Mildly interesting
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The Bullet Ant
The bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) is a tropical rainforest ant named for its powerfully painful sting, which is said to be comparable to being shot with a bullet.
Entomologist Dr. Justin Schmidt describes the sting from this venomous ant as ‘pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over a flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail embedded in your heel.’
When one ant stings, it releases chemicals that signal other ants in the vicinity to sting repeatedly. The bullet ant has the most painful sting of any insect, according to the Schmidt Pain Index. The pain is described as blinding, electric pain, comparable to being shot with a gun. Bullet ant stings produce waves of agony that last 12 to 24 hours.
Habitat: Tropical forests of Central and South America.
Nerdy Stuff: The primary toxin in bullet ant venom is poneratoxin. Poneratoxin is a small neurotoxic peptide that inactivates voltage-gated sodium ion channels in skeletal muscle to block synapse transmission in the central nervous system. In addition to excruciating pain, the venom produces temporary paralysis and uncontrollable shaking. Other symptoms include nausea, vomiting, fever, and cardiac arrhythmia.
The Sateré-Mawé people of Brazil use ant stings as part of a traditional rite of passage. To complete the initiation rite, boys first gather the ants. The ants are sedated by immersion in an herbal preparation and placed into gloves woven of leaves with all their stingers facing inward. The boy must wear the mitt a total of 20 times before he is considered to be a warrior.
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I didn’t know that a blight wiped out all the American chestnut trees in the late 19th century.
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From Foreign Affairs magazine:
"We stand at the beginning of history. For every person alive today, ten have lived and died in the past. But if human beings survive as long as the average mammal species, then for every person alive today, a thousand people will live in the future. We are the ancients. On the scale of a typical human life, humanity today is barely an infant struggling to walk."
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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@Catseye3 said in Mildly interesting:
From Foreign Affairs magazine:
"We stand at the beginning of history. For every person alive today, ten have lived and died in the past. But if human beings survive as long as the average mammal species, then for every person alive today, a thousand people will live in the future. We are the ancients. On the scale of a typical human life, humanity today is barely an infant struggling to walk."
That’s the foundation of what is known as the doomsday principle. Basically a statistical argument for the notion that we are likely to destroy ourselves as a species well before we have a normal span of time on this planet, to say nothing of a future on other planets.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K
Wow, isn't this kind of deliciously eerie. Here's more:The cougar can only be seen during the third week of March and the third week in September. The last 30 minutes before official sunset is prime time for viewing.
Dang, I was hoping to find out more abut the why and the how, but couldn't. Anyway, below is a time lapse photography of the cougar forming.
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Anna Comnena born in 1083, the eldest daughter of Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantine.
Several portraits of her survive. There's the one up top, who Jon would hit, and there's the one who in a depressed fit wrote, “Time in it’s irresistible and careless flow carries along on its floor all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity.”
Except she probably didn't write it's right there.
Anna Komnena (which can also be spelled Comnena) was considered the world’s first secular female historian, who wrote the biography of her father, as well as documented the political history of her era.
Anna was promised her father’s throne up until her brother John was born, having the rug totally pulled out from under her.
What was one of the most interesting things about Anna was her reaction to her brother taking their father’s throne away from her. Anna felt extremely cheated out of her “birthright.” She didn’t just sit back like “oh, well, that’s okay I’m sure things will be fine.” No, she wanted to go full Game of Thrones, and she probably would have if her plan had gone through.
When he father grew sick, Anna and her mother Irene tried to persuade her father to disinherit the throne to her brother. She even started to plot how to “dispose” of her brother. However, her husband did not support her plot, so it was discovered. It cost Anna her property and she had to retire from the court life. It was after her husband’s death that she joined a convent founded by her mother and started writing her first piece, Alexiad, a 15-volume history catalog of her family. It’s arguable whether Anna chose to join the convent herself or if her brother the Emperor forced her to go.
Emperor John being no fool.
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In a clickbaity list of Top 30 Films of All Time, the movie All Quiet On the Western Front is presented as "one of the best anti-war movies of all time. The story revolves around the German’s efforts to prepare for World War I. This controversial film was banned in Germany because of its propaganda." The Mildly Interesting bit: "Film theater owners also reportedly released rats in their theaters to discourage people from seeing it."
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
Looks great… Until one gets off the track and you have to fix it…
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Mildly interesting:
And another interesting fact, that dog mosaic is from Pompeii, where the remains of dog were found in the house.
In another house was the worlds first “beware of the dog” sign.
Cave Canem. Beware of the dog.
Pompeii taught us that people are just the same two thousand years later.
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From a doctor friend’s FB:
Levetiracetam, Adalimumab and Domperidon—these all hove two things in common. They are prescribed medications and they are very difficult to pronounce. So why are medication names so difficult to pronounce and their generic name is an alien language? And where do these names come from?
Pharmaceutical names (the generic name) are assigned according to a scheme in which specific syllables in the drug name (called stems) convey information about the chemical structure, action, or indication of the drug. But brand names are strange because they must be.
If it seems as if drug names have been getting weirder, it’s because, in some cases, they have. And they’re likely to continue to, as the FDA approves new medicines at record rates, and regulations require a certain degree of differentiation from both other drugs and recognizable words—in any language.
The more drugs that come out every year, the more novel the names need to be. For example, drug names use the letter Q three times as often as words in the English language. For Xs, it’s 16 times as much. Zs take the cake, at more than 18 times the frequency you’d find them in English words.
Only about 10 percent of drug brand names had four syllables in 2010, but now have grown to 15 percent, as drugmakers search for ever-unique names. As for five-syllable drug names? They’re coming. Take Jentadueto, a combination of two diabetes products sold by Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly.
Since the FDA requires a unique name for the drug and have to make sure the name is proprietary, can be protected and isn’t overlapping or on top of an existing name. To add still another layer, drug companies have to beware of whether their brand names mean anything in any other language. Tecfidera was almost called Panoplin but it had to go, ultimately, because it was closely tied to terminologies in Nordic countries and Italy.
Some brand names come about because of what they treat or because of a color. For those reasons, the naming process can start with hundreds or even thousands of names. Those then get whittled down to a handful that may be submitted for regulatory approval. The whole process can take from a few months to a few years; full legal screens can take six months.
The days of simple names like Viagra and Prozac are quickly disappearing. So as the new strange sounding drugs name appear, you can tell your friends you know why.
More useless information just because I wanted to know more.
