​The Mexican jungle could be the starting point of the next pandemic ● If global warming continues, baseball! ● How we became human by hunting snails

The Mexican jungle could be where the next pandemic begins

With the start of the largest modern tourism project in Mexico, “Mayan Train”, not only environmental activists, but also scientists became alarmed. The project, announced in 2018 by the current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, involves the construction of a 1,525-kilometer railway that will cross the Yucatan Peninsula and which wants to show tourists from all over the world the architectural and cultural treasures of the Maya.

So far so good. The problem is that the route that goes around the entire Yucatan Peninsula goes through the jungle. And this has already led to massive deforestation. It is not surprising that all environmental organizations, supported by those who fight for the rights of the indigenous population, sharply criticized the project.

But there is an even greater danger than the destruction of the ecosystems there. Namely, the emergence of outbreaks of infection with viruses, bacteria or parasites from species that until now lived in the wild and rarely came into contact with humans. Simply put, transporting millions of tourists to an environment that promotes human-wildlife contact is an act of enormous risk. And to do this, a mixed Franco-Mexican team is racing against time to identify potential dangers.

Basically, the French from the French Institute of Development (IRD) and the Mexicans from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have to take samples of blood, fluids and parasites from all the species that live there. In detail, 61 species of mosquitoes have been identified on the Yucatan Peninsula alone. Not to mention bats, rodents, birds, etc., which are potential zoonotic outbreaks.

This seems like a Sisyphean task, especially since the first section of the railway will be commissioned at the end of this year, and the entire project will be completed in 2024. In order to deal with the huge database, the mentioned researchers cooperated with more than 200 organizations from 22 countries. Nevertheless, the alarm has already been killed.

If global warming continues, baseball!

If in most sports with a round or oval ball the goal is to enter the ball into the goal, into the basket or into the target zone, and not to send it to the batter, then in baseball everything is exactly the opposite. The further you launch the ball, ideally outside the stadium, the better. This is where the fun part comes in, because the odds of becoming a superstar, if you’ve ever dreamed of becoming one, are on your side.

This is stated in a study conducted by a group of researchers from Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, USA, published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. And, American experts say, against the background of global warming, the number of home runs (the moment when you send the ball out of bounds and can run to all the bases) will increase significantly. How so?

simply! High temperature reduces air density. And the ball (or projectile) will fly further than usual, with less air friction. And this can be seen even in statistics.

Researchers have done some work by analyzing data from more than 100,000 baseball games played in the United States from 1962 to 2019. In addition, they cut more than 220,000 shots on the ball, and all this in the period of 2015-2019. It is not easy, we must admit.

It turns out that between 2010 and 2019, more than 500 home runs can be blamed on global warming. How to say, the number of such successes increased by an average of 58 per season. It is estimated that this trend will continue, and somewhere around 2100 there will be about 10% more home runs.

In summary, there is no point in playing rugby, basketball, handball or any other serious sport, as the chances of achieving any high results have not increased in the meantime. Football there is already so full of mess, there is no need to replenish the ranks. So baseball remains your chance to make a statement.

How we became human by hunting snails

Man is the most feared predator on the planet, and there is no doubt about this statement. No matter how big, poisonous or dangerous the animal was, man always found a way to kill it. Only this was not a mandatory rule of human evolution. As it still happens today, people often prefer the most economical options in terms of energy consumption compared to the nutrients that the game brings.

In this case, offered by Border Cave, one of South Africa’s most famous caves, it was about snails. Before reproducing the content of the study, we will say that Border Cave is the site where the earliest presence of Homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa has been documented, and the age of human fossils exceeds 100,000 years. In addition to fossils, traces of habitation in the cave date back 227,000 years, suggesting an even older presence of our species (or other species) in the same area.

The idea is that the experts found snail shells, mostly fragmented and of various colors, of one of the largest snail species on Earth, Lissachatina fulica. And not only did they find them, but they found them in most of the sedimentary levels, from the sedimentological equivalent of 170,000 years to about 70,000 years ago.

Amazed by the existence of so many remains of snail shells, as well as their unusual color, South African specialists from the University of the Witwatersrand reconstructed the process of preparing snails.

What they found after setting fire to the shells is strikingly similar to what they found in Border Cave. Hence the conclusion of their study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, that snails were part of the diet of our ancestors for a vast period of time. In addition, they represented a tradition that can still be found in many cultures today. If we also consider that Border Cave is one of the key places of human evolution, we cannot help but conclude that yes, snails represented one of those mysteries that helped us on our evolutionary path.

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