This just about sums it up, don't you think?

I learned a new yet horrific word today

Courtesy of Rebecca Skloot, in her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: pneumoencephalography

“I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s.

"There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients or their parents. Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. The same is likely true of at least one other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.”

[Thanks to the folks at Goodreads for putting up the quote. I'd already returned my copy of the book to the library and needed the passage, although I had to correct some typos.]

Elsie Lacks, the oldest daughter of Henrietta and David Lacks, died at age 15 in 1955 at the Crownsville, originally known as the 'Hospital for the Negro Insane'. Elsie was diagnosed with mental retardation, epilepsy, and cerebral palsy, although she may have inherited the family trait for deafness. It's hard to tell what her exact diagnosis should have been. Children at the time were often misdiagnosed and locked away in institutions rather than receiving help. Skloot's description of conditions at Crownsville are chilling, and a photograph provides a window into how Elsie was treated, although there is a lot of room left to the imagination of the reader for just how bad it was.

On the science/palaeontology front...

Spear tip in mastodon bone points to earlier human arrival in North America

A NEW analysis of ancient mastodon bones found in Washington state is adding to growing speculation that humans arrived in North America before the Clovis people, once believed to be the first inhabitants of the continent 13,000 years ago.

I suspect as we learn more, this date will be pushed back further.

New understanding of the dispersal of modern humans

Lock of hair pins down early migration of Aborigines

A lock of hair has helped scientists to piece together the genome of Australian Aborigines and rewrite the history of human dispersal around the world.

DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago.

This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

By contrast, those in the Middle East and North Africa moved out to colonise Europe and Asia about 24,000 years ago. There are also interesting patterns in terms of Neanderthal and Denisovan intermingling with modern man discussed in the article. Aborigines have about the same amount of Neanderthal genes as Europeans, indicating that the interbreeding happened prior to their migration.

Well, that does make sense

Dogs and humans share DNA, thanks to viruses: Research suggests genetic material was exchanged over millennia

Humans and dogs may have exchanged genetic material over the millennia via viruses, scientists conjecture.

Retroviruses — the most infamous example of which is likely HIV, the virus that causes AIDS — have the ability to incorporate their genetic material into that of their hosts. In this manner, these hitchhikers can reproduce when their hosts do.

All mammals and most vertebrates, or creatures with backbones, apparently possess these "endogenous retroviruses" in their genomes. In fact, nearly 1 percent of the human genome consists of these unwelcome guests. Mice and opossums are even more greatly compromised, with these viruses making up about 2 percent of their genomes.

Giant killer...storks?

Giant storks may have fed on real-life hobbits: Bones of small humans and giant birds, found together, tell chilling tale

The fossil remains of what may have been a hobbit-like species of human were discovered in 2003 at the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. In that cave, scientists also unearthed a large number of bird fossils — including 20,000- to 50,000-year-old wing and leg bones from what appears to have been a stork nearly 6 feet tall (1.8 meters).

"From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork," said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

I love this comment by 'News9065': 'I always had an intuitive fear of Big Bird on Sesame Street...now I know why.'

:)

Interesting

New hominin found via mtDNA

--this time from a cave upon a mountainous steppe in Siberia.

Homo erectus, the first hominin to move from Africa to Eurasia, did so 1.9 million years ago. After that, two known migrations occurred: Neanderthals are thought to have left Africa between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, while early modern humans -- immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens -- took a later wave, migrating some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. However, because the lineage of the hominin whose finger was found in the cave split off before Neanderthals and early modern humans arrived, the researchers speculate that that this new human form must have moved to Eurasia after H erectus but before Neanderthals -- probably a couple of hundred thousand years after the divergence.

All this information came from extracting mitochondrial DNA from the pinky bone of a small child in a manner to keep from contaminating the results with researcher's own material. The new hominin's DNA was compared with a variety of other known species (modern humans, Neanderthals, and the bonabo, for example) and came up with unique features.

I find what they can tell through DNA these days to be fascinating. If I'd stayed a biology major, I might have gone into that instead of oecology, but it was all so new then.

They say pregnant women have a glow; turns out we all do

Humans Glow in Visible Light

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals....

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight — the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body's miniscule light production.

Cool, yes? Although it is supposedly undetectable by the naked eye, I wonder if there is some mechanism that we are subliminally aware of it when dealing with others?