Glowing
Plus caffeine-buzzed bees, deer with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, mice that sweat fat, and killer bacteria and viruses in thawing ice.
I’m going to start off with a story so crazy you wouldn’t believe it if I made it up. But it is completely true. And I’ve talked about it before on Twitter.
In September 1987, a Brazilian found a capsule that glowed blue among the contents of the scrapyard that he owned. With a friend, he pried it open with a screwdriver and found glowing blue rice-like grains.
The scrapyard owner thought the glowing grains must be of some value or religious significance, so he took them home. Over the course of three days, friends came to see them. The grains crumbled into a powder. Many people smeared them like glitter. His six-year old daughter played with them.
Soon, many people who touched the grains went to hospitals with diarrhea, vomiting, high-fever, abdominal pain, and hair loss. The first person to make the connection between the blue-glowing substance and the illness was the wife of the scrapyard owner.
The wife put the capsule in a plastic bag, got on a bus, and headed to the local health center where no one could identify it. It stayed in the plastic bag.
In the meantime, one of the doctors treating the patients learned about the blue-glowing capsule and contacted a physicist. By now, dozens of people were violently ill.
The physicist approached a federal office and borrowed a radiation scintillation detection-kit. The counter went off the charts when he was about 80 meters from the capsule. He suspected it was broken. He asked for a second counter and got the same result. By now, the truth was dawning.
At the same time the physicist was making his horrific discovery, he noticed that a fireman was carrying the capsule out. He asked the fireman, "what are you doing?" The firefighter replied nonchalantly, "I'm going to throw it in the river."
Fortunately, the firefighter was stopped. The health office was evacuated immediately. Shortly thereafter, the blow-glowing material was identified as cesium-137, a highly radioactive, soluble isotope extremely dangerous to all forms of life.
Over the course of the next few days, four people including the wife and the daughter of the scrapyard owner died. The daughter was buried in a fiberglass coffin: over 2,000 people rioted to prevent the burial. Doctors fearing for their own lives refused to treat many suffering patients.
Around 250 people got sick. Thousands of tons of materials were buried. Ironically, the scrapyard owner, who had the longest exposure for the longest time managed to survive.
So how did one of the most radioactive substances find its way to a scrap heap?
It’s a crazy story in itself. Two years before the mishap, a private radiotherapy institute in Goiânia, Brazil moved, leaving a radiation therapy unit on abandoned premises. Taking advantage of the absence of the guard (assigned to protect it) two crooks entered and stole the machine in 1987, not knowing what it was.
Both of the crooks took the machine home in a wheelbarrow and dismantled it. Although they were sick, they continued removing a bit of the blue-glowing powder and trying to light it like gunpowder. They were the ones who sold it to the scrapyard.
The Goiânia incident was one of the worst radiological incidents in history. The official report of the IAEA from 1988 reads like a thriller.
Killers in the ice?
Will the next killer disease originate in the Arctic? With temperatures rising, there's a new threat- viruses and bacteria from corpses, carcasses, and melting ice and permafrost. My column this week in Hindustan Times addresses this emerging threat. You can read it here (and click on “skip” to get past the preview).
There is already evidence that diseases that have typically afflicted the equatorial belt are spreading up into higher latitudes. Mosquitoes, ticks, and other insects spread many of these diseases. West Nile is spreading into Canada and the Arctic.
You might remember that just this year Russia reported the first case of the H5N8 avian flu passing from birds to humans. But not just birds, the range of foxes is changing and might spread rabies. Anthrax in Siberia.
Thawing ice carcasses (even of extinct animals like mammoths) pose a threat too. In 2014, researchers reported the discovery of giant viruses that had been dormant in Siberian permafrost for around 30,000 years. The following year, bacteria were recovered from Alaskan permafrost.
Most people don't know this. But the H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish Flu pandemic was extracted from the corpse of an Alaskan woman and used to recreate the virus in 2005. That virus was not viable, but viruses and bacteria can remain in ice for an awfully long time.
Another risk is that of resuscitating smallpox from infected corpses (since we are no longer vaccinated). Last month, a report in journal Microbiome on 15,000-year-old-viruses (including 28 different kinds identified for the first time) from the Tibetan Plateau went viral.
Visualizing the climate crisis
The effects of the climate crisis are pervasive, but sometimes it is difficult to visualize in a single image. One of the scariest images you will ever see is this landscape representation of the Earth kind of like a marble rolling into “Hothouse Earth”. This is not inevitable: if we can cut emissions by half in the next decade and completely by 2050 then we can shift the trajectory to “Stabilized Earth”. But right now, things don’t look good at all. (The image from this article in PNAS)
What else I’ve read.
Many of the deer in the U.S. and Canada have antibodies to the coronavirus.
Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 40% of wild white-tailed deer sampled from four U.S. states.
Not only does caffeine give bees a nice high, but it also makes them smarter.
This is a good explainer in The Guardian. Plants that make caffeine have an advantage.
Why our yardsticks for intelligence are all wrong (and used to suppress other ways of thinking and "lesser" peoples).
"At the dawn of Western philosophy, intelligence became identified with the European, educated, male human." This is a superb essay.
The deadly cost of greenhouse gases.
The lifetime emissions of 3.5 average Americans (as of 2020) will cause one excess death globally.
Obese mice that lose weight by sweating fat.
This is a weird observation with unknown but potential implications for weight loss in people.
Is eating meat bad for the environment?
This is a very easy to understand article, but the short answer is “yes”.
A sponge-like creature might be the oldest animal fossil ever discovered.
Exciting work was published in Nature this week. But not everyone is convinced the creatures identified are actually animal fossils. If they are, they could push our estimates of the first forms of life back by a few hundred million years.
What a thrilling story about radioactive material! Movie can be made out of this. Next decade is going to be scary for sure. Knowledge about climate change and it's impact is low among general population, even in educated ones. And that needs to be dealt with immediately.