lobsters are not immortal, or at least only sort of

From McGill University:

So why do we stop growing, while lobsters don’t? The cells that make up our body are constantly making new cells by dividing. A biological technicality causes us to lose a bit of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes (structures made up of DNA and proteins) after each replication. DNA contains the blueprint for our lives, so in order to make sure we aren’t losing crucial information during these divisions, the long molecules of DNA are protected by shorter segments of DNA at their ends called “telomeres.” An analogy would be the plastic tips on a shoelace that prevent it from unraveling. When a cell multiplies, the only part of the chromosome that is lost is a piece of the telomeres. But as we age, our telomeres get shorter, until they reach a critical point where the cell can no longer replicate without damage to its essential DNA. When this occurs, the cell becomes inactive or dies. Shortening of telomeres is linked to senescence and increased risk of disease. Other contributors to aging include oxidative stress (hence the appeal of antioxidants).

Lobsters have a perpetual supply of telomerase – the enzyme that can restore telomeres, helping cells avoid that fateful end. Humans also have telomerase, just not enough to overcome the constant shortening of telomeres. In fact, telomerase is often found in cancer cells, giving tumours a survival advantage.

Unfortunately for our pal Larry, a large supply of telomerase can be a double-edged sword. Lobsters are still more likely to die with age because their hard-shell exoskeleton moults and has to be regrown. This requires reams of energy, eventually too much. As a result, common causes of death for lobsters are exhaustion, immobility, and shell disease, although the leading cause is still predation.

McGill

The article goes on to say that there are actually some jellyfish that are biologically immortal, meaning they do not age or ever die of old age, although they can be killed.

Given an infinite span of time, the odds of a “biologically immortal” organism being killed would seem to be 100%. So this does not sound like immortality to me in a colloquial sense, But figure out this mystery and come up with a drug to restore our telomeres without causing cancer, and we could live for a long, long time if we are careful. Would our brains hold up more than a century or so?

Interestingly, and this is a frequent point of conversation my son likes to bring up, the Norse gods are “biologically immortal” because they do not age but they can be killed (sorry, Thor fans). But the Greek/Roman gods are truly indestructible. I recall one story where Zeus was cut up into little pieces and put into a bag by another one of the gods. Eventually, somebody let him out and the pieces just assembled themselves together again and he continued being Zeus.

what is “heat lightning”?

So-called heat lightning is a thunderstorm that is very tall and very far away. According to this article, sound from thunder will only travel about 15 miles, but if lightning is high enough you can see it 100-200 miles away. So this suggests to me that if you hear thunder, the storm is probably close enough you should go inside to be safe, but if you only see lightning and don’t hear thunder (assuming you are in a reasonably quiet location), it might be okay to stay outside.

Universal health care would have saved lives in the pandemic

This article in PNAS estimates that a universal health care system in the United States could have prevented 212,000 deaths in 2020 alone. That is a big fraction of the total Covid deaths that year – I don’t have the number at my fingertips but total deaths over the whole pandemic (and caused by the pandemic) recently passed one million. I assume this does not count all the deaths from other causes that a health care system could have prevented. This sounds like a pro-life policy to me!

squirrels vs. rats

This is an old and very important question – why do we generally like oen and not the other? I admit I enjoy squirrel antics. I respect rats but generally do not want them close to me. Both go through my urban garbage, so I disagree with this article that there is any difference there. Squirrels can shred a bag of garbage and strew it all over a street, and they do it with impunity in daylight. They also climb my fruit trees and steal all my fruit with impunity, again in broad daylight right in front of me. And they waste it – they like to take one bite of each of my pairs and then spew the rest of the debris on the ground. I think my biggest issue with rats and mice is finding them inside. Intuitively, it seems much more likely that I or my family members could come into contact with some disease or parasite they are carrying, even if squirrels also carry many of the same things. And they pee and poop a lot – which again, outside is just part of the circle of life but inside is smelly and gross. Mice also have an inconsiderate habit of dying in odd places in the house that you can’t even get too, and one dead mouse you can’t find can really stink up a house, while squirrels usually have the decency to die and go into rigor mortis outdoors where you can easily scoop them up with a snow shovel on trash day (the local animal control people will not come out for anything smaller than a coyote, which yes are occasionally spotted in downtown Philadelphia).

measuring inflation is hard

Measuring inflation is hard for a variety of reasons, and it gets even harder when you try to compare across countries and regions. Some of the reasons include methodological choices in averaging, weighting, how housing and transportation are accounted for, how urban and rural consumers are included, and many others. There is a measure called the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) that is used to try to compare across countries and regions. This differs from the U.S. CPI in a variety of ways.

our acceptance of traffic violence is completely irrational

I like this article making the (tired, obvious, to at least some of us) point that we hold motor vehicle safety to a much lower standard than public transportation.

For some types of transportation, an incident causing injury or death will trigger an immediate regulatory response, which targets the setting where the incident occurred and other factors. Airplanes and mass transit fall in this camp. The authorities’ job is to ensure the agency in question only offers services if it reaches specific standards of safety…

Apply that same logic to incidents caused by personal vehicles, and you quickly spot the difference. Traffic violence is one of the highest non-disease causes of death in the US; as noted above, the odds of dying in a car crash throughout your lifetime is around one in a hundred. The same analysis from the National Safety Council puts your chances of dying in a plane crash or transit in the same risk zone as being killed by lightning: literally too small to calculate.

Since I haven’t found anyone to tell me definitively why the focus for traffic is on individuals rather than systems that contribute to crashes, here are a few hypotheses. If the operator of the mode in question is an individual, such as the driver of a single-occupancy vehicle, the state assumes responsibility for risk only at its pleasure, and not as a matter of course. Or perhaps what’s at work is a pernicious and baseless idea that transit and aviation systems can be fixed, but vehicle traffic systems–which are also systems whether or not they’re treated that way–center on individuals instead of institutions, and therefore cannot be regulated in the same way a transit system can. Or maybe it’s down to a tendency for large catastrophic events like plane and train crashes to shock us and cause a fear response, while we’ve become desensitized to the regular occurrence of car crashes.

Greater Greater Washington

I think she gets it about right. It’s desensitization to everyday violence leading to assumed helplessness. It’s a century of auto-highway-oil industry propaganda linking cars to individual “freedom” and deemphasizing the massive investment in public infrastructure to support driving and parking. She leaves out the fact that this propaganda is also convenient for anti-city, nominally anti-tax (although they are fine with hidden taxes) politicians who represent mostly empty land but wield massively disproportionate political power, while taking payoffs from the companies that rake in profits from pollution and death. And finally I wouldn’t underestimate the power of inertia and shifting baseline syndrome – most of us have not experienced and can’t imagine a different or better system.

The author’s suggestions are the usual litany of government investment in safe public transportation infrastructure and walkable, bikable urban communities, congestion pricing, etc. This is awesome public policy but does not seem to be workable politics. Maybe a regular tally and pictures of dead and mangled children in the media would do the trick.

climate change and pollen

It makes intuitive sense to me that heat would reduce crop yields, just by stressing many plants as they try to conserve water and limit evaporation. I hadn’t considered the way heat might affect pollen production and pollinators, but this is also an issue.

But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer.

Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilisation in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice. For this reason, many farmers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises…

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes. 

BBC

It sounds like research is needed just to hold the line on the crop yields we have now, let alone achieve the increases we need to meet projected population and consumption growth. The more I think about climate change and the broad range of issues it is going to cause, the more I think food may be the most critical issue.

June 2022 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.

Most hopeful story: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Taser drones? Seriously, this might have been my most interestingly random post last month. I’ll try to do better.

abortion

This is the time on the show where I say I am not going to comment on divisive social issues on this blog, and then I do anyway. I have just a few things to say: (1) I support the right to choose. (2) I can empathize with the point of view of people who have strong moral or religious objections to abortion. There can never be a true consensus on this issue. (3) Abortion is much less common than it used to be because we have effective birth control technology and by and large people have access to it and use it. We need even more technology, especially for men. It’s one of those research areas that has been neglected by the private sector, and governments need to step in. We need much better access and information and much less stigma to access the birth control technology we have, starting with teenagers whether we like it or not. (4) We should be able to reach a consensus that the goal is for all children who are brought into the world to be wanted and loved. Abortion is a small part of this answer, for now, but family planning and birth control are most of the answer. (5) If the Supreme Court takes family planning and birth control away from us, I want to say I will be out in the streets protesting, but I may also look into Canadian naturalization options. I like to hedge my bets when things are going downhill that are outside my direct control. (6) Clarence Thomas, you are corrupt, you stink and you should be impeached. (7) Read The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t. I didn’t believe this work of fiction could become a reality but we have started down the slippery slope.

what we think about paying for transportation

Is this hypocrisy or ignorance?

Bettina Jarasch, a Green party politician who also serves as the city’s deputy mayor, suggested the implementation of the measure after the apparent success of a recent summer scheme that saw Germans charged only €9 per month for public transport in order to help curb the impact of inflation during the summer months.

According to a report by Bild, Jarasch believes that a mandatory charge of between €15 and €20 ($16-$21) for public transport will further to bump revenue for public transport services while keeping prices low for individual users.

“I’m increasingly thinking about a solidarity levy of 15 to 20 euros a month for all Berliners,” the politician remarked, while also noting that the reduction in the price of public transport has seen a significant uptick in usage across the country.

Breitbart

Meanwhile, here in the USA, we are all forced to pay a fortune for driving and parking infrastructure, whether we use it or not. We accept this partly because it has been the status quo for so long we don’t remember anything different, and partly because of the endless propaganda hurled at us by the auto-highway-oil industrial complex.

Meanwhile, we have a double standard for transit for some reason where we expect it to be paid for 100% by user fees. Then we disincentivize people from actually using it by providing heavily subsidized car infrastructure.

There may be a few corporate executives and marketing types that understand the hypocrisy of this arrangement, but overall I’m going to go with ignorance.