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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| This Inverse piece is a couple of years old, but that's not the problem. Staying Up All Night Rewires Our Brains — This Could Be Key To Solving Mental Health Conditions  What happens in the brains of mice when they stay up all night could help us better understand mood and other psychological conditions. The problem, or one of the problems anyway, at least in my view, is that the headline could easily be interpreted as "Stay up all night to fix your mental health problem!" But we're all too smart to believe that. Right? Everyone remembers their first all-nighter. You know... I really don't. I know I pulled a few in college, just like many college students. I even did some at work, until I got too old for that shit (all-nighters, not work). I just have no recollection of when the first one happened. I also regularly did what we called "tweeters," where you stay up studying until the sky just began to lighten and the birds started tweeting. What’s probably more memorable, though, is the slap-happy, zombie-like mode the next day brings. The best thing about all-nighters to me, back then, was finally being able to collapse into bed and get some decent sleep. Scientists have long thought that there is likely a neurological reason for this sensation, and one group of researchers thinks they might have cracked it. Um, how could there not be a neurological reason for the sensation? Also note the more restrained language here: "one group," "thinks," "might have." A study published last week in the journal Neuron tracked what happened in the brains of mice when they stayed up all night. Their results, surprisingly, may even help us develop a better way to treat mood and other psychological conditions. "Last week," as I noted, means about two years ago. The researchers found that one all-nighter roughly had the same effects on the brain as taking the anesthetic ketamine. "So I can just pop some ketamine instead?" This isn’t an endorsement of acute sleep deprivation. “I definitely don't want the takeaway from the story to be, ‘Let's not sleep tonight,’” Kozorovitskiy says. So she probably didn't write the headline. Insufficient sleep brings risk for myriad conditions and events, such as heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke, way up. Worse, it can turn you into a grumpy asshole. Going a night without shut-eye isn’t the latest craze that will cure your depression, but rather, this insight could shake up our approach to targeting different areas in the brain when developing antidepressant medications. So, you know, just to be clear, this isn't a "something you can do about it" article, but a "look what scientists are working on now" article. There's a lot more at the link, delving into some of the science behind it. I don't need to share most of that; it's there if you're interested. I just have one more quote to highlight: The secret might lie in the neurotransmitter dopamine. Known commonly as the reward hormone, dopamine abounds when we eat and have sex. At the same time? Kinky! |
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