I not uncommonly fall asleep on the love seat in the front room at bedtime, especially if the wood stove is glowing and radiating sleepiness into the darkness. As usual, last night I woke up after an hour or so, and proceeded to head off to bed, after undressing. I was down to my Carhartt work pants, and do not remember doing anything particularly unusual, movement-wise. And at once my left leg locked in the most violent and unrelenting cramp I have ever had. …
There are many reasons now to err on the side of more precaution than less. Masks will bother you; they won’t harm you. And they might save your life.
As a biologist, I’ve always been interested in epidemiology of disease, and as a zoologist, particular those that originate in wild or domestic animals. And so there has been quite a bit to keep up with regarding the zoonoses of the past few decades. And so the Wuhan Coronavirus is something I’m following daily, more to see how the medical staff inside the ambulance are dealing with the patient than to chase the ambulance. This is a study, more than ever, of how national …
This advice was innocent enough, in a smarmy and ominously-prescient sort of way when the “the graduate” got this insider tip so many decades ago. It was certainly the way the world of profit and growth were going, even then, on our way to a shrink-wrapped future. And woe to us, the tsunami of plastic has continued unabated ever since. From where you sit to read this, how many seconds does it take for you to find five objects made partly or entirely of …
Below are some annotated bits from an article in Wired that describe the early successes in the battle to find weapons against the increasingly numerous and increasingly virulent microbes that are resistant to all known antibiotics. We worry about the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or Dr Strangeloves in power around the world, when all along, if the human population suffers the Malthusian reduction many fear, it will most likely come from invaders far too small to see. HOW DIRT COULD …