Stone age brain surgery — on a cow.
Many early societies had a rather unexplained thing for trepanation—the practice of cutting holes in the skull. The mysteries surrounding this practice are many. How did cultures, and we’re often talking early Stone Age cultures, that presumably had neither anesthetics nor antibiotics carve openings into someone’s skull, and have the patient survive? They did live. The pattern of bone growth shows several instances in which ancient skulls, with openings carved out from the size of a dime to the size of a silver dollar, or more, lived for years after the procedure. Even more mysterious is the why. For people whose remains are represented only by bones, stone tools, and at best a few bits of art work, figuring out why they felt it important to cut through someone’s scalp, down through that extremely blood rich skin, down through an average of 6-7mm of bone … just why? Was it done because of severe headaches? As a treatment for paleo-schizophrenia? Was it intended to be an opening to the voice of God or a torture to punish captives? We don’t know. We don’t even have much of a clue about what was done after that little cap of bone was removed. Did the flint blades go on, slicing through the thin meninges, carving into the dura matter, driving deeper and deeper into … eh, enough of that.
Anyway. This week, we do learn something new about these early craniotomies. We learned that in at least one instance, it was done to a cow.
The analysis of an almost complete cow cranium found in the Neolithic site of Champ-Durand (France) (3400-3000 BC) presenting a hole in the right frontal bone reveals that this cranium underwent cranial surgery using the same techniques as those used on human crania. If bone surgery on the cow cranium was performed in order to save the animal, Champ-Durant would provide the earliest evidence of veterinary surgical practice. Alternatively, the evidence of surgery on this cranium can also suggest that Neolithic people practiced on domestic animals in order to perfect the technique before applying it to humans.
If the operation was done as some kind of veterinary effort, just what was it intended to achieve? A cow was unlikely to be complaining of migraines or hearing voices. If it was done in order to affect some aspect of the animal’s behavior, does that mean that other early craniotomies might also represent something similar on people? The thought of Stone Age lobotomy seems particularly awful.
Independently of the reasons that led humans to carry out trepanations, one cannot but be amazed by prehistoric man’s knowledge and mastery of the techniques of cranial surgery. Indeed, the oldest crania with evidence of trepanation reveal the use of the same techniques as those used in historic times with the same degree of accuracy. Similar techniques are recorded all over the world. The bone was scraped or cut or drilled preventing any break of the inner table of the skull bone so as not to compromise the health and integrity of the brain.
If the cow skull represents practice, that would seem to also indicate that there was training. Perhaps from old shaman to apprentice, or perhaps there was something more akin to a ‘school’ for would-be brain surgeons at Champ-Durand. It’s another one of those instances where we get a glimpse of what was obviously a complex, fully-realized culture with its own traditions and practices that went back for centuries or millennia.
Okay, come on. Let’s read some science.
Medicine
Going after a horrific killer that can strike with amazing swiftness.
Some years ago, I had a friend going through her internship at a local hospital. I regularly picked her up and chatted with her on the drive home about her day spent stitching up knife wounds and dealing with the effects of domestic abuse. It was that sort of hospital. But one of the most godawful items she ever detailed to me had to do with a man who bumped his knee while installing a new stereo in his car. The next day, his knee was swollen and hot. A few hours after that, he was delirious. And within a couple of hours of when his anxious family brought him to the ER, he was dead.
Sepsis is always an emergency, but it’s hard to identify with any certainty. “There’s no gold standard test, no X-ray, no lab test, no biopsy, no anything,” says critical care physician and researcher Clifford Deutschman of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. …
“Sepsis is not a diagnosis. It’s a phenomenon,” says John Marshall, a hospital intensivist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and a member of the team that generated the first modern consensus criteria defining sepsis in the early 1990s.
Sepsis as a phenomenon had been recognized long before that. But millennia would pass before anyone began to understand what brought on the condition or how to treat it. With the advent of germ theory in the 19th and early 20th centuries, physicians realized that some type of infection almost always accompanied cases of sepsis. And by the middle of the 20th century, microbiologists and immunologists understood that many of the hallmarks of infectious diseases in general were caused not by the invading pathogen but by the body’s own immune response to it.
It’s only in the last decade that the cascade of events that result in sepsis has been anything close to well understood. It’s both an infection, and the response to the infection, running wild in a ever-worsening series. It doesn’t take an exotic disease or a drug-resistant organism. In fact, what it takes is a bad immune response to something that’s already been present again and again.
“If the body continually comes into contact with bacteria or a bacterial product, it can eventually stop responding to it,” Peña explains. “The body develops a type of immune amnesia.”
How the body moves from there to a full one suicidal assault, it something Peña is still working to solve.
Environment
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly growing larger.
Global annual plastic consumption has now reached over 320 million tonnes with more plastic produced in the last decade than ever before. A significant amount of the produced material serves an ephemeral purpose and is rapidly converted into waste. A small portion may be recycled or incinerated while the majority will either be discarded into landfill or littered into natural environments, including the world’s oceans. While the introduction of synthetic fibres in fishing and aquaculture gear represented an important technological advance specifically for its persistence in the marine environment, accidental and deliberate gear losses became a major source of ocean plastic pollution. Lost or discarded fishing nets known as ghostnets are of particular concern as they yield direct negative impacts on the economy and marine habitats worldwide.
There are a number of species being lost specifically because of ghostnets, and the indiscriminate use of large gillnets made from synthetic fiber. This includes the Vaquita, the small dolphin that lives in the Gulf of California. From an estimated 60,000 individuals a few decades ago, the population of Vaquita dropped to fewer than 600 by 2000, was down to 100 by 2014, and now is believed to number fewer than 20.
But what we’re losing in biolgical diversity, we’re making up for in accumulated mass of plastic.
Around 60% of the plastic produced is less dense than seawater. ... A portion of these buoyant plastics however, is transported offshore and enters oceanic gyres. A considerable accumulation zone for buoyant plastic was identified in the eastern part of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This area has been described as ‘a gyre within a gyre’ and commonly referred to as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ (GPGP). The relatively high concentrations of ocean plastic occurring in this region are mostly attributed to a connection to substantial ocean plastic sources in Asia through the Kuroshio Extension (KE) current system as well as intensified fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean.
Just think of it as the Great Pacific Plastic Gravemarker for many species.
Adjusting plant communities to meet climate change.
This week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has a particular focus on China and how it is addressing changes in the environment. On part of that is looking at how climate change is already affecting a sensitive region—the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau—and how it may be necessary to try to beat a human-induced change in climate with a human-induced change in plants.
Here we combined 32 y of observations and monitoring with a manipulative experiment of temperature and precipitation to explore the effects of changing climate on plant community structure and ecosystem function. First, long-term climate warming from 1983 to 2014, which occurred without systematic changes in precipitation, led to higher grass abundance and lower sedge abundance, but did not affect above ground [production]. ... Overall, our study demonstrates that shifting plant species composition in response to climate change may have stabilized primary production in this high-elevation ecosystem, but it also caused a shift from above ground to below ground productivity.
That China is in control of this region at all is one kind of tragedy. But the way climate change is likely to force a change on the region’s long traditions and lifestyle is another.
China’s role in climate change.
Another of this week’s papers looks at how China is contributing to climate change, and also how it’s beginning to work toward remediating the problem.
China accounted for 27.6% of the global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2013. Its policies on climate change and CO2 emission reduction are therefore key to achieving global emission-reduction targets. China’s emissions are closely related to population size and economic growth. China is the most populous country in the world, with 1.37 billion people, about 4.3 and 2.7 times greater than that of the United States and the European Union, respectively. China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has expanded at an average annual rate of 10.1% during the past 30 y and is ranked as second today, a large jump from its position at 13th in the early 1980s, although its GDP per capita is still relatively low among nations.
And like everyone else, what Chinese citizens want is improved life quality for themselves and their children. For thousands of years, the idea of “a better life” has been tied to the idea of “more stuff,” and for at least the last two hundred years, it’s also been tied to the idea of “more energy.” But if China continues to grow in both the accumulation of stuff and the use of energy, it’s going to be very difficult for it not to become ever more dominant in another category—more damage.
China’s vast land area (960 Mha) is similar to that of the United States (915 Mha) and 2.3 times that of the European Union (424 Mha), and spans a broad range of latitude (from 18 to 53°N) and climatic conditions to which diverse ecosystem types have evolved. As a result, most of the global vegetation types can be found in China (8, 9), ranging from tropical rain forests and evergreen broadleaf forests in the south to evergreen or deciduous coniferous forests in the north, from diverse temperate vegetation in the Great Eastern Plains (i.e., the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin, northern plains, and northeastern plains) to the cold grassland, meadow, and cushion vegetation in the Tibetan Plateau, and from the Mongolian steppe to the Gobi Desert in the west.
There’s no one great conclusion from this paper, but it discusses a broad array of topics. It also touches on the importance of those grasslands, which is something that came up again and again this week.
Grasses are the most prepared plants for a higher carbon world.
For years, I literally worked next door to someone whose job it was to spread the Good News of carbon dioxide. She created web sites, pamphlets, and infographics, all praising the wonders of our friend, CO2. But while “CO2 makes plants grow!” may be way up there in the ranks of odious misrepresentations of facts, there are certainly some plants that are more hungry for carbon—and more capable of holding it—than others.
Grasslands in warm and dry climates could grow faster as carbon dioxide levels rise, according to data from a long-term ecological field experiment in Minnesota. The finding, which runs counter to long-established ideas about how plants will respond to the greenhouse gas, suggests that grasslands could provide a buffer against climate change.
The secret lies in a group called “C4 plants.” These plants, just 3 percent of the world’s species of green plants, use a system that boosts internal CO2 levels before carrying out photosynthesis. This makes the process more effective. Because these plants already have this carbon dioxide concentration mechanism, it’s been assumed that higher levels wouldn’t provide much of a boost for the C4 plants. That turns out to not be the case.
Not only are these grassland plants quite capable of going even higher in their use of CO2, they’re already pre-evolved for dry, hot conditions. These C4 plants are like the mammals of the plant world, lying low alongside their dominant, and often larger, neighbors, waiting for that asteroid strike that gives them an opportunity. And human beings may be that asteroid.
Scientists had thought that the forests would be likely to grow faster when exposed to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But that's not what experiments have shown. When C3 plants are exposed to higher CO2 levels, their rate of growth increases for a period — but eventually the plants are hobbled by the limited availability of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
But the C4 plants also seemed capable of dragging more nitrogen out of their environment as CO2 levels went up. What plants are C4? Mostly grasses. Beans and wheat are C3 plants, along with all trees. Corn and amaranth are C4, along with grasses.
Poorer countries will take the first blows from global warming.
New tools are making better predictions about where the effects of climate change will be felt first and worst. Not surprisingly, many of these areas are in countries that will have the greatest problem meeting the challenge of a shifting and rising seas.
Nations such as Bangladesh and Egypt have long known that they will suffer more from climate change than will richer countries, but now researchers have devised a stark way to quantify the inequalities of future threats. …
A map of "equivalent impacts", revealed at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) this month in Vienna, shows that global temperatures would have to rise by a whopping 3 °C before most people in wealthy nations would feel departures from familiar climate conditions equal to those that residents of poorer nations will suffer under moderate warming.
Which means, unfortunately, that many Americans will continue to feel only small amounts of direct impact, even as they sneer at war, poverty, disease, and disaster in nations where the impact is already driving millions from their homes.
Biology
Shrimp stir the ocean.
Each year, nutrient rich currents rise from the deep, feeding an explosive growth of tiny shrimp-like organisms that in turn form the base of a food chain in some of the most productive areas of the ocean. That’s the story we’ve all been told a thousand times, often in David Attenborough’s pleasantly plumy tones.
Now, turn that on it’s head.
It has previously been argued that biologically generated turbulence is limited to the scale of the individual animals involved, which would make turbulence created by highly abundant centimetre-scale zooplankton such as krill irrelevant to ocean mixing. Their small size notwithstanding, zooplankton form dense aggregations tens of metres in vertical extent as they undergo diurnal vertical migration over hundreds of metres. … These observed large-scale mixing eddies are the result of flow in the wakes of the individual organisms coalescing to form a large-scale downward jet during upward swimming, even in the presence of a strong density stratification relative to typical values observed in the ocean. The results illustrate the potential for marine zooplankton to considerably alter the physical and biogeochemical structure of the water column, with potentially widespread effects owing to their high abundance in climatically important regions of the ocean.
In other words, the rising krill may be a huge factor in that upwelling of nutrients. Tiny as they are, their sheer numbers so stir the waters that they have a dramatic impact. It’s not that the rest of the food chain depends on the krill simply because they eat the krill. The krill, and similar organisms in other ecosystems, bring with them nutrients that feed other organisms, large and small.
Climate Science
Ice cores point to a long period of stability — if not for humans.
Ice cores taking from Arctic and Antarctic regions can help document the climate going back tens, or even hundreds of thousands of years. Those cores have given us a sense of just how often our planet has cycled from glacial (like the Ice Age) to interglacial (like now) over the last million years.
The climate of the last 500,000 years (500 kyr) was characterized by extremely strong 100-kyr cyclicity, as seen particularly in ice-core and marine-sediment records. …
Ice cores provide the most direct and highly resolved records of (especially) atmospheric parameters over these timescales. They record climate signals, as well as forcing factors of global significance such as greenhouse gases and of more regional significance such as atmospheric aerosol content. Until now, ice-core data have been available only for the past 420 kyr, with the longest record coming from Vostok in East Antarctica, supported by the 340-kyr record from Dome Fuji. These data indicated the similarities of the last four glacial terminations. They showed that glacials and interglacials had similar bounds in the measured properties over the last four cycles. Most tellingly, they showed the very close association between greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4) and climate (as recorded using the Antarctic temperature proxy, the deuterium/hydrogen ratio in ice ....
Looking back over that period, scientists found one shift in particular that starts out looking a lot like the shift that ended the most recent Ice Age.
The transition from glacial to interglacial conditions about 430,000 years ago (Termination V) resembles the transition into the present interglacial period in terms of the magnitude of change in temperatures and greenhouse gases, but there are significant differences in the patterns of change. The interglacial stage following Termination V was exceptionally long—28,000 years compared to, for example, the 12,000 years recorded so far in the present interglacial period. Given the similarities between this earlier warm period and today, our results may imply that without human intervention, a climate similar to the present one would extend well into the future.
If the past records provide any predictions, we should have been in for another ten thousand plus years of mild climate before we had to worry about the glaciers creeping southward again. However, since we’ve been messing with both the CO2 and CH4 levels, all bets are off.
Technology
US vs China in the fight to get rare earth elements.
Many of the technical wonders that are in our vehicles, homes, and pockets depend on elements that are neither common nor uniformly distributed. Materials such as cobalt, yttrium, and germanium are all in increasing demand. Which is leading to a global struggle over the supplies and sources of these elements.
Historically, resource conflicts have often centered on fuel minerals (particularly oil). Future resource conflicts may, however, focus more on competition for nonfuel minerals that enable emerging technologies. Whether it is rhenium in jet engines, indium in flat panel displays, or gallium in smart phones, obscure elements empower smarter, smaller, and faster technologies, and nations seek stable supplies of these and other nonfuel minerals for their industries. No nation has all of the resources it needs domestically. International trade may lead to international competition for these resources if supplies are deemed at risk or insufficient to satisfy growing demand, especially for minerals used in technologies important to economic development and national security. Here, we compare the net import reliance of China and the United States to inform mineral resource competition and foreign supply risk. Our analysis indicates that China relies on imports for over half of its consumption for 19 of 42 nonfuel minerals, compared with 24 for the United States—11 of which are common to both. It is for these 11 nonfuel minerals that competition between the United States and China may become the most contentious, especially for those with highly concentrated production that prove irreplaceable in pivotal emerging technologies.
That unequal distribution means that not every element is in contention. China imports most of its Selenium. The US finds this material at home. On the other hand, China has all it needs of Germanium, while the US has almost none. For bother countries, there are a group of elements that they need to obtain elsewhere—and elsewhere is often nations in Africa, Asia, or South America where the tussle to lock up mineral resources affects human rights, local economies, and even political stability.
Image
As usual, today’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Clip over to his site for a larger, easier to read version.