Speak of scientific progress to game version

Plague Inc – Learn while you infect the world

Last week I stumbled across a game called Plague Inc, available on iOS an Google Play. The goal of the game is to design a disease that will become an epidemic that wipes out humanity. You as the player chooses where you start the disease, the symptoms of the disease, how the disease will be transmitted and the defence mechanisms it will have such as drug resistance.

I am planning to use Plague Inc with my Year 9 class this year when we are learning about diseases. I am going to use the game in the beginning and have students come up with questions they would like to explore and mould that into a project based learning opportunity.

Plague Inc is a bit morbid and perhaps not entirely politically correct, so it is best to check with your principal if you are thinking about using Plague Inc in your classes as well.

Thanks for another trademark "timely appearance" in our forum.

Diatoms http://www.diatom.org/Home.htm

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Krill http://animals.nationalgeographic.c...

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Right, probably not for us and mammals and aerobes in general. Instead, anthropic pollutants and environmental changes peculiarly favor anaerobic life. The Earth more than 2.3 billion would have been regarded as intolerably poisonous from the aerobes' point of view. Our pollutants are the anaerobes' substrates for their metabolism.

How have humans changed the the Earth board so far? I have some guesses below:

1. The most permanent and far reaching is our output of radioactive wastes. Long lived transuranics and long-lived fission products are still significantly radioactive even after millions of years. Medium-lived fission products are significantly radioactive for hundreds of years. This is another long topic.

2. Changes in the mixture of atmospheric gases. Anthropic CO2, methane CH4, and sulfur dioxide SO2 atmospheric increase are included here.

These may not be as seriously long term as as what the mass media portrays. One reasoning is that the levels of these gases before humanity's industrial revolution began to significantly change them must have been in some kind of equilibrium. The abundance of substances in Nature are almost always dictated by multi-factorial influences that drive them into equilibrium. Humans have upset this equilibrium by outputting gases like CO2 into the air.

However, if all anthropic gas output were to suddenly stop, natural influences should quickly return their abundance to their natural equilibrium.

For SO2, a product of sulfide ore mining and coal burning, it's relatively quick and simple. Terrestrial plants crave SO2 and sulfur containing molecules that arise from it as nutrients; plants assimilate them quite rapidly for their sulfur-containing proteins. Sulfate reducing anaerobic bacteria are even more ravenous- they 'breathe' in sulfates instead of free O2. Their waste products are metallic sulfides, the same chemical substances that compose the sulfide ores from which we released them.

For methane, the atmosphere itself has mechanisms that oxidize it into water and CO2, such that atmospheric CH4 has a supposed half life of about 7 years. I suspect it could be much less because of the undocumented activities of CH4 oxidizing and CH4 assimilating bacteria in the biosphere. These bacteria actively take in CH4 from their environment.

Regarding CO2, it's known from experiments since the early 1900s that plants take in more of it as it increases in the air surrounding them, increasing their growth. A negative feedback mechanism which implies that natural cycles will 'handle' the extra CO2 humanity has pumped into the atmosphere if we cease adding more from fossil fuel combustion, calcium carbonate mining, and smelting oxide ores using coal.

3? Human activities have already driven many animal species into extinction, but these are mostly birds and mammals that do not essentially affect the natural cycles and chemical abundances of nature. (After having said that let me also say that from my biased point of view, extinguishing species is horrible.)

<Migrating blue whales rediscover 'forgotten' waters>

http://www.newscientist.com/article...

The other rorquals- fin, sei, Bryde's, minke, humpback whales were never hunted as much as the blue whale. If any of the rorquals are in danger, it would be the blue. Blue whales (and the right whales which are the fattest whales) were hunted more because their huge blubber harvests made it more economical to hunt them than smaller or thinner whales.

Blue whales may also be more prone to extinction than other whales because, aside from the fact that bigger mammals are generally more prone to extinction than smaller ones, they seem to be specialized krill feeders. Large swarms of krill may be a necessary pre-requisite for their existence. The other rorquals have more varied diets, including forage fish, copepods, pelagic crabs, squid, in fact just about anything that is relatively meaty and occurs in masses that can be swallowed in a single gulp. (Or maybe I am wrong and blue whales may also survive on opportunistic diets; and that they are scarce just because they were hunted the most.)

Right whales, even more hunted than blues, are also specialized feeders, on copepods. They seem to be recovering more slowly than blues. These whales feed by skimming the surfacew and near surface waters and netting the nearly microscopic copepods with very fine baleen.

Trivia for those that aspire to live 200 years old!!

The bow head whale, one of the right whales, may actually live that long.

<A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

“No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It’s rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

The whale had a bomb lance fragment lodged a bone between its neck and shoulder blade. The fragment was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.

The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said. Advertise

“It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place,” he said. “He couldn’t have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years.”

The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.>

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/wave-...

http://www.theprovince.com/technolo...

http://news.yahoo.com/cameras-captu...

<Thanh Phan: Nice to see the recovery of whales is happening>

Goods news of possible recovery for the Sumatran rhino too.

<Poachers poison 90 elephants with cyanide in Zimbabwe wildlife park>

<http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/...>

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/n...

Going back to the blue whale..

Why the economy of scale works for the biggest animal ever to exist in Earth history.

[Event "rated blitz match"]
[Site "Free Internet Chess Server"]
[Date "2013.10.03"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Quylthulg"]
[Black "NN"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2121"]
[BlackElo "1916"]
[ECO "A01"]
[TimeControl "180"]

<35. Be3 {White forfeits on time}>