sick

We have been believing for decades that wet hair makes us sick in winter. Science knows perfectly well that it is a lie

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“Don’t go out with wet hair or you’ll catch pneumonia” or “put on your coat or you’ll catch a cold” are very grandmotherly phrases that almost all of us have been told in our childhood and that have been burned into our brains. But the question we can ask ourselves: is this true? The reality is that not directly. The culprit. May we have a cold or flu It doesn’t exactly depend on the cold. The culprit in this case are infectious agents such as viruses, the most common being rhinovirus. The fact that this microscopic germ accesses our body and overcomes our defense barriers causes it to begin to replicate and generate its effect that In the long run it’s really annoying when accompanied by fever, cough and a host of other symptoms. In this way, the equation is quite simple: if there is no exposure to the virus, the external temperature is irrelevant. To understand it, if we put ourselves in the situation of going out to Antarctica with our hair soaked and naked, we would surely die of hypothermia, but we wouldn’t catch a cold unless a penguin sneezed rhinovirus on us. The same thing happens if we are in an environment completely isolated from viruses and at a very low temperature: no infection would occur. The experts. Just as it isExperts from the Mayo Clinic explain and disseminating pharmacistscold alone does not have the ability to spontaneously generate a pathogen. Cold is a physical condition, not a biological agent. And science has been trying to explain this for decades. One of the most cited and relevant studies is the one carried out by the University of Rochester where they separated volunteers into two groups. One of them was exposed to low temperature and cold conditions; the other was kept in a warm and comfortable environment. Subsequently, they were exposed to rhinovirus that causes colds. The result. In this way, it was seen that between the two groups there was no significant difference in the contagion of the virus or in the symptoms they presented. The group subjected to the cold did not have a harsher cold, so the factor in getting sick was solely and exclusively the virus. Getting sick in winter. It is a reality that when winter arrives the rates of people with colds or flu increase greatly, as we are seeing in Spain these days. This makes us think that the relationship really exists, whatever science says. And this is where we give a little point to ‘grandmother’s advice’. Science suggests that rhinoviruses they replicate better at the temperatures we usually have in our noseswhich ranges from 33 to 35 °C. But in addition, the cold temperature also causes our defenses to lower, so it is much easier for the virus to access our body and begin to spread in a much simpler way. And that’s why winter is where we see a higher rate of colds. Other factors. But he is not the only one. The social factor is also a big culprit, because when it is cold the truth is that it is better to be locked up at home with Netflix. But in these cases we would be in an interior space with little ventilation (because it is cold) and very close to other people. In this way, if a person has the virus, the probability of contagion skyrockets in a heated indoor place much more than in an open-air park at 5°C. Another point is the dry environment that exists at this time due to the cold outside and the indoor heating. This causes the nasal mucous membranes to dry out, which is a serious problem for the mucus, which is our first line of defense at the entrance to viruses and bacteria. If the mucosa is dry, its effectiveness decreases and facilitates the entry of pathogens. Wet hair. A special distinction must be made for this myth since today there is no evidence to justify a relationship between wet hair and an increase in viral infections. Going out with wet hair causes a great loss of body heat (since the head has a lot of vascularized surface), which generates notable thermal discomfort. This translates into a feeling of very cold, feeling cold and perhaps accompanied by a headache due to muscle tension derived from the cold, but the humidity on the scalp does not attract germs or facilitate infection. Images | Dmitriy Kievskiy Brittany Colette In Xataka | H5N1 bird flu unleashes a massacre in Antarctica: half of the female seals have already disappeared

Getting a manicure while she was on sick leave almost cost her her job. He was saved by a detective who didn’t know how to do his job.

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Companies increasingly make use of the services of private detectives to investigate whether their employees really They are on sick leave or they are faking itwhich would be reason enough to a disciplinary dismissal. According to the detectives themselves, the companies that use their services do so because they previously They already have signs that there is fraud, which is why the majority of cases that are investigated agree with the companies that hire them and end up in disciplinary dismissal. However, in some cases, the way that evidence is obtained is the key to the success of the case. This is what happened to the employee of a beauty center in Barcelona. Despite being able to prove that there had been fraud, a sentence The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia declared the dismissal null and void and forced the company to compensate its employee. Medical leave and dismissal. The employee at the beauty center went to the doctor because of pain in her left hand and back, and they gave her the temporary disability leavewith rest and rehabilitation to recover. While she was still on sick leave, the company began to suspect that perhaps she was not that sick and decided to hire a private detective to check what she was doing outside of work. The detective prepared a report in which he noted that the worker had performed a manicure service for which she had charged 35 euros in cash while she was still on sick leave. With that report as a key piece in its argument, the company fired her via disciplinary dismissal, alleging that she had broken trust and that she was taking advantage of her leave to work on her own. In your dismissal letter you could read: “(…) you summoned, and performed a manicure treatment on, a person who was accompanied by said company (of detectives), at the aforementioned address, and charged this person in cash 35 euros for the service performed. The company has sufficient evidence, images and videos that confirm the regularity of these events.” What the court decides. The worker appealed the dismissal because she understood that it was unfair and was based on evidence obtained illegally. In the first instance, the Social Court No. 1 of Barcelona agreed with the company and declared that the dismissal was appropriate, and assigned the employee to collect 771.15 euros for untaken vacations plus 10% late payment interest. But did not recognize compensation some. The story changed when the case reached the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJCAT), when the worker appealed that first sentence. The Social Court reviewed how the detective’s evidence had been obtained and concluded that it was invalid because it had been obtained by inducing the situation. That is to say, something that was already happening had not been observed, but rather the opportunity had been created for the employee to do that manicure. What Detectives Can and Can’t Do. The case puts on the table what private detectives can do when investigating a person on sick leave and what lines they cannot cross. From Sentinel Private Detectivesremember that the law “prohibits them from taking images or evidence of events that occur in the intimate part of people’s lives. The garden is also considered an extension of the home,” so they cannot record there if it is a closed space. The investigation agency points out that their work should focus on “following and observing, without forcing situations,” and that their role is that of “mere observers of facts and behaviors.” Jordi Briñoldirector of Brininvest Detectiveshighlights that its activity is regulated by the Private Security Law and for the Civil Procedure Law, and that in cases of sick leave they can only act in “open spaces.” According to his explanation, “anything that happens in intimate spaces or that has what is called an expectation of privacy, we cannot access there”, and any monitoring must comply with what he calls “the triple judgment of proportionality”, that is, that the evidence is adequate, necessary and that it does not take longer than reasonable. The researcher clarifies that they can carry out actions under pretext (for example, making an appointment in a publicly announced consultation), but “we cannot provoke an unnatural response”, which fits with the idea that the person under investigation cannot be induced to commit the infraction. Why the detective’s evidence is useless. In this case, the court considers that the detective did not limit himself to looking from the outside at what the convalescent employee was doing as his regulations dictate, but that he intervened to make the behavior happen for which she was later punished. Along these lines, the ruling links with the doctrine of the Supreme Court that rejects evidence based on provocation, and remembers that situations cannot be fabricated and then used as an excuse to fire. By removing the detective’s report from the case, the company’s entire argument collapsed, so the Court understands that the true reason for dismissal is that the worker I was on medical leavesomething that Law 15/2022 prohibits using illness as a reason to dismiss a person because it represents discrimination due to illness. For this reason, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia declares the dismissal void, orders that the company reinstate the employee, pay her all the salaries that she stopped receiving during the time that the judicial process lasted and pay her 7,501 euros for moral damages, in addition to 600 euros in defense fees. In Xataka | Social Security has published the data on sick leave in 2024 and we have bad news: we have broken a record Image | Unsplash (Behnaz Kh)

sick offspring ask to be executed to save the colony

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In nature, the survival instinct It is usually the absolute norm: any living being fights to stay alive until the last second. However, in the world of social insects the rules change radically, as happens with ants, which When they get sick they actively ask to be euthanized so as not to condemn the rest of his colony. As if it were some kind of euthanasia. The smell of death. Until now, it was known that sick animals in groups often hid their symptoms to avoid being excluded or attacked by someone more powerful in the herd. But in ant colonies, where everyone is closely related, the logic is completely reversed. According to a published study in Nature and after analyzing invasive garden ants, it has been seen that ant pupae infected by pathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum They do not passively wait to die. On the contrary, when the infection is fatal and they know there is no other remedy, they modify their body chemistry to alert the workers. Something complex. Although they do not speak (or at least we do not understand them) ants have a communication system between them. In this case they do it through chemical signals based on cutillary hydrocarbonswhich we could say is a smell that the ant gives off. In this way, by activating a series of reactions when they see that their death is near, a greater amount of this hydrocarbon ends up being generated, which results in a warning to the rest of the ants warning “I am a biological threat.” A ‘kill me’ warning. Upon detecting this signal, the worker ants do not attempt to cure the pupa. The answer is destructive unpacking and disinfection: they remove the pupa from its cocoon prematurely, bite it, and inject it with acid (poison) to kill it and sterilize the fungus before it can sporular and infect the entire colony. In this way, we are seeing that ants are true heroes because they sacrifice their lives thinking about the entire colony. There is one exception. Death with this system is something that has been seen exclusively in worker pupae. By this we mean that those pupae that are predestined to become future queens do not emit these death signals, even when they are infected. So… Is this an act of real selfishness? The answer seems no. The immunological analysis revealed that queen pupae They have a basal immune system that is 35% more powerful than that of workers. While the workers succumb to the replication of the fungus, the queens are able to contain the infection on their own and that is why they are not a threat to the entire group of ants and therefore do not need to ask for sacrifice. New evidence. This discovery reinforces a fascinating theory in biology: social immunity. In the same way that the cells in your body have mechanisms to self-destruct with apoptosis if they become cancerous or infected by a virus to save the entire organism, individual ants act as cells of a larger body. The study concludes that this sacrifice is not an act of submission, but rather a finely tuned evolutionary adaptation. The chemical signal does not simply indicate “I am sick” (which could lead to an attempt at a cure), but rather it indicates “I have failed to overcome the infection and am a danger.” Images | Prince Patel In Xataka | New species of insects are not discovered in exotic places: we have just found two new ants in Andalusia

40% of the soil is already ‘sick’

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For years we have talked about the desertification as a future threat or a shadow that loomed over the Iberian Peninsula. Now, thanks to data science and to joint work from the University of Alicante (UA) and the CSIC, we have stopped talking about probable futures to talk about tangible presents, and the truth makes us rethink many things. The reality. In order to get an idea of ​​what our country is facing, researchers have prepared the First Atlas of Desertification of Spain (ADE). This is not just a map, but it is a complete x-ray of the Spanish soil health based on decades of data that we had accumulated and that has served to understand the trend of the country. The diagnosis in this case is quite clear: more than 40% of the national territory undergoes a degradation process. But although this is an alarming figure, it is not the most worrying. The Atlas itself reveals our relationship with water: technology and intensive irrigation They are ‘covering up’ a problem that is advancing silently under our feet and that we are not seeing. An exhausted soil. To understand this research, we must first kill a myth: desertification does not mean that Spain is becoming the Sahara full of dunes, although it is a reality that aridity is increasing. How do they explain project coordinators, Jorge Olcina (UA) and Jaime Martínez Valderrama (CSIC), desertification is the degradation of land in dry areas. It is a process by which the soil loses its biological and economic capacity to produce. Stop being fertile. The data. There are two points to take into account in this case. The first of them is that 40.9% right now is showing signs of degradation. But if we go to the ‘dry lands’ such as arid, semi-arid and dry subhumid areas, the percentage of “sick” territory shoots up to 60.94%. The paradox of irrigation. One of the most interesting points in this case is the role that agricultural technology is playing. And although right now it may be thought that the irrigation system can combat desertification, the study points out that In many cases it can speed it up. That is, the opposite effect. The report details how intensively irrigated agriculture acts as a “cover-up mechanism.” Thanks to fertilizers and massive extraction of groundwaterwe can see very green crops on the surface, which makes us think that there are no problems with them. But the reality is very different. The demonstration. The Atlas has cross-referenced the data on the amount of chlorophyll and biomass that can be seen on earth with the state of water resources and the reality that emerges. For science, we are right now maintaining that greenery at the cost of depleting the aquifers and salinizing the soils, as can occur in the maintenance of very profitable crops such as avocados in the south of the peninsula. A devastating fact from the report illustrates this: in the Guadiana basin, 86% of the aquifers show rates of overexploitation or degradation linked to this phenomenon. And we are giving a lot of weight to maintaining the color green while we are ‘charging’ our water resources. The state by zones. The Atlas, which consists of more than 60 thematic maps generated using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, allows you to zoom in on critical areas. The “zero ground” of desertification in Europe is clearly drawn in the southeast of the peninsula, where there are some highly affected regions: Region of Murcia: it is the most affected community, with extreme water pressure and increasing aridity. Valencian Community and Andalusia with large areas of intensive cultivation that overlap with areas of high climatic vulnerability. Canary Islands with an island location that adds an extra risk factor to land management. La Mancha and Aragón are inland areas that, although less in the media, are suffering accelerated degradation due to agricultural transformation. Specific case. In addition to this information, the report points to strategic locations such as the Sierra de Gádor in Almería, which suffered from 19th century mining and therefore deforested holm oak and espart forests with 52,000 tons of charcoal from half a million destroyed trees, leaving skeletal soils that last for centuries despite repopulation. Changing the rules. This is something really important, because until now Spain depended on more general or outdated maps. ADE changes this by introducing socioeconomic variables into the equation. Not only does it look at how much it rains (which is becoming less and more torrential), but also at how we use the water that falls. The document warns that 42% of the national territory consumes more than 80% of the available fresh water. In a context of climate change, where rainfall will be more erratic and temperatures higher, maintaining this model is physically impossible. Images | giovanni cordioli Being Organic in EU In Xataka | The drought is turning water into a very scarce and valuable commodity in Spain. And there are already organized groups of thieves

We have been growing lettuce in space for years. Now we have discovered that they are more likely to get sick

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Bad news for astronauts who usually eat healthy. That is, for all astronauts. The crew members ago of the International Space Station consume the vegetables that they themselves cultivate in microgravity: lettuce, peppers, radishes. Some spicy Chile. More recently, vegetables have joined the autoconsumo astronauts of the Chinese Space Stationwhich already has lettuce, cherry tomatoes and chivesalthough it does not carry so much in orbit. The problem is that space salads They are not as safe for consumption as we thought. A team of researchers from the University of Delaware has discovered that lettuce and others Microgravity cultivated vegetables They are more Pollution prone by bacteria such as Salmonella. The study, funded by NASA, shows that under conditions of microgravity, plants tend to open their stomata (the small pores of their leaves and stems) instead of closing them to prevent the invasion of pathogens. To reach this conclusion, the team created a simulated microgravity atmosphere in the laboratory with a device called clinostat, which rotates plants as a chicken in an grill. The results showed that, under these conditions, the salmonella more easily infects the tissue of the leaves. Friendly bacteria also lose their protective effect The researchers explored the use of a friendly bacterium, B. Subtilis, as a solution to the problem. However, bacteria, which on earth helps plants fight pathogens, He failed to protect them in it Simulated microgravity environmentwhich suggests that space changes significantly the interaction between plants and microbes. The finding is important. Not only because he doubts that the salads of the International Space Station are totally safe, but also because it helps to understand the challenges of agriculture in future space colonies. With population growth on earth and the loss of agricultural land, space is an increasingly realistic option for food cultivation. But if they want Avoid an outbreak of salmonellosisthe future farmers of space be worth the future farmers to wash their hands well with soap and water. Image | NASA/Cory Huston In Xataka | The space dream was to spend billions of euros to go to Mars to end eating crickets In Xataka | The food knows very different in space. The reason is more intriguing than it seems: confinement *An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024

What is the ‘wounded man’, the most unfortunate creature of the entire Middle Ages: sick, beaten and sewn to Sabblazos

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No matter what happened to you, how bad the week has gone, if you are exhausted after climbing and lowering boxes during a move, you have injured yourself, you have a fever, you have given positive in Covid or yesterday you cut the piss while cooking. No matter how bad that you find yourself and a lot that you suffer is impossible that you are worse than the ‘Wounded man ‘. If there is a unfortunate character in history, one mistreated to the limit, that is him. Nor the Biblical Job. My Héctor dragged by Achilles. Not Julio César with The gross frame dagger. He Wounded man It is the most suffering creature of creation for a very simple reason: it was created for that, to suffer, to support all the hardships imaginable by medieval minds. And yet there we see it in the codices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with resigned expression, almost unstimated. The wounded man? Exact. It is probably one of the most unfortunate names (and also one of the least original) in the history of humanity; But thus, ‘wounded man’ (‘Wound Man’), is how the diagram is known that for centuries, approximately Between the XV and XVIalthough some outstanding examples can also be found The XVIIillustrated the surgery manuals. The term says it all. The injured man was a representation in which the aesthetic and medical criteria were combined to basically show that: an “injured man.” Although saying so is to fall short. The character was a compendium of catastrophes, a creature that gathered all kinds of injuries, infections and various ailments. Virtually all misfortunes that fit in a medieval mind. Eejmplo of wounded man collected in a treaty of the Wellcom Collection. A pistoning with legs. If it is true that saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, the injured man is his greatest exponent. The figure is not only “injured.” If we showed us the portrait of a real staff, of flesh and blood, it is most likely to be unable to stand up. Not all versions are the same, but usually the injured man used to be crossed by swords, daggers, spears and arrows (some look, others have the cut tip), beaten by garrotes, full of blood cuts and with thorns stuck in the feet. Is there more? Yes. They have also bitten snakes and dogs, has run into poisonous toads and have chopped bees and scorpions. And the above is only ‘skin outside’. Inside the panorama was not much better. The images show it full of bubones that suggest that it has contracted the plague and with smallpox marks. In A particularly ruthless example of the wounded man, prepared in the XV and that today is preserved in the funds of the London’s Wellcom Collection, he is seen with a curtured penis while one of his testicles has an aspect that invites us to think that he suffers a venereal. A medieval celebrity. Today your image may surprise us (or even look exotic), but in its day, during the low Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, the wounded man was a relatively popular topic in European medical treaties. Jack Hartnellprofessor of the Univerisity of East Anglia and who has dedicated him several Essayscalculate that it has been found at least A dozen of examples in medieval manuscripts and more than twenty manuals printed in the modern age. And those are just known cases. Wounded man preserved in a xylography in the Wellcomo collection. A long (and extensive) trip. “The first known versions appeared at the beginning of the XV in books on the surgical trade, particularly in works by southern Germany related to the famous surgeon Würzburg Ortolf von Baierland,” says Hartenell in An article Posted in Public Domain Review. Interestingly, despite his battered appearance, the injured man survived the fifteenth century, the Middle Ages and the handwritten codices and sneaked into the manuals created with The new technology of printing. In 1497 we found him on the cover of a book on Strasbourg Surgery and In 1678 We can still observe it in the pages of the ‘Full Speech of the Wounds’, of the London surgeon John Browne. The wounded man lived enough to mistreat him with new weapons, not only spears, swords, daggers, arrows and clubs. In 1517 the German military surgeon Hans von Gerdorff included a version in Your field manual in which he saw how the unfortunate man was shot with cannon bullets to the hands and legs. And what exactly did it serve? Good question. Difficult response. And the reason is that its meaning, its role, the purpose it had in the surgical manuals that it illustrated, could vary over time. They recognize it From the well collection, custodian of one of the most fascinating versions that are preserved, the only English specimenincluded in a medical treaty in the late XV. “Its exact purpose is still somewhat mysterious, but presumably served as a reminder of the wounds to which the human body is prone,” He recounts The British institution. At least in some of the first versions, the injured man was accompanied by numerous annotations related to each of his injuries, sometimes more or less extensive texts accompanied by figures, which reinforces his role as a diagram. “A human index”, In words of Hartnell. In the ‘Das Buch der Clurgia’, 1497 manual, we already see it however Free of annotations. Example extracted from a Strasbourg Treaty of 1519. Art or science? Its extensive trajectory and those changes over time has led to different interpretations about what its exact use could be. Hartnell points out, for example, that at least in his first versions he served as a didactic guide, a conductive thread of the manual that facilitated its handling to the surgeon. In A German specimen From the XV we see the character surrounded by numbers and phrases, each related to a different ailment (a sablazo, a bite, an arrow … Read more

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