Pg 2: The Distillery

• In late 2013, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority released a report on investment needs for the next 20 years, which suggested a way to dramatically alleviate overcrowding on subways across America:

Curiously, very few American subways allow passengers to move freely between cars.  On those that do, passage is usually through a narrow door.  But in much of Europe, subway carriages are connected by wide-open spaces, allowing travellers not just to wander between cars but to sit or stand in flexible areas between them.  When Toronto adopted this technology in 2011 (see picture above of their Metro cars’ interiors), it increased passenger capacity by 8-10%.

But don’t hold your breath, Americans and tourists.  The transportation industry is seemingly quite resistant to change.

• Chris Roberts is a security researcher whose job is ostensibly to prevent hacking.  As part of his research he apparently crossed a line he shouldn’t have: he told FBI agents in February that he’d hacked in-flight entertainment systems on over a dozen flights and on one occasion hijacked an aircraft’s thrust management computer, briefly altering its course, as wrote FBI agent Mark Hurley in a warrant application filed in April.  The US Government Accountability Office has released a report warning that hackers could bring down a plane by using onboard Wi-Fi systems.  But airlines were warned about this problem as early as 2008, yet little has been done about it since; there are certain to be improvements that could be made.  Punishing hackers who freely reveal vulnerabilities may not be the best way to go forward.

• Point It is a traveller’s language kit by Dieter Graf that’s been around for 20 years, though this is the first time I’ve run across it.  It’s a book of tiny coloured pictures of 1,300 different items that you can whip out and point at the image of what you want to get your idea across.  This passport-sized assistant could help anyone trying to get by in a situation where there’s no common language (now available as an app).  Therapist have been using icons for some time to communicate with nonverbal children, often those with autism. Cows, primates, elephants, and cetaceans have proven able to read icons.

• The brightness under the arch of the Milky Way is where the moon has set.  To each side of the frame is where the sun was starting to warm the sky (you can actually see it to the far left).  The photographer is unsure whether the moon or the sun caused the strange rays to the right, but stresses there was no city light pollution because he shot in the middle of nowhere.
• Whatipu is a remote beach on the west coast of the Auckland Region of the North Island of New Zealand.  As of 2012, the Whatipu area is utilised as a scientific reserve.  The road to it is unsealed, and beach access is poorly signposted from the end of the road.  To the south of Whatipu is Manukau Harbour.  Shifting sands substantially change the beach — since the 1940s over 6 square kilometres have been added.
• This image was captured from Carey’s Hut on the shore of North Mavora Lake.  It’s composed of 12 photos and 2 exposures, one at 25 seconds for the sky and another at 85 seconds for the foreground.  Mavora Lakes Park (an impressive landscape of mountains, lakes, forests, and tussock grasslands) was used as a film location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  It’s part of the Te Wahipounamu / South-West New Zealand World Heritage Area.  The Mavora-Greenstone Walkway is a 50-kilometre, 4-day tramping trip.  (You should all try it at least once.)

• The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our solar system.  Its name “milky” is derived from its appearance as a dim glowing band arching across the night sky in which the naked eye can’t distinguish individual stars.  From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within.  Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610.  Up until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that all of the stars in the Universe were contained inside the Milky Way.  But observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies — now known to be in the billions.
• This shot of the Milky Way was taken at Lake Wairarapa (east of Wellington) on a crisp, cold night in June, just before the photographer’s lens fogged over.
• At the entrance of the Franz Josef valley lies Franz Josef township, permanent population approximately 330.  It’s situated 5 kilometres from the glacier on State Highway 6 and has a petrol station, small, busy heliport, and numerous tourist accommodation options.  An 8-hour day hike up Alex Knob (1,303 metres or 4,275 feet) allows the climber to overlook the glacier and valley below.  The path up Alex Knob is of good tramping track standard, but consodered strenuous due to its steep climb (1,100 metres or 3,600 feet) and advanced due to the length of the hike.  (So start getting in shape now!)

• This photo was taken behind the so-called Devil’s Gate, at Red Rocks walkway in Wellington, a 30-40 minute coastal walk that leads from Owhiro Bay to the Red Rocks Reserve — an area of national significance with fascinating geology.  The Red Rocks are ancient pillow lava formed 200 million years ago by undersea volcanic eruptions.  Small amounts of iron oxides give the rocks their distinctive colouring.  The coastal walk continues on to Sinclair Head, wherein lies a fur seal colony.  From May-October the colony is populated by bachelor males who failed in their attempts to breed in their home South Island colonies.
• Lake Wanaka is located in the Otago region of the lower NZ South Island, at an altitude of 300 metres.  Covering an area of 192 square kilometres (74 square miles), it’s NZ’s 4th largest lake, estimated to be more than 300 metres (980 feet) deep.  The name is Maori, a corruption of Oanaka (“The place of Anaka”, once the local tribal chief).  Wanaka is a town on the lake with which it shares a name.
• Bluff is a town and seaport in the NZ Southland region, on the southern coast of the South Island.  It’s the southernmost town (excluding Oban) and, despite Slope Point and Stewart Island being further to the south, is colloquially used to refer to the southern extremity of the country (in the phrase “from Cape Reinga to the Bluff”, a distance of 1,401 kilometres).  Bluff is 30 kilometres (20 miles) by road from Invercargill, at the end of a peninsula that forms the western side of Bluff Harbour / Awarua Bay.  This is the Aurora Australis as seen from that bay — a compensation for the winter cold that inhabitants must endure.

• In a little-noticed brief filed last summer, lawyers for the US House of Representatives claimed that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of congressional insider trading should be blocked on principle, because “lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work”.  The legal team claimed that the insider trading probe violated the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branch.  Yet in 2012, members of Congress patted themselves on the back for passing a bill meant to curb insider trading for lawmakers and their staff.  But as the SEC made news with the first major investigation under that new law, Congress moved to block the inquiry.  A staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee allegedly passed along information about an upcoming Medicare decision to a lobbyist, who then shared the tip with other firms.  Leading hedge funds used the insider tip to trade on health insurance stocks affected by the soon-to-be announced decision.  Wall Street investors routinely hire specialised “political intelligence” lobbyists in Washington to get insider knowledge so they can make trades using the information.  And this is hardly the first time Congress has moved to undermine its own ethics rules.  It’s bluster and then business as usual.  And the very rich get a bit richer.
• This image reveals the complex ocean currents around Antarctica.  The colours show speed, where white is fast and blue is slow.  The oceans play an important role in the earth’s climate; they transport heat from equator to pole, provide moisture for rain, and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Detailed turbulent structures are visible throughout the Southern Ocean, where the Antarctic circumpolar current flows eastward around the globe.  Large eddies are particularly visible in the Agulhas current at the southern tip of Africa.  These ocean simulations are validated against satellite and shipboard observations.  Their cumulative effects have large and long-ranging consequences on the earth’s climate and therefore on future warming projections.
• Volcano Calbuco in southern Chile erupted for the first time in more than 50 years on 19 April 2015, sending a thick plume of ash and smoke several kilometres into the sky.  Chile’s emergency office declared a red alert following the sudden eruption, which occurred about 1,000 kilometres (625 miles) south of the capital, Santiago, near the tourist town of Puerto Varas.  About 1,500 people were evacuated within a 20 kilometre radius.  Trevor Moffat, who lives in Ensenada (10 kilometres away) said the eruption happened without warning.  “It sounded like a big tractor trailer passing by the road, rattling and shaking, guttural rumbling … we left everything there, I grabbed my kid, my dog, and got in the car with my wife,” said Moffat.  “All the neighbours were outside, a lot of young people crying.”  A spectacular mushroom-shaped column billowed into the sky with occasional lightning bolts shooting through.  The eruption was seen in towns at least 50 kilometres away.  Chile, on the Pacific Rim of Fire, has the 2nd-largest chain of volcanoes in the world after Indonesia, including around 500 that are potentially active.  In March, volcano Villarrica, also in southern Chile, erupted in a similar spectacular fashion, sending a plume of ash and lava high into the sky, but it quickly subsided.

• Hundreds of police officers stand alongside brand new police vehicles provided by local government to ensure public security over the New Year holidays during a handover ceremony in Taiyuan on 30 December 2009.  Taiyuan is the capital and largest city of North China’s Shanxi province.  At the 2010 census, it had a total population of 4,201,591 inhabitants.  China has now overtaken the US as the world’s biggest car market.
• Entertainers perform with their Fou drums (ancient Chinese percussion instruments) during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on 8 August 2008.  Towards the beginning of the ceremony, 2,008 dancer / percussionists staged a synchronised presentation, striking large square fou with glowing red sticks.  Those particular instruments had a white square LED array surrounding each drum, allowing them all to produce both music and dazzling displays, which included Chinese characters and shapes created in tandem.
• Students perform martial arts during a competition at a high school in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on 20 October 2011.

• Students at the Shaolin Tagou Martial Arts School participate in a rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympic Games at a stadium in Nanjing on 9 August 2014.  (In the larger image you can see there are safety wires.)  A total of 520 students took part in the performance named “Building the Dream.”  The school was built in 1978 in response to the revival of the popularity of kung fu in China due to the Jet Li film Shaolin Temple.  With 18,000 pupils, the school is China’s largest martial arts school and was featured in the movie The Real Shaolin.  Tuition is US$1,100 per 1 month or $10,000 per year.  This includes all training classes, the use of equipment, full room and board (3 meals a day), optional classes (such as Mandarin), and an on-site English translator.
• Students take an examination on an open-air playground at a high school in Yichuan, Shaanxi province on 11 April 2015.  More than 1,700 freshmen students took part in the exam, the first attempt at having it in the open air.  The school said there was insufficient indoor space.
• Paramilitary recruits formed a heart pattern prior to the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration on Valentine’s Day 2010 at the Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, air base.  Click on the photo to see that only one of the things they’re holding (lanterns?) has a white top.  No explanation for the difference was given.

• Harmful blue-violet light is emitted from the LED screens of devices such as smartphones and tablets.  Being in close proximity to this light can make the risk of early onset macular degeneration worse, as well as contribute to eye fatigue.  Recent figures show that a typical multi-screen user in NZ clocks up just under 7 hours of screen time daily (laptops, desktops, tv, and smartphones combined).  These emit blue-violet light, the highest-energy visible light wavelength.  Effects are believed to be cumulative.  Over-exposure can cause headaches, dry eyes, and difficulty sleeping and may also have serious long-term effects as blue-violet light is a risk factor for age-related macular degeneration along with genetic factors, smoking, and diet (unclear which contributes most).  Consider getting lenses especially designed to filter blue light or, if possible, reduce time spent on devices.
• A website offering services called Invisible Girlfriend and Invisible Boyfriend said lonely hearts can receive texts, phone calls, and even handwritten notes for $25 a month.  The website allows users to choose their faux significant other’s picture, name, and age.  The basic plan includes 100 text messages per month, 10 voice mails, 1 handwritten note, photos, and a backstory that doesn’t involve Tinder, OKCupid, or Canada.  You can text your new significant other and get a response text right back.  CrowdSource supplies mostly-US employees (42% of whom have a bachelor’s degree) to author the messages (by turns, funny, provocative, or totally bland) and to make the phone calls from their multinational workforce of people willing to do micro-tasks for a very small amount of money.  Some of the users who’ve signed up so far include soldiers who want others to believe they have a girlfriend waiting back home, people who’ve never had a sweetheart and want to practice for the real thing without being judged or rejected, and gays and lesbians who don’t want their conservative families to discover their sexual orientation.
• As consumers, we’re often faced with the opportunity to purchase a new, enhanced product — such as an upgraded cell phone — even though the device we currently own is still fully functional.  To justify the purchase to ourselves, we behave in rather strange ways.  We treat our current products in ways that may break them, often unconsciously, so as to have a proper justification to upgrade — a consumer microwaves his cell phone instead of a burrito, a lab worker drops his mobile into a vat of toxic sludge, or a commuter leaves her phone in the back seat of a departing taxi.  Oops!  Careless behaviour allows people to justify buying an upgrade without having to consciously admit to themselves or others that they’re being intentionally wasteful.

• Arkhangelsk is in the north of European Russia, near Finland’s northern shore, and on both banks of the Northern Dvina River near its exit into the White Sea.  The city stretches for over 40 kilometres (25 miles) along the banks of the river and the numerous islands of its delta.  Arkhangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval Russia until 1703.  Population has been decreasing over the past 3 decades, down to about 350,000.  A number of rural suburbs exist around the city.  One sales pitch for the cottage settlement Chasovenskaya (as translated by Google:) “A man who lives in a big city, every day [is] faced with a large number of problems: cigarette smoke, [noisy, nutty] neighbours, bad access roads, [pollution], the eternal problems with parking and other not unimportant city [travails].  Many people dream of having a corner somewhere away from all the bustle, to relax with the family after work on his plot.  In this case, a country house [is an] excellent option…  Made of laminated veneer lumber [because] a tree “breathes” and fills the house [with] millions of particles, creating a unique microclimate.  It absorbs heavy odours, excessive moisture [yet] nourishes a moisture-dried space.  It should also be noted that the air in a wooden house is filled with aromas of pine oil, a natural antiseptic.  Therefore, people living in wooden houses, rarely get sick, [are] better adapted to the environmental conditions, have an increased immunity, and a good mood.”  Makes you want to go live there, right?  Or at least sniff a bag of sawdust.  I’m not sure which cottage settlement this photo actually depicts.
• With no winds and temperatures around -15°F, the conditions were right for light pillars to form.  A patch of fog rolled in around 4am on 15 January 2015, causing the moisture to crystallise into what is referred to as “diamond dust”.  The plate-shaped facets of the crystals reflect light to form these pillars.

• This is a foggy winter day in the Tyrol, Austria, taken on New Year’s Eve, 2010.  The man is wearing snowshoes (which I’ve never had the occasion to use).
• Panorama of Reine (Lofoten), Norway, made from 3 frames.  Lofoten is an archipelago and a traditional district in the county of Nordland, Norway.  Though lying within the Arctic Circle, the archipelago experiences one of the world’s largest elevated temperature anomalies relative to its high latitude.  Lofoten is known for distinctive scenery with mountains and peaks, open sea and sheltered bays, beaches and untouched lands.

• Axons are where neurons conventionally produce electrical spikes, but many of the same molecules that support axonal spikes are also found in dendrites.  Previous research utilising dissected brain tissue showed that dendrites could use those molecules themselves to produce electrical spikes, but it wasn’t clear whether they normally did that or not.  Recent research by Spencer Smith with the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine has found that they do indeed.  Dendrites effectively behave as mini-neural computers, actively computing the neuronal input signals themselves — dendrites fire spikes at times when other parts of the neuron don’t, suggesting that those spikes are the result of local dendritic processing — adding a new level of complexity to the brain.
• When Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St Augustine, Florida, first began studying comb jellies, he was puzzled.  Their neural anatomy was like nothing else he had ever encountered.  Comb jellies appear to lack the commonly-used chemical messengers that other animals have, such as serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine.  (They do use glutamate, a simple molecule that plays a major role in neuronal signalling in all animals.) Instead, they have genes that are predicted to produce a slew of neural peptides, small proteins that can also act as chemical messengers.  No other animal except in this phylum has anything similar.  Neurons are the most complex cell type in existence, capable of capturing information, making computations, and executing decisions.  Because they’re so complicated, it was thought unlikely they would’ve evolved twice.  But recent genetic work suggests comb jellies are ancient — the first group to branch off the animal family tree, bolstering the chance that they evolved neurons on their own.  This has generated intense interest among evolutionary biologists.  Comb jellies are incredibly fragile, often falling to pieces once caught in a net.  And they’re difficult to raise in captivity, making it nearly impossible to do the routine experiments scientists perform on other animals.  For a long time comb jellies were thought to be closely related to jellyfish because, with similar body plans and gelatinous makeup, the two species outwardly resemble each other.  Yet they swim and hunt differently — jellyfish have stinging tentacles, while comb jellies have sticky ones.  Convergent evolution, in which natural selection produces two similar structures independently, is fairly common in nature.  The retina, for example, evolved independently several times.  But neurons?  This is generating a lot of debate.
• Photographer David Liittschwager joined scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration off the island of Hawaii.  Creatures must specialise to survive in these open, nutrient-poor waters making for rich diversity.  Liittschwager got his samples with a bucket and fine-mesh net; at night, he lowered lights as lures.  What squirmed toward the glow?  A genuine riot of life, he said.  Gelatinous shapeshifters lazily rode the currents.  Familiar forms in miniature — wide-eyed fish larvae, baby squid, and octopuses — darted about freely.  But their lives are precarious.  Some wear shells or exude toxins against predators; others are active only after dark.  Untold numbers succumb to hungry mouths — each other’s or those of bigger foes.

• The car-tire-size opah (also called a moonfish) is striking enough thanks to its rotund, silver body (which can grow up to 6 feet — 1.8 metres — long).  But researchers have discovered something surprising about this deep-sea dweller: it’s warm-blooded.  That makes the opah (Lampris guttatus) the first warm-blooded fish ever discovered.  Most fish are exotherms, meaning they require heat from the environment to stay alive.  The opah, as an endotherm, keeps its own temperature elevated even as it dives to chilly depths of 1,300 feet (396 metres) in temperate and tropical oceans around the world.  As a result, its muscles can contract faster, its eye can focus faster, and its brain can think faster than its cold prey.
• Old Tjikko is a 9,550-year-old Norway Spruce, located on Fulufjället Mountain of Dalarna province in Sweden.  Old Tjikko originally gained notoriety as the “world’s oldest tree” but is instead the oldest living clonal Norway Spruce — there are older clonal trees — and no individual tree is known to have reached Old Tjikko’s age.  The age of the tree was determined by carbon dating of genetically matched plant material collected from under the tree, not by dendrochronology (counting tree rings).  The trunk itself is estimated to be only a few hundred years old, but the plant has survived for much longer due to a process known as layering — when a branch comes in contact with the ground it sprouts a new root — or maybe vegetative cloning where the trunk dies but the root system is still alive and sprouts a new trunk.  Geologist Leif Kullman, who discovered the tree, named it after his dead dog.
• The true cost of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will be 300 million premature deaths and up to $100 trillion (£64 trillion) lost to the global economy by 2050.  This scenario is set out in a new report which looks to a future where drug resistance is not tackled between now and 2050.  No new class of antibiotic has been discovered since 1987 — but a new infection emerges on an almost yearly basis.  Less than 1% of available research funds in the UK and Europe were spent on antibiotic research in 2008–2013.  Yet within a few years routine procedures such as hip operations will become impossible if we no longer have antibiotics to make them safe.  Many newborns won’t survive without effective antibiotics.  The profitability of a new drug hinges on either high prices or high sales.  Companies have an incentive to increase sales, even if these extra sales have little or no medical value and come at the cost of adding to drug resistance.  This leads to overuse for antibiotics and is at odds with the objective to conserve antibiotics to make them last longer before resistance arises.  “You can look at antibiotic resistance as a slow moving global train wreck happening over the next 35 years,” says health law expert Kevin Outterson at Boston University, US.  However, an isolated Amazonian tribe of Yanomami discovered in 2007 were found to have gut bacteria with nearly 60 unique genes that could turn on and rally to fend off antibiotics, including a half-dozen genes that could protect the bacteria from synthetic antibiotics.  Perhaps the antibiotic crisis would happen no matter how much or how little they were being prescribed.

• The Baikal teal duck breeds in eastern Siberia, Russia, and journeys through Mongolia and North Korea to winter in Japan, South Korea and mainland China.  In winter they are also occasionally seen in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with vagrants reaching as far west as the Iberian Peninsula and east to the USA (Alaska and California).  A flock of Baikal teal ducks can appear in such numbers that they resemble a tornado of birds.  This occasion was photographed in South Korea.  The ducklings learn to fly by August, becoming independent of the adults.  In autumn and winter, the species forms large flocks, which wheel about in spectacular patterns reminiscent of those formed by the common starling.^nbsp; I had mot known ducks were so graceful.
• The village of Mawsynram, India, claims to have the highest average rainfall on Earth.  Perched atop a ridge in the Khasi Hills of India’s northeast, the village receives 467 inches of rain per year — 13 times that of Seattle.  The heavy rainfall is due to summer air currents sweeping over the steaming floodplains of Bangladesh, gathering moisture as they move north.  When the resulting clouds hit the steep hills of Meghalaya they are “squeezed” through the narrowed gap in the atmosphere and compressed to where they can no longer hold their moisture, causing the near-constant rain the village is famous for.  In the valley beneath Mawsynram, the village of Nongriat maintains the best-known example of the “living bridges” which have been used for centuries in the region.  Bridges are grown from the roots of rubber trees trained on bamboo frames (those frames eventually rot away).  In the relentless damp of Meghalaya’s jungles, wooden bridges would rot too quickly to be practical.  For centuries the Khasi people have instead trained the roots of trees to span the region’s rivers.  As well as bridges, the jungles beneath hide “living ladders” curled into shape to assist villagers descending the steep flanks of the Khasi hills.
• Weather can be one of the most dramatic and tangible ways to experience change on a daily basis.  While photographing chimpanzees on remote Ngamba Island in Lake Victoria, Uganda, the photographer suddenly saw two waterspouts spinning wildly in the middle of the lake.  It was a surreal and completely unexpected sight.  This was the more dramatic of the two.  A few hours later, the sun was out and all the drama had completely dissipated.

• After learning that a tigress had given birth to cubs in India’s Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, photographer Souvik Kundu visited the sanctuary a number of times to photograph the family.  On this day his group was treated to an “unforgettable display of tender bonding,” with “the cubs engaged in several bouts of play-fighting under the watchful eyes of the mother.”
• Since in many species, sperm is males’ only contribution to reproduction, biologists have long puzzled about why evolutionary selection, known for its ruthless efficiency, allows them to exist.  Now British scientists have an explanation: males are required for a process known as sexual selection, which helps species to ward off disease and avoid extinction.  A system where all offspring are produced without sex — as in all-female asexual populations — would be far more efficient at reproducing greater numbers of offspring, but in research published in the journal Nature, they found that sexual selection, in which males compete to be chosen by females for reproduction, improves the gene pool and boosts population health, helping explain why males are important.  So let me get this straight — the value of males is that they fight with each other over who gets to have sex with the females?  Wow.  Who knew?
• Wastewater treatment plants not only struggle removing pharmaceuticals, it seems some drugs actually increase after treatment.  The microbes that clean our water may also piece some pharmaceuticals back together.  Carbamazepine and ofloxacin on average increased by 80% and 120%, respectively, during the treatment process.  Such drugs, and their metabolites (formed as part of the natural biochemical process of degrading and eliminating the compounds), get into the wastewater by people taking them and excreting them.  Flushing drugs accounts for some of the levels, too.  The researchers have a clue as to how this might happen: microbes.  After removing the solids from incoming wastewater, treatment plants use microbes — tiny single-celled organisms — to decompose organic matter that comes in the sewage.  Researcher Benjamin Blair says his best guess is that people take the drugs, their body breaks them down into different metabolites that are excreted, and the microbes take these different parts of the drug and put them back together.

• Is binge drinking bad?  The UK Government defines a binge as double the maximum “safe” daily limit for alcohol intake.  For men that means 8 units, or 4 pints of lower-strength beer; for women it’s 6 units or 2 large glasses of wine.  Identical twin brothers decided to put to the test if it’s better to drink a little every day or a lot once a week.  They both drank 21 units a week for a month, only one drank 3 units per day (moderate drinking) while the other drank 21 units each Saturday (binge drinking).  Drunkenness is said to have 8 stages: verbose, grandiose, amicose (the “you’re my best friend” stage), bellicose, morose, lachrymose (the weepy stage), stuperose (the incoherent stage) and comatose — basically going from chatty to unconscious via being fun and then weepy.  21 shots in about 4 hours took the bingeing twin through all those levels.  Currently, the UK government recommends taking 48 hours off after heavy drinking and the idea of a liver holiday has some medical evidence to back it up.  One 2006 study suggested that drinking on only 1-4 days per week and taking a liver holiday for the rest is better than daily drinking for male heavy drinkers.  Hepatologists (liver specialists) weekly measured chemicals in the twins’ blood called interleukins and cytokines (sensitive markers of inflammation and disease).  The bingeing twin had raised levels that didn’t go down at all even after 6 days of no drinking.  By the end of the month, his levels had soared.  Inflammation links to a vast array of diseases from cancer and severe infection to heart disease and dementia.  Disturbingly, the moderately-drinking twin had almost the same results.  However, only the binger had 3 times the amount of bacterial endotoxin in his blood — a physician himself, he surmised the alcohol was so irritating to the lining of his stomach and intestine that they were leaking bacteria into his bloodstream.  48 hours off after a binge wasn’t nearly enough to fix this — it takes weeks, not days.  But your mileage may vary somewhat because several genes control how we break down alcohol and your genes may handle alcohol better — or worse — than the twins’.  the interaction of our drinking habits and our genes affects our risk of cancer, liver disease, and hangovers.  Alcohol-related genes are strongly associated with ethnicity.  If your face gets red or your hangovers are severe, the physician twin suggests that it may be best to not drink at all.
• Traditionally, scientists have focused on the role of the central nervous system in regulating our moods and behaviours, but a paradigm shift is afoot, with new research revealing a unique role of our gut microbiota in influencing our emotions, writes M J Friedrich, author of a new paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.  A growing body of research shows the significance of the relationship between the gut microbiota, stress, and anxiety-related behaviours.  Additionally, two different gut bacteria have been shown to produce “feel good” molecules like dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA).  Genetic and environmental factors mean that there may be significant variability in gut composition from person to person leaving researchers still trying to figure out exactly what environment constitutes a “healthy” gut in the first place.  Eating whole grains, stone-ground cereals, bananas, brown rice, legumes, pulses, barley, unsweetened yoghurt, kefir, kimchi, brightly coloured fruits, vegetables, and small amounts of red wine seem to fall on the positive side while processed foods, booze, and sugars are the negatives.  Oddly, exercise seems to increase the diversity of gut bacteria (a good thing).
• No one doubts, of course, that any amount of exercise is better than none.  Like medicine, exercise is known to reduce risks for many diseases and premature death.  But unlike medicine, exercise doesn’t come with dosing instructions.  The current broad guidelines from governmental and health organisations call for at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week to build and maintain health and fitness.  But whether that amount of exercise represents the least amount that someone should do — the minimum recommended dose — or the ideal amount hasn’t been certain.  Researchers with the National Cancer Institute, Harvard University and other institutions gathered and pooled data about people’s exercise habits from 6 large, ongoing health surveys, winding up with information about more than 661,000 adults, most of whom were middle-aged.  Unsurprisingly, the people who didn’t exercise at all were at the highest risk of early death.  But those who exercised a little, not meeting the recommendations but doing something, lowered their risk of premature death by 20%.  Those who met the guidelines precisely, completing 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise, enjoyed greater longevity benefits and 31% less risk of dying during the 14-year period compared with those who never exercised.  The sweet spot for exercise benefits, however, came among those who tripled the recommended level of exercise, working out moderately, mostly by walking, for 450 minutes per week, or a little more than an hour per day.  Those people were 39% less likely to die prematurely than people who never exercised.  Those whose exercise was often vigorous gained even more benefit.  There was no indication of such a thing as too much exercise.  So go to the gym.  Start today.

• Britain’s Royal Navy said on Monday it had launched an inquiry after a sailor who served on its submarines armed with nuclear weapons claimed the vessels had major security flaws and were a disaster waiting to happen.  In a lengthy dossier released on the internet, Able Seaman William McNeilly, who describes himself as a weapons engineer, said Britain’s Trident nuclear defence system was vulnerable both to enemies and to potentially devastating accidents because of safety failures.  “All it takes is someone to bring a bomb on board to commit the worst terrorist attack the UK and the world has ever seen,” he added.  McNeilly said people were not properly checked or searched before being able to get near or on the submarines, and that even nightclubs had stricter security.  A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman declined to say whether McNeilly faced arrest for breaking the Official Secrets Act.  He served on board the HMS Vanguard, one of 4 submarines carrying the Trident missiles.
• Want high-def footage of your neighbour taking her morning shower?  Then splash out on the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+, with “crystal clear” HD video and a “3-axis camera stabilisation system”.  Or perhaps exhibitionism is more your style?  Then put in your pre-order for the Lily quadcopter, a personal drone to be released later this year.  It will hover overhead filming your every move.  It’s intended for extreme sports enthusiasts, many of whom already wear head-mounted cameras to capture their stunts.  But unlike most remotely-controlled hobbyist drones, the Lily can fly and film on its own following a GPS tracker worn on the owner’s wrist, filming at any desired angle.  Every self-respecting snow-boarder or mountain-biker will have multiples buzzing around them, filming from every angle.  But you don’t have to be Philip K Dick to predict that selling flying surveillance machines on the open market might have unhappy consequences: terrorists, stalkers, corporate spies and jealous lovers will wreak hi-tech havoc as well as expand the current epidemic of human vanity displays.  Vanity was once an embarrassing secret; now it’s a universal pastime.  How will the human psyche hold up in a world full of flying cameras controlled by voyeurs and narcissists?

• In 2001 a chartered private jet crashed in Aspen, Colorado, USA, killing 18.  According to official reports, the passenger who paid for the flight got really mad after hearing he might miss an airport curfew.  That put pressure on the pilot to land despite not being able to see the runway, investigators concluded.  Private jet pilots are subject to the whims of the people who pay them in a way pilots for airlines aren’t.  The Aspen crash was one of 62 fatal accidents since 2000 involving sophisticated models of corporate-style jets and turboprops operated by professional pilots.  That compares with 13 for passenger airlines.  Airline crashes have become rare because carriers take steps to protect against pilot mistakes.  The Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t regularly inspect many corporate aircraft operators; pilots are often left to decide when it’s safe to land or how many hours they can work.  Some pilots say yes to every flight because they worry about the owners or clients looking for another pilot.  Privately-owned aircraft have almost no oversight.  The FAA has begun introducing safety monitoring for private operations like that used by airlines, but adding new rules will make little difference since many don’t follow regulations anyway.  (For operators whose flight crews routinely adhere to industry best practices, the likelihood of a fatal accident is greatly diminished.)  The solution is for Private Jet Flight Departments to require the same training and safety standards the airlines have.  But who absorbs the extra cost?
• Today’s wind turbines have colossal blades that spin at speeds of more than 200 miles (320 kilometres) per hour.  While some might consider them majestic, they’re a threat to bird life and can be a noisy blight on the landscape.  However, a Spanish company has come up with a solution to ease opposition to the technology: a bladeless wind turbine that can generate electricity (30% less than normal wind turbines, but cheaper to build and to operate and you can put 2 in the same space needed by a single turbine with blades).  It’s a long cone made from a composite of fibreglass and carbon fibre, designed to vibrate in wind.  Two rings of repelling magnets positioned at the base of the cone act as a non-electric motor.  When the cone moves one way, a magnet pulls it a different direction providing a boost to the mast’s movement even when wind speeds are low.  This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast’s oscillation to improve its energy-gathering efficiency.  Due to needing no blades, the design reduces manufacturing costs by up to 53%, it doesn’t pose a risk to bird life, and it’s totally silent.  The small version, the Vortex Mini, at 41 feet (12 metres) tall, can capture 40% of the wind’s power in normal conditions (wind blowing at around 26 miles per hour).  A 9-foot, 100-watt turbine will be available for use in developing countries by the end of the year.  (Demo)

• Sadly, some 70% of Americans, according to a 2007 Gallup Poll, believe in the existence of the devil.  This personification of evil has implications beyond the supernatural, influencing how we think about what it means for people to be “pure evil.”  Evil has been defined as taking pleasure in the intentional inflicting of harm on innocent others.  But psychologists have argued instead that the roots of evil actions can lie in quite ordinary psychological causes.  This grounding of evil in ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, phenomena have led some to describe the notion of pure evil as a myth, a misguided understanding of human nature deriving both from specific socio-cultural traditions as well as a general tendency to understand others’ behaviour as a product solely of their essence or soul, as opposed to a more complicated combination of environmental and individual forces.  Alarmingly, one of the central features of a belief in pure evil (BPE) is evil’s perceived immutability.  Evil people are born evil — they can’t change.  Two judgements follow from this perspective: 1) evil people can’t be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all evil people.  BPE predicts such effects as harsher punishments for crimes (murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation.  Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for pre-emptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.  People are becoming what they hate.
• Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt.  The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who’s been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is constantly revealed.  The Economist’s clock shows the global figure for almost all government debts in US dollar terms (right now, in excess of $56 trillion).  Does global debt even matter?  After all, world governments owe the money to their own citizens, not to the Martians.  But the rising total is important for two reasons.  First, when debt rises faster than economic output (as it’s been doing in recent years), this implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future.  Second, debt must be rolled over at regular intervals.  This creates a recurring popularity test for individual governments, rather as reality TV show contestants face a public phone vote every week.  Fail that vote, as various euro-zone governments have done, and the country (and its neighbours) can be plunged into crisis.
• Begging the question means assuming the conclusion of an argument from the beginning — a type of circular reasoning.  Begging the question is not considered a formal fallacy (an argument that is defective because it uses an incorrect deductive step).  Rather, it’s a type of informal fallacy that’s logically valid but unpersuasive in that it fails to prove anything other than what it already assumed.  It happens when someone attempts to prove a proposition based on a premise that itself requires proof.  For example: “To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be, on the whole, advantageous to the State, for it is highly conducive to the interests of the community that each individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of expressing his sentiments.”  The term “begging the question” originated in the 16th century as a mistranslation of Latin petitio principii (“assuming the initial point”).  Many English speakers use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”, “evades the question”, or even “ignores the question”. and follow that phrase with that question, for example: “I weigh 120 kilograms and have severely clogged arteries, which begs the question: why have I not started exercising?”  In philosophical, logical, grammatical, and legal contexts, most commenters believe that such usage is mistaken, or at best, unclear.

• Romsdal is the name of a traditional district in the Norwegian county Møre og Romsdal (located between Nordmøre and Sunnmøre), derived from the name of the river Rauma.  The area is reached via the Trollstigen, a serpentine mountain road.  The tourist village of Geiranger is nearby.
• A setting moon illuminates a group of Tajinaste flowers on the island of Tenerife, Spain.  The strength of the moon is around 20-30% even though it might seem stronger in the photo.  [This photo looks much better in the larger version you’ll see if you click on it.]
• The Odle (Italian Gruppo delle Odle) is a mountain range of the Dolomites, the comb between Funes and Val Gardena in South Tyrol (the northernmost province of Italy).  The Odle Group is largely in the Puez-Geisler Nature Park.  In this photo, mist is clearing in front of the Geislergruppe after snowfall on the higher parts.  [How does the congregation reach their church, especially in the snow?  There must be a road on the right hidden by the hillock.]

• This photo was unlabelled as to the location it depicts but it looks like where the Tsauchab River finally gives up on its effort to reach the ocean and disappears into the bone-dry sand of the Namib Desert.  The white clay contrasts with the red sand of the dunes, making it one of the most photographed places in Africa.
• This is the Sossusvlei Mountain, Namib-Naukluft National Park, where the incredible red sand Namib Dunes are located.  It’s the world’s oldest desert — 30 million years and counting.
• The bare plains of the Namib Desert, possibly part of the NamibRand Nature Preserve.  Don’t forget to fill your tanks and take lots of water!

Fes is the second-largest city of Morocco, with a population of 1.1 million (2014).  It was the capital until 1925, but is now only the capital of the Fès-Boulemane administrative region.  The modern Turkish name for Morocco, Fas, originally referred only to the capital city.  The city has two old medinas (distinct city sections, typically walled, with many narrow, maze-like streets), the larger of which is Fes el Bali, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and believed to be one of the world’s largest car-free urban areas.  Al-Qarawiyyin, founded in AD 859, is the oldest continuously-functioning madrasa (educational institution) in the world.  The city has been called the “Mecca of the West” and the “Athens of Africa”.  As to this photo, it was taken in Fes looking through the grill on the terrace of the top floor of a place called the Clock Cafe.  Notice the stairs on the top right of the picture.  The man is lying down on a purple couch on the upper floor.  The “doorway” in the middle is actually a balcony looking down to the lower floors (for ventilation in a hot climate).
 

• Tattoos: In Thonon-les-Bains, France lives a tattoo artist who goes by the name of Loic.  He is famous for tattooing works of art on the skin, not merely an eagle, flower, naked girl or bleeding heart.  Many consider him a master of ink painting on a human-skin canvas.  Several more examples here.
• Toilet Icons: The last time you went in search of a bathroom at the airport, of the two available entrances, you picked one, without consciously thinking about how the respective pictograms actually depicted the sexes — men with narrow hips and women in A-line dresses.  The images are as expected and predictable as gravity, pulling you toward your gendered option.  But women don’t wear dresses so much any more.  These designs avoid using a skirt.

• A bald eagle enduring the tribulations of a winter snow storm near Homer, Alaska.
• Researchers placed 20 beautifully intact shells that were a little too big for most hermit crabs at various spots around the island of Carrie Bow Cay in the Caribbean and watched what happened.  When a lone crab encountered one of the beautiful new shells, it immediately inspected the shelter with its legs and antennae and scooted out of its current home to try the new shell on for size.  If the new shell was a good fit, the crab claimed it — classic hermit crab behaviour.  But if the new shell was too big, the crab didn’t scuttle away disappointed — instead, it stood by its discovery for hours, waiting.  This was unusual.  Eventually other crabs showed up, each one trying on the shell.  If the shell was also too big for the newcomers, they hung around too, sometimes forming groups as large as 20.  The crabs didn’t gather in a random arrangement, however — rather, they clamped onto one another in a conga line stretching from the largest to smallest animal — a behaviour dubbed “piggybacking.”  Only one thing could break up the chain of crabs: a Goldilocks hermit crab for whom the new shell was just right.  As soon as such a crab claimed its new home, all the crabs in the queue swiftly exchanged shells in sequence.  The largest crab at the front of the line seized the Goldilocks crab’s abandoned shell.  The second largest crab stole into the first crab’s old shell, and so on.  A “vacancy chain” had formed — a term originally coined by social scientists to describe the ways that people trade coveted resources like apartments and jobs.  The orderly vacancy chain the crabs observed is called a synchronous vacancy chain, which is different from an asynchronous vacancy chain in which a lone crab encounters a shell, claims it and leaves behind its old home, later seized by a different crab that never interacts with the first animal.  Vacancy chains are an excellent way to distribute resources: unlike more typical competition, a single vacancy chain benefits everyone involved — it makes sense.  Do crabs release chemical signals to attract others nearby to start the chain?  Researchers will be checking that.
• Oh nuts… look what’s invaded the garden.  This squirrel morphed into a menacing Cyberman after snacking at a feeder designed by a Doctor Who fan.  Mum-of-two Emma Young, 40, said: “My whole family love Doctor Who so I decided to create a sci-fi feeder.  I packed a sticky mix of nuts and peanut butter into the head of a novelty radio, padding the rough edges with felt.”  Emma lives in Beaulieu, New Forest, Hampshire.  She says it was well worth the effort.