Zoo Jobs: Meet a Curator. Michael Dickinson: How a fly flies. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments. 4 Tiny Historical Changes That Made Modern Life Possible. #2.
We No Longer Carry Around Bloodsucking Worms That Make Us Poor Despite its cuddly name, the hookworm is actually quite nasty. Hookworm larvae live in soil that's been contaminated by fecal matter, and their attitudes don't really get much better from there. After burrowing through the bare feet of unsuspecting victims, these tiny parasites eventually take up residence in the small intestine, where they start living off the host's blood like they're paying rent. viaWikipediaIf this guy was a roommate, he'd put the empty milk carton back in the fridge after spitting in it. Luckily, if you live in America and are a human, you probably don't have to worry about hookworm-gut anytime soon. Rockefeller's foundation threw millions of dollars into wiping out hookworm in America: They built thousands of outhouses to prevent soil contamination and ran education campaigns warning people about the horrors that lurked before they walked outside barefoot.
What If It Hadn't Happened? #1. Why Do We Knock on Wood? Reader Dante wrote in to ask, “Why is knocking on wood good luck?”
Traditionally, when you speak of your own good fortune, you follow up with a quick knock on a piece of wood to keep your luck from going bad. More recently, simply saying the phrase “knock on wood”—or “touch wood” in the UK—has replaced actually knocking. Where’d all this come from? Before Christianity and Islam came around to spoil the party with their rules about idolatry, many pagan groups and other cultures—from Ireland to India to elsewhere in the world—worshipped or mythologized trees. Some peoples used trees as oracles, some incorporated them into worship rituals and some, like the ancient Celts, regarded them as the homes of certain spirits and gods.
Authors Stefan Bechtel and Deborah Aaronson both suggest two connections between knocking on wood and these spirits in their respective books, The Good Luck Book and Luck: The Essential Guide. Cat intelligence and cognition: Are cats smarter than dogs? Photo by Astrid860/Thinkstock “We did one study on cats—and that was enough!”
Those words effectively ended my quest to understand the feline mind. I was a few months into writing Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs, which explores how pets are blurring the line between animal and person, and I was gearing up for a chapter on pet intelligence. I knew a lot had been written about dogs, and I assumed there must be at least a handful of studies on cats. But after weeks of scouring the scientific world for someone—anyone—who studied how cats think, all I was left with was this statement, laughed over the phone to me by one of the world’s top animal cognition experts, a Hungarian scientist named Ádám Miklósi. We are living in a golden age of canine cognition. I knew I was in trouble even before I got Miklósi on the phone. Agrillo studies something called numerical competence. But what about cats? Still, there may be hope. Jellyfish Sting Under The Microscope In Slow Motion.