Month: October 2016

Human tower-building is the ultimate team sport. A single structure, or castell, can comprise hundreds of individuals working together to ascend several stories in the air. The unusual tradition traces back to the 18th century and, as CBS News reports, the 26th competition recently took place in Catalonia, Spain.

To win the event, teams called colles must assemble to build the tallest most complex castells possible. The towers can involve as many as 400 people and reach dizzying heights. The world record for tallest tower belongs to the team Minyons de Terrassa, which stacked competitors 10 levels high during 2015’s event. The construction process is only half the battle. After the colles achieve their maximum height, they then have to disassemble themselves without toppling over.

According to Times of Malta, roughly 20,000 people gathered to witness the competition. This year the Castellers de Villafranca team was crowned victorious, marking their eighth win in a row.

[h/t CBS News]

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The Industrial Revolution brought significant development to Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but it also increased the risk of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), which spread like wildfire among people living in close quarters in cities. Without a cure, TB was responsible for nearly one-third of all deaths in Britain in the first half of the 19th century. Now, bioarchaeologists are discovering skeletons that show some people lived a long time before the disease killed them. A new study investigates a skeleton of a young man who had tuberculosis in the early 19th century in Wolverhampton, England—and oddly enough, changes to his spine and ribs suggest he may have worn a corset.

Tuberculosis primarily infects the lungs, but it can spread to bone through the bloodstream. The disease tends to concentrate in the vertebrae of the spine, because these bones are near the lungs, and because the pathogen likes the blood cell–producing tissues there. The infection of the spine often results in a hunchback deformity as the vertebrae collapse, known as Pott’s disease.

Since TB couldn’t be cured and often progressed to deform the spine, men and women both wore corsets as an orthopedic device to correct postural issues. Of course, people also wore corsets for reasons of fashion: Women attempted to slim their waists and emphasize their hips and busts, while aristocratic men used them to show off their broad shoulders and narrow waist.

Writing in the International Journal of Paleopathology, UK bioarchaeologists Joanna Moore and Jo Buckberry lay out the evidence from this skeleton, which was one of 150 burials excavated from St. Peter’s Collegiate Church overflow cemetery in 2001–2002. The cemetery was in use from 1819–1853; they couldn’t pinpoint the time of the man’s death any more precisely. His ribs had a weird angle to them on both sides—the result of something compressing them over time. While the vitamin-D deficiency rickets can cause this, there was no other evidence of that disease in his body. The spinous processes of the man’s thoracic vertebrae—those little poky bits you can feel along the midline of your back between your ribs—were also strangely positioned, angling to the left. Both types of bony deformities are consistent with compression from long-term corset use.

But beyond the compression seen in the ribs and mid-spine, Moore and Buckberry found evidence of a life-threatening disease. All of the vertebrae in the man’s lumbar spine in his lower back had been damaged. The destruction was so immense in the first and second lumbar vertebrae that they collapsed and fused together, creating a significant bend in his lower spine. Similar destruction was present in the lower thoracic spine, where the vertebrae meet with the ribs. These destroyed vertebrae are characteristic of Pott’s disease and are almost certainly the result of tuberculosis.

Moore and Buckberry found historical records from Wolverhampton that note that tuberculosis—also known as consumption, because people literally wasted away from the disease—was a significant factor affecting health and causing death in this area in the early 19th century. The rapid industrialization of the city had led to increased levels of air pollution, which in turn contributed to a rise in lung diseases like TB.

So, this young 19th-century British man had tuberculosis and wore a corset. But the skeleton itself does not reveal whether he was a dandy who contracted tuberculosis or a consumptive who didn’t much care for fashion. The skeletal effects of fashionable garments and medical apparatus in men of the time period would be similar. Of course, as anthropologist Rebecca Gibson of American University, whose research deals with social and biological effects of corseting in European women of the 18th and 19th centuries, told mental_floss, “being a dandy and being a consumptive are not mutually exclusive.” All that said, the link between TB and corsets is well established through both historical records and skeletal remains, so it is at least probable that this Wolverhampton man contracted TB and corrected his spinal issue with a corset.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is that this is actually the first male skeleton ever found to have corset-related changes. Gibson says, “The deformation shown here is consistent with corseting damage seen in female skeletons.” Although historical records clearly mention European men wearing corsets, prior to this study, the only skeletons shown to have corset deformities have been female. This lack of evidence may be related to the diminishing popularity of corseting among men in this time period, or it may be related to a lack of systematic study of male skeletons for corseting practices. Regardless of the reason for it, this new finding shows that bioarchaeologists should consider chucking gendered assumptions when looking at skeletons for corset wearing.

What began as Moore’s student project on a skeleton curated by the Biological Archaeology Research Centre at the University of Bradford may now change the way bioarchaeologists look at the bodies of men from 18th to 19th century Europe. Now that we know that corseting evidence can be found on men’s bodies, more studies of this kind will increase our understanding of both Victorian medical practice and men’s fashion.

Brewing beer is one of the world’s oldest culinary pastimes. It dates back 5000 years in China, and probably longer in Mesopotamia, where the ancient Sumerians had a goddess of brewing.

As old as it is, scientists and historians don’t entirely know how beer brewing evolved across the world. Now, a new study published in Current Biology finds that compared to other alcohols like wine, the genetics of beer yeasts are incredibly diverse, possibly highlighting how inventive early beer-makers were. Most strains of yeast used to brew beer come from a different genetic line than the yeasts used to make other alcohols, the study found.

Different yeasts yield different beer varieties. Ales are made with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (commonly known as baker’s yeast), as are wine and bread, while lagers are fermented with S. pastorianus. The S. cerevisiae yeasts ferment at the top of the liquid, while the S. pastorianus ferment at the bottom.

The study found that genetically, beer yeasts are very different from each other. “Whereas wine yeasts from any place in the world, say France and New Zealand, cluster in the same group and are genetically very similar, quite the opposite is true for beer yeasts,” said a press statement by the study’s lead author José Paulo Sampaio, who researches yeast ecology at Nova University of Lisbon. He and his colleagues looked at genetic data from more than two dozen yeast strains.

They found that top-fermenting beer yeasts like S. cerevisiae mostly belong to one clade (or group with a common ancestor) that’s split up into three subgroups: mostly German and Belgian beers; mostly British, Australian, and American ales; and a subgroup of other strains used for kölsch beers and a California ale. Of the 30 top-fermenting yeasts in the study, 23 belonged to this main beer clade, which showed genetic diversity that was more than twice that found in wine yeasts.

Meanwhile, some other beer yeast strains were closely linked to the yeasts used to make sake, wine, and bread. This indicates that the main genetic group of beer yeasts—the top-fermenting ones—was likely domesticated in a completely separate event than the strains related to wine and sake yeasts.

“Our results revealed that the most important wheat beer strains are in the sake clade and seem to have a completely different ancestry as compared with the other wheat beer yeasts,” Sampaio and his co-authors write. Those wheat beer strains include the type of yeast used in 90 percent of Bavarian wheat beer production, they note.

Some of the other strains used in beer-brewing were related to sake and wine yeasts. “The search for new beer types might have [led brewers to] co-opt wine, bread, and sake strains for beer brewing, as evidenced by our results,” they hypothesize.

Love beer history? Go enjoy a brew at one of the multiple European breweries that have been operating continuously for almost a thousand years.

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For two years, retired Marine Corps. Sgt. John Peck kept a packed black suitcase in his closet. He had no idea when he might get summoned to Brigham and Women’s Hospital for an urgent—and incredibly complex—emergency surgery.

This past August, the call came. A man was dying. And Peck would be the recipient of both his arms.

In a story detailed in The Washington Post, Peck is now learning to cope with what appears to be only the second double-arm transplant on a quadruple amputee. A veteran of the Iraq War, Peck encountered an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan in 2010 that took all four of his limbs. In 2014, he discovered he might be a candidate for the procedure. After two years idling on a waiting list and 14 hours of surgery, he became the recipient of two flesh-and-blood arms that are intended to replace his prosthetic devices.

While doctors have cautioned him the healing process will be slow, Peck told reporters in Boston on Wednesday that he can already lift his arms and has faint sensations in both. Physicians expect that Peck will have enough command of the limbs within the next nine to 12 months to perform complex tasks like cooking.

Good news, since Peck’s goal is to become a chef. But at the press conference, he was more concerned with acknowledging the unidentified donor who had given him a new lease on life. “Your loved one’s death will not be for nothing,” he said. “Every day that I look down at our new arms, I will drive on . . . and I will never give up. I will remember his selflessness and his gift until the day I die.”

[h/t NPR]

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Plants are liars. There, we said it. All right, fine, not all plants. But a lot of them. Meet the newest member of the botanical pants-on-fire club: a little flower that stinks like an injured bee in order to attract bee-eating flies. Researchers published a report today on the plant’s trickery in the journal Current Biology. 

Most plant deception is pretty crude. Consider the reeking corpse flower, or the bee orchid, whose lady bee-shaped flowers are irresistible to passing bee dudes. The male bees zoom in and get busy. Before too long they realize they’ve been had—but not before they’ve pollinated the devious, devious orchid.

Other plants employ slightly subtler devices. Plants in the Ceropegia family depend on flies for pollination. Their flowers are trap-shaped, so once a fly gets in, it will pretty much have to rub itself all up on the plant’s sexual parts in order to escape. But for that to happen, the fly first has to show up.

To catch a fly, you need to think like a fly. Fortunately, many of the flies that pollinate Ceropegia are fairly easy to predict. They like flying, buzzing, mating, and, most importantly, they like stealing other bugs’ food. Rather than hunting for its own honeybee, a kleptoparasitic fly waits until a predator like a spider has caught one, then buzzes down and digs in.

Flies could presumably follow spiders around until they made a kill. But it’s much more efficient to just sniff the air for the scent of a bee in trouble. It’s kind of the arthropod form of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

A team of European scientists suspected that the little South African flower Ceropegia sandersonii was using flies’ own trickery against them.

To find out, the researchers studied both the flowers and the bees. The first thing they noticed was that a spider-caught bee would eject its stinger, which released a droplet of venom. The team tested the venom and found it riddled with alarm pheromones, which, when released, would warn nearby bees to beat it.

 
Next they captured and tested C. sandersonii’s oh-so-innocent floral fragrance, looking for chemical similarities with the bee venom. They found them. In an act of chemical mimicry, flowering C. sandersonii plants were in fact emitting what seemed to be appealing olfactory distress calls.

Biologist Daniel Janzen studies plant-animal relationships at the University of Pennsylvania. (He was unaffiliated with this study.) “Tropical nature is packed with these kinds of detailed eco-behavioral interactions,” he told mental_floss in an email. “It’s nice to have another one worked out.”

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