Month: November 2016

Rule No.1 of owning a credit card: Pay off your full balance every month. But that can be easier said than done. Some people stick to debit cards, which don’t let you spend more than is in your account, solely because they make it impossible to mire yourself in debt. But it would be a mistake to refuse the very real benefits of having a credit card because you’re worried about inadvertently spending money you haven’t yet earned.

For anyone who’s really worried about keeping their credit card spending in check, there are services like Debitize, a website that will use money from your checking account to pay off your credit card bill throughout the month. So if you spend $100 on your credit card, that $100 disappears from your checking account balance immediately.

Many budgeting apps will show you both your checking account and your credit card balance, allowing you to see if the latter has ballooned to twice what you’ve got socked away—but seeing the problem isn’t the same as tackling it. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking, “Well, I’ll have enough money when I get paid in a week” or subject yourself to some creative budget math.

When activated, Debitize can automatically siphon off money to cover your credit card purchases, or you can choose to do it manually. You can also set it so that it only transfers money if your checking account has more than a certain minimum balance. That way, you don’t have to worry about accidentally overdrafting in your quest for good credit.

By default, Debitize holds onto the funds it takes from your checking account until your credit card bill comes due at the end of the month. But if you want, you can also use Debitize to optimize your credit score by paying off your bill whenever your balance threatens to exceed the recommended “credit utilization ratio” of less than 30 percent of your credit limit.

Either way, the company does keep your funds in sort of a credit-limbo situation; though according to the site’s FAQs, the funds are held with a regulated bank. Using the service, you can pay off credit card bills from big-name banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citibank. Unfortunately, some credit card providers (like Discover, for example) aren’t supported, so while you can see that account’s balance on Debitize, you can’t set up automatic payments through the service.

Another downside to the service is that there isn’t a mobile app. The site is easy to use on a phone’s web browser, but it doesn’t have quite the convenience of a standalone app. According to a company representative, the first iPhone app is due out sometime in early 2017, with an Android version to follow.

Regardless, the convenience of never having to wonder if you’ve paid your credit card bill or if you have enough in your checking account to cover your automatic payments is well worth it.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that the USSR’s breakup and subsequent turmoil allowed one strain of tuberculosis to evolve in a virulent, drug-resistant form that continues to plague Central Asia. They also traced the spread of the strain from Central Asia to Afghanistan and then to Europe due to armed conflict and population displacement. 

Every action we take has unpredictable consequences on the world around us, and geopolitical events are no different. With this fact in mind, an international team of anthropologists and disease experts set out to investigate if and how human history could have altered the evolution of one widespread human disease.

The tuberculosis-causing bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, or MBTC) exists in seven distinct subtypes, or lineages. The second, third, and fourth lineages have been wildly successful as diseases go, but exactly how they’ve done it remains the subject of some disagreement. For this study, the researchers focused on the second lineage (L2), the so-called “Beijing lineage,” a particularly nasty strain that’s rapidly spreading and shows drug resistance.

The team collected samples of L2 tuberculosis germs from patients in Europe, South Asia, and Central Asia. They scanned all the bacterial genes in order to sort out the geographic origins of each patient’s TB, as well as to pinpoint the moments in the disease’s evolution when specific mutations—like those that make it resistant to medication—first appeared.

Their results indicated that one especially drug-resistant subtype of L2 was most common in former Soviet states. This would make plenty of sense if the mutations conferring drug resistance had evolved while the states were all part of the same Soviet Union. But the mutations are relatively new. They evolved in those places after the Soviet Union collapsed—a time of intense and violent conflict. On top of that, citizens of these states were being displaced en masse, and public health resources were nearly nonexistent.

The strain has spread as a consequence of armed conflict and population displacement, the authors write. It was introduced to Afghanistan with the 1979–1989 Soviet invasion and occupation. It spread further after the American invasion in 2001, when much of the population experienced further upheavals. L2 continued to mutate in Afghanistan, creating a new strain. More recently it’s been detected in Europe in small TB breakouts mostly limited to Afghan refugees.

The authors say the combination of these factors may have created a perfect environment in which TB could grow, get tougher, and become more virulent. Drug-resistant TB continues to be a major health concern in Central Asia. “Our results highlight the detrimental effects of political instability and population displacement on global TB control,” they write, “and demonstrate the power of [these] methods for understanding bacterial evolution in time and space.”

On November 22, 1963, dozens of people in Dallas, Texas lined the streets to watch President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade pass by Dealey Plaza. In the weeks and years that followed, many of their identities became known, while others still go by identifying nicknames (such as “Umbrella Man” or “Badge Man”). Conspiracy theories have abounded since that day, including ones surrounding “Babushka Lady,” so-called because the mystery woman was wearing what looked like a Russian head scarf. She was standing on the grass between Elm and Main Streets, photographing the moment JFK was shot, and now, 50-some years later, we still have no idea who she is, and whatever footage she may have taken of the president’s assassination has never been found.

A number of bystanders in Dallas took photos and videos, to varying degrees of quality, of what became the president’s assassination, and Babushka Lady appears in a few. In Dallas resident Marie Muchmore’s film (which has become one of the primary chronicles of that day), Babushka Lady appears at 0:41, standing behind a man, Charles Brehm, and his 5-year-old son, Joe. We can only see the back of her, but she wears a long tan coat, holds her arms up by her face, and stands with a wide stance.

In another video, taken by U.S. postal carrier Mark Bell, Babushka Lady is visible at 0:47 after the shots were fired and the motorcade has just passed by. Her back is to the camera, but she seems to have walked closer to the street and stands across from the grassy knoll. She remains standing, while others around her are running for cover or sitting on the ground in shock. The Zapruder film, which has become possibly the most famous citizen video because it is considered the most complete, offers a frontal view of Babushka Lady at 0:37, but her camera obscures her already-blurry face.

Seven years after the assassination, in 1970, a former dancer and singer at a burlesque club named Beverly Oliver claimed to be Babushka Lady. Oliver asserted that she photographed the assassination with her Yashica Super 8 camera, and two FBI agents took the camera from her. Oliver also claimed that she knew Jack Ruby, who supposedly introduced her to suspected JFK shooter Lee Harvey Oswald, saying Oswald was a member of the CIA. (Ruby, of course, went on to shoot Oswald while he was in custody.) Oliver’s story has some serious problems, though, and has been generally debunked.

She was a slender 17-year-old in 1963, which clashes with the older woman who appears in the film footage of Babushka Lady. Additionally, the Yashica Super 8 camera wasn’t produced until the mid-1960s. Oliver has backtracked on some of her claims, arguing that her camera was a prototype that she got before it became available to the general public.

Conspiracy theories involving Babushka Lady proliferate, with some theories holding more merit than others. Some say she was a Russian spy, an assassin holding a camera gun, a secret service agent, or a man dressed as an older woman (her wide stance for example, as seen in Muchmore’s film, could be viewed as a bit unusual for a woman in the 1960s—especially one dressed in a time-appropriate dress and trench). Because it had been raining earlier that morning, some women in Dealey Plaza wore scarves on their heads; but, the rain had stopped at 10 a.m., and since the shots weren’t fired until 12:30 p.m., Babushka Lady wasn’t wearing a scarf to shield herself from active rain. Perhaps she was holding binoculars rather than a camera, which would explain why her photographic or video footage has never been found. But because she never came forward to tell law enforcement what she saw (unlike other spectators who witnessed the shots being fired), her identity (and what she may know) remains a mystery.

The average American typically eats between 3,000 to 5,000 calories at Thanksgiving dinner.

There were no forks at the first Thanksgiving.

Writer Sarah Josepha Hale is responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday. She also wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Some jellyfish can return to earlier life stages.