You’ve probably noted we didn’t have a newsletter last month. With the launch of The Paris Contagion, all energy went to that endeavor. Run do not walk over to your favorite book source and grab a copy. The book is doing well on Amazon. Leave a review and share with friends.

If you missed the launch party hosted by the amazing Edith and the Chattering TeaCup - here is the link to the podcast. Enjoy!

Hugs and Purrs to the hostesses and the amazing Hillary Huber, the audio book narrator who read a section for the audience.

This month its all about my favorite things—baseball, coffee, kittens, exotic places and amazing science!

Baseball is all about statistics—the matchup between the pitcher and the batter—how and what one pitches versus the skill of hitting that specific pitch. Climate change and global warming affects all aspects of our lives. And will continue to do so in the future. So what does climate change have to do with baseball? In 2012, the hall of fame catcher and broadcast commentator Tim McCarver posited a question ‘were the number of home runs increasing due to climate change?’ Christopher Callahan, a Dartmouth climate scientist was intrigued by this question. Because Major League Baseball is obsessed with data, the scientists had a wealth of statistics. They tracked the game-day temperature versus number of home runs for over 100,000 games and 220,000 individual hits. The results—for every 1 degC rise in air temperature there was a 2% increase in the number of homers hit. This is a small-small-small increase but one that is detectable and will only increase as our planet warms. Read more in Science.org.

Wake up tired — do you reach for a cup of coffee? What an amazing organic suspension coffee is, just ask Captain Janeway of the Star Trek Starship Voyager. More than two billion cups are consumed every day in the world, so a lot of folks imbibe. Coffee’s stimulant is caffeine and this compound interacts with the way adenosine reacts with the cells in your brain. After a hard day or a difficult night’s sleep, levels of adenosine rise, binding with cellular receptors. This binding tells the cells to slow down, even go to sleep. Rest and sleep reduces adenosine levels and you begin feeling re-energized. Caffeine molecular-shape is much like adenosine and it binds with the brain’s cellular receptors - blocking adenosine by filling up the receptor spots - stopping the drowsy feeling. You feel refreshed, energized. But wait for it, caffeine’s intervention is a ‘loan’ not the creation of new energy. As the consumed caffeine breaks down and releases from the receptors, all the adenosine that has built up and waited to bind, rushes in—leading to a crash. If you add sugar to your drink, this spikes your blood sugar and ultimately leads to a sugar collapse that adds to the caffeine crash. I’ll still drink my caramel macchiato but I’ll try and time the drink to beat the crash. Check out the full article from The Conversation.

Toxoplasma gondii—a protozoan—infects every mammalian and avian species. The resulting high-risk parasitic infection causes blindness, birth defects and death. A reason pregnant women are told not to scoop litter boxes and risk infection. This single-celled organism is only found in the intestines and thus the feces of members of the Felidae family: cats, cheetahs, tigers and lions. Oh my! To study the protozoan, researchers would feed domestic kittens, meat contaminated with Toxoplasma and then harvest the parasite from the intestines, euthanizing the cats. Researchers at Grenoble Alpes University, using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, turned off certain protein-producing genes and activated others in the parasite, initiating sexual reproduction of the protozoan in the lab, not in the kittens. See Science.org for more information.

 An infrared video of a wild short-beaked echidna maneuvering through the Australian bush. (Image Credit: Christine Cooper)

When in Sydney Australia, we visited their amazing zoo, seeing examples of all the unique marsupials native to that continent. A small child visiting the same exhibits kept saying, ‘Look Mum, it's a bandicoot.’ Only in most instances it wasn’t. One of the species she mis-identified (not all the animals were bandicoots) was the echidna. This strange creature looks like a pug-sized spiny hedgehog with an anteater’s nose. They are a species of monotreme—mammals that lay eggs. Another monotreme characteristic is they are unable to perspire. So how do they stay cool in the scorching deserts of the Australian outback? They blow ‘snot-bubbles’ (see photo above) and utilize evaporative cooling to drop their body’s temperature about 10degC. This finding will aid naturalists in protecting this endangered species in captivity and as temperatures rise due to global warming. See the full story in Science.org.

 Some of the tendrils of the cosmic web as visualized by the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments (EAGLE) Project. (Image credit: EAGLE Project)

Einstein is right again! In his Theory of General Relativity, he postulated that matter would warp light. Astronomers have discovered that light produced just 380,000 years after the Big Bang is warped by dark matter, invisible matter that is pervasive throughout the universe, exactly as he predicted. The map above depicts 14 billion-year-old light illuminating tendrils of dark matter. The ‘map’ shows lumpiness and helps calculate the rate of expansion which are exactly what Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts. It is theorized that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter—material that would mutually-annihilate each other when they come into contact. We have no antimatter in the universe, but why do we still have matter? It is hypothesized that pockets of plasma-like matter may have been preserved within clumps protected by the tendrils. Only about 4% of the mass of the Universe is regular matter. The rest is ‘dark’ matter. But Einstein ‘saw’ it in his thought-experiments and predicted its existence in his seminal theories. Check out the article in LiveScience.com for more.

No, not the rock band. It’s the World Health Organization which turns 75 this year. This UN organization has dominated the news recently due to its sometimes controversial role in the COVID pandemic and the conflicts which arose over the origin of the SARs-CoV2 virus. The organization was born out of the aftermath of the Second World War, where more than 80 million people died from injury, disease and/or famine. The organization’s founding constitution states:

    “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.”

Perhaps, we in the United States should consider our role in this tenet. Not only for the global population but for our own citizens. The origin of the SARs-CoV2 virus may never be resolved, but that doesn’t preclude us from stopping the spread of this deadly disease and protecting the world from future pandemics. It takes a ‘village’ and the WHO is in the best non-patrician position to do just that.

This amazing book is a collection of six introductory freshman lectures in physics at California Institute of Technology given by Professor Feynman. Feynman may have won the Nobel Prize for the development of quantum field theory, but it was his engaging lectures to the young students at CalTech that developed a new generation of scientists. This book is easily understandable by the layperson and should be a part of anyone’s library. If interested, it's available on Amazon.

If physics isn’t your thing - head on over to Cambridge University Library and peruse the papers of Charles Darwin. Darwin laid the foundations of modern genetics and evolution.

I’m working on the fourth book of the Nexus Series. Since six more books are planned, in three trilogies, I’ve divided the Series into three Arcs. Quantum Time is Book One of Arc 2, with Quantum Gravity and Quantum Space as Books Two and Three, Arc 2. Not to be too overworked, the next book in my Geopolitical Thriller series is Designer Genes.

Enjoy Spring flowers if you reside in the northern hemisphere or autumnal changes in the southern.

Back to the keyboard. 

Be curious. Be kind.