Hic Sunt Dracones (aka Here be Dragons)

We find dragons in various religions and cultures around the world, often revered as representatives of the primal forces of nature, religion and the universe. Usually, dragons are associated with wisdom and longevity, sometimes possessing some form of magic or other supernatural power. We all know movie and television's version of dragons--typically reptilian or serpentine in trait with large wings and sometimes horns. They may even breathe fire. With the discovery of how pterosaurs walked on ground, some dragons have been portrayed without front legs and using the wings instead as front legs.

The word dragon entered the english language in early 13th century. Derived from the Latin word draconem meaning "huge serpent, dragon," and from the Greek word δράκων, drakon meaning "serpent, giant seafish". The Greek and Latin term referred to any great serpents, not necessarily mythological. This usage was also used in English up to the 18th century.

While those may have been ancient depictions, populated by Hollywood and the imagination, there are a few real live "dragons" alive today. They don't breathe fire or are larger than a house, but they are very cool nevertheless and look like little dragons.

image credit: redbubble.com

The first is what's called a glaucus atlanticus or the blue sea slug often found in the temperate and tropical waters. It is a member of a new species called nudibranch which is a marine snail that lost is shell back in early evolutionary history. There are more than 3,000 species and are known for their elaborate patterns and vibrant colours. It floats on the surface of the water with the aid of a gas filled sac in its stomach. Because of the location of the sac, this little slug floats upside down. They feed on the venomous Portuguese Man o' War Physalia physalis; the by-the-wind-sailor Velella velella; the blue button Porpita porpita; and the violet snail, Janthina janthina. They survive by collecting the animal's toxins and storing them in littel sacs on the ends of their feather-like "fingers", producing a much more powerful and deadly sting.

The second is the gliding lizard, belonging to the genus Draco. This little guy looks more like the mythological creature. There are more than 45 species, ranging in size from 7-15 cm in length and are native to Southeast Asia.

The wings of the lizards are actually a rearranged rib cage in which one of the primary functions is to allow them to glide. By elongating their extended movable ribs, spanning the large flap of skin between their limbs, these arboreal reptiles can glide distances of over 60 meters. They also have a small set of flaps on their neck that serve as a horizontal stabilizer and a rudder-like tail to steer.

Not exactly creatures of legend, but still. What about the mythology of dragons do you like? What intrigues you?

Are you a chimera?

Thousands of years ago, the Greek poet ­Homer wrote about a specific monster with the chest of a lion, the tail of a snake, the midsection of a goat and heads of all three animals. While this is only mythology, and an exaggerated version at that, there are many natural-borne chimeras around today that we may not even know about.

What is a chimera?

From wiki: a chimera is a single organism (usually an animal) that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes. Chimeras are formed from four parent cells (two fertilized eggs or early embryos fused together). Each population of cells keeps its own character, resulting in an organism of mixed tissues. Usually, the condition is inherited, but may also be acquired through the infusion of allogeneic hematopoeitic cells (this happens through transplantation or transfusion). The likelihood of offspring being a chimera is increased if it is created via in vitro fertilization.

There is also a form of congenital chimerism (tetragmetic chimerism). In this way, chimerism occurs through the fertilization of two separate ova by two sperm. The two usually then fuse together at the blastocyst or zygote stage. What results is an organism with intermingled DNA. As the organism develops, it can come to possess organs that have different sets of DNA (i.e. it may have the liver composed of one DNA and a kidney of another. It may even have two different blood types). In CSI (the original), this was a particular key plot in "Bloodlines".

The difference in phenotypes may be subtle (e.g., having one eye a different colour from the other, etc.) or completely undetectable. Chimeras may also show, under a certain spectrum of UV light, distinctive marks on the back resembling that of arrow points pointing downwards from the shoulders down to the lower back in what is called Blaschko's lines.

Blaschko lines form from the fact that chimeras start out with two different cells, each with different DNA (and therefore different instructions). The skin of the person is therefore made up of two different sets of instructions on how to colour the skin. The Blaschko's lines result from the fact that some of a chimera's skin cells say to make darker skin and some say to make lighter.

When there is a big difference between the two DNA's instructions on how dark to make the skin, then you get obvious Blaschko's lines. If the differences are subtle, then you may not be able to see the pattern without the aid of an UV light.

While not as rare as once believed, chimeras may be identified by finding two different populations of red cells, or if the zygotes were of opposite sex, either ambiguous genitalia or hermaphroditism (alone or in combination).

In 2003, scientists had begun to blur the lines of chimerism-producing animal-human hybrids-when Chinese scientists at Shanghai Second Medical University successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. While the embryos were successful, after several days of being allowed to develop in a laboratory dish, they were destroyed so that the stem cells could be harvested. And in 2004, pigs were created with human blood.

Why?

Because scientists believe that the more human-like the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.

What do you think about chimeras?

The Rise of the Phoenix, a case of spontaneous combustion?

On Sept 23, 2011, a man burned to death in his home, his death ruled as spontaneous combustion.

We've all heard the tales, the most famous, a fictional story by Charles Dickens when he killed off an alcoholic character in such a manner in his book "Bleak House." The character, named Krook, was an alcoholic, following the belief at the time that spontaneous human combustion was caused by excessive amounts of alcohol in the body. However, one of the first known accounts of spontaneous combustion dates back farther back to 1663 by a Thomas Bartholin who described a woman in Paris as she "went up in ashes and smoke" while she was sleeping, the straw mattress unmarred by the fire. And then in 1763, a collection of spontaneous combustion cases--"De Incendiis Coporis Humani Spontaneis"--was published.

There are several popular theories:

1. a fire is sparked when methane builds up in the intestines and is ignited by enzymes

If this was true, victims would suffer greater damage to their internal organs. However, from the cases where the body wasn't completely charred, the evidence suggests the opposite.

2. a fire results as a buildup of static electricity inside the body
3. from an external geomagnetic force exerted on the body
4. one individual has claimed that it is the work of a particle called a pyroton, which he says interacts with cells to create a mini-explosion.

No evidence has been found to prove the existence of these.

Although many attribute such ideas of spontaneous human combustion to the paranormal, in 1998, forensic scientists believed they found a possible explanation as they tested the "wick" effect.

Using a dead pig, wrapped in cloth, they tested the idea that a body can be devoured by flames from its own body fat. Scientists found that the clothes soaked up the melted fat, acting like the wick of a candle, leaving all surrounding materials unharmed, such as the case in 1951 of Mary Reeser who is suspected to have burned to death after taking sleeping pills while smoking, causing her body to burn from within. Another example, in 1966, a body of a 92-year-old was discovered. while only his leg and slippered foot was found, the rest of his body had been burned to ashes. A hole in his bathroom floor was the only evidence of the fire that had killed him, everything else untouched.

In this case of the man's death on Sept 23rd, forensics found that the fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where the badly burned body was discovered was not the cause of death. Neither was there any trace of an accelerant found, which could have suggested foul play. The only damage was to the body and the ceiling above him and floor underneath.

In mythology, we hear about a creature that burns up, much like in these cases of spontaneous human combustion. That creature is the phoenix, a mythical bird that, at the end of a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, goes up in flame and a new phoenix (often as an egg) is reincarnated as an egg, born from the ashes.

Could spontaneous combustion be an explanation for such tales of a phoenix? What do you think?

Mermaids: Pt 2- Reproduction

Last week I talked about mermaids and how they could potentially see under the water—eyes like fish, not like ours. Today’s discussion is how mermaids could possibly reproduce if they were real. This isn’t going to be a sex-ed. I imagine it’d be something similar to dolphins. However, that wasn’t the question a friend asked me. She asked whether mermaids would lay eggs or have live birth.

Would they take after the fishes, considering they’re fish-like from the waist down or would they take on the live birth like mammals? If we go by the fact, for the moment, that they are fish-like completely from the waist down, then we should assume that their reproductive organs are as well. That would mean that they’d lay eggs. But let’s step back a moment. If mermaids did lay eggs and then were fertilized by the males after, there wouldn’t be much diversity of the species as a whole. Also, fish can lay hundreds of eggs. Even if only half of them hatch, that’s a lot of mermaids. You’d expect a lot more sightings.

Therefore, this leads to the explanation that mermaids would have to take after whales and porpoises= live birth. Not just that, but mermaids have been depicted with mammalian traits (i.e. breasts and a navel). If you account for probably only one baby per pregnancy, maybe two, the odds seem more reasonable. Also, if you look at the depictions of their tails, it closely resembles that of a dolphin rather than a fish.

What about their scales? Dolphins and whales don’t have colourful scales like fish do. I would assume that it is just artistic license. If you look at drawings of dolphins, some are drawn with scales as well and we know they don’t.

So what do you think? If mermaids were real, how do you think they would reproduce? On a fiction note, do you like stories of mermaids?

Vampires Pt 1 (re-posted from an old blog)

. . .I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

from Jonathan Harker's Journal

Vampires. Love them. Hate them. They're everywhere in one form or another. We all know them--mythological undead that feed on the blood of the living. Often described as gaunt and pale, vampires have dated back from the early Nineteenth Century. Although they have been recorded in most cultures, the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe.

But what makes a vampire?

ORIGINS

Porphyria:

In the mid-1980s, police in Virginia arrested twenty-year-old Jeffery Wainwright for murder. The vic? Charles Brownell, a forty-three-year-old brick mason and self-proclaimed vampire and although he called himself a vampire all his adult life, no one took him seriously. After Brownell disappeared for two weeks, neighbours became suspicious when they found a trail of blood outside his apartment. What the police found inside, was a gruesome sight of human organs, tissue and blood. The police suspected Brownell of murdering an innocent then fleeing.

Scientific evidence proved otherwise, finding that the bloody evidence was of Brownell himself. What was most intriguing of all, were that tests of the victim's liver showed that Brownell had suffered from porphyria, a rare genetic disease in which heme (the red pigment of the blood) is not properly biosnthesized, occurring in 1 of every 30,000 people.

To a sufferer, even mild exposure to sunlight can be devastating, creating lesions of the skin that can be so severe that the nose and fingers are destroyed. Although teeth don't become longer, the lips and gums were said to recede dramatically. Not only that, but some sufferers were said to become hairy. Could what some people call vampirism simply be a case of porphyria sufferers trying to alleviate the symptoms of their disease? It is thought, that perhaps if a large amount of blood were drunk, the heme in it would supply the missing heme in the sufferer, although this method is not very efficient. Today, porphyriacts are treated with heme injections, however, in the Middle Ages, when injections were impossible, drinking large amounts of blood would have been the only way of getting the necessary supply of heme. Since death can result from heme insufficiency, it is expected then, that personality changes and dementia are psychiatric symptoms would occur.

And because porphyria is genetic, it is noted that many siblings share the same defective gene, with only one showing disease symptoms, creating local pockets of porphyriacs (such as mountainous, isolated Transylvania). It has also been noted that a strain on th system, such as the sudden and major loss of blood, can trigger the disease in a person already genetically pre-disposed.

What about garlic? In vampire folklore, garlic was used to ward off vampires. In many drugs and chemicals that destroy heme, there is a feature in common with the principal constituent of garlic (dialkyl disulfide). Which could result in both a deterrent and an increase of severity.

Of course, although we now know that porphyria patients are NOT vampires, porphyria might have contributed to the origin of the vampire legends.