I have found a most interesting non-fiction book that should satisfy any curious person.  It is called "Riddled with Life" and is subtitled "Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are."   The author is Marlese Zuk.

This is quite an eclectic work, and touches on many subjects.  From time to time, I think I'll post little excerpts because they will undoubtedly strike a chord with some readers and stimulate their curiosity enough to make them go out and read the whole work.

I had the experience this past year of allowing to stay free of charge at my home a 61-year-old woman, the mother of a friend of mine, who turned out to be the most extreme cleanliness freak I have ever met in my life.  One thing I discovered about her quickly was that she was allergic to almost everything.  She couldn't stand the smell of PineSol, could rake leaves because she had an allergy to them, and generally couldn't do anything that brought her in contact with foreign substances.  The list of food she could not eat was immense.  And she disliked dogs (I have three) because she was allergic to them, too.

Recently I came across a section of "Riddled with Life" that may have explained her allergies.

It seems that later in life children brought up with a dog in the family are significantly less allergic to various things and have less asthema to a statistically significant degree than those brought up without a dog.  The theory scientists have to explain this is that children brought up in hyperclean environments do not have fully developed immune systems.  Or to put it another way, we need exposure to a certain amount of dirt in our lives if we are to be able to function normally.

Maybe that little, squirming cocker-poodle my brother and I used to cavort with 75 years ago, though she has long been gone, gave us a legacy of better health than we would have had without her.

And in a related way, a brief aside in "Riddled with Life" also revealedf another inhteresting fact.  If you have a dog, you are likely to get licked by your pet.  People who think this is just dirty and disgusting miss one or two points about that.  First, getting licked by a dog isn't going to give you significant germs unless the dog is rabid.  And in fact there is some indication that if a dog licks a wound on you, this may actually help the wound heal.  I checked with a nurse about that and she said she had heard it slsewhere, too..



    

Where do you find the most interesting science stories ?  All over the Internet, as well as in books and magazines.  The point of this blog is simply to bring some of the most amazing, interesting and significant science stories to your attention. They share these qualities to different degrees and proportions.  I'll try to post a few of these frequently.  Here, for instance, is the first -- simply amazing !  The quote comes from a selection in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010," edited by Freeman Dyson.  The article, which originally appeared in National Geographic, is called, "Still Blue."

"The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest creature  ever to live.  Linnaeus derived the genus name from the Latin balaena, "whale," and the Greek pteron, "fin" or "wing."  His species name, musculus, is the diminutive of the Latin mus, "mouse" -- apparently a Linnaean joke.  The "little mouse whale" can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long.  A single little mouse whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League.  Just as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal tongue.  Had Jonah been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he would have swum the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds or so by the slow, godlike pulse."

Yes, the information here isn't earth-shaking.  But to the curious, and may just give a little pleasure.