MarysLibrary

Follow Your Gut

 

A report on the most recent developments concerning the microbes in and on your body. There are more of them than you might thing. This is one of a series of short (fewer than 100 pages) TED books. I've found the ones I've read filled with amazing information.

The author is taking part in a crowd-sourced medical study of people's microbiome which is different for every person. For a donation of $99 to the Human Biomes Project and a few swabs from here and there on your body you can discover some of the microbes you are carrying around with you.

Which may surprise you. Scientists have discovered that the microbes on our left hands are different from those on our right and that we share a good many of them with our pets. The critters in our gut may one day play a significant part in curing asthma, allergies, and obesity. The widespread use of antibiotics in animals may be doing harm to our general health as well as contributing to the rapidly growing resistance of disease to the most commonly used treatments.

The Three Questions

A little boy and I read every week and this week one of the books we read was Jon J Muth's The Three Questions, which is based on something by Leo Tolstoy.

The little boy in the book, Nikoli, asks, "When is the most important time?" "Who is the most important person?" "What is the right thing to do."

Leo, the wise old turtle tells him:"The most important time is now. The most important person is the one you are with. The right thing to do is to help the one you are with."

When we finished reading we were looking at the end-papers. (We are both very fond of attractive end papers and the ones in this book are lovely.) I was repeating the answers more for myself than for the boy and admiring the Zen-like quality of the story.

Then he said, "God is with us all the time and He tells us what to do."

This six-year-old was reading the story a level or two more deeply than I was. He found there what Tolstoy was saying between the lines: These answers are from God. He is there now and always and He will tell you the right thing to do. If you listen.

The child was listening.

Think about it . . .

 

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
                                                                                        ― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

Grunt

"If possible, the US army would like to dress its men and women in uniforms that protect them from all that modern warfare has to throw at them: flames, explosives, bullets, lasers, bomb-blasted dirt, blister agents, anthrax, sand fleas. They would like these same uniforms to keep soldiers cool and dry in extreme heat, to stand up to the ruthless rigors of the Army field laundry, to feel good against the skin, to look smart, and to come in under budget. It might be easier to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East."

But the armed services are doing their best, as Mary Roach demonstrates in her most recent book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. The author has visited facilities from Natick, Massachusetts, to Camp Lemonniere in Djibouti. She trains with Army Rangers to observe the sweat-testing scientists, who are interested in the fact that some people sweat more than others, which is a very good thing when you are toting 60 lbs and in the middle of a fire fight in the desert. They are also interested in smell and how to keep it down to a tolerable level.

She talks with a Navy Seal about diarrhea and how these men deal with its inevitability. Baby wipes, says the Navy guy. "Nah," says the Seal. "Just tear a piece off your T-shirt and use that."

Moving on. The army tests fabrics for resistance to fire. It doesn't have to resist long. Fire from a blast flashes by in seconds so if you have a fabric that, even when blown up against the skin of the soldier experiencing the bomb, resists fire for that second or two, that's enough.

She tells the reader about hearing loss and how the services try to avert it, the advances surgeons have made in treating genital wounds resulting from IEDs, how they train medics to face the extremely gory battlefields of modern war, and how air conditioning contributed to reducing sick bay calls. 

And much more. Mary Roach writes about applied science and she has a winner here as science is applied to war and the problems of the soldiers who have to fight it.