HUMAN. NATURE.

The blogger is unwell. But ever dutiful, will post at least this: Mice dream. And they’re nice dreams.

Mitzi at this moment is crashed with her face resting against the clear wall of the condo. And she’s eating like a maniac. Her tiny jaws breaking down something delicious — a leaf of spinach? A nugget of granola? A salted cashew? A blueberry?

These are the only dreams I ever see my mouse dreaming. So I’m going to hope that her life is sufficiently anxiety free that she only dreams about good things.

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Nine out of ten saints prefer white horses

No only is there no free lunch, but there is also a downside to absolutely every beautiful thing you can think of. And I’m here to discover it. The latest: Why is sucks to be a beautiful, white horse.

There’s an aura of romance that surrounds white horses. They show up in fairy tales, under great princes and princesses, and in that documentary that runs on PBS every couple of days. Presumably, we revere them because they’re rare. (Don’t get me started on diamonds.) There’s nothing else special about them — they don’t have wings, or breath fire.

Well, there is apparently one thing special about them: Fewer flies.

Flies are more than a bother to wild animals. They can carry infection to open wounds, and lay their eggs in those wounds. Some species lay eggs whose contents find their way under an animal’s skin and wander around eating horse tartar before making a messy exit as adults. Flies suck.

And according to a new study, flies don’t care for white horses. Actually, they have no aversion to white horses, they just find dark ones easier to… find. Dark fur somehow polarizes sunlight, and that reflected light is a beacon for horseflies, sort of a flashing DINER sign. A brown cloth, minus the polarizing effect of fur, proved unappealing.

So white horses don’t flash like DINER signs. What’s the downside?

They get skin cancer, just like pale-skinned people. And while they’re invisible to flies, they are WAY, TOTALLY VISIBLE to larger predators. With two-color vision, your average wolf/lion/etc. sees white JUST FINE. White horses are more likely to get “predated.” Which means ated.

Perhaps predators have also learned that white meat is lower in maggots.

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I remember kvetching to my Dad that a bird I had just seen wasn’t in the Peterson’s guide. I had flipped through the whole flipping thing four times,and my bird was definitely not in there. “Well, do all humans look alike?” he asked. “Neither do all chickadees or cardinals.”

WHAT? How absurd! What claptrap!

But one of Nature’s strengths lies in variety. Every roll of the genetic dice, every generation, presents an opportunity for Nature to toss in a few mutations that might improve an animal or plant slightly. It doesn’t always go well, as with the double-headed snakes and the six legged frogs. And sometimes the alterations are harmless but also helpless. Then once in a blue moon a cardinal is born with genes for an even more scarlet hue. The males are so blinding that the females have eyes for no other. Jackpot!

Another source of the endless diversity is the environment. Even the cardinal with the awesome-red genes may mature as a dim and dingy fellow if his environment lacks sufficient carotenes. Birds have to eat yellow, orange, or red foods to get those colors into their feathers. Dull environment = dull bird. Or perhaps the cardinal finds plenty of dandelions and berries to eat, but is riddled with bird lice, and he looks musty anyway.

And of course a young bird can have completely different plumage from a mature one.

So yeah, birds have no end of reasons to look different from each other.  Just like us.

The reason this is on my mind is that I found an enigmatic track in the snow this weekend. It was fresh, with tiny crumbles of icy snow still perched where they fell as the animal lifted its foot away. It was the size of a muffin, and nearly as round. That should rule out canids — dogs, coyotes and wolves are supposed to have feet that are longer than they are wide.

Felid tracks are rounder, sometimes wider than long. But my tracks also had claw marks. Bobcats are too small and should be keeping their claws sheathed; lynx ought to have furry, indistinct paw prints; and cougars have a trilobate heel pad — the rear pad has three lumps. My tracks had a neatly bilobate heel.

Dogs do have bilobate heel pads — but the notch between the lobes is wide. The lobes on my tracks met like the two bumps on the top of a Valentine’s Day heart. And again, dog paws are supposed to be longer than wide.

Which takes me back to the birds. My vet is coming on Thursday, and I’ll try to remember to ask her if some breeds of dog have tighter lobes and fatter paws.

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Here, Skeeter-Skeeter!

A largely French team conducted an experiment in Burkina Faso to see if tippling makes you more attractive to mosquitoes. They gave some subjects water and others beer. They counted the insects who flocked to each.

(Why beer, French team? Why not wine? Well, I presume beer is more commonly drunk in the tropics than is wine. Why do I presume this? Because wine tends to feel kind of wimpy on the palate in hot weather. Beer holds up, and it’s generally kept cold. I digress. Maybe. It could be that if people in the tropics all drank wine, instead of beer, mosquitoes would avoid them in droves and malaria would be a thing of the past. Maybe this was a wine-industry-sponsored study… I digress.)

Mosquitoes love beer, apparently. Or at least the components of beer that waft from the breath and skin of someone who has ingested beer.

The reason for such studies is that mosquitoes are known to discriminate between potential victims. Pregnant women, for instance, are twice as attractive as others. Mosquitoes sniff out a wealth of information based on body odor when choosing their target. If science can find a way to fool mosquito noses, or alter human body odor, millions of lives could be saved.

For now, to minimize your risk, don’t get pregnant in the tropics, and don’t drink beer in the tropics, and definitely don’t drink beer while pregnant in the tropics.

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"ORPHANS" Thomas Kennington

We kind of know this intuitively: Children from “bad” homes are more likely to go off the rails. But is their self-destructive behavior something they learn — nurture? Or is it something about the way their brains develop — nature?

It’s impolite to collect dysfunctional families and study them as they mess up their kids. So to better understand where self-destructive behavior comes from, scientists use rats.

One of the biases this introduces is that the headlines are about mothers. Rat fathers are not included in such experiments. Presumably, once we translate the results to humans, either parent can mess up a kid. Or rescue her.

So in a rat, is it nurture, or nature that steers a young rat toward trouble?

The experiment measured specific “maternal behaviors” of mommy rats to determine which were good or bad mothers. Researchers monitored the cleanliness of the nest, the total time Mom spent grooming her pups, and how quickly she would retrieve one that wandered away (or was moved by meddling humans).

And… it’s nature. Pups who spent less time with their mothers matured into little drunks, hitting the alcohol bottle as well as the water bottle.

This isn’t because the young rats “learned” to party. Rather, I would guess, the stress of a pup’s early days informed the growing brain that life is hard and gathering calories is urgent.

Because alcohol and other addictive drugs hijack the system that drives us all to hunt for food, these urgent seekers are easily led astray.

It bears repeating: In humans, parenting is a two-party deal, although offspring are biologically attached to their mother by the need to nurse. Furthermore, there are a million ways to become an addict, and people with perfectly attentive parents manage it all the time.

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If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder, now you have even more to be sad about. You’re gonna die of a heart attack.

Of course I exaggerate. In reality you merely stand a better chance of dying of a heart attack. That’s the finding of a large study of SAD and health problems.

SAD is like depression, but with two key differences. Instead of eating less, as is common with depression, people with SAD simply cannot get enough pasta down our gullets. And we’re not hopeless, we’re just sleeeeeeeeeeeeepy. I’m yawning just thinking about November.

So it’s this biological phenomenon that overtakes some people the way sluggishness overtakes animals like chipmunks and skunks in winter. We don’t hibernate, exactly. We just slow down a little, saving our calories and waiting for food to spring again from the soil.

Problem is that for the modern human food is everpresent. It has no seasonality. We with SAD are able to both save calories by moving less, and add calories to the bank by eating more. This would be great if we were chipmunks and skunks.

But in a human, according to this study, seasonal sluggishness travels hand in hand with calorie-related risks. People with SAD also proved to have higher waist-to-hip ratios, which is generally a BIG FAT DANGER SIGNAL for your heart. They also have higher triglycerides and Body Mass Indices. Yow. Men had higher cholesterol; women smoked more and exercised less.

This does not add up to a rosy prognosis. If the cost of a “happy light” has been off-putting to you, maybe you should weigh it against the cost of kacking.

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To rotate your tires, you call a garage. To rotate your stock, you call a stockboy. To rotate your planet, you call The International Earth Rotation Service. Talk about the division of labor. Though as careers go, I think stockboy and mechanic probably engender a whole lot less job stress than “Earth rotator.” That’s a heavy responsibility.

I was reminded of the fabulous International Earth Rotation Service by the Chilean earthquake. NASA thinks the Earth’s crust shifted with such force that it jiggled the whole planet, ringing it like a bell. NASA predicts the quake will shorten Earth’s days by a millionth of a second. The Indonesian quake of 2005 was estimated to cost us another 2 milliseconds, and alter the location of the North Pole by centimeters.

Picture your grade-school gyroscope just twirling away on its axis, then picture tapping it ever so lightly with your finger. Wobbbbbble!

The same thing happens to the planet. But it happens all day, every day, in a series of tiny taps and tugs. The Moon pulls a massive amount of water hither and yon, speeding and slowing the rotation. A passing planet adds its gravitational pull. In the Earth’s own core, molten iron and rock shift as they cool.

So Earth’s rotation is anything but reliable. But the IERS, now renamed with a couple added words, does its best to add and subtract all these forces. Astronomers are particularly interested in this service.

As extraordinary as their mission is, IERS has one of the plainest logos and websites on Planet Earth and probably any other planet. I’ve always thought their mascot should something along the lines of Michael Jordan spinning a basketball. And under the logo, the motto: “All the nutation that’s fit to print.”

Nutation: The wobbling of an axis. A spinning figure skater will generally nutate prior to collapsing.

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What a fabulous word. It has survived intact from ancient Greek speakers, for whom it was apparently an exercise in onomatopoeia. You can almost guess what it means just from saying it. Say it low and slow. Or listen for it as the lunch hour approaches.

Everybody experiences borborigmus. It’s most common in the stomach or at the beginning of the small intestine. It’s the noise made by a mixture of fluid and digestive gas when the gut constricts to squeeze things on down the line. BORRRR… BORRRR… IG…  MUSSSSSS. If it happens more than once, then you have borborigmi — many borborigs.

Borborigmus is often the result of an empty stomach or upper intestine. But a high fiber diet can also feed the bacteria that produce gas. And food intolerances can also bring on the growls, which then serve as a warning, of sorts.

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Considering how closely the lives of our ancestors were tied up with the lives of animals, the ancestors got some things shockingly wrong. Like, mice are born from a mixture of grain and dirty cloth. And a dog with a dry nose is sick.

This subject arose, as it does a dozen times a day, when Emma poked me with her wet, cold nose. Why, oh, why, is Emma’s nose always wet and cold? The startled reaction it elicits is so reliable that she seeks out human skin whenever she wants attention. Kuchen, the other household canid, does not have a wet nose. He does not poke, because it draws no response.

So, one myth disposed of: Dry nose is not a problem.

This morning I prepared to do some research on Emma’s rhinarium to see exactly where that moisture might come from. As she slept I approached with a tissue, prepared to dry her pink sponge. But it wasn’t wet.

Second myth dispensed with: Even a wet-nosed dog’s rhinarium isn’t wet all the time.

But when she woke to find me prodding her poker, she licked her dry nose. It was like watching a flash flood spread across parched ground. Moisture scraped from her tongue sluiced through the tiny canyons that carve her schnozz into polygons. Soon the whole thing was wet, at least in the canyons. It still felt dry to the touch. But a few more licks produced the sheen I am accustomed to.

So a dog can moisten her nose for specific purposes. What would those be?

The nose is a dog’s front-line sensory organ, a huge data filter. I find hints in the research that a wet noise might actually capture sniff-worthy molecules which would then drain down into the nostrils for thorough analysis. So Emma might lick her nose as a means of sharpening her sense of smell.

But the wet nose is also a compass. When you lick your finger and hold it up to gauge the direction of the wind, you’re exploiting the cool sensation of evaporation. A wet nose is a built-in weathervane. If you’re in the habit of sniffing out your food, it’s nice to know which direction a foody smell is coming from.

And I find that a dog’s rhinarium does, in fact, sweat. Even without licking, a dog can acquire a wet nose through sweat pores. Dogs don’t have many of these, but they do have them on the paws and rhinarium.

I am going to use that word as many times as possible. I never knew of its existence before this day.

And they may have even a third way to wet the nose. Glands inside the nose keep the front of the nostrils wet. And I imagine capillary action could draw that moisture up and around the rhinarium, through those tiny canals.

The coldness of the nose is half illusion. Yes, the dog’s nose is cooled by the evaporation of all that moisture. But so is your arm, where the sweat/saliva/mucous is now evaporating. And a dry nose feels just as warm as the rest of a dog, in my experience.

Quite an edifying morning for me. My remaining query is whether Kuchen wets his nose when he’s out and about, doing houndy stuff. Stay tuned.

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How do you make people more generous with their cash? Less tight-fisted and more open-handed? You have to aim very carefully, but it can be done.

Yesterday I wrote about why we so much prefer a bird in the hand to a bird in the bush. The bird in the hand represents labor we’ve already invested. The same goes for a dollar in the hand.

Now research has shown which part of the brain is responsible for this primal math. The amygdalae, a pair of almond-shaped nuggets deeeeep in your brain, issue an emotional rank to the events in your life. A giggling baby gets a high positive rank. A snarling dog gets a high negative rank. A tree in the park is of no importance, and gets no rank.

And, truth be told, the amygdala seems to be more interested in bad stuff than good. It’s our inner danger-monitor. When you’re anxious, your amygdala is probably on the edge of its seat, fretting over your safety. Current theory goes that people with higher natural anxiety have overactive amygdalae. We’re the vigilant watch-dogs of the community.

So, the new work indicates that loss — of money, or presumably a favored coffee cup or a thumb-wrestling match — gets a big thumbs-down from the amygdala. It’s an important, negative event, worth remembering. It’s dangerous to lose.

The researchers determined this by comparing people with healthy amygdalae to those whose almonds had been injured. While normal people exhibited the monkey-math that results in an “irrational” attachment to the bird in the hand, the people with injured amygdalae were worry free. They wagered with abandon, immune to the panic that can accompany a potential loss.

I promised politics. A scattering of evidence is suggesting that people we think of as “Conservative” have more active amygdalae. They’re biologically more interested in protection and preservation than average. Another school of psychology is arguing that people we call “Liberal” are distinguished by a high tolerance for ambiguity.

(We all experience STATES of both anxiety and intolerance for ambiguity, of course. When your brain hits its ambiguity ceiling, you say things like, “Get it over with! The suspense is killing me!” But people with TRAIT anxiety or ambiguity tolerance live there full time.)

Thus, although a “good bet” is a mathematical question, humans answer it with emotions. A Conservative’s defensive brain may wave off a risky opportunity in favor of a predictable outcome; a Liberal may wave off stability in favor of exploring the possibilities. They’re complimentary behavior styles, which is why our species (and mice as well) evolved to have some of each.

Much more on this in the book that comes out next March. Working title was THE MOUSE & ME, but that’s not working anymore, as it has been deemed “too mousy.” Suggestions welcomed.

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