On The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa
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- Category: Earth Is Weird
- Published on Wednesday, 06 February 2013 12:06
- Written by Chris
We know from cliché and folk music that rolling stones gather no moss. Judging by the wandering stones of Racetrack Playa, that's true.
First off, playa. It's not this:
It's this:
Playas, also known as alkali lakes or dry lakes, are wide, shallow flats that are dry and cracked for much of the year, but wet and muddy sometimes. Their wet seasons may occur due to ground water seeping to the surface, snow melt-off from nearby mountains, rain, or fairies. They're typically coated in a layer of fine sediment and salt left behind when the ephemeral lake evaporates away.
Okay, with that out of the way, let's turn to the playas in the American southwest and an odd phenomenon that occurs there. At Racetrack Playa, Bonnie Claire Playa, and others in the region, people have observed for decades long, narrow trails often (though not always) ending in a large boulder. It looks like this:
Or this:
On Perverse Incentives
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- Category: Earth Is Weird
- Published on Wednesday, 30 January 2013 13:33
- Written by Chris
Perhaps the most famous example of a perverse incentive, cited in the Freakonomics podcast and elsewhere, is the story of the New Delhi cobras. During colonial times, British factotums were justifiably concerned about deadly snakes wandering the streets of Delhi, stealing jobs from the locals and using up all their health care and public education. The solution: offer a bounty on dead cobras. For each snake corpse turned in to some very unlucky clerks, you'd get a few rupees.
Pretty sweet deal, right? The streets would be clear of slithering death, the Indians would make a little scratch to alleviate their poverty, and the British could feel good about doing their white man's burden and bringing order to a chaotic world.
Payment for cobra corpses, no question asked.While the East India Company men sipped mint juleps and planned the opium wars, the Delhians got busy killing cobras. Pretty quickly, some of them realized that at the rate they were ridding the city of snakes, this nice little racket was going to dry up. Also, hunting snakes in the street wasn't really that fun or safe. Someone, probably that weird guy that most people in the neighborhood told their kids to stay away from, figured that snakes born in captivity looked the same as snakes born in the mean Delhi streets. So why not just make your own cobras? And it worked like gangbusters. The snake hunters raked in the rupees like a domestic abuser picking up groupies at a night club.
Eventually though, the British figured out the scam. This is the culture that came up with Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, after all. They ended the bounty. Suddenly all those snake breeders no longer had a market for their wares; cobra curry never took off the way they hoped. So, they did what any good entrepreneur would; they dumped their goods in an alley and moved on to the next venture.
The end result: there were more cobras on the streets of Delhi after the bounty than before. Good work, East India Company.
You can find more examples of perverse incentives here.
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Chris is an American writer and educationalizer living in Istanbul. You can follow him on Twitter @crfsanders if you're into that sort of thing.
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Earth Is Weird: On How Disgusting Your Face Is
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- Category: Earth Is Weird
- Published on Wednesday, 05 September 2012 12:39
- Written by Chris
Humans are gross. If it's not their secretions, it's their body odor or their fluid-exchange rituals or their unpleasant offspring. Seriously, have you ever seen a human's pillow without a pillowcase? Horrific!
Have you heard of demodex? No? Well, you should get to know it; it might be having sex on your face right this moment!
How do Demodex mites spend their time? They eat! Some say they eat sebum, but Nutting thought that such a diet wouldn’t be nutritious enough. Instead, he said that they feast on the cells that line the follicle, sucking out their innards with a retractable needle in the middle of a round mouth. On either side of the mouth, D.folliculorum has a seven-clawed organ (a “palpus”) for securing itself to what it’s eating. “All of the structures formed a sharp, offensive weapon,” writes Xu Jing, who first looked at them under an electron microscope. (D.brevis, with its five-clawed palpus, was branded as “less offensive”.)
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They don’t poo! The mite has no anus, and stores its waste in large cells within its gut. Nutting saw these as adaptations for a life spent head-down in a tightly closed space. When the mite dies, its body disintegrates and the waste is released. More on this later.
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And they have sex! On your face! Their favourite hook-up spots are the rims of your hair follicles. Males outnumber females by three to five times, but this detail aside, Demodex sex lacks much of the horror found throughout the arachnid clan. No traumatic insemination. No cannibalism. The penis and vulva are hidden within the pairs of legs. (Jing wrote that D.folliculorum’s penis “looks like a small candle when it was elongated”. He failed to see D.brevis’s.)
These unwelcome little guests can't poop and die in your skin. This might be the cause of conditions like rosacea. If there are enough of the punks in a single folicle, when they die and release their stored excrement, it may trigger an immune reponse, leaeding to the the unfortunate skin irritation.
Earth Is Weird: On Brain-eating Amoebas
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- Category: Earth Is Weird
- Published on Thursday, 16 August 2012 12:21
- Written by Chris
Naegleria fowleriIt's an amoeba.
It lives in warm water.
It's steadily moving north, thanks to climate change.
And it's going to kill us all.
"It proceeds at a terrifying pace," said William Pomputius, an infectious disease consultant with Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
"The other thing that's disconcerting to us is that there are very few survivors. Even in cases where they've been recognized early," Pomputius said. "This is a very, very virulent organism once it's in the brain."
While infections in humans are rare, when they do occur, they have a 98% fatality rate!
You may now return to your regularly scheduled quiet terror.
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biologyEarth Is Weird: On the Missing Magnetic Field of Mars
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- Category: Earth Is Weird
- Published on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 04:32
- Written by Chris
Magnetic field: not yours, Mars.We here on the little blue marble take our magnetic field for granted. Unless you are a migrating goose or you know what orienteering is, the last time you thought about it was in science class during that experiment with the iron fillings on the paper.
But not every planet gets to have a magnetic field like ours. Planets like Mars, for one. The reason the Earth gets our top-notch VIP field is the dynamic between our planet's core and the mantle above it. Mars, once upon a time, almost certainly had the same thing. But something royally eff'ed up the dynamo. One of the leading theories as to why is a series of perhaps 5 very large meteor strikes.
Ouch!The last one, the one that left the Utopia crater, would have been a Texas-sized meteor. The previous impacts would have weakened the magnetic field, and the ol' Texas haymaker would have finished it off. The heat resulting from these impacts disrupted the temperature differential that causes the magnetic field.
Confused? Read up, yo.
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