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acosmiceducation · 5 months

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The Intimate Connectedness of all Life on Earth

These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science… Realize that everything connects to everything else.

– Leonardo Da Vinci

When I first read Richard Dawkins’ masterful book The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life and learned how every living organism alive today is descended from the same single-celled organism that lived about 3 billion years ago, my reaction was twofold. Firstly, I was in awe of how interconnected life really is; it helped me see life on Earth as one living interconnected organism, as opposed to separate unrelated entities. My second reaction was “well duh, how else do you think life evolved on this planet?”

Why wasn’t it obvious to me? It wasn’t like I was just learning how to walk. I was 25 years old when I read this, fresh from completing a university degree in physics. So why had I literally never once thought, when I looked at another human (anyone will do), that if we both traced our lineage back, eventually, we would hit a common ancestor, making us cousins, usually several times removed? You can take it further. Look at a dog, a cow, or a dragonfly, if you trace all their lineages back, you will eventually converge on a common ancestor. It works with amoebas. It even works with extinct animals. You and a long-extinct T.rex share a common ancestor — seriously.

Is this supposed to be so obvious that no one bothers to talk about it? Is this not talked about because it goes against religious beliefs? Are most people just completely unaware of this? Or is it not discussed much because it leads to a host of conclusions that expose our own hypocrisies and ethical shortcomings? Allow me to entertain some of these ideas and the implications they hold.

First a proof

To prove that humans are at least descended from the same common ancestor is relatively simple. It does not require scientific evidence, only some simple reasoning and acceptance that parents and children are related. This can be proven using the mathematical trick reductio ad absurdum as described by Dawkins below:

Take our imaginary time machine absurdly far back, say 100 million years, to an age when our ancestors resembled shrews or opossums. Somewhere in the world at that ancient date, at least one of my personal ancestors must have been living, or I wouldn’t be here. Let us call this particular mammal Henry (it happens to be a family name). We seek to prove that if Henry is my ancestor he must be yours too. Imagine, for a moment, the contrary: I am descended from Henry and you are not. For this to be so, your lineage and mine would have to have marched, side by side yet never touching, through 100 million years of evolution to the present, never interbreeding yet ending up at the same evolutionary destination — so alike that your relatives are still capable of interbreeding with mine. This reductio is clearly absurd. If Henry is my ancestor he has to be yours too. If not mine, he cannot be yours.

A formal proof that all living organisms on Earth are descended from the same common ancestor requires in-depth DNA analysis. By all means read up on it, or better yet prove it for yourself scientifically. But for the purposes of this article let’s take it as fact (and it is fact) that every animal, plant, fungi, bacteria, archaea and eukaryote are all directly descended from the exact same single-celled organism that existed in the oceans of Earth over 3 billion years ago.

What does this imply?

You’re inbred? Yup. Unless you define an arbitrary number of generations apart disqualifies a conceiving couple from being considered to have interbred. I won’t get into that here. No matter how you look at it, your parents do indeed share a common ancestor (who was human no less). The same goes for your children. It is inescapable.

But interbreeding is possibly the least interesting implication. I want to go a level deeper. Let’s start by meeting the ancestor of all living beings, our collective great, great, great, great… (many million greats later) grandparent. And here it is:

https://i0.wp.com/acosmiceducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cell-copy.png?w=3442&ssl=1

Living somewhere in the oceans of the early Earth, this lone single-celled organism was the true origin of life on Earth — ancient Earth and modern Earth. Remove this one cell and the butterfly effect takes on a whole new meaning. There, in the oceans, an incredibly important event happened. Division! This cell split in two, replicating itself. Then one or both of these replicas split again, and then again, and again and again. These events may have been separated by hundreds of millions of years — but they did happen — and they happened in precisely the way that led to life as we know it today; all life!

I want to entertain the same question I first had when I thought about this: what was the result of that first division? Was it the same cell replicating itself resulting in two copies of the same cell? Or was there one parent cell and one child cell? Or was the result two children cells rendering the original parent dead?

The first possibility is what I find most exciting, but I’ll go into detail on that near the end of this article as it involves some spiritual leaps of faith that may not resonate with some. For now, let’s entertain the other two possibilities.

Obviously, if the cell division led to either a parent and a child, or two children, that implies that the resultant cells were related in much the same way you are related to your family, either your parents or your siblings. And of course, if you extend this to the entire tree of life, that has resulted in all life currently on Earth, every living being is biologically related.

If that’s not enough to get you to deeply contemplate this I don’t know what would be. Let us see some examples now of how this huge family of life functions and is interdependent with one another.

Clownfish and sea anemones

These two animals share a special bond, and not just in the movie Finding Nemo but in real life too! Clownfish benefit from this relationship by having a safe place to hide from predators; clownfish have a coating on their bodies that protects them from being stung by the anemones. Predators of clownfish don’t have this coating, so they generally stay away.

Anemones benefit from this relationship in a whole host of ways. Clownfish pick-off parasites, and the anemones get a free meal from the clownfish’s feces! Other possible ways clownfish may help anemones is by circulating water around the anemone helping them to oxygenate. And the clownfish’s bright colours help lure in small animals that the anemone feeds on.

Woolly bats and Pitcher Plants

Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants and have a slippery coating around the opening so small animals slip and get trapped inside and then get eaten. But woolly bats actually voluntarily allow themselves to get trapped! Pitcher plants do not eat the bats themselves but do love their feces, (I’m sensing a trend). The bats in turn get a safe place to hide from predators for the night. This happy union of defecation and voluntary imprisonment lasts until the bats have had enough and push their way out to get on with their day (or night, actually!).

Don’t let this take your breath away

Billions of years ago, Earth had very little oxygen and a lot of carbon dioxide. If you travelled back in time to Earth 3 billion years ago, you would suffocate to death almost instantly. But for billions of years, tiny single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria breathed in the carbon dioxide and converted it into oxygen allowing the rest of life to evolve. You now breathe the oxygen given to Earth by these bacteria.

The function the cyanobacteria served is now carried out by their descendants, plants. Every out-breath you take is mirrored by an in-breath from a plant, and every in-breath you take is mirrored by an out-breath of a plant. I love this concept! I heard from Tom Chi in a TED Talk which I encourage you to check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPh3c8Sa37M&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

Life from destruction

Destructive processes can sometimes lead to new life and often something even more abundant, than what was there originally, occurs. Here are some ways this can occur:

Dead trees in a forest decompose and form ecosystems of their own. The rotting wood fertilizes the soil and gives new plants and fungi a place to grow.

Forest fires crack open seeds that otherwise wouldn’t make it in an old dense forest (e.g., giant sequoias, etc.).

If an asteroid had not hit Earth 65 million years ago, dinosaurs would probably still be the dominant life form on the planet (I’ll leave it up to you to decide which scenario would have been preferable).

Muscle hypertrophy. Muscles cannot grow without first undergoing small rips. The act of working out your muscles tears them slightly, and in recovery they grow back stronger.

Why isn’t this taught?

Let’s return to the problem I had earlier, which was: why had I never explicitly understood this concept until I read about it in my 20s? And why wasn’t this taught in school? Is it just so obvious that they don’t bother teaching it? I don’t think so. But even if we assume that it is obvious, for a moment, this has got to be one of the most profound discoveries of modern science. It merits much more than mere mention. The implications are too fascinating, too deep.

Does it go against religious beliefs? Are most people just completely unaware of it? Does learning about it expose certain hypocrisies and ethical shortcomings?

There may be some truth in the above questions, but I believe the main reason why life being interconnected isn’t taught in school (and certainly not contemplated deeply), has to do with the values of society today and of the North American education system. Education is still based on economics. It is a system designed to optimize for economic output rather than human happiness, or wisdom, or free thinking or the thriving of Earth. There likely isn’t much money in spending hours studying the interconnectedness of life. I mean maybe there is, and if that is the case great, but money shouldn’t be the reason why it should be taught and studied.

Why can’t school be more about understanding our interconnectedness with all beings and then, also, connecting our life to the world around us? Why can’t school also be more about thinking for yourself and understanding the beauty of nature? The fact that every lifeform on Earth shares a common ancestor has been scientifically proven. Is that not one of the most beautiful examples demonstrating the beauty of reality and science?

That’s why I’m writing this blog — because I didn’t learn everything I wanted to in school — writing about this helps me. And hopefully it will help others as well (when people other than my family start reading this!).

So let’s continue our holistic understanding of the world together…

How Everything is Connected

Let us push beyond life on Earth (as we understand it) and see how everything in the universe is connected.

Stars form and live over millions or billions of years, under conditions of extreme pressure and heat. The lives of stars more massive than our sun end in supernova explosions that can reach over a billion degrees Celsius and affect an area of the universe several light-years across. Under these conditions any lifeform on Earth would be vaporized instantaneously, yet these are also the only conditions under which it is possible to form the element iron — an essential element to keeping you and all you’re dependent on alive. Every beat of your heart carries iron through your bloodstream — iron that was formed in a massive supernova. In fact, every element in your body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.), other than hydrogen and helium, was formed in the hearts of stars.

Furthermore,

The material that is leftover from dying stars, gas, gets combined with other star remnants. This forms large nebulas that generate new stars.

The water you depend on was carried to Earth by asteroids that bombarded the young planet over 4 billion years ago.

The radio signals we send out every day are sent out into space that may be heard by aliens in the distant future.

Imagine how different our world would be if every human contemplated not just the scale of the universe, but the interconnectedness and interdependence of it all. How much suffering could be averted? How much more meaning would people find in their lives? I don’t know exactly, but I’d be willing to bet our world would be unrecognizable.

How far can this be taken?

The function of education is to help students understand the interconnectedness of all life and develop a sense of ecological responsibility.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, 20th century spiritual teacher

Let us return to the first thought I had of our collective ancestor dividing for the first time. If indeed the first cell division was our cardinal cell’s way of replicating itself, resulting in two copies, then projecting that idea forward to each subsequent generation until present day (a huge cognitive stretch, I know), this may imply on a certain level, that all life on Earth is the same organism that has just been replicating itself over and over again since time immemorial. Some may think this notion is absurd but bear with me.

Spirituality — not strictly organized religion — but spirituality in a more fundamental sense may have something, perhaps everything, to say about this. Spiritual teachings from the Buddha to Krishnamurti describe the entire universe as a single consciousness. This is the notion that not only is everything in the universe connected but that everything in the universe is one and the same. In perhaps a similar way that the cells and organs, all components, in your body work harmoniously together — everything, on a much grander scale, is doing the same thing.

This — a way of understanding spiritual enlightenment — is the deepest, most fundamental truth one can know. I myself am absolutely not enlightened, there are few who are, but I have yet been given a reason to doubt spiritual enlightenment. In fact, the proven tree of life on Earth, being connected as one biological family, only makes this notion of the entire universe being a single consciousness that much more compelling.

This is where I see science and spirituality begin to merge, two traditionally opposite disciplines, rivals, starting to eerily show parallels. Perhaps the whole purpose of humanity, in all its pursuits, is to realize that science and spirituality are not only similar disciplines but complementary, ultimately leading to the same conclusions, that the entirety of existence itself is a single, infinitely intelligent consciousness whose sole purpose is to understand and love itself.

My pursuit of understanding myself and the universe I live in will inevitably lead to deeper spirituality. I am only in my infancy, so I won’t go deeper on this for now. But, at the very least, I hope I have convinced you somewhat of the importance of learning and appreciating how life on Earth is connected at least. No matter what form you happen to take, learning this and thinking deeply about this should be taught to everyone, because it involves everyone and everything.

Allow me to conclude with a quote from Tom Chi’s TED Talk:.

What does this imply?

https://i0.wp.com/acosmiceducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cell-copy.png?w=3442&ssl=1

Clownfish and sea anemones

Woolly bats and Pitcher Plants

Don’t let this take your breath away

Life from destruction

Destructive processes can sometimes lead to new life and often something even more abundant, than what was there originally, occurs. Here are some ways this can occur:

Dead trees in a forest decompose and form ecosystems of their own. The rotting wood fertilizes the soil and gives new plants and fungi a place to grow.

Forest fires crack open seeds that otherwise wouldn’t make it in an old dense forest (e.g., giant sequoias, etc.).

Muscle hypertrophy. Muscles cannot grow without first undergoing small rips. The act of working out your muscles tears them slightly, and in recovery they grow back stronger.

Why isn’t this taught?

Does it go against religious beliefs? Are most people just completely unaware of it? Does learning about it expose certain hypocrisies and ethical shortcomings?

So let’s continue our holistic understanding of the world together…

How Everything is Connected

Let us push beyond life on Earth (as we understand it) and see how everything in the universe is connected.

Furthermore,

The material that is leftover from dying stars, gas, gets combined with other star remnants. This forms large nebulas that generate new stars.

The water you depend on was carried to Earth by asteroids that bombarded the young planet over 4 billion years ago.

The radio signals we send out every day are sent out into space that may be heard by aliens in the distant future.

How far can this be taken?

The function of education is to help students understand the interconnectedness of all life and develop a sense of ecological responsibility.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, 20th century spiritual teacher

Allow me to conclude with a quote from Tom Chi’s TED Talk:.

Imagine for a moment you were one of these little organisms two billion years ago (cyanobacteria that gave us oxygen). You might be born, you live a couple weeks, you die and you kind of feel like “nothing really changed. I had no purpose in this life, the world I came to is exactly the same as the world that I left”. But what you wouldn’t have understood is that every breath you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives that came after you. Lives that you would never see; lives that we are all a part of today. And it’s worth thinking that maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even within the scope of our understanding. Because it is true of every one of these organisms, and it may also be true of us.

Thank you for reading! Please visit my site for more! https://acosmiceducation.com

#connection #interconnectedness #life #unity

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tanadrin · 3 years

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Khoda Station

For a long time after she joined the Project, Sirrek had found Tjumak to be a puzzle, the most difficult to understand of her colleagues. She took as read that you had to have pretty good reasons to want to risk defying the Archive’s most sacrosanct law, and also to spend half of every year out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest transport routes and thousands from the nearest settlements. For most of the people at the station, their motives were actually pretty simple. Koridek believed passionately in the work; so passionately that he was willing to break his most deeply held convictions about what it meant to be an Archivist. For him it was all about values. His desire to serve humanity ran deep, and that was what made him a good fit for the Archive. His desire to serve Paradise, well, that ran even deeper; it was the source of his desire to serve humanity, to protect their nascent colony, but also to violate an order that had been created decades before Sirrek was born, to prevent terrible bloodshed. Depending on how you looked at it, that made him a very bad archivist indeed.

Ardhat was also simple. She was a problem-solver. That wasn’t all of it, but it was most of it. Of course, she believed mightily, too, but Sirrek doubted anyone could believe in anything as strongly as Koridek did. But above all else, Ardhat wanted to solve the biggest problems she could find. That was what got her up in the mornings, and drove her forward. She was a puzzle-cracker, a code-breaker, a solution-seeker, a builder-of-systems. She would have been a fine architect, or a talented engineer, or a clever physicist. But what greater puzzle was there than the Great Record? What greater problem to solve could there be than resurrecting a lost world out of the most ancient memory of the past? Of building a whole new ecosystem, alongside and on top on alien to it that already existed? Sirrek was quite certain that Ardhat would die to protect the Project if it ever came to it, but in the meantime, she would live for its mysteries.

Sirrek? Well, introspection wasn’t her strong suit. But where Ardhat had a cordial indifference to authority and Koridek a deep but respectful complaint against it, Sirrek just hated being told what to do. And they had told her, you shall not be a biologist. Not in the way you want to be. You shall not undertake any part of the great work--for it will not begin in your lifetime. They had said to her, you shall leave Paradise fallow, at least for a human definition of the term. And so Sirrek hated them for that, hated them for deciding before she was born that all her talents and her ambition must be sacrificed in the name of politics, hated the religious zealots and the blind ideologues whose fledgeling war meant that it would be many lifetimes before the Paradise she dreamed of would come to be. She was compelled to disobey. That was what got her out of bed in the morning.

But Tjumak. There was a mystery. He affected it a little, Sirrek thought. He spent his days ensconced in the middle of his dark laboratory, like the heart of an animal, or the engine of a machine. He did not come and go, like Koridek. The dim light of the displays shone on the glossy exterior of his support apparatus. He had once had a survival suit, Koridek said, and had gone back and forth from the surface like most of the other Archivists, returning to Ammas Echor when the strain of surface living became too great. Archivists were not born for planetbound life; they were humanity as it lived between the stars, made for the long dreamlike time in the cold and dark, and for keeping the long memory of their people alive. How long did our ancestors travel from star to star? Sirrek had once asked her mother, when she was young. For countless ages, she had replied. Since the Garden was lost to us in the beginning of time.

A survival suit was meant to be a temporary thing, a way to endure the stresses of gravity and the immoderate temperatures of the surface. What, do you go naked in space? Sirrek had asked Koridek. Koridek laughed. No, he said. We still have to wear suits on the vessel, though they are much lighter. You see me only as a hulking, heavy thing in this armor. In microgravity, I am considered graceful; above the sky, I can dance. Why someone would exchange that for a planetbound prison, much less one where they could not leave the room they worked in, Sirrek struggled to guess. But that was what Tjumak had done. From the outside, he looked almost like a silly toy: a round, smooth metal body, topped with a round, smooth head on a short, flexible neck. His arms were more graceful, and the apparatus in which he set could turn this way and that to reach th various monitors and keyboards around him; but apparently much of the interface was actually inside the suit, which in Tjumak’s case was more of a chamber, one in which he floated in a carefully-formulated synthetic fluid. And if the power goes out? Sirrek had asked. He will be very annoyed until someone finds the switch for the backup generator, Koridek said.

Direct neural prosthetics like the Archivists used, and which Tjumak relied on for his work, were rare among the younger generations, so it was probably a less claustrophobic way of living than Sirrek imagined. And if he really had to, he probably could switch back to a survival suit. Like if they ever got caught, and had to evacuate the station. That was a possibility she did her best not to dwell on.

She got a little window into Tjumak’s world, or at least his thought process, when they spent several long weeks working on a section of the Great Record. It was a frustrating and exceedingly difficult task, and the missing portions that Sirrek needed amounted to only a handful of characters, but the Record was nearly impossible to work with directly. When she was little, her teachers had explained that the Great Record was a library of the genetic information of every animal and plant and little microscopic beastie that had ever lived in the Garden, the world humankind had come from. And when their most ancient ancestors, the ancestors of their unimaginably remote ancestors, had had to leave the Garden as exiles, they preserved the Record, and kept it safe, for hundreds of thousands of years.

That was almost, but not quite, entirely a lie. When she had started studying biology, with an eye to genetics and to endobotany specifically (back when she imagined that she might be permitted to do something with her training), she started learning about how the Great Record worked. It wasn’t just a record of DNA; that on its own would have been quite useless, she was assured. DNA was an important part of it, of course, nuclear and mitochondrial both, but only a small part. Rather, the Record had been compiled as an image of the shape of a living cell: it described actual genetic code, but also how DNA was formed, how proteins were folded, how DNA and RNA were transcribed, processes of methylation and copying, how mitosis and meiosis functioned, and so on and so forth, attempting to describe the metabolism of an ideal cell, one which contained within it the potential to embody almost any form of life to which humankind had once been related; and it was by reference to this elaborate, ideal lifeform that literally millions of other species, from single-celled bacteria that lived in the human gut to storybook leviathans, were described. And the reason, Sirrek was told, that the Record had been composed in this way was that, long long ago, their ancestors had once had the technology to use those reference descriptions directly. The heart of the Record was a terrible lacuna, a tool that had been so widespread, and so useful, that it had once been presumed it would never be lost.

Oh, fathers of my fathers and mothers of my mothers! Sirrek had thought. How far your children have fallen. The senior geneticists referred to this technology as the key to the universal cell; or just the key. What, exactly, it was and how it had functioned was hard to guess. It was related to other technologies they had that barely worked, and that they did not understand at all, like the ones the Archivists used to modify their genes and to improve their neural prosthetics. There were baseline humans who had been brought all the way from Rauk on the last journey, in sarcophagi that had preserved them between life and death. It was a form of the key that had brought them back to wholeness, and let them live out the rest of a natural lifespan. But it was a specialized version, a crippled and ghostly version. They did not have the true key; and they were working to rebuild it. Perhaps one day, many centuries from now, they would live up to the promise of those long-ago masters of the living world, and they would read forth out of the Record a whole teeming world, as had been intended.

But they didn’t need the key to start understanding the Record, and ordinary genetic engineering and cell manipulation techniques would serve to clone the most basic organisms recorded there. Of course, all of this was hampered by the fact that the Record was at both extremely terse, intending to encode an enormous amount of information in as small a space as possible, and maddeningly repetitive. It was not really one Record, but many; the collocation of multiple copies, in some places defective, and in others damaged. Later, totally uncomprehending generations had apparently lost all but the memory of the importance of the thing, and carefully copied what they did not understand into new forms. It was only in the glare of Rauk, millennia ago, that the Janese had finally understood what they had had in their grasp, and built it into the skeleton of Ammas Echor itself.

Understanding the Record had been the original purpose of the Archive, and in the long, slow journey to Paradise they had labored ceaselessly at their task. Still, it was slow work. And since their station did not have the benefit of access to either the Archive on Ammas Echor, or to all the latest work from investigators working on the surface, sometimes they had to work at it themselves. At Ardhat’s encouragement, Sirrek had been trying to get a handle on some of the plant species that, by their position in the Record, seemed to be relatively basal. Much of the work in unraveling that portion of the Archive had been done by others, and was well-known, but little attention had been paid to the bryophytes. Under the logic of the agreement between the Renewalists and the Instrumentalists, this didn’t matter. Actual resurrection of species was not slated to begin for nearly eighty years, and even then it would be confined to laboratories. But Sirrek wanted practical results. What she ideally wanted was trees, flowers, grasses, important primary producers that also occupied slightly different ecological niches from the xenophytes, and could be integrated alongside them. But mosses were step zero. Possibly even step negative one. All she needed was a single viable spore. In theory, everything she needed was in the Record, somewhere.

In their long, slow labor, the Archivists had painstakingly indexed the Record, but it was an immense of information, and one that was only partly understood. The language of the record, if it could be called that, was a sophisticated polyvalent writing system that could encode chemical formulae, the structure of molecules and proteins and organelles, and dipped in its most specific registers into the subatomic scale, to describe the precise interaction by which choloroplasts captured the light of the sun, to convert into energy; and at its most general, sketched a mathematical relationship between the populations of a predator and its prey. Yet for all that it said, it also left maddening amounts unsaid, details that were perhaps assumed by its creators to be common knowledge, or which simply could not be fit in.

“It’s almost gibberish,” Tjumak had observed dryly. “Almost.”

“Why do you think they made it in the first place?” Sirrek asked Tjumak. “Do you suppose they really thought the umpteenth children of their children would be able to make use of it?”

“I can only assume so. Hubris, perhaps, or merely an unfathomably acute case of optimism.”

“It had to have been made in the Garden, right?”

A small movement suggested a shrug from Tjumak. “To speculate on the historicity of our people before the last journey is to engage in theology as far as I can tell. Whatever the Garden once was, it is now more myth than fact.”

“Maybe,” said Sirrek, tapping her chin as she moved the same section of the Record back and forth on the display. The curling, two-dimensional network of shapes blurred together if you tried to take in too much of it at once, not to mention it was dispiriting. It was far easier to concentrate on the smallest legible piece, and work through it one symbol at a time. Tjumak peeked over her shoulder, and glanced at her notes.

“No, that’s not right,” he said. “That’s not a DNA sequence, it’s a protein sequence. Look, that’s a symbol for a folding geometry, in the corner.”

Sirrek muttered an impolite word and started backtracking.

“They can’t have made it during the Exile, anyway,” she said. “You can’t put millions of species on a generation ship. Even if most of them are beetles.”

“Perhaps not,” said Tjumak. “But what is an object such as this? It is a monument against ruin. If they made it in the Garden, they made it knowing its desolation was close at hand.”

“So you’re definitely in camp made-to-be-used.”

“I think… I think it doesn’t matter why they made it,” Tjumak said. He was scanning his own section of the text, which in real terms was inscribed about a meter and a half away from Sirrek’s on the same section of Ammas Echor’s structural frame; but which felt like it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. “The question is, why do we want to use it?”

“Hubris, and/or an unfathomably acute case of optimism?”

“It’s a reasonable question. We could have come to Paradise, gone down from the Ammas Echor, and made our living on this world as it is, with no attempt to change it besides the introduction of ourselves. For that matter, we could have stayed in orbit, bringing up such resources as we needed, air and water and soil, to make life there far more comfortable than it ever could have been on one of the airless or gasping worlds our ancestors lived their lives on, and left Paradise almost entirely unchanged. Yet when we arrived, we nearly fought a war against one another, not over whether to make use of the Record to resurrect the creatures of the Garden, but only how.”

“Do you think we should have considered the possibility?”

Tjumak leaned back from the display he was hunched over. The head of his support apparatus tilted up toward the ceiling, which was as close as he ever got to looking pensieve.

“I cannot honestly say yes. I’ve known space, Sirrek, real space. Not orbital microgravity, but the deepness beyond the summit of the sky. Some of my earliest memories are of the firing of Ammas Echor’s great engines, to turn our path inward toward the light below. Of the long, slow spiral down to the inner worlds of Kdjemmu. And even that emptiness was brighter and warmer by far than the great darkness between the stars that my mother and father were born into. When they were young, ever joule of energy was precious beyond reckoning, every drop of water or puff of air worth more than a human life.

“The other worlds around this star, they’re airless, or formless giants, or scorching hot, or worse. And every world our ancestors ever visited, if the tales are true, from the Garden-which-was-lost to Usukuul-we-mourn, was as barren as them. I cannot imagine what suffering generation after generation endured to bring us here--and it would spit in the face of every soul that died on the journey not to bring Paradise to flower.”

“We will, Tjumak,” Sirrek said softly. She had never seen Tjumak speak so earnestly before. “And we will not ravage, and we will not burn. And one day we will call our brothers and sisters out of the darkness to live with us again.” The rhythm of the ancient litanies came back to her smoothly. Her parents had not been religious, but her grandmother had been. She had recited the litanies to Sirrek when she was small, a soothing voice to sleep to.

“Will they thank us?”

“The other Exiles?”

Tjumak shook his head, then pointed at his display. “No. The ghosts we’re going to call up.”

“What do you mean?” Sirrek asked, perplexed.

Tjumak swiveled in place to another display, and tapped a few keys on the panel next to it. The image of another part of the Record appeared, this one displayed alongside long sections of plain text. There were ghostly outlines of various creatures superimposed on it and displayed alongside it, gracile things with four legs and taut muscles, and things with sharp teeth and long claws.

“This part of the Record was indexed four generations ago, and pretty well translated,” Tjumak said. “It’s an unusual one--it’s organized by relationship between constituent elements, not by phylogeny. It’s probably from a lesser Record that was only integrated into the whole later.”

“What are they?”

“Animals. Warm-blooded, furry, placental. Very much like us, in some ways, but quadrupedal. And, to judge by the annotations, quick. Well-muscled. Herbivorous and carnivorous.”

“One is predator, and one is prey?”

“Likely.”

Sirrek had that dark feeling again, the one that was tinged with despair. Sometimes it came up when she looked at too much of the Record at once, or when she spent too long thinking about the aching gulfs of time that they hoped to bridge with the Project. The feeling that it was too much--too much for her, too much for anyone, too much for innumerable lifetimes.

“We’re a long way from placental mammals, Tjumak.”

“Yes. But we’ll get there one day. I don’t doubt that. What I wonder is, what would they say? If we could ask them. And, you know, they could talk.”

“I don’t think there’s anything alive that doesn’t want to live.”

“Ah, but they are not alive. Not right now. It will be us who make them live, if we choose to. And consider, my friend, what that will mean. For some, they will be the prey. The hunted. The fearful. The one whose existence ends with blood and pain and screaming. And others, they will be the predator. Hungry, ever-hunting, fearing that one day their source of food will move beyond the hills, or that a harsh winter will kill them all, and leave the hunter to starve.”

“You think it’s not a life worth living?”

“Would you want to live such a life?”

Sirrek shook her head. “It’s not a coherent question. Does the ferngrass or the swarmbug want to live? The ferngrass can’t react to external stimuli at all, and the swarmbug has six neurons wired in sequence--basically glorified clockwork that tells it when to fly and when to land, and when to lay eggs. There are more complicated xenozoa in Paradise, but they aren’t anything like us, either. And these mammals? Maybe they’ll be able to feel pain, and hunger, and a kind of fear in the moment--but ‘life worth living’ is a human concept. I’m not sure it applies.”

“Surely it must. Even to creatures without language, without tool use, without abstract thought. If they can suffer and feel joy, there is a place where suffering outweighs joy, however you favor one side of the equation over the other. Someone that brought a child into the world, knowing their whole life would be without joy and full of suffering, would be cruel indeed.”

“Are you really proposing we put the entire Project on hold to decide if the creatures we bring back might suffer too much for the Project to be worth it?”

“Just humor me for a bit.”

“All right, fine. A parent has moral responsibility for their child’s welfare.”

“Unless and until we discover something wiser than us already living here, we have moral responsibility for this world.”

“And it would be cruel of us to go out of our way to inflict suffering on the things living in it. You don’t see me pulling the wings off swarmbugs. But that moral responsibility only goes so far, because we can’t impose human values without limit onto things which live very different existences from us.”

“Not so different, these beasts here,” Tjumak said, tapping the display.

“Different enough. Different enough that in order to even begin to pose the question of whether their life was worth living, you would have to alter them mind and body until they were far more human than anything else. If you cannot pose the question without destroying the thing you propose to investigate, it is a bad question.”

Tjumak tilted his head in what Sirrek had come to recognize as the sign of a smile somewhere on the face she could not see. But he didn’t seem ready to drop the argument yet.

“Aren’t all values human values in the end? Unless you believe in a creating power with the authority to order the ethical universe by its own whim, which seems rather like a self-contradicting idea to me. The only values we have to judge the world by are human values. They’re limited tools, but they’re the best ones available. So if a human could have a life not worth living, so could an animal, by the only standard we have available to judge.”

“I don’t know if I buy that,” Sirrek said. “But even so: everything that lives desires to live. If you could bring one of those beasts back, and then you tried to hurt or kill it, it would run away. There’s something like volition there, and as far as I can tell, a vote in the ‘let me live!’ direction.”

“Hardly a spirited defense of the idea, though!” Tjumak said. “A mere stimulus response, maybe.”

“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say a beast’s volition matters if it doesn’t want to suffer, but doesn’t matter if it wants to live. It’s not human, so you can’t ask the question as you would to a human, or to another creature capable of abstract thought, and in the only way it knows how to tell you, it tells you it wants to live. And, presumably, do other things. Eat. Run. Have babies. You might not let it do all those things. You certainly don’t have to let it eat you. But if the creature’s experience of the world matters at all, its desires must matter in some sense, too.”

“There’s always the option of just leaving out the carnivores, you know,” Tjumak said. “After all, your moss here doesn’t feel pain. Probably.”

Sirrek smiled. “I really hope not. And maybe that is an option. Or maybe we don’t know enough. Maybe the carnivores are as essential to the herbivores as the herbivores are to them, in some way we haven’t seen. I think a certain expansive humility is necessary when poking at these questions.”

“Humility. Humility!” Tjumak roared with mock outrage. “Expansive humility, says the woman who opposes the Archive and the consensus of the whole world, and seeks to resurrect an ancient biosphere from the dead! While remaking an alien one to boot!”

“You can be ambitious and humble at the same time,” Sirrek said. “It just means you set your sights high, but aren’t surprised when you fuck everything up.”

Tjumak laughed sharply. “You’re a good sparring partner,” he said. “Koridek always gets annoyed with me when I try to start an argument, and Ardhat has learned to ignore me. It’s good to have a new face around.”

And for the rest of the evening, that’s all Sirrek thought their conversation was--a verbal wrestling match for Tjumak, a way for him to sharpen his wits, and get to know Sirrek at the same time. But later that night, as she was brewing a cup of bitterstalk tea to take to bed with her, she saw a dull glow from Tjumak’s lab, when his monitors were usually all dark, and he was asleep. She went to the door, thinking to say goodnight, but paused when she got there. His back was turned to her, and he was looking at the image on his monitor, the one that showed the ghostly outline of runners and hunters, of the ones that long ago had died, and the ones that long ago had killed. He seemed to be staring at it, intently, one finger tapping slowly on the side of the display.

As she lay in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her, it occurred to her that Tjumak’s cynicism was just as much a kind of protection as his support equipment. It was his armor against the world, and the fears of his own heart. She didn’t doubt his commitment to the project. She did not doubt the commitment of a man who had exiled himself indefinitely to the loneliest place in the world. But he understood, perhaps, that he was responsible for the world he hoped to create. Maybe it was right that it should keep them all up at night from time to time.

#tanadrin's fiction

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panatmansam · 4 years

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Ego, ego and ego.

The word “ego” simply means “I” in Latin. In English it has three meanings. In common English speech it means “prideful nature”.

The second is the classic Freudian ego that part of our psyche which mediates between the subconscious and the id.

The third, Buddhism it means that part of us which we consider our unique self which the ancients called atman, a unique soul, a lasting thing that is “us” for all time, is an illusion. This is the doctrine of anatta. a basic understanding of human consciousness in Buddhism.

Instead we are a flowing changing thing just as modern genetics shows us to be. Within us are our ancestors extending back into the mists. The Buddha described this 2500 years before anybody had ever heard of DNA.

We are part of a greater being. A four dimensional thing stretching through time called “life”. Life is the ultimate “meta-being”. If you take evolution and speed it up or better yet, take a God’s eye view and see it all unfold life is a process that starts small and simple and then like a science fiction monster mutates and grows and changes and mutates again into many different forms.

Sometimes the planet tries to throw life off with an ice age or massive volcanic eruption or a big rock out of the sky and most living things die but there are still viruses trapped in Antarctic ice, creatures at the bottom of the sea clustered around thermal vents in pitch dark and crushing pressure, and bacteria that can live in outer space.

Humans are unique, so far as we know, as being the only animal with meta-cognition. That is, we can think ABOUT thinking. I know I’m thinking. My cat doesn’t. I know this because she doesn’t have the highly developed part of the brain which is required for such thought. Can’t run the software without the hardware.

We can.

This is not religion. It is science.

#text

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windingriverherbals · 4 years

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The Illustrated Herbiary Collectible Box Set: Guidance and Rituals from 36 Bewitching Botanicals; Includes Hardcover Book, Deluxe Oracle Card Set, and Carrying Pouch (Wild Wisdom)

Rosemary is the smell of deja vu and the after-breath of nostalgia. Her gift is the faint scent that teases and vanishes, leaving you longing for something you can’t quite name, with memories that crest and crash, pulling you gasping into their undertow.

In Victorian times Rosemary was said to say, “Remember me.” This is but a small part of her magic. Rosemary can ease remembrance, softening sharp edges, or she can dredge the distant past, pulling on your DNA to bring forward the longings of lineage. Crush the leaves. Hold them to your nose. The past is encoded into our cellular memory. Rosemary whispers, Sink into the knowledge that lives in your bones. Let memory rise up from the body of your being.

Honoring Ancestral Memory {Ritual}

Rosemary’s magic lies in her scent and the volatile oil hidden in her leaves. Science has affirmed that the smell of Rosemary’s essential oil enhances memory. Here’s how it works; When you inhale Rosemary, her vaporous oils cross through the mucous membranes in your nose and enter your bloodstream. Recall is significantly improved with Rosemary flowing in your veins.

You can get a good whiff of rosemary by crushing fresh leaves between your fingers or by rubbing a drop of rosemary essential oil between your palms. Then hold your hands over your nose and inhale for a few minutes. Notice how you feel.

Remembering Your Lineage

Connect with your ancestral past through freewriting. Her’s how: Grab a notebook and set a timer for 10 minutes. Below is a prompt to start your writing. After you read it, begin writing and don’t stop until your timer goes off.

I can almost guarantee that you’ll feel silly or lost or confused for at least the first 3 minutes. You’ll feel like you are making things up, or that you don’t know what to write. Keep writing. At a certain point, your ego will step aside and that is when the magic happens.

Hee’s your writing prompt: Dear {name of ancestor}, I’m working to deepen my ancestral ties. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Now start writing, answering in the voice of your ancestor.

You Are Made Of Memories {Refection}

Rosemary whispers the memories of this lifetime, but she also reminds us of the kitchens of generations past and the scent of camphor mixing with sea air. Our DNA has traveled through millennia. When we think of memory, we focus on the people we ourselves have known – grandparents, great-aunts, cousins twice removed. Our thoughts tend to be based on personalities, experiences, likes or dislikes. Rosemary asks us to travel beyond those associations to feel for the memory that lives in the twisting threads of our chromosomes. This is what it means to honor our ancestors and to be rooted in our own history.

What if your bones are ancient bedrock and your laugh the wild wind? What if you are not only an individual but the present incarnation in a long lineage?

Rosemary Oil; Benefits of Therapeutic Use

Rosemary is a fragrant herb that is native to the Mediterranean and receives its name from the Latin words “ros” (dew) and “marinus” (sea), which means “dew of the Sea.” It also grows in England, Mexico, the USA, and northern Africa, namely in Morocco. Known for its distinctive fragrance that is characterized by an energizing, evergreen, citrus-like, herbaceous scent, Rosemary Essential Oil is derived from the aromatic herb Rosmarinus Officinalis, a plant belonging to the Mint family, which includes Basil, Lavender, Myrtle, and Sage. Its appearance, too, is similar to Lavender with flat pine needles that have a light trace of silver.

Historically, Rosemary was considered sacred by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Romans, and it was used for numerous purposes. The Greeks wore Rosemary garlands around their heads while studying, as it was believed to improve memory, and both the Greeks and the Romans used Rosemary in almost all festivals and religious ceremonies, including weddings, as a reminder of life and death. In the Mediterranean, Rosemary leaves and Rosemary Oil was popularly used for culinary preparation purposes, while in Egypt the plant, as well as its extracts, were used for incense. In the Middle Ages, Rosemary was believed to be able to ward off evil spirits and to prevent the onset of the bubonic plague. With this belief, Rosemary branches were commonly strewn across floors and left in doorways to keep the disease at bay. Rosemary was also an ingredient in “Four Thieves Vinegar,” a concoction that was infused with herbs and spices and used by grave robbers to protect themselves against the plague. A symbol of remembrance, Rosemary was also tossed into graves as a promise that loved ones who passed away would not be forgotten.

It was used throughout the civilizations in cosmetics for its antiseptic, anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-oxidant properties and in medical care for its health benefits. Rosemary had even become a favorite alternative herbal medicine for the German-Swiss physician, philosopher, and botanist Paracelsus, who promoted its healing properties, including its ability to strengthen the body and to heal organs such as the brain, heart, and liver. Despite being unaware of the concept of germs, people of the 16th century used Rosemary as incense or as massage balms and oils to eliminate harmful bacteria, especially in the rooms of those suffering from illness. For thousands of years, folk medicine has also used Rosemary for its ability to improve memory, soothe digestive issues, and relieve aching muscles.

Rosemary Essential Oil’s chemical composition consists of the following main constituents: α -Pinene, Camphor, 1,8-Cineol, Camphene, Limonene, and Linalool.

α -Pinene is known to exhibit the following activity:

Anti-inflammatory

Anti-septic

Expectorant

Bronchodilator

Camphor

Cough suppressant

Decongestant

Febrifuge

Anesthetic

Antimicrobial

Anti-inflammatory

1,8-Cineol

Analgesic

Anti-bacterial

Anti-fungal

Anti-inflammatory

Anti-spasmodic

Anti-viral

Cough suppressant

Camphene

Anti-oxidant

Soothing

Anti-inflammatory

Limonene

Nervous system stimulant

Psychostimulant

Mood-balancing

Appetite-suppressant

Detoxifying

Linalool

Sedative

Anti-inflammatory

Anti-anxiety

Analgesic

Used in aromatherapy, Rosemary Oil helps reduce stress levels and nervous tension, boost mental activity, encourage clarity and insight, relieve fatigue, and support respiratory function. It is used to improve alertness, eliminate negative moods, and increase the retention of information by enhancing concentration. The scent of Rosemary Essential Oil stimulates the appetite and is also known to reduce the level of harmful stress hormones that are released when involved in intense experiences. Inhaling Rosemary Oil boosts the immune system by stimulating internal anti-oxidant activity, which in turn fights ailments caused by free radicals, and it relieves throat and nasal congestion by clearing the respiratory tract.

Diluted and used topically, Rosemary Essential Oil is known to stimulate hair growth, reduce pain, soothe inflammation, eliminate headaches, strengthen the immune system, and condition hair to make it look and feel healthy. Used in a massage, Rosemary Oil’s detoxifying properties can facilitate healthy digestion, relieve flatulence, bloating and cramps, and relieve constipation. Through massage, this oil stimulates circulation, which allows the body to better absorb nutrients from food. In cosmetics for hair care, Rosemary Essential Oil’s tonic properties stimulate hair follicles to lengthen and strengthen hair while slowing the graying of hair, preventing hair loss, and moisturizing dry scalp to relieve dandruff. Traditionally, Rosemary Oil combined with Olive Oil in a hot oil hair treatment has been known to darken and strengthen hair. The anti-microbial, antiseptic, astringent, antioxidant, and tonic properties of this oil make it a beneficial additive in skincare products that are meant to soothe or even treat dry or oily skin, eczema, inflammation, and acne. Effective for all skin types, this rejuvenating oil can be added to soaps, face washes, face masks, toners, and creams to achieve firm yet hydrated skin that appears to have a healthy glow that is free of unwanted marks.

Rosemary Essential Oil’s refreshing and energizing aroma can be diluted with water and used in natural homemade room fresheners to eliminate unpleasant odors from the environment as well as from objects. When added to recipes for homemade scented candles, it can work the same way to freshen the scent of a room.

COSMETIC: Stimulant, Analgesic, Anti-inflammatory, Antiseptic, Anti-fungal, Anti-bacterial, Astringent, Disinfectant, Antioxidant.

ODOROUS: Anti-stress, Cognition-enhancement, Psycho-stimulant, Stimulant, Decongestant.

MEDICINAL: Anti-bacterial, Anti-fungal, Detoxifying, Analgesic, Anti-inflammatory, Carminative, Laxative, Decongestant, Antiseptic, Disinfectant, Antiseptic, Anti-nociceptive.

CULTIVATING AND HARVESTING QUALITY ROSEMARY OIL

Rosemary is a perennial bush that often grows on the sea cliffs of Spain, France, Greece, and Italy. The leaves of the aromatic Rosemary bush have a high oil concentration, and it is part of an aromatic family of herbs, which also includes Lavender, Basil, Mint, and Oregano to name a few.

Rosemary is a hardy plant that can withstand frost, but it also loves the sun and thrives in dry climates where the temperature is between 20ᵒ-25ᵒ Celsius (68ᵒ-77ᵒ Fahrenheit) and does not drop below -17ᵒ Celsius (0ᵒ Fahrenheit). Though Rosemary can grow in a small pot inside a home, when grown outside, the Rosemary bush can reach a height of approximately 5 ft. Due to its adaptability to various ecological conditions, Rosemary plants can vary in appearance in terms of their colors, the sizes of their flowers, and the aromas of their essential oils. The Rosemary plant requires adequate water drainage, as it will not grow well if it is over-irrigated or in soils with high clay content, thus it can grow in the earth that ranges in soil type from sandy to clay loam soil as long as it has a pH range of 5,5 to 8,0.

The upper side of Rosemary leaves are dark and the undersides are pale and covered in thick hairs. The tips of the leaves begin to sprout small, tubular pale- to deep-blue flowers, which continue to bloom in the summer. Rosemary Essential Oil of the most superior quality is obtained from the flowering tops of the plant, although oils can also be obtained from the stems and leaves before the plant begins to flower. Rosemary fields are usually harvested once or twice a year, depending on the geographical region of cultivation. Harvesting is most often done mechanically, which allows more frequent cutting due to higher yields from rapid regrowth.

Before distillation, the leaves are dried either naturally by the heat of the sun or by using driers. Drying the leaves in the sun results in poor quality leaves for producing oils. The ideal drying method involves the use of a forced air-flow drier, which results in better quality leaves. After the product is dried, the leaves are further processed to have the stems removed. They are sieved to remove dirt.

HOW IS ROSEMARY OIL EXTRACTED?

Rosemary Essential Oil is most commonly extracted through the steam distillation of the plant’s flowering tops and leaves. After distillation, the oil has a watery viscosity and can be colorless or pale yellow. It’s the powerful and refreshing smell is herbaceous and similar to mint with an undertone that is characterized as woody and balsamic.

USES OF ROSEMARY OIL

The uses of Rosemary Essential Oil are abundant, ranging from medicinal and odorous to cosmetic. Its many forms include oils, gels, lotions, soaps, shampoos, and sprays, to name a few suggestions for homemade products.

Used in aromatherapy, the woody, evergreen scent of Rosemary can promote relaxation and boost alertness as well as brain function, thereby improving memory. To relieve stress while studying and maintain concentration, diffuse Rosemary Essential Oil in the room for a maximum of 30 minutes.

Diluted with a carrier oil and used topically, Rosemary Essential Oil’s detoxifying and anesthetic properties can boost immunity by recharging the body’s detoxification system. By diluting Rosemary Oil in a carrier oil such as Fractionated Coconut Oil and massaging it into the lymph nodes, the body will be stimulated to more rapidly eliminate waste and to soothe digestive ailments. Its analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties make it an ideal essential oil for relieving muscle aches and pains. For a massage oil that reduces pain, blend Rosemary Oil with Peppermint Oil and dilute the blend in Coconut Oil then rub on tender muscles and aching joints.

Rosemary Essential Oil’s anti-viral, anti-microbial, and antiseptic properties make it a natural homemade multi-purpose cleaning spray to cleanse indoor environments and eliminate harmful bacteria therein. A dilution of Rosemary Oil in distilled white vinegar and water makes a spray cleaner that is suitable to wipe down surfaces like countertops.

A GUIDE TO ROSEMARY OIL VARIETIES & THEIR BENEFITS

ROSEMARY VARIETY & BOTANICAL NAME COUNTRY OF ORIGIN BENEFITS OF OIL Rosemary (Morocco) Essential Oil

Rosmarinus Officinalis

Found in:

Morocco

Believed to:

soothe inflammation

strengthen the body

eliminate harmful bacteria

Rosemary Essential Oil (Spanish)

Rosmarinus Officinalis

Found in:

Spain

Believed to:

improve memory

soothe digestive issues

relieve aching muscles

Rosemary Organic Essential Oil

Rosmarinus officinalis

Found in:

Spain

Believed to:

relieve nasal congestion

reduce fever

relieve muscle and joint pain

CONTRAINDICATIONS FOR ROSEMARY OIL

As per NAHA guidelines, we do not recommend the ingestion of essential oils. It is imperative to consult a medical practitioner before using Rosemary Essential Oil for therapeutic purposes. Pregnant and nursing women and those taking prescription drugs are especially advised not to use Rosemary Essential Oil without the medical advice of a physician. The oil may have a negative effect on the fetus and potentially lead to miscarriage. Rosemary Essential Oil should always be stored in an area that is inaccessible to children, especially those under the age of 7. Those with high blood pressure should avoid using this oil, as it may further elevate blood pressure.

When applied topically, Rosemary Essential Oil should be used in dilution – a carrier oil such as Almond, Coconut, Jojoba, Olive, or Hemp is recommended – and in small amounts, as using the oil directly or in high concentrations can potentially cause skin irritation. A skin test is recommended prior to use. This can be done by diluting the essential oil in a carrier oil and applying a small amount to a small area of skin that is not sensitive. Rosemary Oil must never be used near the eyes, inner nose, and ears, or on any other particularly sensitive areas of skin.

ROSEMARY ESSENCE…

Rosemary receives its name from the Latin term “Dew of the Sea,” as it is native to the sea cliffs of the Mediterranean region

Rosemary belongs to an aromatic family of herbs that includes Basil, Lavender, Myrtle, and Sage.

Rosemary was considered sacred by ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Romans, who used it to improve memory, incense, protection, and as a reminder of the life and death cycle, among other uses.

Rosemary Essential Oil of the most superior quality is obtained from the flowering tops of the plant.

Rosemary Essential Oil is best known for its stimulating, soothing, and pain-relieving properties.

Rosemary, “Remember Me” The Illustrated Herbiary Collectible Box Set: Guidance and Rituals from 36 Bewitching Botanicals; Includes Hardcover Book, Deluxe Oracle Card Set, and Carrying Pouch (Wild Wisdom)

#Ancestor&039;s #Aromatherapy #book #health benefits #Herbal #Herbs #journal #lineage #Maia Toll #remembrance #Rosemary #rosemary oil #Rosmarinus Officinalis

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thecoroutfitters · 7 years

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Before Europeans discovered the Americas and introduced such diseases as chicken pox, the flu, smallpox, and measles, Native Americans were relatively disease-free and, for the most part, lived long, healthy lives, unless of course famine struck.

Native American remedies for existing illnesses were made of indigenous medicinal plants, many of which were highly effective.

Unlike modern medicine, sick patients weren’t just handed medicine until they either got better or died. Instead, Native Americans took care of their health holistically; it was strongly linked to spirituality.

The Native American ideal state of health and well-being was intrinsically linked to a close connection to the Earth and living in harmony with the environment.

In other words, they weren’t the “savages” that Europeans assumed that they were; I’m sure that, if they had the European desire for progress and financial gain, the Americas would have been vastly different than they were when Columbus found them. Instead, they believed that natural balance must be maintained. Life was about coexistence, not the almighty dollar.

But, if you take a look at what they actually did to maintain that balance, you may be surprised to find that their methods coincide with what modern medical practitioners preach on a daily basis.

Regular Cardio and Strength Training

Many tribes greeted the dawn with an early morning run to celebrate the arrival of a new day. How many people do you know that run in the mornings (or at some point during the day) as part of their exercise routine?

Of course, along with the physical exercise they also benefited from the release of stress-releasing hormones that we now know comes from physical exercise. Since running was, in large part, spiritual, there was also surely the clarity of mind that comes with meditation.

Oh, and we can’t forget that regularly carrying animal carcasses, curing hides, carrying water, setting up and tearing down camps, and participating in ceremonies and games that centered on acts of physical strength are all examples of strength training in its purest form.

Get this lifesaving information about surviving when doctors, pharmacies and hospitals are shut down!

Healthy Diets

The Native American concept of fast food was eating berries, fruits, and nuts as they picked them. They didn’t typically gorge themselves unless it was a celebratory feast and the only chips they had were possibly buffalo chips – depending on location – that they used to start a fire (or possibly create a home remedy).

Everybody now is preaching that free-range, organic, hormone-free meat is the only healthy option. Well guess what – the Native Americans were already following that diet. They treated sick animals in the same way that the treated sick people – herbally.

Either that or they just put them down and maybe ate them, depending on the illness or injury. Plus the animals weren’t ingesting grass poisoned with artificial pesticides and other chemicals.

Nuts and seeds were rich in Omega-3’s, high in good fats and low in bad fats, so they had that covered, and the berries that they ate, again, had no pesticides or chemicals. And lest we forget, they had to work for their food, so they were naturally exercising every day of their lives.

Until less than 100 years ago, diabetes was practically non-existent in the Native American population, until they began to adopt the eating habits of other Americans.

Mental Health

We now know that mental health is critical to physical health.

Native Americans regularly meditated and practiced acts of gratitude for everything that surrounded them.

As some modern philosophies teach, they were present and mindful. They celebrated the seasons and the bounty, and they were grateful and respectful to the animals that they killed to sustain themselves.

In a nutshell, Native Americans had a healthy outlook on life and worked regularly to maintain that. They knew, without an advanced medical degree, what it took to stay healthy.

Medicinal Herbs

For every illness, there’s a cure. At least in theory. Though Western Medicine hasn’t managed to find cures for many diseases, Native Americans had treatments for just about everything, and if you pay attention to early American writers, they often worked.

These treatments were entirely natural – no penicillin or opiates required. There are natural elements that provide the origins of these modern meds, such as soil and plants that contain natural antibiotics and plants such as willow bark that contain natural pain killers. In fact, willow bark was an original ingredient in aspirin.

Just because a cure is natural doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work as well as modern medications; in fact, the opposite is often true.

As preppers, we realize that we may not always have access to OTC and prescription meds so, considering that, we’ve put together a special report on Native American remedies that teaches you how to use the eight super-plants that treat more than thirty diseases. You’ll also learn how to help your body stay healthy and heal itself naturally, and how to preserve your food without refrigeration or electricity.

Click here to subscribe to Survivopedia’s newsletter and get this month’s FREE REPORT to find out more about our ancestors’ natural healing secrets.

Native American Remedies

In general, their naturally healthy lifestyles prevented many diseases, but some did exist. Plus, you have to consider injuries such as broken bones, open wounds, and infections.

When treating any medical condition, the knowledge of the tribe healer often saved the day with a combination of treatments.

Throughout the generations, natural remedies were handed down from one healer to the next, and it seems pretty likely that the entire tribe knew how to use herbs, plants, seeds, and roots for healing, too.

These ingredients, alone or combined, were used to make poultices, teas, decoctions, salves, and oils that worked in conjunction with other holistic methods described above.

Sweat Lodges

Also known as medicine lodges, sweat lodges were often used for healing, prayer, introspection, and purification. Sweat sessions were required to be supervised by trained elders who were experienced with the process and could safely control the situation in case somebody became ill or uncomfortable.

Many holistic healers believe that sweating purifies the body by flushing toxins from the body and may help kill disease by raising the body temperature to a point that bacteria and viruses can’t survive. That is, of course, theoretical, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Remember that knowledge is the only doctor that can save you when there is no medical help around you.

This article has been written by Theresa Crouse for Survivopedia.

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s-c-i-guy · 7 years

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Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life’s Origin

Researchers have discovered that simple “chemically active” droplets grow to the size of cells and spontaneously divide, suggesting they might have evolved into the first living cells.

A collaboration of physicists and biologists in Germany has found a simple mechanism that might have enabled liquid droplets to evolve into living cells in early Earth’s primordial soup.

Origin-of-life researchers have praised the minimalism of the idea. Ramin Golestanian, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research, called it a big achievement that suggests that “the general phenomenology of life formation is a lot easier than one might think.”

The central question about the origin of life has been how the first cells arose from primitive precursors. What were those precursors, dubbed “protocells,” and how did they come alive? Proponents of the “membrane-first” hypothesis have argued that a fatty-acid membrane was needed to corral the chemicals of life and incubate biological complexity. But how could something as complex as a membrane start to self-replicate and proliferate, allowing evolution to act on it?

In 1924, Alexander Oparin, the Russian biochemist who first envisioned a hot, briny primordial soup as the source of life’s humble beginnings, proposed that the mystery protocells might have been liquid droplets — naturally forming, membrane-free containers that concentrate chemicals and thereby foster reactions. In recent years, droplets have been found to perform a range of essential functions inside modern cells, reviving Oparin’s long-forgotten speculation about their role in evolutionary history. But neither he nor anyone else could explain how droplets might have proliferated, growing and dividing and, in the process, evolving into the first cells.

Now, the new work by David Zwicker and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, both in Dresden, suggests an answer. The scientists studied the physics of “chemically active” droplets, which cycle chemicals in and out of the surrounding fluid, and discovered that these droplets tend to grow to cell size and divide, just like cells. This “active droplet” behavior differs from the passive and more familiar tendencies of oil droplets in water, which glom together into bigger and bigger droplets without ever dividing.

If chemically active droplets can grow to a set size and divide of their own accord, then “it makes it more plausible that there could have been spontaneous emergence of life from nonliving soup,” said Frank Jülicher, a biophysicist in Dresden and a co-author of the new paper.

The findings, reported in Nature Physics last month, paint a possible picture of life’s start by explaining “how cells made daughters,” said Zwicker, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. “This is, of course, key if you want to think about evolution.”

Luca Giomi, a theoretical biophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who studies the possible physical mechanisms behind the origin of life, said the new proposal is significantly simpler than other mechanisms of protocell division that have been considered, calling it “a very promising direction.”

However, David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a longtime champion of the membrane-first hypothesis, argues that while the newfound mechanism of droplet division is interesting, its relevance to the origin of life remains to be seen. The mechanism is a far cry, he noted, from the complicated, multistep process by which modern cells divide.

Could simple dividing droplets have evolved into the teeming menagerie of modern life, from amoebas to zebras? Physicists and biologists familiar with the new work say it’s plausible. As a next step, experiments are under way in Dresden to try to observe the growth and division of active droplets made of synthetic polymers that are modeled after the droplets found in living cells. After that, the scientists hope to observe biological droplets dividing in the same way.

Clifford Brangwynne, a biophysicist at Princeton University who was part of the Dresden-based team that identified the first subcellular droplets eight years ago — tiny liquid aggregates of protein and RNA in cells of the worm C. elegans — explained that it would not be surprising if these were vestiges of evolutionary history. Just as mitochondria, organelles that have their own DNA, came from ancient bacteria that infected cells and developed a symbiotic relationship with them, “the condensed liquid phases that we see in living cells might reflect, in a similar sense, a sort of fossil record of the physicochemical driving forces that helped set up cells in the first place,” he said.

“This Nature Physics paper takes that to the next level,” by revealing the features that droplets would have needed “to play a role as protocells,” Brangwynne added.

When germline cells in the roundworm C. elegans divide, P granules, shown in green, condense in the daughter cell that will become a viable sperm or egg and dissolve in the other daughter cell.

Droplets in Dresden

The Dresden droplet discoveries began in 2009, when Brangwynne and collaborators demystified the nature of little dots known as “P granules” in C. elegans germline cells, which undergo division into sperm and egg cells. During this division process, the researchers observed that P granules grow, shrink and move across the cells via diffusion. The discovery that they are liquid droplets, reported in Science, prompted a wave of activity as other subcellular structures were also identified as droplets. It didn’t take long for Brangwynne and Tony Hyman, head of the Dresden biology lab where the initial experiments took place, to make the connection to Oparin’s 1924 protocell theory. In a 2012 essay about Oparin’s life and seminal book, The Origin of Life, Brangwynne and Hyman wrote that the droplets he theorized about “may still be alive and well, safe within our cells, like flies in life’s evolving amber.”

Oparin most famously hypothesized that lightning strikes or geothermal activity on early Earth could have triggered the synthesis of organic macromolecules necessary for life — a conjecture later made independently by the British scientist John Haldane and triumphantly confirmed by the Miller-Urey experiment in the 1950s. Another of Oparin’s ideas, that liquid aggregates of these macromolecules might have served as protocells, was less celebrated, in part because he had no clue as to how the droplets might have reproduced, thereby enabling evolution. The Dresden group studying P granules didn’t know either.

In the wake of their discovery, Jülicher assigned his new student, Zwicker, the task of unraveling the physics of centrosomes, organelles involved in animal cell division that also seemed to behave like droplets. Zwicker modeled the centrosomes as “out-of-equilibrium” systems that are chemically active, continuously cycling constituent proteins into and out of the surrounding liquid cytoplasm. In his model, these proteins have two chemical states. Proteins in state A dissolve in the surrounding liquid, while those in state B are insoluble, aggregating inside a droplet. Sometimes, proteins in state B spontaneously switch to state A and flow out of the droplet. An energy source can trigger the reverse reaction, causing a protein in state A to overcome a chemical barrier and transform into state B; when this insoluble protein bumps into a droplet, it slinks easily inside, like a raindrop in a puddle. Thus, as long as there’s an energy source, molecules flow in and out of an active droplet. “In the context of early Earth, sunlight would be the driving force,” Jülicher said.

Zwicker discovered that this chemical influx and efflux will exactly counterbalance each other when an active droplet reaches a certain volume, causing the droplet to stop growing. Typical droplets in Zwicker’s simulations grew to tens or hundreds of microns across depending on their properties — the scale of cells.

The next discovery was even more unexpected. Although active droplets have a stable size, Zwicker found that they are unstable with respect to shape: When a surplus of B molecules enters a droplet on one part of its surface, causing it to bulge slightly in that direction, the extra surface area from the bulging further accelerates the droplet’s growth as more molecules can diffuse inside. The droplet elongates further and pinches in at the middle, which has low surface area. Eventually, it splits into a pair of droplets, which then grow to the characteristic size. When Jülicher saw simulations of Zwicker’s equations, “he immediately jumped on it and said, ‘That looks very much like division,’” Zwicker said. “And then this whole protocell idea emerged quickly.”

Zwicker, Jülicher and their collaborators, Rabea Seyboldt, Christoph Weber and Tony Hyman, developed their theory over the next three years, extending Oparin’s vision. “If you just think about droplets like Oparin did, then it’s not clear how evolution could act on these droplets,” Zwicker said. “For evolution, you have to make copies of yourself with slight modifications, and then natural selection decides how things get more complex.”

Globule Ancestor

Last spring, Jülicher began meeting with Dora Tang, head of a biology lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, to discuss plans to try to observe active-droplet division in action.

Tang’s lab synthesizes artificial cells made of polymers, lipids and proteins that resemble biochemical molecules. Over the next few months, she and her team will look for division of liquid droplets made of polymers that are physically similar to the proteins in P granules and centrosomes. The next step, which will be made in collaboration with Hyman’s lab, is to try to observe centrosomes or other biological droplets dividing, and to determine if they utilize the mechanism identified in the paper by Zwicker and colleagues. “That would be a big deal,” said Giomi, the Leiden biophysicist.

When Deamer, the membrane-first proponent, read the new paper, he recalled having once observed something like the predicted behavior in hydrocarbon droplets he had extracted from a meteorite. When he illuminated the droplets in near-ultraviolet light, they began moving and dividing. (He sent footage of the phenomenon to Jülicher.) Nonetheless, Deamer isn’t convinced of the effect’s significance. “There is no obvious way for the mechanism of division they reported to evolve into the complex process by which living cells actually divide,” he said.

Other researchers disagree, including Tang. She says that once droplets started to divide, they could easily have gained the ability to transfer genetic information, essentially divvying up a batch of protein-coding RNA or DNA into equal parcels for their daughter cells. If this genetic material coded for useful proteins that increased the rate of droplet division, natural selection would favor the behavior. Protocells, fueled by sunlight and the law of increasing entropy, would gradually have grown more complex.

Jülicher and colleagues argue that somewhere along the way, protocell droplets could have acquired membranes. Droplets naturally collect crusts of lipids that prefer to lie at the interface between the droplets and the surrounding liquid. Somehow, genes might have started coding for these membranes as a kind of protection. When this idea was put to Deamer, he said, “I can go along with that,” noting that he would define protocells as the first droplets that had membranes.

The primordial plotline hinges, of course, on the outcome of future experiments, which will determine how robust and relevant the predicted droplet division mechanism really is. Can chemicals be found with the right two states, A and B, to bear out the theory? If so, then a viable path from nonlife to life starts to come into focus.

The luckiest part of the whole process, in Jülicher’s opinion, was not that droplets turned into cells, but that the first droplet — our globule ancestor — formed to begin with. Droplets require a lot of chemical material to spontaneously arise or “nucleate,” and it’s unclear how so many of the right complex macromolecules could have accumulated in the primordial soup to make it happen. But then again, Jülicher said, there was a lot of soup, and it was stewing for eons.

“It’s a very rare event. You have to wait a long time for it to happen,” he said. “And once it happens, then the next things happen more easily, and more systematically.”

#biology #evolution #biophysics #science #sciblr

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ashwinder-venom-blog · 7 years

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TRIGGER WARNING!!!!

The content of this blog may OFFEND members of various demographic groups, including but not limited to:

Trolls, orcs, goblins, demons, angels, fairies, spirits, deities, gargoyles, gnomes, werewolves, vampires, zombies, robots, androids, cyborgs, elves, hobbits, giants, dwarves, humans, other primates, felids, canids, other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, worms, molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms, cnidarians, sponges, bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, minerals....

....men, women, intersex people, agender people, transgenders, cisgenders, heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, demisexuals, asexuals, sadomasochists, furries, otherkin, fictionkin, aliens, natives, white people, brown people, Europeans, Africans, Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Middle Easterners, Hispanics....

....conservatives, liberals, moderates, libertarians, progresssives, industrialists, globalists, colonialists, fascists, socialists, capitalists, gardeners, farmers, ranchers, pet owners, false environmentalists, anthropocentrists, humanists, transhumanists, biohackers, transcendentalists, atheists, rationalists, agnostics....

....Christians, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, Taoists, Heathens, Wiccans, Satanists, Scientologists, scientific researchers, computer programmers, office workers, medical professionals, religious leaders, false prophets, paranormal skeptics, paranormal investigators, government officials, military personnel, police officers, social justice warriors....

....feminists, civil rights activists, eugenicists, terrorists, vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, paleo dieters, pet owners, pregnant people, infertile people, parents, oocytes, spermatocytes, embryos, infants, children, adolescents, adults, elders, baby boomers, millennials, college graduates, or high school dropouts....

....As well as anyone who has been vaccinated, fluoridated, fumigated, irradiated, intoxicated by alcohol, circumcised as an infant, artificially inseminated, fertilized in vitro, sexually assaulted, born with a chromosomal defect, diagnosed with a chronic illness, or prescribed prescription medication.

Could you make it through all that without puking, panicking, punching a wall, or popping a pill? Good. I don’t mean to offend, but it’s so hard not to these day, and I want to make sure I’m being inclusive enough. Patience and compassion are virtues I’m still working on, so please bear with me. What I share could save your life or limb some day.

Who am I? For starters, I’m a very private and security-minded person. I like to remain as anonymous as possible while still appearing as an individual. With the dangers of identity theft, cyber-terrorism, electronic surveillance, and preteen hackers, I suggest you aspire for anonymity as well. Keep it simple and vague like me.

Bisexual cisgender young adult female, childfree unmarried housewife, mostly white European heritage, living in the central United States of America. Been labelled nerd, geek, emo, goth, punk, hippie, rebel, freak, bipolar, autistic, narcissistic, antisocial, uneducated, genius, witch, doctor, rewilder, primitivist, prepper, survivalist....Take your pick.

I have a strong passion for....a lot of things. So many hobbies, interests, miscellaneous areas of expertise, etc....I could prattle on endlessly about the utterly irrelevant. But what is most relevant to YOU? I’ve already failed to keep it short and sweet, but I’ll try again anyway.

My passion for biology should really sum it up. Although that usually isn’t good enough for most people, not without expressing just how hot that passion burns. Geobiology, deep ecology, biochemistry, botany, herbalism, zoology, anatomy, psychology, anthropology....I’ve studied it all more in-depth than you could ever dream of.

Supplemented heavily by astrophysics, metaphysics, theology, history, archaeology, and bushcraft, of course. For well over a decade, ever since preschool, I’ve felt a mysterious drive to study all these things. Why? Well that’s the mystery! But I suppose I should use my knowledge to help people.

I’m a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer. I walk everywhere, squat to pee, eat wild plants and meat, build simple shelters to sleep in, crawl and climb through the woods, and don’t drink alcohol or use any manmade medication, Do I suggest you live the same way? Yes. That’s how humans evolved to live, not as an overpopulated petrochemical-eating virus. We are animals.

Sure it sounds like a dirty, bloody, painful, difficult life. It can be at times, but so can modern “western” life. Are terrorist attacks, hate crimes, environmental pollution, and disease outbreaks not dirty or painful? If the human population was smaller again, just another animal in the ecosystem, we wouldn’t have those problems. Think about it.

Mammals with brains our size can socially track 50-150 individuals. Extended family and close friends. Healthy well-fed hunter-gatherer bands have usually numbered in that range, with 25-200 miles of forest or savanna between communities. A far cry from the cities and highways of today.

Why is there racism, sexism, starvation, sickness? Because our personal territory is being invaded! Human life is considered so valuable, more than the trees and bees we rely on, and every measure is taken to preserve human life and promote population growth. But the quality of all life has been lost.

When a human suffers an injury or illness that silences their heart, they are resuscitated, drugged, butchered, and often left disabled or disfigured anyway. If an athlete breaks his neck and stops breathing, if a child receives a 3rd degree burn over 75% of her body, they should be led peacefully into a merciful death. Not kept alive in misery for the corporations and politicians to continue cultivating the masses for their own profit.

Likewise, infertile people are aided in conception. Disadvantageous genes that would otherwise die out are then perpetuated in the population. The resulting children often have a higher rate of preterm birth and congenital abnormality, entering this life requiring drugs or surgery as newborns. Helpless babies being butchered, just because their parents needed someone to love.

Many mental illnesses are also affected by genetics, including susceptibility to suicidal ideation. If you are dissatisfied with your personal life, depressed by the state of the world, or simply curious about the afterlife, you have no right to die. Your body is owned by the government, and it is a crime to vandalize government property. The pharmaceutical corporations that fund their campaigns make a lot of money from psychotropic medications.

Children are raised as livestock, all to turn a profit. We’re all livestock. Thanks to human overpopulation, dozens of other species go extinct each day, but still we suffer the most from our own mistakes. No other animal struggles so much with disease. If there were less humans, sure there would be less of us, but there would be so much more for everyone!

Without providing the infertile a chance to have triplets through in vitro fertilization, there might be less congenital birth defects and less overpopulation overall. A smaller population, thus more isolated communities, limits the spread of infectious disease. And less humans but more nature means more natural resources.

Like clean water, space to move around, and fresh food that isn’t loaded with dyes or preservatives. You know, all those basic human needs we wage wars for. Yes, politics and religion might be part of it too, but violence is mostly science. Psychology. Biology. Our food, water, and space is being threatened by human overpopulation, so we have the inexplicable urge to kill each other off. As we should.

Our global ecosystem, the biosphere, is imbalanced and infected. By us. Like us. Earth is running a fever and shaking with the chills, fighting the virus that is our species. We can either go with the flow of Mother Nature, or we can continue trying to fight her. But this is a war we cannot win, because if the trees and bees die, so do we. They feed us with the breath of life.

Demcocrats, Republicans, everyone between and beyond....Folks of all creed, color, sex, gender, ethnicity, and/or philosophy....You are ALL being LIED to! The hatred you feel toward each other is sorely misplaced and misunderstood. Women against men, black against white, liberals against conservatives, youths against elders....You are ALL wrong!

More government-mandated social programs are NOT the answer. Neither LED lightbulbs, nuclear energy, vegetarianism, nor flying to Mars will save this society or this planet. We’ve been running toward the edge of a cliff for several thousand years, and we may or may not have jumped to our deaths within the past decade. It is time to “get back to basics”.

Humanity did fine for hundreds of thousands of years as just another animal in the food web, even millions if you count all the Homos before us Sapiens. And Earth did fine without us for BILLIONS of years. Learn to live as our ancient Paleolithic ancestors did, how to build, hunt, forage, cook, pee, and sleep like the cavemen. Heal and protect yourself and your family like we all know you can.

In a nutshell, this blog will contain wilderness survival tips, natural health hints, fun facts about science and history, as well as sociopolitical commentary. There might also be occasional references to the liberal arts, mostly pre-2000 music, psychoactive herb use, and erotica/porn. I have a major hurt/comfort fetish, like a shamanic Florence Nightingale, and the medical experience to back it up. TRIGGER WARNING!

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kristinsimmons · 4 years

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The future of dentistry is functional. Here’s why.

Dentistry is not separate from medicine

Diet & lifestyle

Periodontal disease & chronic disease

The oral microbiome

Sleep & airway health

How functional dentistry offers hope

Benefits of a functional dentist

Principles of functional dentistry

Are you ready for the future?

One of the worst mistakes ever made in healthcare was the separation of “medicine” and “dentistry”.

Fortunately, patients — and dentists — are changing this paradigm.

The practice of functional dentistry, which honors the mouth-body connection and takes a root cause approach to dental health, is in high demand.

As people learn the integral connection between their oral and overall health, they are seeking an answer they can’t find in the average dental office.

Dentists who take a functional approach to patient care are the cutting edge of modern dental care.

To succeed in dental practice, functional dentistry will soon become not just a “niche” specialty, but a necessity.

I see it every day — my team receives hundreds of emails, DMs, and comments each week from patients desperately seeking a functional dentist in their area.

Dentistry is Not Separate from Medicine

Our insurance plans, regulations, and education may be strictly separated, but dentists and medical doctors are treating interconnected parts of the same person.

The body simply has no “closed systems” that can be addressed without considering the rest of the body.

Most significantly: A functional approach to health is likely to improve overall health, while an unhealthy lifestyle will most certainly lead to disease throughout the body over time.

So, what are some of the most common examples of the entanglement of oral and overall health?

Diet & Lifestyle Habits

The most obvious way that oral and overall health are connected is the way they are impacted by your diet and lifestyle.

The same dietary patterns associated with higher rates of chronic disease are also a root cause of cavities.

Smoking is not just a leading cause of oral cancer, but also cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, birth defects, and diabetes.

A sedentary lifestyle won’t just lead to an increased risk of heart disease and obesity; it’s also bad for your oral health.

Your diet and lifestyle impact absolutely every part of your health, from the brain to the toes.

Periodontal Disease & Chronic Disease

Periodontal disease (gum disease or periodontitis) is one of the most common dental diseases, impacting almost half of all adults in the US and over 70% of adults over the age of 65.

Some functional dentists have suggested that periodontal disease is an autoimmune disorder.

Similar to other autoimmune issues, the body’s immune response (in the form of inflammation) actually hurts the body and damages healthy cells. This may happen specifically as an autoimmune response to collagen.

Autoimmune responses and chronic inflammation aren’t limited to the gums. If you develop periodontitis, your risk of many other chronic diseases skyrocket.

Periodontitis is associated with the following chronic diseases:

Type 2 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Osteoporosis

Coronary heart disease (CHD)

Hypertension (high blood pressure)

Pneumonia

Parkinson’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease

Psoriasis

Respiratory infections

Allergies

Endocrine disorders

2019 research suggests that gum disease may be a causative factor of Alzheimer’s.

Learn More: Can gingivitis cause Alzheimer’s disease?

The Oral Microbiome

The human microbiome is home to up to 100 trillion microbes, many of these found in the gut.

Few people are unaware of how very important the microbiome is, particularly for a healthy immune system.

But the oral microbiome, the second most diverse of the body’s biomes and containing about 45% of the same bacteria strains as the gut, is a system many people have never even heard of.

A dysbiosis (imbalance) of the bacteria in the oral microbiome is associated with conditions such as:

Inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis)

Cirrhosis of the liver

Certain types of cancer

H. pylori infection

Rheumatoid arthritis

Atherosclerosis (which causes cardiovascular disease)

Type 2 diabetes

Adverse pregnancy outcomes (miscarriage, preterm birth, low birth weight, etc.)

PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome)

Obesity

Sleep & Airway Health

During sleep, the body repairs and restores itself.

However, poor airway position and sleep-disordered breathing (including sleep apnea) can rob you of the benefits of restful sleep.

These same problems may also lead to worsened dental health by causing dry mouth and/or weakening your immune system.

Your dentist can spot telltale signs of sleep and airway problems up to a decade before your medical doctor can. The most well-known of these is bruxism (teeth grinding).

Without a comprehensive healthcare team of both functionally-minded doctors and dentists, those crucial years can be lost.

Consequences of poor sleep over time range from obesity to the risk of heart disease or diabetes, to depression.

How Functional Dentistry Offers Hope

Functional dentistry takes an approach to oral health that does not simply focus on getting rid of symptoms, like cavities or gum disease but gets to the root cause of your problems.

Some of these root causes may be somewhat obvious — like a diet full of candy. Others, though, aren’t obvious to the general observer.

Root causes of oral disease that a functional dentist may address with you include:

Mouth breathing

Antibacterial mouthwash and toothpaste

Chronic inflammation

Microbiome dysbiosis (of the gut and oral microbiome)

Improper facial development

Acidic pH levels in the mouth

Side effects of pharmaceutical medications

A diet devoid of nutrient-dense foods and rich in empty carbohydrates and processed foods

nutritional deficiencies

Chronic stress

Sleep apnea or other sleep disorders

After 33+ years of dental practice, I can attest to the fact that when patients address these root causes, their symptoms abate and their overall health improves.

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When was the last time you had a whole-body conversation with your dentist?   ⁣ ⁣ Functional means addressing the root cause of disease. To learn more, whether as a patient or a practitioner, I highly recommend you follow some of the pioneers of functional medicine @drmarkhyman @instituteforfxmed @drkarafitzgerald   ⁣ ⁣ Dental health impacts every other system in the body, which is why we can’t achieve great health without it. You need a dentist who thinks this way, otherwise you could be on a path toward chronic illness, like nearly half of the US population.  ⁣ ⁣ Systemic diseases, like diabetes and heart disease, will show themselves first in the mouth—sometimes decades before they fully manifest systemically. If you’re seeing a functional dentist, you’ll get alerted to that earlier, and fixing it will be easier and more preventative.  ⁣ ⁣ Head to the Functional Dentist Locator on my website (link in bio), a free tool to get connected with a dentist who doesn’t just do fillings, but also works with the nutritional, lifestyle, and other root causes behind tooth decay.  I’m on a mission to connect anyone who wants one with a functional dentist in their area. If you don’t find a functional dentist in your area, send me a DM and I’ll help you find someone.

A post shared by Dr. Mark Burhenne (@askthedentist) on Jul 9, 2020 at 9:50pm PDT

Benefits of Seeing a Functional Dentist

As you can see, a functional dentist should be an integral part of your healthcare team. But this form of dental practice is also beneficial in other ways.

Quality Time

As a functional dentist, time spent with my patients is vitally important to their health success. We talk about what they eat, how their lifestyle has changed, the quality of their sleep, and more.

A traditional dentist might spend a few moments beside your chair, while a functional dentist spends truly quality time with each patient.

Plus, most functional dentists see a small fraction of the patients that a traditional dentist sees. You are at a far lower risk of being just another patient ID number to your healthcare provider.

A Lifetime of Savings

The number one complaint people have about functionally-minded dentists — and all dentists, really — is the cost.

Many functional dentists don’t accept dental insurance and only perform services of a higher, more expensive quality than a traditional dentist.

However, this is a shortsighted concern.

By working with a functional dentist to improve your oral and overall health by getting to the root cause of your problems, you may save untold thousands of dollars in future medical costs. Yes, it may cost more initially, but the benefits in the long-term are well worth it.

Quality of Life

Modern humans have extended our lifespans by decades beyond many of our ancient ancestors.

Sadly, this coincides with the rampant spread of chronic lifestyle diseases that impact an overwhelming number of people throughout the world. This leads to millions of sick, tired, miserable people… that live a few years longer.

But by addressing the root causes of your dental issues — which are likely behind some systemic issues as well — your quality of life can grow exponentially.

The Principles of Functional Dentistry

Each dentist in my Functional Dentist Locator agrees to a set of principles that define the way we work with our patients.

Functional Dentistry goes beyond treating the signs and symptoms of our patients by determining how and why illness occurs and restoring health by addressing the root cause of dental disease.

Functional Dentistry aims to teach patients prevention strategies to help them avoid the need for future dental work.

Functional Dentistry recognizes the importance of the oral microbiome in both dental and whole-body health, and as such, discourages the use of antimicrobial mouthwashes and toothpastes.

Functional Dentistry recognizes the ability of enamel to remineralize on its own, and as such, educates patients on diet and nutrition strategies in order to maximize this natural remineralization process and avoid the most prevalent oral disease: caries and periodontal disease.

Functional Dentistry works closely with colleagues in a variety of fields, including sleep medicine, myofunctional therapy, integrative specialties, and functional orthodontics, in order to restore dental health, because the mouth does not exist in a vacuum and partnership with a patient’s multiple healthcare providers results in the best outcome.

Functional Dentistry practices early intervention in pediatric patients because it recognizes the importance of craniofacial complex and its contribution to overall health.

Functional Dentistry embraces the latest scientific research, as we continue to better understand the mouth-body connection and the relationships between dental disease and diseases of the rest of the body. As “forever students” of the latest discoveries in the mouth-body connection, we are able to provide the best root-cause care for our patients.

Functional Dentistry works to understand the impact of inflammation in the mouth and its impacts on inflammation throughout the rest of the body.

Functional dentistry is not just removing our patients’ symptoms; it’s enabling our patients to thrive.

Are you ready for the future?

As you can see, a root cause approach is the most cutting-edge, patient-first approach to dental health available to us today.

Don’t stay sick and tired. Don’t be left behind. Find a functional dentist and start living in the future, now.

Are you a patient seeking a trustworthy functional dentist in your area? Search my Functional Dentist Locator today.

Are you a functional dentist who wants to connect with patients who want your root cause approach to treatment? Join the Functional Dentist Locator and sign up for my free newsletter for dental professionals.

25 References

Raju, P., George, R., Ramesh, S. V., Arvind, H., Baskaran, M., & Vijaya, L. (2006). Influence of tobacco use on cataract development. British journal of ophthalmology, 90(11), 1374-1377. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1857475/

Hutchinson, D., Shepstone, L., Moots, R., Lear, J. T., & Lynch, M. P. (2001). Heavy cigarette smoking is strongly associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), particularly in patients without a family history of RA. Annals of the rheumatic diseases, 60(3), 223-227. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1753588/

Chang, S. A. (2012). Smoking and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Diabetes & metabolism journal, 36(6), 399-403. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3530709/

Sheiham, A., & Watt, R. G. (2000). The common risk factor approach: a rational basis for promoting oral health. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology: Commentary, 28(6), 399-406. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11106011/

Hirsch, H. Z., Tarkowski, A., Miller, E. J., Gay, S., Koopman, W. J., & Mestecky, J. (1988). Autoimmunity to collagen in adult periodontal disease. Journal of Oral Pathology & Medicine, 17(9‐10), 456-459. Abstract: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0714.1988.tb01315.x

Taylor, G. W., Manz, M. C., & Borgnakke, W. S. (2004). Diabetes, periodontal diseases, dental caries, and tooth loss: a review of the literature. Compendium of continuing education in dentistry (Jamesburg, NJ: 1995), 25(3), 179. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15641324/

Bahekar, A. A., Singh, S., Saha, S., Molnar, J., & Arora, R. (2007). The prevalence and incidence of coronary heart disease is significantly increased in periodontitis: a meta-analysis. American heart journal, 154(5), 830-837. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17967586/

Holmstrup, P., Damgaard, C., Olsen, I., Klinge, B., Flyvbjerg, A., Nielsen, C. H., & Hansen, P. R. (2017). Comorbidity of periodontal disease: two sides of the same coin? An introduction for the clinician. Journal of oral microbiology, 9(1), 1332710. Abstract: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5508374/

Sperr, M., Kundi, M., Tursic, V., Bristela, M., Moritz, A., Andrukhov, O., … & Sperr, W. R. (2018). Prevalence of comorbidities in periodontitis patients compared with the general Austrian population. Journal of periodontology, 89(1), 19-27. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28844189/

Dominy, S. S., Lynch, C., Ermini, F., Benedyk, M., Marczyk, A., Konradi, A., … & Holsinger, L. J. (2019). Porphyromonas gingivalis in Alzheimer’s disease brains: Evidence for disease causation and treatment with small-molecule inhibitors. Science advances, 5(1), eaau3333. Full text: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3333

Ursell, L. K., Metcalf, J. L., Parfrey, L. W., & Knight, R. (2012). Defining the human microbiome. Nutrition reviews, 70(suppl_1), S38-S44. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426293/

Cass Nelson-Dooley, M. S., & Olmstead, S. F. (2015). The Microbiome and Overall Health Part 5: The Oropharyngeal Microbiota’s Far-Reaching Role in Immunity, Gut Health, and Cardiovascular Disease. Full text: https://www.drkarafitzgerald.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2015-Oral-Microbiome-Nelson-Dooley-Olmstead.pdf

Caballero, S., & Pamer, E. G. (2015). Microbiota-mediated inflammation and antimicrobial defense in the intestine. Annual review of immunology, 33, 227-256. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4540477/

Meurman, J. H. (2010). Oral microbiota and cancer. Journal of oral microbiology, 2(1), 5195. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3084564/

Zou, Q. H., & Li, R. Q. (2011). Helicobacter pylori in the oral cavity and gastric mucosa: a meta‐analysis. Journal of oral pathology & medicine, 40(4), 317-324. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21294774/

Zhang, X., Zhang, D., Jia, H., Feng, Q., Wang, D., Liang, D., … & Lan, Z. (2015). The oral and gut microbiomes are perturbed in rheumatoid arthritis and partly normalized after treatment. Nature medicine, 21(8), 895-905. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26214836/

Slocum, C., Kramer, C., & Genco, C. A. (2016). Immune dysregulation mediated by the oral microbiome: potential link to chronic inflammation and atherosclerosis. Journal of internal medicine, 280(1), 114-128. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26791914/

Casarin, R. C. V., Barbagallo, A., Meulman, T., Santos, V. R., Sallum, E. A., Nociti, F. H., … & Gonçalves, R. B. (2013). Subgingival biodiversity in subjects with uncontrolled type‐2 diabetes and chronic periodontitis. Journal of periodontal research, 48(1), 30-36. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22762355/

Han, Y. W., Shen, T., Chung, P., Buhimschi, I. A., & Buhimschi, C. S. (2009). Uncultivated bacteria as etiologic agents of intra-amniotic inflammation leading to preterm birth. Journal of clinical microbiology, 47(1), 38-47. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2620857/

Lindheim, L., Bashir, M., Münzker, J., Trummer, C., Zachhuber, V., Pieber, T. R., … & Obermayer-Pietsch, B. (2016). The salivary microbiome in polycystic ovary syndrome (pcos) and its association with disease-related parameters: a pilot study. Frontiers in microbiology, 7, 1270. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996828/

Goodson, J. M., Groppo, D., Halem, S., & Carpino, E. (2009). Is obesity an oral bacterial disease?. Journal of dental research, 88(6), 519-523. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2744897/

Cappuccio, F. P., Taggart, F. M., Kandala, N. B., Currie, A., Peile, E., Stranges, S., & Miller, M. A. (2008). Meta-analysis of short sleep duration and obesity in children and adults. Sleep, 31(5), 619-626. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2398753/

Cappuccio, F. P., Cooper, D., D’Elia, L., Strazzullo, P., & Miller, M. A. (2011). Sleep duration predicts cardiovascular outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies. European heart journal, 32(12), 1484-1492. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21300732/

Gottlieb, D. J., Punjabi, N. M., Newman, A. B., Resnick, H. E., Redline, S., Baldwin, C. M., & Nieto, F. J. (2005). Association of sleep time with diabetes mellitus and impaired glucose tolerance. Archives of internal medicine, 165(8), 863-867. Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486518

Hayley, A. C., Williams, L. J., Venugopal, K., Kennedy, G. A., Berk, M., & Pasco, J. A. (2015). The relationships between insomnia, sleep apnoea and depression: findings from the American National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2005–2008. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 49(2), 156-170. Abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25128225/

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dentalinfotoday · 4 years

Link

Dentistry is not separate from medicine

Diet & lifestyle

Periodontal disease & chronic disease

The oral microbiome

Sleep & airway health

How functional dentistry offers hope

Benefits of a functional dentist

Principles of functional dentistry

Are you ready for the future?

One of the worst mistakes ever made in healthcare was the separation of “medicine” and “dentistry”.

Fortunately, patients — and dentists — are changing this paradigm.

The practice of functional dentistry, which honors the mouth-body connection and takes a root cause approach to dental health, is in high demand.

As people learn the integral connection between their oral and overall health, they are seeking an answer they can’t find in the average dental office.

Dentists who take a functional approach to patient care are the cutting edge of modern dental care.

To succeed in dental practice, functional dentistry will soon become not just a “niche” specialty, but a necessity.

I see it every day — my team receives hundreds of emails, DMs, and comments each week from patients desperately seeking a functional dentist in their area.

Dentistry is Not Separate from Medicine

Our insurance plans, regulations, and education may be strictly separated, but dentists and medical doctors are treating interconnected parts of the same person.

The body simply has no “closed systems” that can be addressed without considering the rest of the body.

Most significantly: A functional approach to health is likely to improve overall health, while an unhealthy lifestyle will most certainly lead to disease throughout the body over time.

So, what are some of the most common examples of the entanglement of oral and overall health?

Diet & Lifestyle Habits

The most obvious way that oral and overall health are connected is the way they are impacted by your diet and lifestyle.

The same dietary patterns associated with higher rates of chronic disease are also a root cause of cavities.

Smoking is not just a leading cause of oral cancer, but also cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, birth defects, and diabetes.

A sedentary lifestyle won’t just lead to an increased risk of heart disease and obesity; it’s also bad for your oral health.

Your diet and lifestyle impact absolutely every part of your health, from the brain to the toes.

Periodontal Disease & Chronic Disease

Periodontal disease (gum disease or periodontitis) is one of the most common dental diseases, impacting almost half of all adults in the US and over 70% of adults over the age of 65.

Some functional dentists have suggested that periodontal disease is an autoimmune disorder.

Autoimmune responses and chronic inflammation aren’t limited to the gums. If you develop periodontitis, your risk of many other chronic diseases skyrocket.

Periodontitis is associated with the following chronic diseases:

Type 2 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Osteoporosis

Coronary heart disease (CHD)

Hypertension (high blood pressure)

Pneumonia

Parkinson’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease

Psoriasis

Respiratory infections

Allergies

Endocrine disorders

2019 research suggests that gum disease may be a causative factor of Alzheimer’s.

Learn More: Can gingivitis cause Alzheimer’s disease?

The Oral Microbiome

The human microbiome is home to up to 100 trillion microbes, many of these found in the gut.

Few people are unaware of how very important the microbiome is, particularly for a healthy immune system.

But the oral microbiome, the second most diverse of the body’s biomes and containing about 45% of the same bacteria strains as the gut, is a system many people have never even heard of.

A dysbiosis (imbalance) of the bacteria in the oral microbiome is associated with conditions such as:

Inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis)

Cirrhosis of the liver

Certain types of cancer

H. pylori infection

Rheumatoid arthritis

Atherosclerosis (which causes cardiovascular disease)

Type 2 diabetes

Adverse pregnancy outcomes (miscarriage, preterm birth, low birth weight, etc.)

PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome)

Obesity

Sleep & Airway Health

During sleep, the body repairs and restores itself.

However, poor airway position and sleep-disordered breathing (including sleep apnea) can rob you of the benefits of restful sleep.

These same problems may also lead to worsened dental health by causing dry mouth and/or weakening your immune system.

Your dentist can spot telltale signs of sleep and airway problems up to a decade before your medical doctor can. The most well-known of these is bruxism (teeth grinding).

Without a comprehensive healthcare team of both functionally-minded doctors and dentists, those crucial years can be lost.

Consequences of poor sleep over time range from obesity to the risk of heart disease or diabetes, to depression.

How Functional Dentistry Offers Hope

Functional dentistry takes an approach to oral health that does not simply focus on getting rid of symptoms, like cavities or gum disease but gets to the root cause of your problems.

Some of these root causes may be somewhat obvious — like a diet full of candy. Others, though, aren’t obvious to the general observer.

Root causes of oral disease that a functional dentist may address with you include:

Mouth breathing

Antibacterial mouthwash and toothpaste

Chronic inflammation

Microbiome dysbiosis (of the gut and oral microbiome)

Improper facial development

Acidic pH levels in the mouth

Side effects of pharmaceutical medications

A diet devoid of nutrient-dense foods and rich in empty carbohydrates and processed foods

nutritional deficiencies

Chronic stress

Sleep apnea or other sleep disorders

After 33+ years of dental practice, I can attest to the fact that when patients address these root causes, their symptoms abate and their overall health improves.

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A post shared by Dr. Mark Burhenne (@askthedentist) on Jul 9, 2020 at 9:50pm PDT

Benefits of Seeing a Functional Dentist

As you can see, a functional dentist should be an integral part of your healthcare team. But this form of dental practice is also beneficial in other ways.

Quality Time

As a functional dentist, time spent with my patients is vitally important to their health success. We talk about what they eat, how their lifestyle has changed, the quality of their sleep, and more.

A traditional dentist might spend a few moments beside your chair, while a functional dentist spends truly quality time with each patient.

Plus, most functional dentists see a small fraction of the patients that a traditional dentist sees. You are at a far lower risk of being just another patient ID number to your healthcare provider.

A Lifetime of Savings

The number one complaint people have about functionally-minded dentists — and all dentists, really — is the cost.

Many functional dentists don’t accept dental insurance and only perform services of a higher, more expensive quality than a traditional dentist.

However, this is a shortsighted concern.

Quality of Life

Modern humans have extended our lifespans by decades beyond many of our ancient ancestors.

But by addressing the root causes of your dental issues — which are likely behind some systemic issues as well — your quality of life can grow exponentially.

The Principles of Functional Dentistry

Each dentist in my Functional Dentist Locator agrees to a set of principles that define the way we work with our patients.

Functional Dentistry goes beyond treating the signs and symptoms of our patients by determining how and why illness occurs and restoring health by addressing the root cause of dental disease.

Functional Dentistry aims to teach patients prevention strategies to help them avoid the need for future dental work.

Functional Dentistry recognizes the importance of the oral microbiome in both dental and whole-body health, and as such, discourages the use of antimicrobial mouthwashes and toothpastes.

Functional Dentistry practices early intervention in pediatric patients because it recognizes the importance of craniofacial complex and its contribution to overall health.

Functional Dentistry works to understand the impact of inflammation in the mouth and its impacts on inflammation throughout the rest of the body.

Functional dentistry is not just removing our patients’ symptoms; it’s enabling our patients to thrive.

Are you ready for the future?

As you can see, a root cause approach is the most cutting-edge, patient-first approach to dental health available to us today.

Don’t stay sick and tired. Don’t be left behind. Find a functional dentist and start living in the future, now.

Are you a patient seeking a trustworthy functional dentist in your area? Search my Functional Dentist Locator today.

25 References

Chang, S. A. (2012). Smoking and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Diabetes & metabolism journal, 36(6), 399-403. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3530709/

Meurman, J. H. (2010). Oral microbiota and cancer. Journal of oral microbiology, 2(1), 5195. Full text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3084564/

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ecotone99 · 4 years

Text

[SF] You've traveled back in time 65 M years with no way to return. What evidence can you leave to ensure future humans will know of your existence?

First, I would like to emphasize the immensity of this number:

65,000,000 years

I will put it in perspective:

It is approximately 1.3 million human generations.

Considering the time of degradation of a human body in 2 years, this process would be repeated for 32,500,000 times.

The oldest human fossil ever found dates back to 3,200,000 years. (Lucy) Not even close to our goal.

The oldest monument ever found is the Göbekli Tepe dating from 9000 BC. Therefore, the building would have 11019 years nowadays.

If the 65 million years were compressed on a 24-hour scale (1 day), the oldest human construct would have been 8.8 seconds and Lucy (the oldest hominid fossil ever found) would have 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Some considerations:

Since I have to prove my existence, I will suppose that I traveled in time by accident and that no one else knows what has happened.

Considering it is not possible to take any object with me (clothes, accessories and technological equipment), I will have to use the natural resources available at the time.

I do not know why you chose exactly 65 million years ago, but it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs. (The presence of dinosaurs makes my goal much more difficult, so I will consider the post-extinction period).

I will discard constructions of any kind since the oldest constructions of mankind are gigantic, they would need thousands of people and it would take a long time to complete it.

With the predators of the time (even after the extinction of the dinosaurs), survival borders the impossible, so I would need to complete my goal as fast as possible.

Assuming that I will not know to which region of the planet I’ll be taken and what type of soil at the time, my goal becomes technically more complicated. (If I could choose the soil type, I would choose a sedimentary region.)

Taking into account the above points and the main objective: proof that I existed 65 million years ago, I will expose my solution.

I present to you the Amber:

The amber consists of a plant resin that has fossilized inside the plant or after draining from it. Amber pieces can be 20 to 320 million years old.

The characteristic that makes Amber important for my purpose is that it can preserve organic structures for long periods.

Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park knows that amber - a substance that comes from ancient trees, millions of years ago, that made a viscous matter is an essential element in preserving a species intact. That's because insects, 230 million years old, were found trapped in amber.

Now you must wonder, how will he prove his existence preserving insects for millions of years?

The point is: I will not preserve insects, but rather my DNA. And no, I will not use primitive mosquitoes to suck my blood and then arrest them in amber. The gastric juices from the mosquito would digest the blood even if she died shortly after consuming it. In general, trying to fossilize any liquid substance that contains my DNA would be a misnomer, since the process of fossilization of soft parts is very rare. However, in the literature, some cases of animals totally preserved in amber or by freezing are known.

Lyuba (a mammal of 40,000 years old) was found frozen in 2007, preserving all soft tissues and stomach contents.

Mummification by freezing, in this case, would be unfeasible by the climatic variations that can occur in the next 65 million years. So Amber would be my best option.

At that moment another question arises, is he thinking of fossilizing himself in amber? The answer is yes, a partial yes. I will use only one part of my body:

Yes, the little finger. I will lose a lot of hand movements, but since my goal is not to survive but to prove my existence, that's fine. And if I was too obstinated to do that, I could double, triple, quadruple, or multiply my chances of success by 20.

But I'm not THAT obstinated!

Yes, I know what you are thinking: but why use the painful option to amputate the finger when you can find DNA in other parts of the body like hair, nails and teeth?

Some studies indicate that DNA can not maintain its structure after long periods (more than 7 million years). That way, I would not be able to prove my existence based on DNA only. However, the choice of this member was not by chance, the finger has another form of identification, the digital. (This is just another form of identification if it is not possible with DNA).

How will I continue:

First of all, I need to make a fire for two reasons: keep the animals away and make pottery (I'll explain in the next step).

After making the fire and taking the essential care for survival (at least for a few days), I need to find suitable soil to produce clay and then burn it to turn the ceramic clay into gourds.

I need to find a tree that produces the "amber". It is not a difficult task, given the enormous diversity of gymnosperms and angiosperms of the late Cretaceous period. An example of trees producing this resin is pine trees.

After making the gourds and finding the resin, the difficult and painful part arrived. To amputate my finger I will need a sharp object.

After getting all the materials, I have to put a good amount of resin in the gourd and submerge my finger entirely in the "amber". Now I'll have to seal the gourd with more clay.

Now, the next obvious question you may be wondering is: how will he make sure the gourd will be found someday?

And for this crucial step I will need two more things:

Uranium ore

And

Galena(lead)

Bear with me here.

There are numerous examples of methods used throughout time to preserve important information or objects:

The Egyptians used the pyramids as a safe and long-lasting place to rest the afterlife.

Ancients humans used rock painting in caves to transmit information.

Paper writing was created to effectively transmit information. eg: The Bible.

None of these methods serve my purpose given the considerations above cited. What I will definitely need is:

Something that lasts millions or even billions of years.

Something that can emit some kind of signal.

And lastly, this signal has to be trackable using modern technology.

With that in mind, I present to you:

Radiation

In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium.

So, radiation is probably the best choice here, since it emits/transmits a signal that(depending on the element) can last billions of years and is trackable using a lot of methods.

The mineral in the first image above is Uranium ore:

It contains two isotopes of Uranium, 238 and 235 with a half-life of 4.47 billion years and 704 million years, respectively.

Uranium is one of the more common elements in the earth’s crust. It is about 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold.

The second mineral above in the image is Galena(lead):

It is not hard to find and identify galena.

It will be used only to block radiation.

How I will proceed:

First of all, DNA and radiation do not get along together(ionizing radiation breaks the bonds that hold the molecules together). That’s why I need Galena, to avoid damage in my DNA. So, what I have to do is to make more clay and mix it with crushed galena like-concrete. I’ll put a thick layer of it around the gourd.

The next step is to select and crush the best parts of Uranium ore, mix it with clay and add it around the gourd.

Just to summarize all the process:

First, I made a gourd of clay, filled it with amber and submerged my finger in it.

After that, I added a thick layer of like-concrete galena around the gourd.

And lastly, I added a thick layer of Uranium ore around it.

So, after all this hard work, my finger now can last millions of years and can emit a signal for even more time.

The next question you may be thinking about is: where he is going to leave it?

I'll leave it in a cave on the highest mountain I can find. A mountain is a natural fortress for Catastrophes and people are curious creatures that like to climb high mountains.

At present, after a day or two without contacting anyone, the police will surely be aware of my disappearance. A mysterious disappearance will cause a great repercussion in the social media and possibly in the news. This will be of great importance for further investigation into my 65-million-year-old finger-link. Now the definitive question, how does this prove your existence if your finger could be found 1000 years before your birth or 1000 years after your death?

The answer is simple: no matter when, because of my family tree. If it is found 1000 years before my birth, it will certainly be put in a museum, and after almost 1 millennium with the advent of the DNA test, they will find my ancestors (they will find it a bit strange since my finger will have 65 million years and my ancestors a few hundred years, don't you think?). If it is found 1000 years after my death, they will find not only my ancestors but also me. That is, mission accomplished.

Interesting fact: considering that I traveled in time 65 million years and assuming that the dinosaurs were not extinct by the time I arrived. I could have been the cause of the extinction not only of dinosaurs but of other species. Being from the future, I own bacteria, viruses, and other disease-causing agents that the animals of the day had no immune protection. My nickname at the time: Meteor.

My original Quora answer: https://qr.ae/Taaw8p

submitted by /u/dy0707 [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/3hbkKBd

#Blogger #Story

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kathleenseiber · 5 years

Text

Being an omnivore is actually quite odd

The first animal likely was a carnivore, new research finds. Humans, along with other omnivores, belong to a rare breed.

What an animal eats is a fundamental aspect of its biology, but surprisingly, the evolution of diet had not been studied across the animal kingdom until now.

The study is a deep dive into the evolutionary history of more than one million animal species going back 800 million years.

The study reveals several surprising key insights:

Many species living today that are carnivorous—those that eat other animals—can trace this diet back to a common ancestor more than 800 million years ago.

A plant-based, or herbivorous, diet is not the evolutionary driver for new species that scientists believed it to be.

Closely related animals tend to share the same dietary category—plant-eating, meat-eating, or both. This finding implies that switching between dietary lifestyles is not something that happens easily and often over the course of evolution.

The researchers scoured the literature for data on the dietary habits of more than a million animal species, from sponges to insects and spiders to house cats. They classified a species as carnivorous if it feeds on other animals, fungi, or protists (single-celled eukaryotic organisms, many of which live on bacteria). The researchers classified species as herbivorous if they depend on land plants, algae, or cyanobacteria for food, and omnivorous if they eat a mixture of carnivorous and herbivorous diets.

The scientists then mapped the vast dataset of animal species and their dietary preferences onto an evolutionary tree built from DNA-sequence data to untangle the evolutionary relationships between them.

Insects are a group in which feeding on plants increases rates of species proliferation, including among the butterflies and moths, which are almost all herbivorous. (Credit: Daniel Stolte/U. Arizona)

The whole animal kingdom’s menu

“Ours is the largest study conducted so far that examines the evolution of diet across the whole animal tree of life,” says lead author Cristian Román-Palacios, a doctoral student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department of at the University of Arizona. “We addressed three highly-debated and fundamental questions in evolutionary biology by analyzing a large-scale dataset using state-of-the-art methods.”

All species can be classified according to their evolutionary relationships, a concept that is known as phylogeny. Organisms are grouped into taxa, which define their interrelationships across several levels. For example, cats and dogs are different species but belong to the same order (carnivores). Similarly, horses and camels belong to a different order (ungulates.) Both orders, however, are part of the same class (mammals).

On the highest level, animals are classified in phyla. Examples of animal phyla are arthropods (insects, crustaceans, spiders, scorpions, and the like), mollusks (snails, clams, and squid fall into this phylum), and chordates, which include all animals with a backbone, including humans.

The survey suggests that across animals, carnivory is most common, including 63% of species. Another 32% are herbivorous, while humans belong to a small minority, just 3%, of omnivorous animals.

Unlike many of their land-dwelling kin, many so-called sea slugs such as this Spanish Shawl are carnivorous snails that prey on polyps, sponges or even each other. (Credit: Daniel Stolte/U. Arizona)

Tracing the evolution of eating meat

The researchers were surprised to find that many of today’s carnivorous species trace this diet back all the way to the base of the animal evolutionary tree, more than 800 million years, predating the oldest known fossils that paleontologists have been able to assign to animal origins with certainty.

“We don’t see that with herbivory,” says corresponding author John Wiens, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Herbivory seems to be much more recent, so in our evolutionary tree, it appears more frequently closer to the tips of the tree.”

So if the first animal was a carnivore, what did it prey on?

The authors suggest the answer might lie with protists, including choanoflagellates: tiny, single-celled organisms considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals. Living as plankton in marine and freshwater, choanoflagellates are vaguely reminiscent of miniature versions of the shuttlecock batted back and forth during a game of badminton.

A funnel-shaped collar of “hairs” surrounds a whip-like appendage called a flagellum whose rhythmic beating sucks a steady stream of water through the collar, filtering out bacteria and detritus that is then absorbed and digested. It is possible that the common ancestor of today’s animals was a creature very similar to a choanoflagellate.

“The ancient creature that is most closely related to all animals living today might have eaten bacteria and other protists rather than plants,” Wiens says.

Black vultures and Andean condors are carnivorous birds that specialize on consuming carrion. (Credit: Cristian Román-Palacios/University of Arizona)

Omnivores are super rare

Turning to a plant-based diet, on the other hand, happened much more frequently over the course of animal evolution.

Herbivory has traditionally been seen as a powerful catalyst for the origin of new species—an often-cited example is the insects, with an estimated 1.5 million described species the most diverse group among the arthropods. Many new species of flowering plants appeared during the Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago, and the unprecedented diversity of flowers is widely thought to have coincided with an increase in insect species taking advantage of the newly available floral bounty.

“This tells us that what we see in insects doesn’t necessarily apply to other groups within the animal kingdom,” Wiens says. “Herbivory may go hand in hand with new species appearing in certain taxa, but it clearly is not a universal driver of new species.”

The study also revealed that omnivorous (“eating everything”) diets popped up rarely over the course of 800 million years of animal evolution, hinting at the possible explanation that evolution prefers specialists over generalists.

“You can be better at doing what you do if that is all you do,” Wiens says. “In terrestrial vertebrates, for example, eating a diet of leaves often requires highly modified teeth and a highly modified gut. The same goes for carnivory. Nature generally seems to avoid the dilemma of being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, at least for diets.”

This need for specialization might explain why omnivores, such as humans, are rare, according to the authors. It might also explain why diets have often gone unchanged for so long.

“There is a big difference between eating leaves all the time and eating fruits every now and then,” Wiens says. “The specializations required to be an efficient herbivore or carnivore might explain why the two diets have been so conserved over hundreds of millions of years.”

The study appears in the journal Evolution Letters.

Source: University of Arizona

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biofunmy · 5 years

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A Billion-Year-Old Fungus May Hold Clues to Life’s Arrival on Land

Scientists reported on Wednesday that they have discovered the oldest known fossils of fungi, a finding that may reshape our understanding of how life first arrived on land from the oceans.

Fungi are the invisible giants of the natural world, even if most people are only dimly aware of them as toadstools along a hiking trail, or mushrooms sprinkled across a pizza.

Scientists have identified about 120,000 species of fungi so far, but estimate there are as many as 3.3 million species in all. By comparison, all living mammals comprise fewer than 6,400 species.

The success of fungi results largely from their unique way of feeding. Rather than absorbing sunlight like plants or devouring other organisms like animals, fungi spew out powerful enzymes. These break down surrounding cells or even rock, which the fungi slurp up.

Some of them seemed to have partnered with plants that also left fossils behind in the rocks. Others appeared to have specialized in breaking down dead plant matter.

Until now, those fossils have been the oldest clear evidence of fungi. Many scientists considered them a snapshot of the early conquest of land. Fungi and plants came ashore together as ecological partners, it seemed. Together, they transformed barren lands into a soil-carpeted habitat.

Recently, though, some researchers have grown dissatisfied with this scenario.

By comparing the DNA of different species, scientists have drawn an evolutionary tree of fungi. If the Scottish fossils were among the earliest members of the fungal kingdom, you’d expect that living fungi would share a common ancestor not much before 407 million years.

But that’s not what the DNA trees tell us. The genes of living fungi indicate that their common ancestor lived over a billion years ago.

Could there be a 600-million-year gap in the fossil record? In recent years, scientists have searched for fungi in rocks older than those in Scotland, and they’ve found a few microscopic fossils that looked like they might be fungi. But they were too ambiguous to convince many experts.

The new fossils came to light during a geological expedition to the barren fringes of the Canadian Arctic. In 2014, Robert Rainbird, a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada, noticed black flecks on a piece of shale.

He knew that sometimes flecks like these turn out to be microscopic fossils. “I thought, ‘I should grab some of this stuff, because it looks juicy,’” he said.

Dr. Rainbird sent the material to Emmanuelle Javaux, a paleontologist at the University of Liège in Belgium. She asked Corentin Loron, a graduate student, to analyze them more closely.

Mr. Loron put the rocks into an acid bath to strip out the minerals. He ended up with a black paste of organic matter, which he smeared onto slides. When he looked at them under a microscope, he saw hundreds of tiny fossils.

The fossils were single-celled organisms. They were much bigger than bacteria, but Mr. Loron couldn’t determine exactly what they were. Dr. Rainbird’s analysis of the rocks showed that these organisms, whatever they were, had fossilized a billion years ago in an estuary, where a river flowed into a sea.

On an expedition in 2017, Dr. Rainbird, Mr. Loron and their colleagues discovered some peculiar fossils in the rocks. They were composed of spore-like spheres, often joined to long filaments that sprouted T-shaped branches — the kind of shapes found today in fungi.

Mr. Loron used electron microscopes to survey the fine structures, and found that the spheres and filaments had double walls — another hallmark of fungi. To see what molecules were contained in the fossils, Mr. Loron and his colleagues fired infrared beams at them and measured the light they released.

Three fossils produced a pattern that matches that of a substance called chitin. All fungi make chitin to build their tough walls. Only insects and a few other species do the same.

The researchers concluded they had found an ancient fungus, which they named Ourasphaira giraldae.

“This is the first evidence that fungi are a billion years old, even though we’ve thought they were for a long time,” said Mary Berbee, a mycologist at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the new research.

But Dr. Berbee and other experts said they would have more confidence in the findings with more data, especially about the fossils’ chemistry.

“I don’t have any doubt that they’re fossils, and that alone is fascinating,” said George Cody, an organic geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington. But the infrared results could have been produced by molecules other than chitin, he added.

If the Arctic fossils are indeed fungi, it’s a mystery how the tendril-sprouting organisms made a living.

Today, fungi that sprout tendrils can grow to huge sizes by feeding on vast amounts of plant matter. A single subterranean mat in Oregon is three times larger than Central Park.

A billion-year-old fungus would have had no land plants to feed on. The oldest known plant fossils are no more than 470 million years old.

“The fungi were probably colonizing the land before the plants,” Mr. Loron speculated.

The fungi had to be eating something. One possibility: bacteria. Researchers have found signs that crusts of bacteria were growing on land as long as 3.2 billion years ago.

It’s also possible that these ancient fungi lived on the bottom of the estuary, perhaps feasting on underwater mats of algae. Land plants evolved from green algae, and so perhaps the estuary habitat was where fungi and the ancestors of plants first formed partnerships.

It’s possible, Mr. Loron said, such ancient estuaries provided “the toolbox for everything that’s going on land afterward.”

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My ancestor died of a splinter. Wait, what?

By Eleanor Cummins, Popular Science, April 18, 2018

Annie Hortense Crawford’s death was a long, dramatic affair. According to her front-page obituary in the California Democrat, the local paper serving California, Missouri, Mrs. Crawford’s demise had begun a full week prior to her 1930 demise. First, there was severe pain in her hand. Slowly, a creeping debility overcame her entire body. “She grew steadily worse throughout the day and evening,” the newspaper reported, “until the end came.”

It’s easy to imagine my great-great-great-grandmother (for that’s who Crawford was) was felled by some larger-than-life illness. But the reality is a little different: Crawford died of a splinter.

Reading the details of her rapid decline almost 90 years later, I was struck by the historic nature of her death--almost unfathomable to Americans today--and set out to find out why, exactly, people don’t die of splinters anymore. In the process I discovered the peculiars of her death weren’t, in fact, all that peculiar. In fact, unless we change our relationship to antibiotics, death by splinter could be familiar once again.

When Crawford was born in 1860, many Westerners still attributed disease to miasma--bad air--or an imbalance in the bodily humors like blood and bile. Doctors, just as they had since the days of ancient Greece, treated all manner of illnesses with things like fresh air, rest, and even bloodletting. It’s no surprise, then, that most people in this era died of their infections and many diseases considered curable today killed thousands.

“We had a gross misunderstanding of things we called blood poisoning and things we now recognize to be infectious disease,” says Duane J. Funk, a physician and sepsis expert at the University of Manitoba. But over the course of Crawford’s life, enterprising researchers drove an incredible shift in the practice of science and, most importantly, how we think about infection.

In the late 1850s, the French scientist and father of microbiology Louis Pasteur set about disproving the common theory of spontaneous generation. At that time, many people believed that agents of decay--the things that molded bread or rotted a peach--magically appeared from within the bread or peach itself. By showing that microorganisms came from elsewhere--that they infected a body--Pasteur established the basic mechanism of infectious disease. He went on to develop the earliest technique for pasteurization, as well as rabies and anthrax vaccines.

Other scientists subsequently sought to validate and expand on Pasteur’s ideas. Though he was ridiculed at first, the inquisitive surgeon Joseph Lister ultimately proved that carbolic acid had a sterilizing effect on open wounds and, when properly applied, saved lives. In 1890, the German physician Robert Koch published his unified “germ theory.” Koch’s postulates displaced miasma theory and germ theory remains the predominant explanation for infectious disease to this day.

By the time a splinter pierced Crawford’s thumb in March of 1930, scientists knew that small microbes, invisible to the naked eye, could invade a human body and feast until the host recovered or, more often, died. These germs, such as they were, caused everything from waterborne illnesses like cholera to sexual transmitted conditions like syphilis. They were also responsible for the disease that killed Crawford: blood poisoning.

But just because doctors of that day may have understood the biological war raging in my ancestor’s thumb doesn’t mean they could cure what ailed Crawford. It would take one moldy discovery--and more than a decade of subsequent research--before anyone could do a thing about infectious disease.

Splinters aren’t deadly in and of themselves. Neither really are blisters, scratches, or other seemingly superficial assaults on our skin. But these nicks allow for something much deadlier to make entry into our otherwise sealed-off selves: Harmful bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus or Group A strep. Sometimes, these minuscule invaders can wreak havoc, pushing people to the point of blood poisoning, which today we call sepsis.

While thousands of people still die from sepsis each year, many Americans think they are impervious to such diseases. Funk says that may be because, on a statistical level, people aren’t that susceptible to death by splinter and never really have been. “I get cuts from shaving every second or third day,” says Funk. “The question is, why do some of them get infected and some of them don’t?”

The answer, he says, starts in the skin. “As soon as you get the splinter wound or the cut, right off the bat, there’s a battle that begins,” Funk says. First, blood clotting factors swarm to the affected site. This not only stops a person from bleeding out; it also serves as a biological drawbridge, raising against any potential invader. In some cases, there may not be harmful bacteria on the afflicted site at all. But if there is, the immune system is ready. It deploys white macrophages, the body’s Roombas, to slurp up any dirt, bacteria, or other foreign objects. “Bacteria are all around us,” Funk says. “But 99 percent of the time, our immune system works great at preventing infection.”

The very young, very old, and infirm are less likely to fight back effectively, however. Crawford, who was 70 at the time of her death, was part of this vulnerable population. The infectious agent--like Staphylococcus aureus--was able to push past Crawford’s natural defenses, which had diminished with age, and make their way into her bloodstream.

The infection likely moved quickly from there, Funk says, thanks to the tropical heat of the human body. “Some of these bugs have a doubling time of eight to 20 minutes,” he says. “There’s two [microbes], then there’s four, eight, 16--you do the math. It doesn’t take long to have millions to billions of bacteria floating in your system.” But they didn’t just float. Division made the bacteria hungry, so they eagerly turned Crawford’s heart, lungs, liver, and other organs into food. Without medical intervention, her body was overwhelmed. Her blood pressure likely dropped suddenly. And in the absence of any suitable medical intervention, she died.

For thousands of years, the fate of sepsis patients was largely sealed. But that began to shift in 1928 when the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic. Just two years before Crawford’s death, Fleming was working with a lab culture of Staphylococcus, which just so happens to be one of the two main agents that cause sepsis. He noticed what scientists call an “inhibition halo”--a line the bacteria could not cross--clearly defined on the lab specimen. A blue-green mold had contaminated the sample and inhibited bacterial growth. Fleming��s original experiment was wrecked, but the mishap presented him with an unprecedented opportunity.

Upon isolating the mold, Fleming found he had the relatively common fungi Penicillium notatum on his hands. The mold, which thrives in damp environments, easily infests water-damaged buildings. When airborne, it can cause allergic reactions in humans. But when synthesized into a bacteria-fighting drug, Fleming realized the cloudy growth could save thousands of lives. The only problem: it couldn’t be synthesized.

For a decade, Fleming tried and failed to persuade chemists and manufacturers to help him transform his fungal find into a mass-market product, knowing all the while that lives were being unnecessarily lost to infection. It was not until World War II that penicillin made its debut as a bona fide treatment.

In the 70-odd years since its debut, penicillin has saved millions of lives, and subsequent antibiotics have saved millions more. “I think one of the greatest advancements in medicine is the development of antibiotics, which turn[ed] a lot of these diseases into non-events,” says Funk. Today, when an unlucky American finds themselves with an infected splinter or verging on sepsis, these drugs will almost certainly save them from my great-great-great-grandmother’s fate.

But even with modern medicine, Funk says Crawford may not have recovered. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1.5 million Americans get sepsis each year. Whether it’s from a splinter like Crawford’s or, more commonly, a hospital-acquired infection, sepsis continues to kill approximately 250,000 Americans annually. And not only can antibiotics fail--it’s increasingly apparent they can create problems all on their own.

While penicillin was still being hailed as a wonder drug, by 1942 scientists were suddenly aware of a terrifying possibility: antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Mere months after penicillin had finally been mass-produced and deployed, researchers reported the existence of penicillin-resistant bacteria. “By growing the organism in increasing concentrations of penicillin over a long period it was possible to render the organism resistant to penicillin,” Charles H. Rammelkamp and his colleagues wrote at the time.

The biggest fears of these early scientists have since been realized. Today, at least 2 million Americans experience antibiotic-resistant infections annually. Approximately 23,000 die as a result. Antibiotics have saved thousands of lives, but they have also slowly selected for even more powerful bacteria. A round of penicillin might kill 99.9 percent of the harmful bugs in a person’s body, but the few organisms that live are stronger than average and now they’re free to breed wildly. Given the right environment--like a weakened immune system in an ICU patient--the already-scary Staphylococcus aureus can transform into methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly called MRSA.

About 720,000 Americans acquire infections while in the hospital in 2011, according to a CDC report. And for every three people who die in the hospital, one dies of sepsis. While doctors are working on instituting new protocol to reduce the risk of superbugs, like minimizing the use of ventilators, which can cause pneumonia, and carefully tailoring treatments to the specific bacteria regaining control over these pathogens has proven difficult.

Despite increasing awareness, doctors continue to overprescribe antibiotics and patients continue to quit an antibiotic regimen before they’re supposed to. At the same time, the livestock industry consumes 70 percent of the antibiotics in the United States to keep their animals healthy--all the while breeding antibiotic-resistant meat, soils, and even farmers. A 2014 report from the United Kingdom predicted 10 million annual deaths due to antibiotic resistance by 2050. While experts still quibble over the impending tsunami of deaths from antibiotic resistance, one thing is clear: People rarely die of splinters in 2018, but 2080 is looking a little different.

Poring over the reports on antibiotic resistance, I’m reminded of a dystopian novel I once read called Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. At one point in the book, the main character describes her brother’s death as “The kind of stupid death that never would’ve happened in the old world. He stepped on a nail and died of infection.” While Station Eleven was a work of fiction, I remember feeling a jolt down my spine when I read that line for the first time. My great-great-great-grandma’s all-too-real obituary (“The injury was so insignificant that she thought nothing of it… until the end came”) gave me the same sensation. Reading the detailed account of Crawford’s death, I can’t help but think this brave new world looks a lot like the old one she left behind.

#sepsis #blood poisoning #penicillin #antibiotic resistance #antibiotic-resistant bacteria

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ntrending · 6 years

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An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/an-evolutionary-biologist-takes-on-the-absurd-bodies-of-superheroes/

An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

Evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton loves reading comic books almost as much as he loves studying unusual animals. Now he’s combining his twin passions in a new podcast, The Biology of Superheroes, co-hosted by fellow geek Arien Darby. The podcast uses comic book characters to explore big ideas in science and technology. Campbell-Staton recently sat down with Nexus Media to talk about his new project, his favorite superheroes and his ongoing research into the ways climate change is driving evolution. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have a podcast where you talk about the biology of superheroes. Which superheroes?

We try to take characters from the comic book universe, not just superheroes, but also other figures of science fiction — dinosaurs, robots, giant monsters. We use them as archetypes to explore the place where fact meets fiction.

Let’s talk about Spider-Man, the subject of your first two podcasts.

Arguably, the thing that separates Peter Parker from other superheroes in the comic book universe is that he uses these webs. These webs are a huge part of his persona. And Spider-Man doesn’t produce spider silk in the way that a spider would. He has to engineer it.

So, the first question in that scenario is, “What would he use as inspiration?” Obviously, there is a huge diversity of spiders in the world. If you’re trying to develop a tool, you want go out into the real world and see how animals have come up with extreme solutions to solve similar problems. This is a really valid and popular means for scientists to wrap their heads around problems that are presented in the real world. It’s called bio-inspired engineering.

When we’re considering Spider-Man, one question is, “Can spider webs actually accomplish what we see in the comic books?” If we look at the biomechanics of silks, the answer turns out to be “yes.” Spider silks are extremely strong and very versatile. The drag line of spider silk, pound for pound, is stronger than steel. If you scale that up to the size of the webs that Spider-Man is producing, they could very easily support his body weight and help him catch bad guys.

How about the Flash?

One of the central plot lines for the Flash is his ability to move between parallel universes. You have numerous parallel worlds that are vibrating at slightly different frequencies, and you have slightly different versions of superheroes and other characters in these different universes. They never meet each other and they never see each other because they are vibrating at different frequencies. The Flash is able to vibrate from one universe into another universe, allowing him to explore the entire DC Comics multiverse.

If we follow the Flash on his adventures, not only do you see the same species on most of these parallel Earths — you see humans, for instance — you also see different variations of the same individuals popping up across each of these Earths. Thinking about the multiverse invites the question, “If you have four and half billion years of evolution playing out independently on each of these Earths, and you get almost the exact same result each time, what does that say about the process of evolution?”

This is a classic question in evolutionary biology: if you replay the tape of evolution, do you get the same result over and over again? This is a question that people have been chasing for decades. In some cases, in the real world, we see that the answer is “yes.” If presented with the same environmental challenges, natural selection drives independently evolving lineages down very similar trajectories.

On the other hand, there are one-off events, oddities like the duck-billed platypus. It has a bill and a beaver tail it uses to navigate through the water and locate crayfish and crustaceans and things like that. There are a lot of animals that live in very similar habitats and have very similar lifestyles, but none of them look anything like the platypus.

The DC multiverse is the ultimate biology experiment.

Exactly. In the real world, we only have one Earth, but there are ways that scientists in the real world can study repeatability. In some cases, they study islands, which act as independent universes. In other cases, they look at bacteria evolving in petri dishes. A lab full of petri dishes represents a multiverse. You can give independently evolving lineages of bacteria the same challenge to see if they find the same solutions. It’s not as cool as traversing the DC multiverse like the Flash, but very similar techniques are being used to explore the repeatability of evolution in the real world.

How did you get into comic books?

I actually got into comic books pretty late in life, when I was a graduate student doing my PhD at Harvard. In the process of writing my dissertation, I started to get pretty stressed. I needed something that was intellectual candy, something to get my mind off the rigors of academia.

I remember I was walking through Harvard Square one evening, and I passed this underground comic book shop, and in the window, I saw this comic book. It was Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. It had this really big classic cover where Muhammad Ali was facing off with Superman, and they both had boxing gloves on, and I thought, “I have to see how this ends.” Superman and Muhammad Ali face off in a room that has red-sun radiation, which basically makes Superman human, and Muhammad Ali whips his butt really thoroughly. That was the first comic book I ever bought, and it got me hooked.

I went back to the store and got a few different comic books, and that was my guilty pleasure while writing my dissertation. As I was reading comic books, I started to come up with all these really weird questions. A certain scenario would present itself in a comic book, and I would wonder about the biology behind it. This became so persistent that I taught a small course at Harvard on the biology of superheroes. We talked about Batman. We talked about Ironman. We talked about zombies. We talked about the Flash and a few other comic book characters. A lot of the undergrads came away from that course having learned a lot of the classic ideas that they would have learned in an intro bio course. That’s what spawned the podcast.

I’ll be an assistant professor at UCLA starting in July, and that’s actually the first course that I’m going to be teaching at UCLA. We’re talking about everything from evolution and physiology to brain machine interfacing and artificial intelligence.

You study how animals adapt to climate change. Do you talk about climate change in your podcast?

In our last episode, we talked about Jurassic Park and resurrecting ancient species. Obviously, this is a really fun topic to talk about. I interviewed Beth Shapiro, a geneticist who focuses on conservation genetics and the genomes of ancient species, and we talked about whether it’s possible to get DNA from dinosaurs and how we go from getting genes from an extinct species to creating a living, breathing animal. That’s all really fun to think about, but the last question is “Why would we do this?”

If we’re not going to resurrect ancient dinosaurs and have fun eating cotton candy watching them do their thing, why would we invest so much in this technology? Well, it turns out that that same technology is being used right now to help conserve species that are on the verge of extinction and potentially bring back species that have been driven extinct by human activity.

We just got news that the last male northern white rhinoceros died. Obviously, we have species like the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon and the black-footed ferret, which is on the verge of extinction. That brings up the idea of genetic rescue. The ability to tinker with the genomes of a species and reintroduce improved versions of those genomes into wild populations to help them recover — that same technology would be required to bring back a wooly mammoth.

What species do you focus on in your research?

I’m a herpetologist by heart, so I work mostly on reptiles and amphibians. A lot of my recent work is studying how changes in climate affect the form and function of wild populations. I published a paper last year looking at the effects of the polar vortex storms that swept the Southeast in the winter of 2013 to 2014. The polar vortex is a pattern of Arctic air that spirals around our poles. As the planet warms, the poles are warming faster than mid-latitudes, which causes that pattern to become more wavy, and it sends these periodic bouts of polar air to mid-latitudes. Here, in North America, it causes these extreme cold events.

It just so happened that in late 2013, I was studying the evolution of cold tolerance in this one reptile species, the green anole lizard, which is native to the United States, but its ancestors come from Cuba, which is very warm and thermally stable. So I had data on cold tolerance in these populations. I had data on gene expression.

So, I took advantage of this particular event to ask, “In the survivors of this storm, do we see any signature of natural selection taking place?” And the answer, in this case, was “yes.” We saw that in the southern part of species range, the survivors of the storm were significantly more cold-tolerant than the population was before the storm.

So much of the talk about climate change is that it’s happening so fast that plants and animals can’t adapt, so it’s surprising to hear that you see that change in such a short period of time.

I think this is something that we are increasingly coming to understand. When we think about contemporary evolution, this is a field that is only a couple of decades old. Now, we’re starting to see an uptick in the number of people who are focused on trying to understand how human perturbations to the environment are not only affecting ecology and extinction, gene flow and species distribution, but also the process of evolution. And we are starting to see evidence that animals around the world are adapting.

Jason Munshi-South is doing work in New York City looking at mice that are adapted to urban environments, and he’s seeing very strong signatures of selection in diet. Mice that are living in cities are eating a lot of the junk food that people leave around, while their cousins in more natural habitats are eating grasses and seeds and insects and that sort of thing. In response, the genes that are involved in digestive processes seem to be diverging between cities and natural habitats.

Pollution is also a factor. Andrew Whitehead’s group has been studying pollution adaptation in small fish called killifish. He’s shown that these animals have colonized these very polluted waters several different times, and we see these repeated signatures of selection in parts of the genome that help them to cope with the deleterious effects of being in these polluted waters.

That feels like cause for some small measure of cautious optimism.

I think it’s easy, when you hear that things are adaptively evolving, to think that things are going to be okay, but we still don’t really know. Because the thing is, when we talk about natural selection, that comes at a cost: death. When you have an extreme pressure that has a large death toll, the individuals who are left behind are better adapted, but in the meantime, all of this genetic variation that would have been in the population gets lost because everything is driven down this one specific trajectory.

In the case of the polar vortex storm, what happens if it’s a drought next time? Or a heat wave? Lineages that may have been better adapted for those types of events may be lost now. We just don’t know. There is lot more data that needs to be gathered to understand how the different types of selective pressures — from extreme weather events to urbanization to pollution—play out over longer periods of time to determine who survives, who dies, and how that translates into extinction and speciation and other important biological processes.

So, who are your favorite superheroes?

It’s funny because I think most of my favorite superheroes are actually scientists. Spider-Man, obviously, is a favorite of mine. Peter Parker is one of the most brilliant minds in the Marvel universe. Bruce Banner — I love me some Hulk. He’s one of my go-to characters. Batman is obviously classic. There is just so much to that character, so much depth and history. He’s got a dark side that you don’t see in many other characters.

As we move along with the podcast, we’ll continue to think about aliens and giant monsters and robots and artificial intelligence and all of these fantastical ideas, and explore the science behind them. I think it’s really important to bring these conversations to the real world. We’re being thrown so much information from all over the place. It’s not necessarily all from reputable sources. If we can go through this mental exercise of separating fact from fiction when it comes to these fantastical ideas like comic book superheroes, maybe that will help us to better discern fact from fiction when it comes to the more serious issues, like climate change.

Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.

Written By Jeremy Deaton

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These editions consist of extensive textual modifications, the reductions as well as substitute from entire stanzas, all in patterns that end up to incorporate integrally along with a publication phoned the Sefer Yetzirah. Considering that this reflects the sophisticated esoteric and also profound thinking from early opportunities, this is. Whether it is the bride-to-be of historical opportunity holding weeds to ward off fiends or today's present day new bride bring a brilliantly colour and also complex designed bouquet, the wedding ceremony bouquet is one wedding ceremony tradition that is actually predestined to continue to be a component of our wedding event tradition. Knows about life in metropolitan areas and also communities from several lifestyles from the world at several attend their past. There are indicators that the word Kabbalah," the getting," today the title from the entire religious beliefs, was in earlier times the leading name of the book that Nostradamus' publication conceals. The Spring Festival that happens in China at the starting point from the Mandarin New Year is just one of the amount of times when the requirement from gold in China is quite high and gold and also jewellery purchases climb considerably. Yet another reason old society dressed up in cover-ups was for function of productivity. The Gnostics related to strongly the ancient Classical philosophers to have actually been actually liable in shaping their religious identity, instead of the intellects and minds of those who have countered their timeless theories. When they have a certain duplicity of temperament and individual concerning all of them, the early theorists had the fascinating suggestion that human beings are actually merely actually ever completely satisfied and to life. Old Greek furnishings operate marvelously effectively for just about any sort of area of your home. The very first method shown was an ancient mechanical extraction method which resembled red or white wine creation. Dubhe, for instance, just is the Arabic term for bear (probably not one of the most helpful Arabic word to know if you discover yourself in Cairo). Dug deep into comforts present that off ancient opportunities the blend and also amount of cologne was actually as important as how long the fragrance will last. No person is sure when astronomy was actually researched and also beliefs around superstars were actually generated through old Egyptians. In early times, tables were helped make off unique materials as well as in different concepts off today: for example the Egyptians used wood or even stone and also their dining tables were made like platforms, whereas the Assyrians used steel. Series trainees photographs or even on the web duplications from wall paintings off old worlds that explain components from life as this was resided in old times. Tribal tattoo layouts have continued to be prominent throughout the grows older, since they were first made use of in the ancient opportunities. SAMSON the son of MANOAH (c) 11OO BC possesses his total story said to in the BOOK FROM JURY in the OLD PROOF declaring he was actually blessed through THE LORD along with substantial stamina made use of in the main to pay a one guy war from his opponents the PHILISTINES. In the Classical world, the voluptuous sexual free-for all presented in films and also many college class was actually certainly not the requirement in the times from the democratic and also free of cost Greek community.

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