
Using mathematical modeling, researchers at New York and Vanderbilt universities have shown that commensal bacteria that cause problems later in life most likely played a key role in stabilizing early human populations [which]… offers an explanation as to why humans co-evolved with microbes that can cause or contribute to cancer, inflammation, and degenerative diseases of aging.
The work sprung from a fundamental question in biology about senescence, or aging past the point of reproduction. “Nature has a central problem–it must have a way to remove old individuals, whether fish or trees or people,” says Martin Blaser, microbiologist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City. “Resources are always limited. And young guys are ultimately competing with older ones.” In most species, individuals die shortly after the reproductive phase. But humans are weird–we have an extra long senescence phase.
Blaser began to think about the problem from the symbiotic microbe’s point of view and he came up with a hypothesis: “The great symbionts keep us alive when we are young, then after reproductive age, they start to kill us.” They are part of the biological clock of aging.
Sheesh! What do we get out of all this? Do you ever get the feeling it is these microbes that are running the whole scheme, and not us?
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Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 