The mysterious life of eels

I almost never thought about eels, dismissing them as somewhat boring snake look-alikes that live in the water. So I was intrigued by this article that says that these creatures are very mysterious and it took researchers a long time to figure out the basic facts about them that had stumped scientists from the time of Aristotle through to Sigmund Freud, the main mystery being that however many eels European researchers dissected, until very recently, they simply could not find their reproductive organs. And the reason was bizarre.
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White House press secretary inadvertently tells the truth

One of the things about the people in the Trump administration is that thought they may be corrupt and incorrigible liars, they are also not that smart and will sometimes inadvertently tell the truth. Consider what Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said yesterday at her press conference.

In response to a question about what President Donald Trump would say to parents who have kids in school districts that may be online-only, McEnany said: “The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open. And when he says open, he means open in full, kids been able to attend each and every day at their school.

“The science should not stand in the way of this,” she added, saying it is “perfectly safe” to fully reopen all classrooms. [My italics-MS]

She must have realized what a stupid thing that was to say because she later tried to cover up the blunder by saying “science is on our side here”, even though it is patently not, and if true would make her earlier statement nonsensical.

Just another day in the Trump stupidverse.

When leaders don’t lead

Donald Trump loves to boast that he’s a decisive leader. But most of that self-image comes from him thinking that sending out a tweet about something is equivalent to having actually done something. In reality many of those tweet message were false, irrelevant to any substantive issue, impossible to carry out, or were slow-walked or even contradicted by his advisors and members of his administration. But no matter, in his mind, and the minds of his supporters, he has ‘acted’ like a strong and forceful leader. But such smoke and mirrors can only be taken so far and the big problem for him is the coronavirus because that is something that cannot be controlled by tweets and here Trump’s indecisiveness and lack of action are increasingly manifest.
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Film review: Chasing Coral (2017)

I recently watched the above documentary that dealt with how the warming of the oceans is killing off the coral reefs all over the world. The filmmakers developed time-lapse cameras that they could place on the ocean floor to show how when temperatures rise even slightly, first the reefs get bleached white and then develop brown fibrous attachments all over them, giving them the look of ghostly apparitions. They focus a lot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
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Normal body temperature

The pandemic has made everyone aware of the need to monitor their body temperature to see if they might be carrying the virus. I wrote earlier about how my ‘normal’ body temperature when I have no symptoms of anything is much lower than the canonical value of 98.6F, which makes it hard to determine how to use my body temperature to determine if I am sick or if I have returned to normal after being sick. This article explains that there is a huge amount of variation because a multiplicity of factors affect the temperature.
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Why the virus is resurging in the US

This article describes how California went from being lauded for the way it controlled the outbreak to now being one of the states where there is a resurgence.

The Newsom administration’s four-phase plan to reopen slowly, while encouraging Californians to remain vigilant about wearing face coverings and maintaining distance to stop the spread of disease seemed “perfectly good and smart”, [Dr Bob Wachter, who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco] said.

“But what I think we didn’t get right was the national political scene,” he said. California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, wasn’t immune to a growing conservative movement that rejects face masks as muzzles on independence and vilifies public health officials as enemies of the people.
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