Boston.com's Big Picture is publishing more entries from this year's National Geographic Traveler Photography contest. They are posting over three dozen of the people who have sent in photographs . The contest closes this June 30. Here are some of my favorites which have been submitted so far.
Middle age seems to get older and older with each new generation. In my childhood, people in their sixties were considered very old. As time progresses, sixties is a prime time now. People now expect to live well into their eighties. Of course, some of that can be chalked up to advance medicine and changing environmental surroundings. Americans are no longer plowing their fields with mules and digging trenches by with a shovel and pick.
However, the science of longevity has grown as people want to seize on to life for longer and longer periods. People who do reach that rarefied level pass 110 are always asked for their secret of life. Some say it is no alcohol and others say they have a glass of wine every day. What is clear is the number of people reaching over 100 is increasing by leaps and bounds. Willard Scott is soon going to have to get a bigger Smucker's jar for his Today Show acknowledgements of those past 100 years.
National Geographic has recently run an article on the science being conducted around aging. Here is an excerpt.
In Calabria the hunt for hidden molecules and mechanisms that confer longevity on people like Salvatore Caruso begins in places like the Ufficio Anagrafe Stato Civile (Civil Registry Office) in the medieval village of Luzzi. The office windows here offer stunning views of snow-covered mountains to the north, but to a population geneticist the truly breathtaking sights are hidden inside the tall file cabinets ringing the room and on shelf after shelf of precious ledgers numbered by year, starting in 1866. Despite its well-earned reputation for chaos and disorganization, the Italian government, shortly after the unification of the country in 1861, ordered local officials to record the birth, marriage, and death of every citizen in each comune, or township.
Since 1994 scientists at the University of Calabria have combed through these records in every one of Calabria’s 409 comuni to compile an extraordinary survey. Coupling family histories with simple physiological measurements of frailty and the latest genomic technologies, they set out to address fundamental questions about longevity. How much of it is determined by genetics? How much by the environment? And how do these factors interact to promote longevity—or, conversely, to hasten the aging process? To answer all those questions, scientists must start with rock-solid demographic data.
“Here is the book from 1905,” explained Marco Giordano, one of Giuseppe Passarino’s young colleagues, opening a tall, green ledger. He pointed to a record, in careful cursive, of the birth of Francesco D’Amato on March 3, 1905. “He died in 2007,” Giordano noted, describing D’Amato as the central figure, or proband, of an extensive genealogical tree. “We can reconstruct the pedigrees of families from these records.”
Cross-checking the ledger entries against meticulously detailed registry cards (pink for women, white for men) going back to the 19th century, Giordano, along with researchers Alberto Montesanto and Cinzia Martino, has reconstructed extensive family trees of 202 nonagenarians and centenarians in Calabria. The records document not only siblings of people who lived to 100 but also the spouses of siblings, which has allowed Passarino’s group to do a kind of historical experiment on longevity. “We compared the ages of D’Amato’s brothers and sisters to the ages of their spouses,” Giordano explained. “So they had the same environment. They ate the same food. They used the same medicines. They came from the same culture. But they did not have the same genes.” In a 2011 paper the Calabrian researchers reported a surprising conclusion: Although the parents and siblings of people who lived to at least 90 also lived longer than the general population, a finding in line with earlier research, the genetic factors involved seemed to benefit males more than females.
The Calabrian results on gender offer yet another hint that the genetic twists and turns that confer longevity may be unusually complex. Major European studies had previously reported that women are much likelier to live to 100, outnumbering male centenarians by a ratio of four or five to one, with the implication that some of the reasons are genetic. But by teasing out details from family trees, the Calabrian researchers discovered an intriguing paradox: The genetic component of longevity appears to be stronger in males—but women may take better advantage of external factors such as diet and medical care than men do.
In the dimly lit, chilly hallway outside Passarino’s university office stand several freezers full of tubes containing centenarian blood. The DNA from this blood and other tissue samples has revealed additional information about the Calabrian group. For example, people who live into their 90s and beyond tend to possess a particular version, or allele, of a gene important to taste and digestion. This allele not only gives people a taste for bitter foods like broccoli and field greens, which are typically rich in compounds known as polyphenols that promote cellular health, but also allows cells in the intestine to extract nutrients more efficiently from food as it’s being digested.
Passarino has also found in his centenarians a revved-up version of a gene for what is called an uncoupling protein. The protein plays a central role in metabolism—the way a person consumes energy and regulates body heat—which in turn affects the rate of aging.
“We have dissected five or six pathways that most influence longevity,” says Passarino. “Most of them involve the response to stress, the metabolism of nutrients, or metabolism in general—the storage and use of energy.” His group is currently examining how environmental influences—everything from childhood diet to how long a person attends school—might modify the activity of genes in a way that either promotes or curtails longevity.
Already thousands of photographs are being sent to National Geographic for their annual "World Traveler Photograph" contest. How in the world the judges are going to be able to chose among amazing entries is beyond my comprehension! Here are a few of my favorites! Enjoy!
As the world becomes smaller and smaller, species are being transported from one country to another. National Geographic in an article by Ker Than is reporting an invasion in Florida of Giant Africans Snails that originate most likely in Nigeria. This snail is very dangerous in that it can cause meningitis, eat plants and even eat the stucco on homes in Florida.
The monster snails can lay a hundred eggs a month and live up to eight years. In eighteen months, Florida has collected 120,000 of these critters.
Here is an excerpt from Than's report:
A new outbreak of giant, disease-carrying snails is threatening Florida's crops, experts say.
The giant African land snail is finding itself right at home in the Sunshine State, whose hot and humid climate resembles the species' tropical Nigerian habitat. (Related: "Giant Snails, Once a Delicacy, Overrun Brazil.")
Now found throughout the world, including the contiguous United States and Hawaii, these invasive plant-eaters pose a particular danger in Florida because of its vibrant agricultural industry.
"We're producing food that the nation depends on ... [and this snail] eats 500 different plants, including pretty much everything that grows in Florida," said Mark Fagan, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Agriculture.
"This is not something we can walk away from. These snails are a major threat to Florida's agriculture."
Some snails are smuggled into the U.S. as pets or for religious practices and, once here, get transported around the country in plants or cargo by unwitting people, experts say. (Read more about invasive species.)
"These snails have been intercepted by customs and border patrols at airports. There was one woman who was flying back from Nigeria [who] was intercepted, and she had hidden some snails under her skirt," Fagan said.
The exact reasons for smuggling the snails is unknown, he added, "but we are aware that these snails are used in certain religious practices. Some people also like to keep these snails as pets because they're exotic."
Hardy Pest
There have been outbreaks of the snails in Florida and other parts of the country before, but Florida's latest boom began a year and a half ago in Miami-Dade County. "They're very prolific," said Awinash Bhatkar, a snail expert with the Texas Department of Agriculture.
After reaching adulthood at about six months of age, the snails can produce up to a hundred eggs per month and live more than eight years.
Whereas most snails feed on decaying organic material or on leaf molds, the giant African land snail is one of the few snails that actually feed on plant parts themselves, Bhatkar said.
In addition to plants, young snails are known to munch on house stucco and even cement as they seek out calcium to strengthen their growing shells.
The snails also pose a human and animal health threat because they can eat rat feces and contract rat lungworm, which can cause a rare form of meningitis. (See pictures of infectious animals.)
"The parasitic nematode that causes rat lungworm can be present in the slime of the snail," Fagan explained. "So if a person comes in contact with the snail, the nematode present can then enter the person's body, eventually making its way into the brain."
He added, "We have confirmation from the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] that rat lungworm disease is present in some snail samples that we sent up to them."
The slaughter of elephants and rhinos in Africa continues abated. News has come out of Chad and Cameroon that on March 14 and March 15 near 90 elephants were killed for their tusks. Among those brutally slaughtered were thirty females pregnant females! This continues the trend of a massacre of African wildlife.
Just the previous week in Cameroon and the Central African Republic a total of 43 elephants were killed.
This follows in February the killing of nearly two dozen rhino in one week in South Africa.
International emergency measures must be taken or we will lose these precious animals. We have lost 33% of the population of elephants in Africa in just thirty years and it is escalating by the day!
"If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together."
- African Proverb
National Geographic is covering the seven year, 21,000 mile walk by Paul Salopek. Starting at the birth place of civilization in Ethiopia, he has just finished his trek across that vast Kingdom. Here is his latest report:
We camp on the flank of Asa Fatma mountain, a basalt sentinel overlooking the caravan trails that braid eastward to the old Sultanate of Tadjourah, a distant port where ivory, salt, and slaves were once shipped by dhow to Arabia. The tiny Republic of Djibouti sprawls below us: a waterless plain, hotter and drier than the Ethiopian desert, sere lake beds of blinding white salt, scarps of gunmetal grey, and, doubtless, huddled somewhere in the shade of a doum palm, more Afar nomads—herders cleaved from their Ethiopian brethren by a colonial border, speaking in halting French.
This is where I begin to say goodbye to my walking companions, the Afar camel men from Herto Bouri.
The Ethiopians declare themselves ready to push on. They are ready, they insist, to walk with me to the beaches of the Red Sea. But this is impossible. My two cameleers, Kader Yarri and Mohamed Aidahis, possess no documents, no scraps of paper attesting to their physical existence, no passport. (“This is all Afar land!” they say.) And Ahmed Alema Hessan, my guide and camel-driving mentor, has relapsed beneath his mosquito net into a mysterious illness. He issues his camel-loading orders lying down, from under his shire, his sarong, which he drapes like a sheet over his head. In a few hours, we will part ways in the grim border town of Howle.
What is it like to walk through the world?
It is mornings like these: Opening your eyes to nothing but seamless sky for day after day; a pale, numinous void that for one fleeting instant when you first awake, seems to suck you upward, out of yourself, out of your body. It is the clean hollowness of hunger, a lightness that seems blown through by the wind, the way an empty pipe is blown, to make it whistle. (We trekked 18 miles yesterday on short rations, on a single bowl of noodles and a handful of biscuits each. My wedding ring, once tight, jiggles loosely along my finger.) It is learning to interrogate landscapes with your eyes for camel fodder, for wind direction (dust), for wood, and of course for water—an antique power resides in this. And it is watching the vastness of Africa slip by at a walking pace, and coming to realize dimly that, even at three miles per hour, you are still moving too fast. It is the journey shared.
A powerful, ant-stomping gait—he plants his feet with force, with vigor, as if to correct the path of the Earth along its orbit. We call him the Third Camel. His appetite is bottomless. One night he gorged himself on bread intended for all. While I fumed, the others laughed. He laughed, too. This is the Afar way: to live (and eat) in the moment. We must disarm him in the towns—his jile dagger is long and sharp—before the police do. At dawn we hear his blade’s tok-tok-tok as he prepares the camels’ thorny breakfasts, chopping branches high up in an acacia tree.
The marionette looseness of a skinny man’s step, light, tireless, eternal, the continent-spanning gait of the ancestors. He is the quiet one, and thus listened to. Early on, I mistook his silences for aloofness: to the pastoralist, to the nomad, sedentary people who own no livestock are inferior beings. But this man’s silence is generous. A watchful steadiness. Without comment he always shoulders more than his share of work. “What will the camels eat?” he asked one day, worried about the cauterized deserts near the Djibouti border. I shrugged: I had no idea. I picked up a stone, held it out. It was the only time I saw him laugh.
Bandy-legged, energetic, with a spring-loaded step. In another place—in the tumbleweed towns of West Texas, say—Alema might have made a fine square dancer. He is the “road boss” of our shambolic little caravan: a human knot, complex, tough, a nexus of murky connections who plays all the angles, as one must on a lean desert margin. At first, his bawdy locker-room English made me doubt his seriousness: He seemed to consider the walk a cosmic joke, a windfall by which to add an executive wing to the shack of his third and youngest wife in the truck stop town of Mile. But Alema is beyond serious. In truth, he has taken possession of this journey, located himself fully within it. He rallies us when we are tired. He presses on. The walk now belongs to him. (“I don’t care about the money, man. It’s the history.”)
On our best days, we four ramblers recognize our good luck. We ricochet down raw mountain trails, almost running, with the whole shining desert of Ethiopia at our feet. We bounce our voices off the walls of black-rock canyons in whooping contests. Then we catch each other’s eye, three Afars and a man from the opposite longitude of the Earth, and grin like children. The cameleers catch the spark, and sing.
What is it like to walk through the world?
It is like this. It is like serious play. I will miss these men.
Paul Salopek has embarked on a seven year walk. On the road, his issues reports to National Geographic Magazine. Here is his latest report.
Afar Triangle, Ethiopia, 11°43'41" N, 41°47'55" E
We are three walking days from the Ethiopian border.
We traverse a sea of volcanic rock. It is hot, infernal, endless. A simmering plain of stones the color of charcoal. There is no sign of life—not even a plant. The view is sterile, alien, like those grainy photographs captured by robots on another world. And then . . . a woman’s shoe. Size 36, imitation leather, with rhinestones attached. Further on: a baseball cap bleached grey by the sun. Then, dozens—no hundreds—of cracked water bottles. (These are cooking oil jugs, many wrapped in burlap for cooling.)
After weeks of roaming on foot through the immaculate deserts of the poor—a nomad wilderness where every article of trash, every tin can, every plastic bottle is picked up, recycled for some secondary purpose—we have entered a new layer of Rift Valley archaeology, one that stretches 150 miles or more into Djibouti, all the way to the Red Sea. It is a debris field of 21st-century wanderers, exiles, penitents, orphans. Somewhere ahead the border crossing forms a funnel, a bottleneck, for migrant workers from all over the African Horn. They, too, are walkers. They walk to Yemen. To Saudi Arabia. To Dubai. Not to hunt oryx with stone-tipped projectiles, as did the early Homo sapiens who walked out of Africa. And not merely for a ludicrous idea, as we do today. But to rent out their muscles, their bodies, for a crust of bread.
They are Oromos from the south of Ethiopia and Tigreyans from the highlands. They are refugees fleeing the ruinscape of Somalia. A few are deserters from the Eritrean army. Young men. A few hardy women. They have to be strong. Because the desert crossing is harsh, pitiless. Some die here of thirst. At the Red Sea, scores drown every year taking passage in rickety open boats. Yet still they come. One hundred thousand people a year, at least, evacuate the continent this way. They trek mostly at night, guided by smugglers. This barren, godless plain crawls with an army of walkers after dark. Under starlight, the out-of-Africa migration continues.
Hahai, the Afar nomads call them. People of the wind.
They blow through the desert, leaving behind little but what gets dropped on the trails. A sandal. A cook pot. Worthless dregs of money. And their bones, laid out beneath loose piles of rock by survivors who cannot linger.
Glasses frame (lenses missing).
A tee shirt.
A brassiere.
A can of Gillette shaving cream.
A sun-rotted backpack (stenciled with children’s cartoons).
We meet the hahai one morning at a remote Afar encampment.
They are 15 tired, men from the mountains of Ethiopia—a country ranked near the bottom of the UN’s poverty index, 174th out of 187 nations—trekking toward slightly less poor Djibouti (165th) to reach marginally less poor Yemen (154th). These numbers explain why, even in broad daylight, these men remain invisible.
They sit on the rocks after a night of hiking. They take sips from yoked jugs of water. One man uses his bare hand to stir besso, a barley gruel, in a dented tin pot. Their smuggler, an old Afar, sits apart, dapper in electric blue socks and hi-top tennis shoes, smoking.
“Yemen is hard,” one migrant says. “They kill us with knives and guns.”
He sees the look on my face: that I do not believe.
“It is true,” another man insists. He calls himself Daniel. He has been walking 13 days from Wollo province. A job picking dates in Saudi Arabia awaits him. It pays 4,000 Ethiopian birr—about $200—a month. This is a princely sum. Double what he earns as a laborer in Ethiopia. He tells this story:
Last year, in Yemen, his group of destitute wanderers was attacked by thieves. The Yemenis stabbed one migrant and dumped his body down a well. Daniel hid in the bushes for three days, without food, before slipping away to the Saudi border. He tells this story smiling. All the men are smiling. The besso is ready to eat. They say nothing more. They have the ocean in their eyes. The story is over.
Night on the plain of stones. Our little caravan is stalled.
My guide, Ahmed Alema Hessan, is sick with something like typhoid. I am sick. We are all hungry. We have walked 22 miles. Our supplies are reduced to a few packets of noodles, a few biscuits. We let the fire die early. We lie awake in our blankets. And I am thinking of a house filled with benign sun far away, a white house at a higher latitude, with green trees, a woman’s laughter in the kitchen, the caw-caw of the hadada ibis. My heart is dreaming.
“Paul?” Alema hisses urgently in the dark. “Hey, Paul.”
But I have heard it already: a disturbance in the night air. A faint rumbling, growing almost imperceptibly louder, like the approach of herd of wild animals. But can there be animals in this place? The nearest blade of grass, the nearest well, is miles away. I sit up.
And then they come, in the pale beam of Alema’ s flashlight, a column of figures.
They are men and women in a bas relief, as if carved in greys and blacks from the branches of the night. Five, six. A dozen. Then scores. They file past our camp in single file. I attempt to count them, but give up after reaching 90. Their shuffling feet raise a veil of dust. They don’t look up. They carry no lights. They leave little behind. We exchange not a single word. My tongue is immobilized
Imagine taking the luxury train across the Russian countryside heading across Siberia. Then suddenly beside the train appear a herd of massive Woolly Mammoth's are grazing! What a sight it would be to behold. Such an event is not totally out of the realm of possibility.
In fact, it might be possible through DNA to bring back not only the Woolly Mammoth but also the Tasmanian Tiger (below) or the Moa. Science could make it possible to recreate these magnificent creatures or at least a version close to them. The question is should they bring them back.
Why not?
National Geographic recently has an article that examines the chances of bringing back a number of extinct animals. The odds are tough but the research could go a long way to saving animals that could disappear in the next years.
Besides wouldn't it be amazing to see a herd of Woolly Mammoth's running along side the that train? The magazine reports on the technology:
National Geographic News asked Hendrik Poinar, a molecular evolutionary geneticist and biological anthropologist at the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, if we might soon see the gigantic land mammals roaming the steppe again. Poinar will speak about the emerging technology at the TEDx Conference on DeExtinction in Washington this month.
"People were painting pictures of woolly mammoths in caves in France 35,000 years ago, so we have this amazing history with them," Poinar said.
Poinar's team isolates DNA and proteins from fossils and preserved remains, and then uses sophisticated sequencing and analysis tools to answer questions about species extinctions, evolution, and even the spread of infectious diseases. Poinar has tested relatively well-preserved samples from mammoth carcasses uncovered in the Yukon and Siberia. The mammoth remains had been entombed in the permafrost (permanently frozen ground), so degradation of their DNA had been slowed over time, Poinar explained.
In 2006, Poinar's lab began to map large sections of the mammoth's genome, aided by new high-input DNA sequencers, which can quickly analyze millions of fragments. This is important, because even the most well-preserved mammoth specimens have DNA strands that have fallen apart into countless smaller sequences, since the complex molecule is highly susceptible to decay (Poinar said DNA starts breaking down as soon as a living thing dies.)
"You'll never really create an exact genome because when you have short fragments there are no good ways to know how many repeats of sequences there are," said Poinar. But scientists can compare the fragments to each other to find overlapping areas, and then piece together much of the strand. Then, they can map those regions against the DNA of the closest living relative of the mammoth—the Asian elephant.
"We can in theory use that information to modify existing chromosomes with what we imagine to be mammoth substitutions," said Poinar. The result would be an elephant-mammoth hybrid, and such a creature could theoretically be implanted into the womb of a mother elephant. Get the formula right, and the offspring might be "a mammoth in the eye of the beholder," said Poinar.
Poinar asked why scientists would want to do that in the first place. "Is it because we have this ability, to push the boundaries of what's possible for the sake of innovation?" he asked.
Poinar added, "Would it give conservation movements something new to generate excitement, or does it generate apathy, so people ask 'why do we need to care about saving them in the wild if we can bring them back?'"
Poinar said he thought parts of Siberia could support reborn populations of mammoths, and that they would likely be able to survive, even in a warming climate, because they had existed across such a wide range.
"That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do," Poinar added. "As much as the kid in me would love to see these fantastic species plundering across the north, it's hard to see a reason why we should unless we think this technology could give us tools for conservation." He explained that the real win would be adapting such techniques to bolster the numbers of current endangered species, such as mountain gorilla
Researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax have completed the most comprehensive study of illegal shark killings. The results are shocking and surprising. Over 100 million sharks are killed a year and at that rate they will be unable maintain their population.
The study shows that between 6.4% and 7.9% of all types of sharks are killed annually. For all the shark species to survive and not become extinct that figure needs to below 4.9%. The cause of such slaughter is the highly desired "Shark Fin Soup" in Asia. So far the Conference on International Trade of Endangered Species have refused to add sharks to the list but it is on the verge of listing given these shocking figures just released.
The Guardian reports that the Shark population off Mozambique will soon disappear. The illegal trade in that nation of shark fins is devastating the population.
Asia again lies at the center of protecting endangered species. Elephants and rhinos are being slaughtered to meet the demand in Southeast Asia countries. This must become a high priority for our State Department.
The Blue Whale is the largest animal/mammal the planet. It's heart is as large as a car. It weighs an average of 140 tons! Hunted to near extinction a colony of new Blue Whales has been discovered off the coast of Sri Lanka. Only 10,000 Blue Whales remain on the entire planet.
The 30 year Sri Lankan Civil War kept people away from the area and they flourished since they don't migrateSir at all like their brothers and sisters in other sections of the world.
National Geographic reports:
While most other blue whales migrate vast distances between cold waters to feed and warm waters to raise their young, this population stays in the Indian Ocean throughout the year, surprising researchers around the world. What makes it possible? A seemingly endless supply of krill, the tiny crustaceans that make up nearly all of the whales’ diet
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