Overnight Open Thread 08/11/16 - [Niedermeyer's Dead Horse]

Happy Thursday my peeps.

Some days you win, some days you lose. On this day, you get a Niedermeyer's ONT.

I'll let you decide for yourselves which day today is.

First up.

Since it's the first official night of NFL football, let's start things off with a pretty girl.

Cute, eh? Like a young Marie Osmond.

Up next...

If you had to guess when Hepatitis-C was first discovered, when would you guess it was?

1913?

1944?

1967?

How about 1989. Yes. 1989.

When i read this tonight, and then had it confirmed by a a virologist on Twitter, it blew me away. It just seems too... something. Too in-my-lifetime, perhaps. Then I thought of the first person I ever heard of having it, and it was Naomi Judd. I remember being shocked that she would retire over it because I had no idea what the hell it was. That was 1991.

Well, now, thanks to some 60-year old blood samples, scientists have been able to trace it backwards and forwards.

The samples were taken as part of a study to determine if Penicillin administered to Strep patients could prevent Rheumatic Fever. It did.

Conducted on nearly 9,000 Air Force recruits during the 1940s, the samples were considered valuable so, following the Strep tests, the samples were locked away for safe-keeping for 40 years. In the 1990s an inquisitive Virologist wondered if he might detect Hep-C in them. His initial tests, which were never fully completed, aroused the interest of other scientists. Subsequent tests found that 17 samples among 8,500 tested were positive for Hep-C, proving that the virus had been in existence in the 1940s. Eight of the seventeen recruits who tested positive were still alive, so off the scientist went...

It's a long, but interesting read.

So, did you also think the discovery dated significantly farther back?

Speaking of death and disease, we now have death as "performance art".

In early July, Molly Davis emailed her closest friends and relatives to invite them to a two-day party, telling them: 'These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness and openness.' And just one rule: No crying in front of her.

...

Friends said it was the final performance for the artist, who once drew pictures on a stage with whipped cream.
'What Molly did gave her the most beautiful death that any person could ever wish for,' Alpert said. 'By taking charge, she turned her departure into a work of art.'

I know that both life and death are more complicated than a bumper sticker, but, I just can't.

I'll say nothing more at this time than to say that I don't know what to say.

In lighter news, Greenland Sharks just might possibly live hundreds of years. Speculation is that the oldest tested is at least 272 years old and could be as old as 512 years old. They've estimated her age at 392 years.

Cute too, ain't it?

Speaking of sharks, if you are unfamiliar with the research organization Ocearch, you should check them out. They study sharks and the most interesting of their methods is that they GPS-tag the sharks and track their movements.

Here in Jacksonville, FL, we had heard tall tales of fishermen spotting Great Whites off our coast but they were always dismissed as misidentification or as typical fisherman hijinks, then someone took a photo.

It was a Great White.

Well, Ocearch's tracking devices have proven that they just LOVE the Southeast coast and regularly travel not only into the shallows, but into inlets as well.

The largest shark they've tagged, Mary Lee, has pinged near Jax a number of times although she really gets around, moving up and down the coast from Florida to New England.

Cleverly, Ocearch really engages their audience. They've created twitter profiles for several of their sharks with each having it's own personality. Katharine
has 41k followers at twitter and tweeted this clip of Today Show Australia wherein they played a video of a very impressive breach which aired on the Discovery Channel.

Heh. Here's the video from the show.

To read the profiles of the sharks they've tagged, and to see where they've traveled, visit Ocearch's website or twitter sites.

What do you think of this? I love it. Well, I love it now, but it took me a bit of time to figure it out.

Do any of you have experience with this type of intersection?

Well, that's it for tonight.

Play nice, and have a great night, folks.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:50 PM

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