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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
August 16, 2025 at 8:47am August 16, 2025 at 8:47am
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Some science as reported by MSN:
I don't know why it took them so long. Anyone who went to university knows what forces the brain to sleep: philosophy lectures.
We spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping...
Ideally, more. I've considered the idea that the purpose of life is to sleep, and anything we do during waking hours is in support of that.
...yet the biological trigger behind sleep has remained elusive.
My above attempt at humor aside, this is pretty cool.
Researchers have found that the pressure to sleep may come from deep inside our brain cells, from the tiny power plants known as mitochondria.
Certain phrases have become cliché. One such phrase is calling the mitochondria "power plants." Despite the similar-sounding name, these are not the same things as the midichlorians that enable one to harness and use The Force. Pretty sure they were going for a similar-sounding name, because mitochondria are the power plants of the cell.
Here in consensus reality (that is, not the Star Wars universe), almost all known macroscopic life possesses cells that have mitochondria. This is, to the extent that I understand it, the result of an ancient and perverted union of an archaeum and a bacterium, both unicellular, with the archaeum failing to digest the bacterium and instead incorporating its guts into its own cytoplasm. If it weren't for that lucky chance, which vastly increased the energy available in cells, we wouldn't be here.
The team, led by Professor Gero Miesenböck and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro, discovered that a build-up of electrical stress inside mitochondria in specific brain cells acts as a signal to trigger sleep.
I suspect that, as with most scientific breakthroughs, this will need to be replicated before one can confidently use words like "discovered."
The research, carried out in fruit flies, showed that when mitochondria become overcharged, they leak electrons.
“When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells,” said Dr. Sarnataro.
If this holds up, it's a good enough reason to not skimp on sleep. We know, empirically, that sleep deprivation causes all kinds of unpleasantness. Apparently, we didn't (and still probably don't) know all the reasons why.
“We set out to understand what sleep is for, and why we feel the need to sleep at all,” said Professor Miesenböck.
I still say that they're probably looking at it from the wrong perspective. The question shouldn't be why we need to sleep. The question should be why we need to spend so much time awake. My cats, for instance, are keenly aware of the value of sleep.
Small animals that consume more oxygen per gram of body weight tend to sleep more and live shorter lives.
The phrase "tend to" is doing a lot of the lifting there. The correlation is apparent when talking about housecats, who are smaller than humans, sleep more, and live shorter lives. But, from what I've heard, big cats also require more sleep, as do, famously, bears. I expect if you graphed body weight vs. sleep requirements, though, you'd end up with one of those scatter charts with a bunch of outliers.
“This research answers one of biology’s big mysteries,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “Why do we need sleep? The answer appears to be written into the very way our cells convert oxygen into energy.”
"Answers" is also probably overstated. It's a step in the right direction, but there are still mysteries. That's a good thing. Hopefully, there will always be mysteries. Some might even be solved after a good night's sleep. |
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Who knew I was just obeying the commands of some tiny bit of non-thinking protein? 
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