When we in the west think of Thailand, most of us can muster little beyond marvellous beaches, Singha beer and slightly risque cabaret shows in Bangkok. A lamentable ignorance on our part; no doubt that country has many cultural treasures with which to educate the world. None more than the fact that apparently the worst insult you can proffer in the Thai language is to call someone a Monitor Lizard.
Herpetologists among us will recognise monitor lizards as belonging to the family Varanidae, a widespread and successful group of reptiles spread across vast regions of the warmer parts of the globe. They play a humble but essential role in many ecosystems, and in towns often function as rat catcher and rubbish scavenger in chief. They have one star member; the giant Komodo Dragon, biggest lizard on the planet, and one even capable of sustaining a cameo on James Bond films (Skyfall 2012).
But there is hope that the Dragon may be able to do even more for us yet. Teams of researchers have been investigating certain proteins in the animals’ blood that appears to protect them from bacteria. Dragons seem to collect the most horrendous bacterial fauna in their mouths, mainly due to their diet of carrion and sewage water. Now it seems that these proteins could form the basis of new treatments to protect us against superbugs even such as Staphylococcus aureus, the fons et origio of MRSA.
We’re linking to several pieces today: Peter Dockrill in Science Alert, the BBC and Medical News Today. Before you say oh, Phuket, it only goes to show: be careful whom you insult-they might save your life one day!
Regular readers of this blog and Facebook will have noted our strong interest in the dangers of antibiotic resistant microorganisms. Up to now, we’ve had a bit of a bias towards bacteria-but fungi are microoganisms too, and they can be deadly.
“Eramos pocos, y se pario la abuela” say the Spanish, which loosely translated means “it never rains but it pours.” And so amid the general woe caused by COVID-19 , Live Science and National Geographic report the rise of a virulent strain of a yeast called Candida auris. And it’s not nice; it can affect ears, open wounds, and enter the bloodstream. We link to Nicolette Lanese, but through her you can get to National Geographic and the US Centre for Disease Control.
Before Covid-19, some of us were worried that an antibiotic resistant superbug would be the next pandemic. Well, here’s Covid-19 dragging one in its wake, so to speak. It’s worth keeping up with things like this, because, to put it bluntly, it’s your family at risk.
If you want to contribute to solving the problem of superbugs, please visit the site of antibiotic research UK Please listen to their appeal on Radio 4 this Sunday 1st November 2020
According to the Daily Mail, *patience with Government Covid 19 restrictions is wearing thin in Britain. If the policies fail, presumably we will fall back on Herd Immunity. For a vaccine is a long, long way off as far as we can see. But is herd immunity a real scientific concept? Or do epidemiologists talk about something else? How is it calculated, and is it the same in all nations? Here Nature has a fascinating read for those who like to think, rather than taking everything at face value.
The term ‘herd immunity’ used to be typically discussed as a desirable result of wide-scale vaccination programmes. During the pandemic, it has become a shorthand for allowing the coronavirus to run its course. It’s a shift that horrifies many public-health researchers. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering,” says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Nature digs deep into the misunderstandings that fuel the arguments in favour of the approach and sets out the relevant facts.
If we are going to understand epidemiology, or anything else, we all need to be more numerate. Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire offers us two pieces towards the deeper understanding of statistics and people who think that they can predict the future. Especially Fund Managers!
The first, from the Wall Street Journal, tells the story of how some financial journalists outguessed a group of market experts
The second by blogger Philip Tetlock, looks at the deeper reasons why things go wrong. In the murky world of algorithms, models and statistics, it’s all about assumptions. Get these awry, and your whole massive effort, however well-intentioned, falls flat.
Attentive readers will recall the name of Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire as an assiduous scourer of the world’s media for informative articles on rather serious subjects such as Political Economy, Science and Medicine. Yet even he has time to relax, as this piece about life in the brash, far-off nineteen eighties makes clear.
“My choice for cocktail hour is the Dark Mojito, for which I supply the recipe below. As with all cocktails, it is often the circumstances which make a particular recipe memorable. They are as follows:
The Place : John L Gardner’s Ringside Bar, Playa Las Americas Tenerife
The Company: Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire
The Circumstances: “After an exhausting day in the sun by the swimming pool, it was back to the room to get ready for the evening. Gary and I would take about 5 minutes to do this and we would go for an aperitif while our respective other halves (Mrs Seymour and Mrs Herbert- ed) needed a bit longer to get ready. We ordered our drinks, mine a draft lager and then there was what became the customary 6.00 power cut. It seems that although Las Americas had lots of shiny new hotels, nobody had thought to hire a decent electrician. So when all of the hair dryers went on at 6.00pm there was a power cut. More importantly the pump in the bar wouldn’t work either and so I couldn’t get my lager. Rather than wait for the power to come back on Bill, the manager, suggested a cocktail. On looking at the cocktail menu I discovered the dark mojito and have never looked back.
If you go to the excellent website Rum Therapyhttps://www.rumtherapy.com, you will find an excellent recipe as recommended by Mr Seymour. This site has numerous recipes for other rum drinks, and many excellent pictures.
Coda: Mr Seymour also informed us that while on this island, he was mistaken for the popular 1970s boxer Joe Bugner. Perhaps he should have tried a Rum Punch instead!
We only recommend books by academics when they’re well written and genuinely tell us something refreshing. But such is the case with Brexitlandby Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford (CUP 2020). In the tradition of Amy Chua and Eric Kaufman, the authors see ethno-tribalism as a compelling force in human affairs. Its clash with the equally powerful multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism which is the inevitable consequence of free markets is the issue of our times.
The fundamental narrative is how the adherents of the latter, taking their power and goodness for granted, belittled and negated those of the former, until in Britain they were destroyed by them. As Fintan O’Toole observed, the Brexit vote was all about Britain, not Europe. Brexit was the British expression of a long-building cultural war which is playing out in many countries. It generally pits the older and less educated (by no means less intelligent!) rural dwellers against the newer younger graduate denizens of the cities. Consider Trump in the USA. The same drama is played out in countries such as Turkey, whose populations are certainly considered beyond the pale by white nationalist purists.
The fall of Communism did not bring about the perfect world that its advocates promised. The politics of this century are and will be about identity, not class and economics. Yet the authors see hope, as at last these concerns are being addressed, however imperfectly. To which we would add: identities are always contingent and particular, the accidental results of large forces of history and biology. Do you know any Romans? How many of them now would fight and die for that city, as they did in the time of Scipio and Marcus Aurelius? Will Wessex go to war with Mercia this year-or are they happy now to be ruled by remote bureaucrats in London? The concerns of ethno-nationalists are deep, real and won’t go away. But there must be room for other, longer-lasting concerns too.
We believe that the reason people turn to strange irrational conspiracy theories and extreme, emotional political beliefs is because of their despair. Readers of LSS will never succumb to despair, because we know that, as long as humans can think, there is still hope for solutions. Thinking is all about asking the right questions. And one of the most powerful questions is “what will happen when I do this?”
People who ask that question can achieve remarkable things. We at LSS love a good, quirky example of human intelligence. Two have come up today, both of which we link to agency reports via The Guardian**: but all the media have them this morning. Probably via the same PRs and agencies! The first is the cooperation between NASA and Nokia to put a 4G network on the moon before the astronauts have landed. Which means they can post images of themselves on Facebook, play games and presumably order take away meals. We hope there will be no sexting!
Meanwhile 200 million miles away, the no less marvellous spacecraft Osiris Rex has brushed the asteroid Bennu to scoop the biggest haul of rock since Apollo. It is is now hurrying back to Earth. Imagine if you brought back a highly intelligent person from the past-perhaps Jane Austen or Goethe-and told them that we could do that. Well, the ones of us who still think, anyway
And the other side? They gather in bellicose rallies full of flags and guns. But they always use technology created by someone else. And we have ask-if you can’t think of new technology, how can we trust you to think clearly about anything else?
The death of Samuel Paty offers a pause for deep, deep reflection. We at LSS don’t do solemn or serious, and the whole matter is beautifully covered by Charles Hadji in the Conversation. But we have seen the education system from both sides. It’s been around for thousands of years, and on the whole, it has served humanity well. The general agreement is that learners and teachers agree not to kill each other. Our only other general observation is that countries with good education systems seem to prosper economically, as China, South Korea and Germany learned long ago.
Say what you like about what happened after 1792, the ideals of the French Revolution were very important indeed. Along with the Constitution of the United States, they come as close as you can get to a mission statement for the modern world, and Charles addresses this very nicely. Both were products of the Enlightenment, whose founding father was the ultimate multicultural cosmopolitan, Baruch Spinoza. We’ll leave you with this extract from Charles’ first rate article-but do read the lot-it’s worth it. We may have to fight to defend these values one day.
“No one can renounce the freedom to judge and opine as he wishes”, as Spinoza pointed out in his Theological-Political Treatise. “In a free state it is possible for everyone to think what he wants and to say what he thinks”.
However, this in no way gives the “right to act by one’s own decree”. When it comes to actions, the law of the Republic prevails and is imposed on all, even the most zealous servants of a religion.
It is this freedom of thought that the teachers of the Republic must promote and defend – and that was intended to be destroyed in the assassination of Samuel Paty.
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Recent events in France *recall one of the oldest dilemmas for liberals, socialists, Christians and even rather moderate progressives like Whigs. A laudable sympathy for the underdog, a desire to address genuine injustices shades all too easily into an unconditional admiration for the moral virtues of the oppressed-and often their artistic ones too. Yet even people at the rough end of society are still people. They too will have the same petty jealousies, tantrums and lusts as the rest of us. Even the poor beat their wives. How far does an individual’s need to murder his enemies depend on his belonging to an out group, to opposition to a supposed Hegemon-or to his own moral shortcomings. What will he do if he suddenly becomes the Hegemon?
Bertrand Russell was thinking about this as long ago as the nineteen thirties. In his essay The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed he demolishes the pretensions and delusions of those who in Lord Sugar‘s immortal phrase, “get the violin out”. We are pleased to note that our hyperlink for you comes from another WordPress blog, called Critica. Our plug is unconditional.
We at LSS are all for removing social injustices and creating a society where everyone has more equal access to things like health and education. We think it makes things more prosperous and long-lasting for everyone. We also think it fatuous to replace one set of oppressors with another, just because we felt sorry for the second lot.
We can and should change our lifestyles to combat global warming, but everyone knows it will take time. Meanwhile, there’s an awful lot of carbon sloshing around in the atmosphere, heating us up, turning our coasts into sea and our land into deserts. And according to Nature, there is hope-rewilding. Here’s what they say
Restoring a third of the areas most degraded by humans and preserving remaining natural ecosystems would prevent 70% of projected extinctions of mammals, birds and amphibians. It would also sequester around 465 gigatonnes of CO2 — almost half of the total atmospheric CO2 increase since the Industrial Revolution. Researchers scoured detailed land-use and cover maps of the globe to pinpoint the places where rewilding would have most impact and be most cost-effective. “We were surprised by the magnitude of what we found – the huge difference that restoration can make,” says environmental scientist Bernardo Strassburg. Done properly, rewilding can even go hand in hand with increased agricultural productivity, says Strassburg.The Guardian | 5 min read Reference: Nature paper
The point is that it can be done. And in a way that will restore our most beautiful habitats-not just forests but also savannahs, wetlands and moors. Let’s take an idea from the United States. It has always been our belief that the great cultural legacy of the USA will be its conception and development of National Parks, It is a gift to the world every bit as valuable as French Gothic Cathedrals or Italian Renaissance Art. If readers will pardon the pun-take a leaf out of the Americans’ book.
It’s a sad fact that progress in one area throws up unexpected problems somewhere else. Such is the case with Forensic Scientists and Super Absorbent Polymers (SAPs). Invented in the 1960s, SAPs are just brilliant at soaking up and holding onto organic fluids of all kinds. Concrete protection, sewage, waterproofing cables, there wasn’t anywhere they couldn’t go or do. In things like nappies and sanitary products they were a godsend. And that’s where the problem started for Forensic Scientists.
As fans of modern crime dramas will know, DNA technology has been the biggest breakthrough in Forensic Science for a hundred years. It allows reliable convictions from tiny samples, and the construction of enormous databases, both of which have facilitated the solution of horrible crimes like murder, rape and sexual assaults. The trouble is that some of the best evidence may be lying on products containing SAPs. And they just won’t give up organic products, especially things like semen. Existing techniques were able to wash semen from the upper layers of SAP containing items, but that was all.
Now Dr Anna Marie O’Connor and Professor Joy Watts of the University of Portsmouth have developed a new technique called SAPSWash which allows the recovery of sufficient spermatozoa to provide completely reliable DNA profiles from things containing SAPs. By experimenting with solutions of calcium chloride (CaCl2) the scientists have been able to get down into the deep SAP gel where the majority of evidence was absorbed. They consistently extracted enough DNA Material for all standard practice. And for an age of tight budgets, the authors claim: “The SAPSWash method has delivered an efficient, cost effective process which could be relatively easily implemented into current, mainstream forensic laboratory practices, using standard, inexpensive consumables.”
The implications are not just for police and forensic investigators however. Victims will know that another step has been taken towards safe and reliable convictions. Intending criminals, take note.
For copyright reasons, we can’t hyperlink to Anna-Marie’s paper this time. But here is the reference if you want to look for yourselves. The Science Direct portal is always a good link to papers on all topics.
A-M.O’Connor J.E.M.Watts The development of a rapid and reliable method (SAPSWash): For the extraction and recovery of spermatozoa from superabsorbent polymer containing products Forensic Science International Volume 316, November 2020, 110501
We would like to offer our thanks to Dr O’Connor and Professor Watts for their help and and advice with this, the first story where LSS actually breaks news. You read this news first atLSS.
Learning, Science and Society 
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