His uvula is not yet growing back, but he shows no symptoms of long-term damage. Considering how many people die or are seriously injured by blanks, he was extremely lucky. The best part of the story is that neither his parents nor his doctor and dentist ever found out!
Reference: Eyewitness account by Brandon Burdette
Reader Comments:
“Paintball Gun + Teen Boys = Trip to ER.”
“Paint your tonsils.”
At Risk Survivor: The Spirit Is Willing
Confirmed True by Darwin
11 DECEMBER 2007, GERMANY
Being frugal can be carried too far! A sixty-four-year-old man returning from holiday in Egypt was carrying two pints of vodka. He ran afoul of security while switching planes at the Nuremberg Airport. Rules now prohibit carrying large quantities of liquid aboard a flight, and the staff was adamant. He could not take that vodka on the plane.
Instead of handing over the alcohol, or paying a fee to check his carry-on luggage, the man quickly quaffed the two pints. That much vodka can easily kill a man! He was soon unable to stand upright.
A doctor was summoned. She determined that he had consumed a potentially life-threatening amount of alcohol and sent him to a local clinic for treatment of alcohol poisoning.
Reference: Associated Press
Reader Comment:
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
At Risk Survivor: Head Shot
Unconfirmed
AUGUST 2007, VIRGINIA
Skeet shooters at the Amelia Wildlife Management Area were taken aback when two large black males strode toward the firing line across the open shotgun range, toting a sawed-off Ithaca and a large black box. After twenty minutes of target practice they opened the black box and retrieved a polished Desert Eagle .50 AE handgun.
The other shooters, seeing that the two men had brought a gigantic handgun to a rifle range, began to pack up and leave, praying that the officer who periodically checks the range would make an appearance before someone got hurt.
The shorter man loaded his pistol and began sighting on a can about nine yards downrange. His technique for firing the weapon was straight from a movie. He held the handgun out, with his right elbow twisted ninety degrees to the left. The rifle shooters looked on with horror as the round’s tremendous recoil whipped the weapon backward into his open mouth, knocking out several teeth.
Needless to say, one doesn’t expect him to survive much longer.
Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account
At Risk Survivor: Storm-Water Surfer
Unconfirmed
JANUARY 2007, AUSTRALIA
When flash floods turned Brisbane streets into raging rivers, a twenty-five-year-old Brisbane man came frightfully close to literally sucking himself down the drain of the evolutionary gene pool.
* * *
“Never surf on a flooded street.”
* * *
This man thought it would be great fun to catch a wave on his surfboard. Fun was fun, until his foot wedged in a storm drain and he was sucked down. After a bumpy and winding three-kilometer ride through the storm sewer, he popped out in a creek, relatively unscathed.
The young man who found the lucky survivor had this advice for those thinking to emulate the surfer’s adventure: “Never surf on a flooded street.”
Reference: Sky News, Australia
Personal Account: A Slippery Slope
Unconfirmed
1960s, NORFOLK, UK
Norfolk, the small seaside town at the mouth of the river Yare, keeps a modern lifeboat at anchor in the harbour. The old lifeboat shed is nearby. Its cobbled slipway descends at a thirty-degree angle straight into the river. Four hundred yards away the harbour opens into the North Sea. The next stop is the coast of Holland.
* * *
“We decided it would be a great wheeze to roll inside a discarded tractor tyre.”
* * *
I was eight years old and not afflicted by the degree of supervision that kids endure nowadays. That summer a bunch of us decided it would be a great wheeze to take a discarded tractor tyre from the dump and take turns curling up inside it while the others rolled us down the slipway into the river. The name of the game was to struggle out before the tyre reached the water.
This provided several minutes of hysterical fun, until the inevitable happened. All hell broke loose as the lucky winner and the tyre rapidly made their way to open sea…. The sight of the big yellow Coast Guard helicopter and its crew saving his ass went some way toward compensating for the pain inflicted upon mine by my dad that evening.
Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account
Personal Account: Bicycle Chain of Accidents
Unconfirmed
JULY 2000 OR 2001, SOUTH COAST OF ENGLAND
A gripping lesson in Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.
This account is a testament to the intelligence of teenagers, who are prone to recklessness—a fact I should have borne in mind. On a Sunday afternoon six years ago, our gang of five had taken it into our brains that, since we live near the sea, it would be fun to play on the cliffs.
We took turns riding our bikes up to the cliff’s edge and braking at the last possible moment, the objective being a typical competition between young males. The drop to the water was over one hundred feet. After one boy almost flew off the cliff, we made it “safer” by tying rope around our waists, attached to separate pegs anchored securely in the ground. This, we thought, would avert trouble.
Uh-huh.
One boy’s bike squeaked terribly when he braked, and it was getting on everyone’s nerves. So he took care of the squeak in an ingenious way: He oiled the brakes. Some of you might already realize that this presents another problem, but we didn’t see it.
When it was his turn, he rode up to the cliff with the ironic cry, “Watch this!” Indeed we did watch. We watched him apply the brakes, we watched his expression change to terror, and we watched him disappear from sight as he sailed over the cliff.
The rope did its job and halted his descent. But his rope was longer than the others and suffered the strain of sixty feet of falling teenager, as did the waist around which the rope was tied. The impact of stopping broke several ribs and almost cleaved him in two. Not surprisingly, he fainted.
At the top of the cliff the four remaining kids telephoned for help, but the cliff was so remote that we couldn’t get through. Instead of running for help we decided to winch him up ourselves. We set about digging up the peg he was attached to. When it finally came free, there was only one person holding it, and he was pulled over the cliff by the weight of the first boy.
Sensibly, he still had his harness on, but the forty-five-foot drop he endured nearly knocked this boy out. Meanwhile, the extra forty-five feet of rope let the first boy plunge into the ocean, where he unfortunately drowned.
The last three boys on the cliff summoned help from the Coast Guard. Half an hour later a large Sea King helicopter attempted to lift the dangling boy to safety. By this point the knot that tied the rope around the boy’s waist had come loose, and he was hanging on for dear life.
Whirling helicopter blades build up a massive amount of static electricity as they beat against the air. Each helicopter therefore carries a cable to ground itself after a flight. As that cable approached the boy, he grabbed for it, heedless of people shouting warnings from the helicopter. When he did grab ahold of the cable, the electric shock blew him against the cliff, and he fell into the sea.
Fortunately, he did not drown. He was airlifted to a hospital, where he made a full recovery.
Six years later I still have the scar on my hand where I touched that earthing cable. I owe my life to the work of the Coast Guard that day. Thank you, Coast Guard, for helping idiots like me stay alive long enough to tell the story to other idiots.
Cheers!
Reference: Eyewitness account by Alexander Anderson (a pseudonym)
“The problem with the gen
e pool is that there is no lifeguard.”
—Steven Wright
SCIENCE INTERLUDE: THE WONDERS OF MOSQUITO SPIT
By Michelle Keefer
Mosquitoes—the bane of many a camping trip and barbecue—have been haunting the human race for millennia. But bloodsucking isn’t as easy as it seems. These insects rarely get the credit they deserve for their highly specialized methods of overcoming the obstacles of blood feeding. They are easy to dismiss with the flick of a hand, without stopping to think about the amazing ways mosquitoes have evolved to survive on your blood.
Painkillers
You look down and see a fat and happy mosquito feeding on your arm, to which you were completely oblivious a moment before. How did that mosquito suck that much blood from your defenseless arm without you noticing? After all, mosquitoes are basically flying needles, and you can feel a needle prick! A mosquito doesn’t want its host to know it is feeding—at best its meal would be interrupted; at worst it would be flattened. So mosquitoes inject painkillers with their saliva when they penetrate the skin, and their victims remain unaware of their piercing proboscises.
Vasodilators
If you’ve managed to tolerate watching your mosquito sitting there sucking up your precious bodily fluids, then another question may occur to you. “How did she slurp up that much blood so quickly?” Enter another ingenious component of mosquito spit—vasodilators. Generally, an injured blood vessel will contract to decrease blood loss. Obviously, this is not good for the poor little mosquito. The longer it takes her to fill up, the more likely her meal will be interrupted. So she injects vasodilators, similar to nitroglycerin, a commonly prescribed drug that lowers blood pressure. Vasodilators relax and expand blood vessels and permit increased flow, so the mosquito can obtain her meal before your patience runs out and you dismiss her in whichever way you feel most fitting.
Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits the yellow fever virus, injects two vasodilators in its spit, proteins that are similar to a mammalian signaling protein. In blood vessels the injected proteins encourage the release of nitric oxide from the inner lining of blood vessels, which in turn causes the smooth muscle of the vessel wall to relax. Mosquito vasodilators mimic your own proteins, to relax your vessels and continue the flow of tasty blood into the mosquito.
Anticoagulants
A useful ability of blood, as I am sure you are aware, is its capability to clot—a property that threatens the life of a bloodsucking insect! Consider, if you will, the mosquito currently filling up on your arm.
Imagine what would happen if your body reacted to the puncture as usual, by activating the blood-clotting system? The mosquito continues to feed…until it sucks up a clot, blocking its needlelike proboscis. The “corked” mosquito now has quite a problem on its hands. It is unable to feed. To avoid this perilous predicament mosquitoes inject anticoagulants to keep dinner flowing.
* * *
After Mrs. Mosquito settles on your arm, she spends some time probing around for a vessel until she finds one. There are studies on this probing behavior of mosquitoes. You do not feel these shallow punctures because the proboscis is slender enough to slip between the nerve cells.
* * *
Our friend Aedes aegypti employs a protein that counteracts a specific protein in the coagulation cascade, factor Xa, which activates the fibrous molecule that forms a blood clot. The mosquito protein that puts a stop to clotting is similar to one your own body produces, which maintains the crucial balance between excessive bleeding and excessive clotting by inhibiting factor Xa. The mosquito injects this anticoagulant into your vessel as it starts feeding. When your skin is pierced, your body responds by activating the coagulation cascade. But the mosquito has played its trump card. It has already injected a neutralizing agent that inhibits factor Xa, preventing clot formation by halting the enzymatic cascade.
Immunomodulators
The mosquito has taken her fill and has departed. As you contemplate the mysteries of mosquito spit, you suddenly notice the reason these insects are so loathed. An itchy bump, increasing in size and annoyingness, has emerged on your arm. This allergic reaction is the first sign of your immune system’s response to the foreign proteins in your blood vessel from the mosquito spit.
Your body is not at all pleased with those weird proteins injected by the hungry mosquito. An immune response is initiated by the antibodies against mosquito saliva that your body produced the very first time you were bitten. Your cells release a variety of molecules to fight the invaders. Histamines dilate blood vessels to allow immune cells access to the mosquito proteins, causing redness and swelling. Histamine also irritates your nerve endings, resulting in an itch. Leukotrienes recruit immune cells and sustain the allergic reaction, extending the life of that aggravating itchy bump.
Which leads to the most ingenious parts of a mosquito’s pharmacological spit cocktail—the immunomodulators. Vasodilators, anticoagulants, and other salivary proteins temporarily suppress your immune system. These immunosuppressants decrease immune cell propagation, histamine secretion, and the number of natural killer cells and macrophages. This benefits the mosquito by delaying the immune response, so the mosquito can finish her meal before you notice the little bloodsucker.
The Perfect Disease Transmitters
Mosquito bites are annoying, but mosquito spit causes no serious harm. However, mosquitoes can transmit West Nile virus, yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, and other debilitating diseases. As a side effect of suppressing our immune systems, mosquito spit makes it easier for these diseases to infect us. Studies show that mice injected with both pathogen and mosquito saliva have higher infection rates than those injected with pathogen alone, indicating that mosquito saliva does indeed increase the ability of the virus or parasite to infect its host.
The prevention of mosquito-borne diseases is a complex and difficult task. However, some scientists use mosquito spit to their advantage by making vaccines against its proteins! Such a vaccine would decrease the infectivity of the pathogens. Vaccines against proteins in sandfly spit have already been developed to help prevent leishmaniasis. Now scientists are working to develop similar vaccines against mosquito spit to protect against diseases like malaria and West Nile.
So the next time a mosquito decides to nourish her eggs with your precious bodily fluids, take a moment to appreciate the finely tuned system she has evolved to suck your blood. You might also give a nod to the scientists who had to raise mosquitoes (yes, raise mosquitoes!) in order to provide you with this fascinating insight into the Wonders of Mosquito Spit.
Intrigued? Take a closer look at the research:
Champagne, D. E., and J. M. C. Ribeiro, 1994. Sialokinin I and II: Vasodilatory tachykinins from the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 91: 138–142.
Edwards, J. F., S. Higgs, and B. J. Beaty, 1998. Mosquito feeding-induced enhancement of Cache Valley Virus (Bunyaviridae) infection in mice. Journal of Med Entomology. 35: 261–265.
Gillespie, R. D., M. L. Mbow, and R. G. Titus, 2000. The immunomodulatory factors of bloodfeeding arthropod saliva. Parasite Immunology. 22: 319–331.
Marquardt, William H. Biology of Disease Vectors. 2nd edition. Academic Press, 2004.
Stark, K. R., and A. A. James, 1995. A factor Xa-directed anticoagulant from the salivary glands of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti. Experimental Parasitology. 8(3): 321–331.
Titus, R. G., et al. 2006. The immunomodulatory factors of arthropod saliva and the potential for these factors to serve as vaccine targets to prevent pathogen transmission. Parasite Immunology. 28: 131–141.
Wasserman, H. A., S. Singh, and D. E. Champagne, 2004. Saliva of the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, modulates murine lymphocyte function. Parasite Immunology. 26: 295–306.
Michelle Keefer has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Colorado State University. When she’s not in the lab, she enjoys traveling, riding her mot
orcycle, playing the guitar, and various nerdier pursuits. Michelle currently lives in Fort Collins with—in no particular order—her cat, her Harley, and her boyfriend.
CHAPTER 2
ELECTRICAL EXTINCTIONS
Zap! Electricity has been part of our daily lives for scant generations, not nearly enough time to come to an evolutionary compromise with its danger. Kites, electric lines, TV power cords, stolen copper, and Tasers…this shocking subject merits a chapter of its own. Electricity surrounds us, and the curious human monkey cannot resist testing the circuits.
Darwin Award: ZAP!
Confirmed True by Darwin
2003, CALIFORNIA
A Los Angeles real estate attorney was skimming leaves from his pool when he noticed a palm frond caught in the power lines. His education had equipped him with sufficient acumen to become a successful litigator, yet he was not shrewd enough to avoid becoming a toasty critter when he reached up with the long metal pole and poked at the palm frond.
Did I mention the power lines?
Our lawyer was, for once, the path of least resistance.
Perhaps as an homage to his litigation skills, his family sued both the utility company and the pool supply store for failure to disclose the danger of poking a metal rod into the power lines.
Reference: Los Angeles Times, freerepublic.com, The True Stella Awards by Randy Cassingham
Reader Comments:
“A true frond.”
“Power lien strikes again!”
The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool Page 4