Ripped From the Headlines of Science Digests!

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a Venatrix.  (And the rest of you, get your minds out of the gutter!)

The newly analyzed drawing, on a third-century mosaic, shows a huntress fighting a leopard with a whip, i.e., a venatrix.

In the Roman Empire, beast hunters put on shows in arenas, where they would battle wild animals, such as boars and bears. Unlike gladiators, they fought beasts rather than people. Like the female gladiators, it seems female beast hunters would "always fight topless, with bare breasts, because [otherwise] spectators from the stands would have had problems to notice that they were actually women, and [to] arouse an erotic effect on those spectators, to excite them sexually, was one of the aims sought by their performance."   (LINK)  

BTW, Romans approved of gladiators and beast hunters because the games reinforced essential cultural values: "martial courage, stoicism in the face of death, and the superiority of Roman power."  And the people loved it because it was exciting, stimulating, exciting... and they got fed for free, thanks to aristocrats and rich folks who were always jostling for popularity.  

Bad news for the permanent space stations:

Turns out that sperm cells, egg and embryos all like gravity. "This human, mouse and pig study, published Thursday (March 26) in the journal Communications Biology, revealed that sperm became disoriented, mouse eggs had fewer successful fertilizations, and pig embryos experienced developmental delays, all due to microgravity.

The findings have big implications for building a lasting human presence off Earth. The long-term settlements planned for the moon and Mars depend not just on keeping astronauts alive but on whether people can eventually reproduce there."  (LINK)

And another shock in the world of biological reproduction:

So if you can't produce your own offspring, clone them!  EXCEPT:

"You can't clone yourself forever, 

You can't make yourself all the time.

At some point you mutate, 

Especially vertebrates,

You can't make yourself 59 times."  

Seriously, the limit is 58 successive clones.

Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the study: “In any kind of animal breeding, once you have the optimal genome, the best way to keep it is by cloning — except for this mutation problem.”  

Cats Can't Taste Sugar - this doesn't mean that your cats will never go after your chocolate, or knock it down onto the floor. It just means they can't taste it.  

The weird part (to me) of the study of taste in animals is that “The super-tasters among the animal world are goldfish,” says Finger. “Goldfish and catfish have way more taste buds than anybody else.” They have poor vision, and their taste buds, including those on their whiskers, could help them sense their way to a meal in murky water, he adds. (LINK)

Goldfish?  Goldfish?  So now I'm pitying all the goldfish swimming in their bowls, getting the same damn fish food day after freaking day... I'm amazed they don't leap out of their bowls and go for the hand that feeds them.

Little Mysteries From Science: WARNING:  Solutions have not yet been found for all.


Why are humans the only species with a chin? (LINK)


Why can't you tickle yourself? (LINK)


What's the deal with blushing?

Charles Darwin described blushing blushing as "... the most peculiar and most human of all expressions."

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” Mark Twain

"Blushing may be a part of the automatic arousal you feel when you are exposed and there is something that is relevant to the self," lead study author Milica Nikolic said. (LINK)

Why do animals have different pupil shapes? (LINK)

The Ig Nobels are moving to Europe! 😭😭😭

Winners have for the past 35 years traveled to the United States to collect their prizes — and be showered with paper airplanes. Last year, winners included a team of researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebralike stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza that lizards preferred to eat.

The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language (as well as Pure Gibberish) and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

And so... off to Zurich it goes! (LINK)

Ig Nobels, we barely knew thee...

LIPS!

Back on March 9, I participated in my own scientific medical experiment regarding the swelling of lips, specifically my bottom lip.  Here's the deal: during an examination my ENT physician found a papilloma in the back of my throat.  Did a biopsy.  Squamous tissue, i.e., we've got to take it out because it might become cancerous if we don't.  So, on March 9 they did, having wisely given me total anesthesia (I have a kick like a mule), using a (portable) laser.  

Anyway, all went well, I came home that night feeling like a zombie, and the next morning I got up, looked at my face, and said, "What the hell...?"  Now in order to get the laser down where it needed to be, they had to hold my bottom lip down with something (I really don't want to know with what), and this was the result:  Basically, I got a not-so-free non-filler Mar-A-Lago filler job on my bottom lip.  

It lasted for about a week.  During this time I reached the strictly scientific conclusion that anyone who has this done on purpose is certifiably insane.  For one thing, it turned meal-times into an adventure, because the lip simply would not behave itself.  It was just there, and not happy about being used, because it hurt.  And since I wasn't 6 months old anymore, I no longer enjoyed the feeling of food spilling down my face.  Also, it completely blew up the trope that the hero (or in my case, heroine) can get in a fist fight (or a surgery) and then have deep  passionate kisses afterwards.  I certainly couldn't:  it hurt.  

I'm back to normal, and I am happy to announce all was benign.  And that I will never pursue the Mar-A-Lago look on a permanent basis.  I'd rather be a female gladiator any day.

The Queen's Poisoner

Queen Christina of Sweden (r. 1632-1654)

 That one got your attention, huh? Kind of a vague term, "the Queen's Poisoner." Does it mean "the person who poisoned the queen?" Or maybe, "The poisoner who worked for the queen, perhaps even filling an official position of "queen's poisoner"? Or it could be the title of a fantasy novel?

For our purposes it's something altogether–uh, okay mostly different. The "poisoner" in question is a professional. The queen is unconventional. And this story has two parts. Today we'll talk about the poisoner and the queen. In two weeks, we'll talk about the indirect impact these two persons had on an entire country–and not the one the poisoner called home (Italy) or the one ruled by the queen (Sweden).

First, the poisoner.

The formidable Olympia Maidalchini

It's easy to sum up the historical record on our poisoner, because said historical record is so slim. His name (we think) was Nicolò Egidi. But he is better remembered by his nom de guerre: "Egidio Exili" ("Egidio the Exile"?). Exili first enters the historical record while serving in the household of Olympia Maidalchini, the influential sister-in-law of the current pope, Innocent X (r. 1644-1655). Exili's position was listed as "poisoner."

It's important at this point to understand that the profession of "poisoner" most often could have been more accurately called "alchemist," which in many ways was a forerunner to what we refer to as a "chemist." Granted, a lot of the experimental research done by these individuals involved coming up with poisons, not least because the only way to prepare an antidote for a particular poison was to experiment with the actual thing. 

How long Exili worked for the powerful (and by all accounts, formidable) Donna Olympia is not recorded. And when next he pops up, it's several hundred miles to the north, at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Which brings us to the queen. 

(We'll get back to Exili in a moment).

Queen Christina dressed as a man

Born in 1626, Christina came to the throne upon the death of her father, King Gustavus Adolphus, in battle. She began to rule in her own right in 1644, and then took two steps guaranteed to ensure her reign was brief: she made public her desire to never marry (and thus never to produce an heir), and eventually made public her conversion from the Lutheranism of her youth (and in service of which her father had died, a casualty of the so-called Thirty Years' War) to Catholicism. 

Neither move was popular with her subjects, who were both A) overwhelmingly chauvinistic by our standards, and B) overwhelmingly Lutheran by any standards. And that's not all. During the ten years before she abdicated in favor of a male cousin, Christina acted in ways very unlike the "conventional" queen of her era.

For starters, she frequently dressed as a man. Coupled with her lack of interest in marriage, it has been speculated that Christina might have been either gay or even transgender. Both are possible, as is the notion that she dressed as a man because she felt men were taken more seriously in the areas which really interested her: the arts and sciences.

While she reigned Christina's court in Stockholm was a hot bed of artistic and scientific inquiry: artists, scholars, scientists (or, as they were known at the time, "natural philosophers") from all over Europe flocked to Sweden hoping for some of the royal patronage with which Christina was so generous that she nearly bankrupted the state treasury.

Exili was among those who went to Sweden looking for a "research grant," and he entered the queen's service and stayed in that position for several years.

Including that time the queen sent him to Paris on royal business, and the French promptly tossed him in the Bastille.

And that's it for now. Come back in two weeks to find out what happened to both this queen and her poisoner, as well as what climactic event they had an indirect impact on. See you in two weeks!

The Bastille surrounded by the eastern part of Paris in 1649.