Isegoria

Jane is The Not-So-Legendary Chimera:

Imagine if you discovered one day that two of your three children were genetically not yours. Recriminations, marital troubles, perhaps a divorce, right? Now add a twist. What if you were these children’s mother? Suddenly the question becomes not “Who?” but rather “Huh?”

Yet that’s what happened to “Jane”. At the age of 52 when her children were full-grown, she and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers.

Jane, it turns out, is a human Chimera.

The Chimera is primarily known as a creature of Greek legend – a fire-breathing monster with parts of a goat and a lion with a serpent for a tail. In biology the term has come to refer to any organism that contains more than one set of genes. There are chimera African violets, where the core of the plant is genetically distinct from the outer layers. Animal chimeras, or mosaics, as they can also be called, don’t usually divide so neatly.

The most common form of human chimera is called a blood chimera. This happens when fraternal twins share some portion of the same placenta. Blood and blood-forming tissue is exchanged, and takes up residence in the bone marrow. Each twin is genetically separate except for their blood, which has two distinct sets of genes, and even two distinct blood types. Up to 8% of fraternal twins are blood chimeras, and as the incidence of fraternal twins in the general populace increases with the popularity of in vitro fertilization, the number of blood chimeras should rise proportionately.

What happened to Jane is a much rarer. Rather than a simple exchange of blood, she and her fraternal twin merged in utero, leaving only one fetus. The cells in her body are a mosaic of genes from both of the original embryos. The cheek cells from which the genetic testing was done were from one of those embryos, but at least some of the cells in her ovaries came from the other.

US and Canadian skiers get smart armour made from something called d3o:

The resulting material exhibits a material property called “strain rate sensitivity”. Under normal conditions the molecules within the material are weakly bound and can move past each with ease, making the material flexible. But the shock of sudden deformation causes the chemical bonds to strengthen and the moving molecules to lock, turning the material into a more solid, protective shield.

The ultimate goal is flexible ballistic protection.

Happy John Frum Day! From In John They Trust:

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men — clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms — appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded “drill sergeant,” the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

Chief Isaac Wan, a slight, bearded man in a blue suit and ceremonial sash, leads the uniformed men down to open ground in the middle of the village. Some 40 barefoot ‘G.I.’s’ suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo “rifles” on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters “USA,” painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

I’ve blogged on cargo cults before.

Cane toads, which were introduced to Australia 70 years ago to control insect pests in sugar can fields, have developed longer legs to enable them to invade more territory:

‘We find that toads with longer legs can not only move faster and are the first to arrive in new areas, but also that those at the front have longer legs than toads in older populations,’ Shine said in a report in the journal Nature.

The researchers studied toads leading the invasion about 60 km (37 miles) east of the northern city of Darwin. They discovered that the first toads to arrive in new areas had longer hind legs than those that came later.

The scientists believe the toads evolved longer legs to conquer new territory to get to better food supplies.

Near the city of Darwin? Hmm…

Much of what we “know” about Native Americans comes from after they were almost wiped out by European diseases. From Early Calif. was Native American killing field:

University of Utah anthropologist Jack Broughton concluded in a paper published this month that California wasn’t always a lush Eden before settlers arrived in the 1700s to find an astonishing abundance of wildlife.

Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to localized extinction and wildlife returned to ‘fabulous abundances’ only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s.

By the mid-1800s, geese and ducks “were so abundant you could kill them with a club or stick.”

In India, Women Work to Preserve The Craft of Lace:

India’s lacemaking tradition started as a way to help young women earn a living, when nuns from Europe began arriving in India as missionaries. Lace had long been a form of sustenance for women of the church and charity institutions: It was wholesome toil at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home. There were no costly materials involved — just thread, bobbins and needles. Moreover, making lace requires extremely hygienic conditions; dirt or dust is ruinous. So the occupation was thought to promote cleanliness, virtue and good health.

The nuns in India taught poor women — though only unmarried or widowed ones — to make lace and other fine embroideries that would be shipped overseas. Even as the popularity of lace declined throughout the 20th century, lacemaking continued to provide women with a livelihood in rural pockets of India.

This of course created an entrepreneurial opportunity: hire married women.

A World of Warcraft World opens with these stats:

There are more people playing World of Warcraft in the U.S. today (two million) than had indoor plumbing 100 years ago. There are more people with blogs today (31 million) than had internet connections ten years ago.