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== == | == Mautam and Rat Flood == | ||
Mautam (Mizo for "bamboo death") is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 - 50 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, which are 30% covered by wild bamboo forests, as well as Chin State in Myanmar, particularly Hakha, Thantlang, Falam, Paletwa, and Matupi Townships. its stages involves a rat boom, which is in turn creates a widespread famine in those areas. | Mautam (Mizo for "bamboo death") is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 - 50 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, which are 30% covered by wild bamboo forests, as well as Chin State in Myanmar, particularly Hakha, Thantlang, Falam, Paletwa, and Matupi Townships. its stages involves a rat boom, which is in turn creates a widespread famine in those areas. | ||
Revision as of 05:04, 14 April 2019
Things to use or delete. See Snippets.
Mautam and Rat Flood
Mautam (Mizo for "bamboo death") is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 - 50 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, which are 30% covered by wild bamboo forests, as well as Chin State in Myanmar, particularly Hakha, Thantlang, Falam, Paletwa, and Matupi Townships. its stages involves a rat boom, which is in turn creates a widespread famine in those areas.
During mautam, Melocanna baccifera, a species of bamboo, flowers at one time across a wide area. This event is followed invariably by a plague of black rats in what is called a rat flood. This occurs as the rats multiply in response to the temporary windfall of seeds, and leave the forests to forage on stored grain when the bamboo seeds are exhausted, which in turn causes devastating famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam
Loxa
Loxa is an insect genus in the large family of shield bugs. It occurs primarily in Central America and Mexico, but is also found in Texas, Florida and South America. While Loxa is a genus of the tribe Pentatomini, its species are similar in many respects to those in the Chlorocorini, specifically the genera: Chlorocoris Spinola, Chloropepla Stål, Mayrinia Horvath and Fecelia Stål. Some species of Loxa are minor crop pests, for example Loxa deducta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxa
See also:
Earless seals have retractable nipples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earless_seal
International Knockout Mouse Consortium
Cephalagogue
Obstetrical forceps (obsolete?).
https://www.google.com/search?q=cephalagogue
The computation power of living systems is maintained by decoherence-free internal quantum states
Conference paper (2005) by Abir Igamberdiev.
Abstract:
The internal quantum state (IQS) is a kind of a pilot-wave (in the Bohmian sense) attached to a macroscopic system and representing its potential field continuously reduced during its exhibition to the external world. This state is maintained as decoherence-free by applying error-correction commands to it and by screening from thermal interactions. Its effective temperature is kept down below the millikelvin range thus being screened even from the background microwave radiation. The quantum Zeno effect enables coherent superpositions and entanglement to persist for macroscopic time intervals. The IQS thus avoids the Boltzmann statistics and approaches a state when the Bose-Einstein statistics is applicable. The IQS of a living system can be viewed as a subtle individual subatomic structure reduced to a complex pattern of vibrating strings and exhibiting itself via a visible classical body-like system. Light quanta inside IQS are trapped like matter is trapped by a black hole in space. The IQS can be considered as a unified field meeting place of gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces. The phenomenon of emission of weak coherent light is an indirect evidence of coherent long-living internal quantum states in living systems. This emission is a kind of a similar phenomenon as the Hawking's radiation from black holes and it may serve for unification of the processes taking place in different subsystems of a biological system (synchronization of individual coherent states within the whole system). The external exhibition of the IQS can be expressed as a mapping from complex to real numbers where the certain rules are generated, e.g. the power law and other recursive formulae. In the simplest case when two superposed states are reduced, it has a limit of price of action equal to the Planck's constant. The reduction is non-computable and resembles the act of volition. The result is Gödel number appearing above superposed states and memorizing the act of reduction. It is used by living system as an information unit in emerging computation process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Igamberdiev
The Most Basal Whale
Pakicetus is an extinct genus of amphibious cetacean of the family Pakicetidae, which was endemic to Pakistan during the Eocene.[1] The vast majority of paleontologists regard it as the most basal whale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakicetus
Elysia chlorotica
Elysia chlorotica (common name the eastern emerald elysia) is a small-to-medium-sized species of green sea slug, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusc. This sea slug superficially resembles a nudibranch, yet it does not belong to that clade of gastropods. Instead it is a member of the clade Sacoglossa, the sap-sucking sea slugs. Some members of this group use chloroplasts from the algae they eat, a phenomenon known as kleptoplasty. Elysia chlorotica is one of the "solar-powered sea slugs", utilizing solar energy via chloroplasts from its algal food. It lives in a subcellular endosymbiotic relationship with chloroplasts of the marine heterokont alga Vaucheria litorea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysia_chlorotica
Radioactive gold jewelry
At some time during the 1930s and 1940s, gold brachytherapy seeds that previously contained radon-222 were melted down by an unknown individual or individuals. Presumably this occurred somewhere in upstate New York. The gold, contaminated with the long-lived decay products of radon (Pb-210, Bi-210 and Po-210), was then mixed with uncontaminated gold and used to manufacture jewelry. Over the years, the wearing of this jewelry, the rings in particular, resulted in mild to severe skin damage. In the 1960s, dermatologists recognized that the damage seemed to be related to the jewelry and had the latter analyzed by health officials who determined that the jewelry was indeed radioactive. Although the issue was addressed in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1967 (JAMA 205(8):595-596), it seems that the matter of radioactive gold jewelry wasn't taken seriously until the 1980s.
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/hpposters/goldjewelry.htm
Spondylus
Spondylus is a genus of bivalve molluscs, the only genus in the family Spondylidae. They are known in English as spiny oysters (though they are not, in fact, oysters).
They look cool: spiked bivalves.
Stichaster striatus
Stichaster striatus, the common light striated star, is a species of starfish in the family Stichasteridae, found in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It was first described by the German zoologists Johannes Peter Müller and Franz Hermann Troschel in 1840.
It has been found that an aqueous extract of S. striatus, when fed to rats with a genetic disposition to consume alcohol to excess, reduced their voluntary intake of alcohol.[4] This line of research was inspired by an oral tradition that Jesuit property-owners in South America in the 17th and 18th century fed "starfish soup" to their workers to encourage sobriety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichaster_striatus
Rectal thermometer blues
"Once had a father abscond from the ER with his feverish toddler because he wasn’t gonna let us “turn him faggot” by taking a rectal temperature."
Birth Canal
It is not polite to shout “birth canal!” in a crowded delivery room.
Myxococcus xanthus
Myxococcus xanthus is a gram-negative, rod-shaped species of myxobacteria that exhibits various forms of self-organizing behavior as a response to environmental cues. Under normal conditions with abundant food, it exists as a predatory, saprophytic single-species biofilm called a swarm. Under starvation conditions, it undergoes a multicellular development cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxococcus_xanthus
Palaeocastor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeocastor
Bacteriophage iron spike
[R]esearchers modified the phage's spike genes so that they only produced the portion of the protein tip that was resistant to being viewed. When they crystallized this smaller protein fragment, the x-rays were finally able to resolve its structure, and from this the team had the very first picture of the tip of the spike: a single iron atom held in place by six amino acids, forming a sharp needlelike tip—perfectly suited for piercing the outer membranes of bacteria. The team reports its findings this month in Structure.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/02/bacteria-killing-viruses-wield-iron-spike