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The space heater I worked on yesterday worked all night long, and none of my water pipes froze in the coldest weather of the year, so far. I kept the space heater in my bedroom turned on all night too. That's the first time I've done that this year. The Canadian Express that is chilling every thing down to the bone makes people who live in moderate winter climates do more than they usually need to in their fear of the Eskimos being right about hell being cold instead of hot.
Even so, my brother and I went out last night for what's becoming a nightly ritual anyway. I had to stop earlier than usual because even with the weather being so cold I was perspiring. Not sweating like a dog. Dogs don't sweat. A lot of furry animals don't sweat. That's why human beings can chase them down and bonk them in the haid when they suffer heat prostration.
In my current opinion (it changes), learning that hominoids have the ability to run huge animals to death exists as the biggest incremental step in grasping how the dinosaurs and other large animals like the wooly mastodon disappeared. Human-like animals hunted them down by chasing them in packs and killed them.
It also explains why track and field are the basic human sports events. We can't run as fast as some animals, but we can last much longer. That's why the marathon winners are usually Africans. They can run at a racing speed even in the hottest part of the day in the hottest part of the season.
I've also become interested in a recognized biologist's claim that homo sapiens emerged directly from the oceans instead of descending from trees to the plains in order to chase the herd animals to death. What convinced me to explore this notion is how he pointed out that humans have subcutaneous fat just like the other ocean mammals like whales and walruses do.
One of the reasons subcutaneous fat interests me is because it goes away as humans go through the aging process. That's why their skin wrinkles. The natural collagen is gone. During my last visit to the VA Hospital arthritis clinic up in Durham, my rheumatologist-in-training with the Duke Hospital program told me the prednisone I am is taking also reduced the subcutaneous fat, along with other even more unpleasant side-effects that steroid drug produces.
The lack of subcutaneous fat in old people is why so many of them like to spend the winter in snow bird places like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and southern California. The subcutaneous fat keeps humans worm just like it does whales and seals and otters. If they lose it, they die. When humans lose it, they're already dying. Sometime slowly, sometimes not.
If the stem cell scientists wanna really help old people get even older, finding a way to restore a person's subcutaneous fat may be the secret. I don't know that, of course. While it seems to be true that plastic surgeons habitually now inject collagen they get from other parts of the body into heavily wrinkled place in an old woman's face, it's difficult to imagine they could do that over the whole human body. I think the stem cell approach might make that happen.
Just to speculate even more wildly than usual, I think that learning how to use the stem cell technology to restore youth to aging bodies may be the next phase of evolution itself. I really think that a lot of the people alive on Earth presently will be alive several hundred years from now, if, and only if, humans don't blow the Earth up in a nuclear holocaust before it can happen.
If rejuvenating old bodies and keeping them in fair health allowed them to carry on research that takes more than one four-score and seven years lifetime to complete, then more could happen exponentially than any other factor. Or not. '-)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
