This is positively mind-boggling. Dandruff, and other skin peelings seems to be a major contributor in the aerosols that cause Global Dimming. I kid you not.
Jaenicke reported that the percentage of biological materials in aerosol pollution topped 40 percent in Mainz in September and 30 percent in October. And a study at Lake Baikal, Russia, showed more than 30 percent in September.
He said he did similar studies of the air over ocean environments, on mountains and in ice cores. There was no strong annual cycle, he said, although pollen was more abundant in spring while decaying cellular matter was more common in fall and winter.
He estimated that the amount of biological particles in the air, worldwide, annually is 1,000 teragrams. A teragram is somewhat more than a million tons. By comparison, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environmental Program, estimated biological particles at 56 teragrams, compared with 3,300 teragrams of sea salt and 2,000 teragrams of mineral dust.
The new finding means researchers should take biological materials seriously in climate modeling, in cloud physics and in hygienic questions such as allergies, Jaenicke said.
Hmmm. 1000 and 56 are a whole 2 orders out. This is really surprising.
Laughing It Off
That's right, meanwhile the hairy, unwashed animal kingdom providing so much aerosols is laughing it up, laughing it off.
"Indeed, neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the brain, and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in other animals eons before we humans came along with our 'ha-ha-has' and verbal repartee," says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University.
When chimps play and chase each other, they pant in a manner that is strikingly like human laughter, Panksepp writes in the April 1 issue of the journal Science. Dogs have a similar response.
Rats chirp while they play, again in a way that resembles our giggles. Panksepp found in a previous study that when rats are playfully tickled, they chirp and bond socially with their human tickler. And they seem to like it, seeking to be tickled more. Apparently joyful rats also preferred to hang out with other chirpers.
Laughter in humans starts young, another clue that it's a deep-seated brain function.
"Young children, whose semantic sense of humor is marginal, laugh and shriek abundantly in the midst of their other rough-and-tumble activities," Panksepp notes. Importantly, various recent studies on the topic suggest that laughter in animals typically involves similar play chasing. Could be that verbal jokes tickle ancient, playful circuits in our brains.
It still doesn't explain why there are so many humourless people; but now we know: They're brain-damaged. :)
- Art Neuro
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