While we’re on the subject of bacteria, viruses, and other microscopic hitch-hikers, the other day I read a factoid that says that about 3 pounds of bodyweight of the average human being is made up of the assorted microscopic organisms that we carry around with us all the time. That includes the teeny little mites that live on your eyelashes like these:
as well as the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest, maintain your eyesight, help you breathe, and a bunch of other essential functions. This SEED Magazine article talks about an emerging philosophy among biologists that most large organisms like humans, are better understood as complex symbionts reliant on the benign and beneficial presence of smaller organisms evolved to co-exist with us in a way that is inseparable for any of the organisms involved.
Moving on to the next link: here’s a post at Mental Floss from September that itself links to a paper published by some researchers at Stanford University who have found that it is possible to make embryonic stem cells out of the fat cells removed in liposuction. Since the link to the paper only takes you to an abstract, the Mental Floss post is actually a better and more comprehensible explanation of what the researchers found. Apparently, while possible, it’s not exactly a piece of cake to accomplish, so this work is more proof-of-concept than “Stem Cells R Us”, but it’s a very exciting development.
And thirdly, on the subject of fat…archaeologists in Ireland have uncovered an ancient oak barrel in a peat bog that is about 3,000 years old and still contained the butter that was put in it all those centuries ago. They find ancient stuff buried in the peat bogs all the time, it seems, because the ancient denizens of The Emerald Isle knew that the conditions in the bogs would preserve things almost indefinitely. This particular cask was big enough that it probably represented the butter output of an entire village rather than just a single farm. The butter has been transformed over time into pure adipocere fat, so it’s no longer edible. Here’s a photo of the cask:
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