All That We Cannot See

     No, that title is not related to the rather famous novel about the German lock tinkerer, but close.  I was going back over a few notes and books, on fungi and mushrooms in particular, and out popped this piece by Sarah Richardson, PhD on bacteria.  Somehow, bacteria --sort of like sharks-- have gotten a bad rap.  We wash our hands of them, we dread the diseases they can cause, and we know that they can multiply faster than we can imagine.  Only Dr. Richardson says that we need to look at bacteria in a different way because, in her words, "bacteria run this planet."  Here are a few of her highlights:  --Bacteria let us breathe: One bacterial genus called Prochlorococcus lives in seawater and is responsible for at least half of our oxygen. --Bacteria feed us: Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen, which is great because we need nitrogen in many molecules in our bodies.  But atmospheric nitrogen is inert. so what we breathe in we breathe right back out unabsorbed.  Only bacteria can convert inert nitrogen to bioreactive nitrogen, which they feed to plants (which we eat for nitrogen).  Without bacteria, the only sources of edible nitrogen would be lightning strikes and rock erosion. --Bacteria feed us more: Fermentation is the process of feeding microbes and harvesting their...product.  Alcohol might be the oldest example...Bacterial fermentation gives us coffee, chocolate, vinegar, cheese, salami, olives, MSG, hot sauce, and more. --Bacteria heal us: Antibiotics, dewormers, pesticides, and antifungals are molecular tricks borrowed from bacteria to fight pests and pathogens. --Bacteria clean up after us: Bacteria break down all abandoned carbon to building blocks for return to the planetary cycle.  Without bacteria, we would be hip-deep in dead stuff.  --Bacteria can do even more: The list of bacterial skills above is nowhere near exhaustive, and when it comes to chemistry, they have us licked.  Humans use unsustainable petroleum to make almost every chemical we use in daily life, but bacteria make the same molecules from the crud in compost heaps.  There are bacteria that produce hydrazine --rocket fuel-- from wastewater.  Some species make magnetic material more perfectly formed than any human has ever managed...Bacteria are neither simple machines nor ancient, inscrutable life-forms.  They're as young as we are, and many are ready to strike a bargain as any other organism we've met.*

     This was taken as an excerpt from the book, How to Influence Friends and Other Fungi, a book celebrating 21 years of hosting "nerd nights" in clubs around the world.  If that title seems a bit odd, read how the book opens, asking the reader why anyone would bother to write a book about such a milestone, and who would want to read about such a thing.  Here's how the book answers: ...because you're smart.  We know that.  You're insatiably curious.  We know that, too.  You like to laugh and maybe even prefer to drink while you learn.  We definitely know that.  And most important, we know you're underserved when it comes to heavy, thick books that cater to your delightful wit and natural curiosity about the world.  Though it may be easy to find information about animal sex in one place, birdsong in another, the first vaccine in yet another, and the science of the hangover in a fourth, it's much more difficult to find in-depth, quirky content about multiple scientific subjects in one spot.  Therefore, we think this book will fill that void of underservedness.  With plenty of quirkiness and silliness along the way.  And so the book begins, even adding this segment on bodily fluids: I tried to help after the spit massacre, but there were no salivas.  That's just the sort of book it is...

     So jump to another book that will likely sit unread by most: Stowaway.  It's about rats.   But here's the thing, rats enjoy being tickled, even emitting laughter (although at frequencies we cannot hear), and rats are often more altruistic than humans, often skipping food treats if they see a fellow rat needing help (yes, this has been studied extensively).  Rats trained to detect buried mines can cover a football field in 20 minutes (this would take a human with a mine detector some four days); and rats can detect tuberculosis in humans with an accuracy about 40% higher than molecular machines, ones which take 2 hours to test a single sample (a rat can "check around 100 samples in 20 minutes," wrote the author).  Accepted as a method by many hospitals in Tanzania since 2007, rats have already screened over 500,000 TB samples (they scored 100% on batches already tested, and picked out an additional 13 the machines had missed).  Rats are now being trained to sniff out illegally poached goods in shipping containers, as well as work as rescue workers (they can penetrate smaller cracks than trained dogs in searching for survivors of bombed cities with collapsed buildings).  And yet, wrote author Joe Shute: According to the latest figures available at the time of writing, in 2022,  2.76 million scientific procedures were carried out on living animals, 1.51 million of which were deemed "experimental procedures" and 12 percent of which involved rats.  This figure marks the lowest number of procedures carried out in a single year since 2002.  All of which means that many more "experimental procedures" were carried out in previous years (as an added note, that rat "number" used for experiments last year works out to be 180,000 rats).  As author Shute wrote, it turns out they prefer being above ground (and not in sewers), reach a stable population at a certain point since they cluster in groups and fiercely "defend" their area (in other words, they won't overrun the world), and have far lower population numbers than we believe.   Add to all of this the words of a study by David Channon PhD: ...that whatever weapon we have deployed in our arsenal, rats have always remained one step ahead.  When we first used acute poisons such as arsenic, the neophobic rats quickly developed avoidance behavior.  When we countered that with chronic anticoagulants to slowly poison them, they developed a stronger tolerance by becoming resistant to the chemicals and also helped each other avoid suspicious substances through both the smell of feces of other rats and even cues passed on in their mother's milk.  The book also added that rats, relative to their size, have a bite 20x stronger than that of a human, and can bite up to 6x each second...yikes!

     But I wasn't done yet.  As I perused the book Is That A Fact,  I came across this from the author/editor on what people asked when they wanted an answer: A professor of radiology wondered why noiseless flatulence ("silent but deadly") is so much more malodorous than its noisier counterpart.  And the answer is...I don't know.  Okay, that was the author pointing out just one of the 1000+ sometimes-odd questions he's had to answer.  But here's his serious side on just one item, "something as simple as honey."  Everyone knows that basically it is composed of sugar and water.  But "sugar" is a general term for a variety of simple carbohydrates, the most familiar of which are sucrose, glucose, and fructose.  But these are not the only sugars found in honey -- not by a long shot.  There's a long list of others that includes raffinose, gentiobiose, maltose, maltulose, kojibiose, nigerose, and turanose.  Then there are the proteins, amino acids, and various enzymes that include invertase, which converts sucrose to glucose and fructose, and amylase, which breaks starch down into smaller units.  There's also glucose oxidate, which  converts glucose to glucosnolactone, which in turn yields glycolic acid and hydrogen peroxide.  Catalase breaks down the peroxide formed by glucose oxidase to water and oxygen.  And there was more, including flavonoids and organic acids and vitamins, but there's only so much chemistry I can read before it becomes well, chemistry (and still tough to decipher, even all these decades later).  To the point...that was just a breakdown of honey.

      And then there was this interesting tidbit from the book, Nuts and Bolts by structural engineer Roma Agrawal: Early phones had one lens with one focal point: that is, the distance at which a photographed object would be very sharp...recently cameras with auto focus were introduced, where tiny little mechanisms physically moved the lens back and forth a bit, to increase the range of focus. Most recently, we are seeing phones that have two or even three lenses.  At one extreme, there's a lens that has a very long focal length for photographing distant objects.  At the other is a short focal length that can take wide shots, as well as one that takes something in the middle.  The sensors in our phones that detect the light and turn it into electrical signals, which are then converted into images, are far smaller than those in digital cameras, to keep down the weight and thickness of our phones.  A new opportunity to improve these small phone cameras comes with the use or periscope focus, where a prism or angled piece of glass is used to turn the light from the camera lens by ninety degrees, then send the beam along the back of the phone through a number of lenses that can be adjusted.  Already, she adds, lenses the size of the tip of a pencil (2 mm) are allowing some blind patients to see, an electronic chip picking up the signal and sending the "image" to the brain.  And as if to mark this rapid change, Costco stopped carry SLR (single lens reflex) digital cameras nearly 5 years ago (don't even ask what to do with your Kodak "film" cameras)...

     Now, memory jog.  An earlier post mentioned ice cores from Greenland, cores which showed atmospheric gases and snow levels from millions of years ago.  It proved an insight into a history we could only previously guess at.  Then came this from Smithsonian, that of scientists venturing into lava caves so recent that they were still cooling down.  And what they discovered was also something we could only guess at...entirely new minerals and elements being created.  Here's part of what the article mentioned: ...the researchers found that different micro-organisms had flourished in different parts of the same cave.  “The first data indicate that environmental bacteria, mostly those associated with soil, begin the colonization,” says Martina Cappelletti of the University of Bologna, a microbiologist.  “They are probably initially transported inside the cave through air currents.”  These micro-organisms can thrive because they are able to subsist on rocks—that is, to derive energy from oxidizing inorganic materials.  Over time, as the caves cooled, the diversity of microbes inside the caves increased.  The findings suggest that such life-forms, which would not require water or organic matter to survive, should have the best chance to establish a foothold in extreme environments—whether in the distant past or on other planets.  And suddenly, we're back to bacteria...*

     So the other day I was binging up this mishmash of information to a friend, suggesting that she take a peek at book from over 20 years ago on the possibility of our universe being a hologram, a theory brought up and written by Michael Talbot.  As a quick refresher (and of course, pending my recalling the contents correctly), he explained how a hologram is made with two lasers "shooting" an image into a piece of glass.  Move one or both lasers a bit, shoot another image, and both 3-D images will be implanted into the glass...and you can do this an infinite number of times from an infinite number of angles.  But here's what struck me: shatter that glass into a hundred pieces and each shard will contain every one of those hundreds or thousands of images.  The smallest splinter of glass will contain the same number of images as the largest piece.  He then goes on to postulate that perhaps our brains' neurons work in much the same manner, holding far more information that our two-dimensional theory to date.  And then, he moves on to speculate our universe might also be a hologram, one far greater than any multiverse, and one holding an infinite amount of information.  

     Why bring any of this up (again)?   With the new year starting, it is easy to forget just how fortunate we are to be surrounded by such mystery, even as we uncover more and more almost daily.  We live in a wonderous place, nestled on a rather tiny orb that somehow is unique in this part of space...but that doesn't mean that we are alone, or have figured everything out.  This became evident as I began to dust the guest bathroom (well, just a toilet & a sink, one of those small rooms you rarely visit until a "guest" is actually coming); I noticed a small black speck (about the size of the point of a pen) under the window sill.  But when I touched it, it opened up like a flower and scampered away.  It was likely the tiniest spider I've ever seen.  And I had to wonder, how could this super-mimi package have the presence of life, it's tiny legs folding up perfectly, it's brain on patient yet high alert, it will to survive and live as strong as any of us.  

     What awaits for us out there, in here, everywhere, is humbling and we should be honored that we remain alive to enjoy it...and yet the big questions of why we continue to fight, why we continue to want to dominate, why we continue to seemingly ignore what really matters, remain questions as old as time.  So with the new year about to begin, may we glance back at the past but concentrate more on looking forward.  As John Lennon asked in his song, "...what have you done?  Another year over, a new one just begun."  For Arthur C. Clarke, the new year's solution was simple, his story of the arrival of a powerful but benevolent alien race simply having everyone "feel" what they'd done, or were doing.  If they'd hurt animals or others, they felt that pain; if they caused hunger or addiction, they felt that as well.  They took over communications and announced that they would do all the things humanity had failed to accomplish...end hunger, end poverty, end war.  It was, at least the message I gathered, an effort to bring about Peace on Earth.  And so what was the result?  As with the year ahead and so much of life, it remains yet another mystery (at least until you read the book).  As the Stoic philosopher Seneca said: The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future.  We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.  Andiamo!

*An interesting side story about the possibility of bacteria crossing the blood/brain barrier came from Quanta; but for those you a bit more daring, there's the story from National Geographic about the surge of flesh-eating bacteria in Florida...ahh, an explanation at last!

--On a totally unrelated note, might I recommend the holiday feel-goos movie now playing on Amazon Prime: This Is Christmas.  It's a movie about seeking connection; picture that silence in an elevator, or in a neighborhood, or in this case, a commuter train.  All in all, a nice break from whatever anxiety you may be feeling over this holiday period...oh and by the way, Happy Holidays to all!