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I am leopard — hear me walk onto campus
A leopard’s 10-hour “rampage” at an Indian school on Monday was probably as “terrifying,” and “shocking” as the headlines proclaimed.
But it wasn’t surprising.
The leopard strolled onto the grounds of a school in India’s own Silicon-Valley-esque tech hub, Bangalore, mauling six people before being sedated and taken to a nearby national park.
As India’s population booms, the spotted predators keep bumping up against people. Last year, a thirsty leopard got its head stuck in a pot for five hours as villagers took pictures and a nation watched in sad fascination.
In Bangalore, a city that’s grown nearly 50% in population (to roughly 10 million) since the start of the tech boom, leopard sightings have become especially common. In Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital, 23 leopards have been killed on roadways in recent years.
All this might make it seem like Indian leopard numbers are climbing. In fact, they’ve plummeted over the last century, thanks to poaching and shrinking habitat.
But new research into the evolving field of “road ecology” is trying to suss out better ways for wildlife to traverse the human environment — without ending up as roadkill or making global headlines for acting, you know, like wild animals.
An aside from space
While the chances of getting swatted by a confused feline predator may be going up in India, the odds of getting struck and killed by a space rock are staggeringly low.
But officials in the southern state of Tamil Nadu believe a 40-year-old bus driver may have been killed by a meteorite this weekend, making him the first known person to be killed by cosmic debris.
Outer space, generally speaking, has been kind to the earth’s creatures, having hurled rocks at them only a handful of times in recorded history.
A meteorite from Mars killed a dog in Egypt in 1911, another struck an Alabama woman who was napping on her couch in 1954, and yet another grazed a Ugandan boy in 1992. The most damaging meteorite blow came in 2013 when a fireball ripped through the sky, landing on a city in Russia’s Ural mountains, injuring 1,000 people and damaging hundreds of buildings.
Police haven’t yet confirmed the Indian space-rock kill, but the government has compensated the family of the bus driver with a grand total of 100,000 rupees — about $1,470.
Itadakimasu, fellas
A small sushi joint in Tokyo has gotten a lot of attention recently for proclaiming itself the first sushi restaurant to employ an all-female roster of chefs.
In Japan, where the sushi patriarchy is as monolithic as Mt. Fuji, female sushi chefs are a rare species. Some say women can’t make sushi because their hands are too warm or that their menses somehow get in the way.
The son of the famed sushi master, Jiro Ono, said: “To be a professional means to have a steady taste in your food, but because of the menstrual cycle, women have an imbalance in their taste, and that’s why women can’t be sushi chefs.”
So there, gals. Keep your hormonal hands off the seafood. Or do what the women in Tokyo did. Get behind the counter and whip up some mean nigiri, even if, as one of the chefs told the Washington Post, “Sometimes I feel like an animal that’s being watched.”
Oddly enough, sushi’s origin myth centers on a female human. As the legend goes, an old woman who wanted to keep her rice from thieves, tied up bags of the grain and hid them in osprey nests. When she went back for her cache, she discovered the birds had dropped fish into the fermenting rice — and that the seafood was perfectly preserved as a result.
But that’s just a cute story about a batty old lady. Eventually, sushi became a global culinary phenomenon dominated by elderly, balding men.
Getting the lead in
The New York Times today reported that lead-tainted water has flowed into homes around the country, not just in Flint, Michigan, where as many as 8,000 children have ingested lead-poisoned water, sparking national outrage and charges of environmental racism.
Turns out, the Times said, that cities across the country have the same problem — and, as in Flint, officials have taken months and even years to tell people about it.
The public seems to have known that lead pipes were trouble well before the government did. Some residents of Boston and New York began complaining about them in the 1850s, long before they came into widespread use.
In the late 1800s authorities finally acknowledged that lead pipes were linked to lead poisoning, and by the 1920s many US cities began banning their use.
But it wasn’t for the lead industry’s lack of trying.
To combat the shrinking demand for their product, the Lead Industries Association unleashed their representatives across the country in the late 1920s to persuade plumbers’ groups, water authorities and federal officials to continue using lead pipes. The association published dozens of articles, trumpeting the virtues of their toxic metal, even giving advice on how best to install it.
A story in the American Journal of Public Health concluded in 2007 that cities continued installing lead pipes even after they were determined to be a public health threat, and that the group’s efforts — which continued until the 1970s — worked, contributing “to the present-day public health and economic cost of lead water pipes.”
Ye Olde Concussiones
Perhaps if he’d been able to see better from the ocularium of his great helm.
A study by Yale researchers, reported in Quartz, suggests that King Henry VIII suffered some serious, “NFL-style” knocks to the head while jousting, which perhaps accounted for his murderous temper later in life. (Poor guy also endured a “sorre legge.”)
The researchers scoured documents from Henry’s life describing several jousting spills that may have triggered migraines, beginning in 1524, and mal d’esprit in later years. He often had major memory lapses — forgetting, for example, that he sent his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, to the Tower of London. (“Honey, would you bring me more roasted venison loin?….Sweetie?….Oh, right. Damn.”)
This, presumably, would not make a wife happy. Nor would, the authors write, Henry’s apparent brain-injury-related impotence. Anne Boleyn told relatives he “was not adept in the matter of coupling with a woman” and “had neither vertu nor puissance.”
Then, of course, she lost her head.