Image: Rennet Stow

As the weather gets warmer, and more and more people hop on their bikes, the complaints about helmets are about to start up. Why wear a helmet, really? If a car hits you, you’re toast, right? But a new study serves as a reminder to bikers everywhere: wearing a helmet really does work.

Over 12 years, researchers looked at bicycle-car collisions to see how effective mandatory helmet laws really were. Helmets accounted for an 88 percent lower risk of brain injury, and helmet laws led to a 20 percent decrease in injury and death in kids under 16 involved in car-bicycle collisions.

The researchers on the study say that parents, regardless of whether a law is in effect in their state, should force their kids to wear helmets. “For parents who feel like there is conflicting information related to child health, this evidence supports the fact that helmets save lives and that helmet laws play a role,” lead researcher William P. Meehan said. This, of course, isn’t the first study to suggest that bike helmets really do work. One review of 63 studies found that “the evidence is clear that bicycle helmets prevent serious injury and even death.” But that study also note that “despite this, the use of helmets is sub-optimal.”

Some of that gap can be attributed to laws. Only 22 states requires kids to wear helmets while riding their bicycles. But even in those states, many parents don’t heed those rules. An earlier study looked at how effective Canadian laws were at getting people to actually wear helmets, and found that helmet laws themselves don’t decrease the rates of head injuries, even though helmets themselves clearly do.

Every year, about 900 people die from being hit by cars while on their bicycle. Helmets certainly wouldn’t save all of them, but this research suggests that it could certainly help.

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Picture a mountain climber, trekking up Mount Everest. Is he kind of burly? Does he have a beard? He’s probably a man—a white man. That’s about accurate: 78 percent of Americans who took part in activities outdoors last year were white. Only 37 percent of African American kids between 6 and 12 did any sort of outdoor sport, from hiking to fishing.

Expedition Denali, a group of teachers and students dedicated to promoting hiking and outdoor activities among minority groups, just ran a successful Kickstarter to fund 12 teachers and students who will become the first African American team to reach the top of Denali—North America’s highest mountain. Here is their video:

Other organizations are trying to increase the diversity of their outdoor groups as well. Outside Magazine reports on the National Outdoor Leadership School:

In 1994, the Lander, Wyoming, nonprofit devised a diversity program that has since doled out more than $1.5 million in scholarships to help get minority youth into its courses, which teach wilderness and leadership skills through extended adventure trips. “We work hard to recruit young people of color, but we still struggle,” says Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin, who manages NOLS’s diversity program. “There are many barriers, including the lack of role models.” That’s where Expedition Denali comes in, and NOLS has budgeted nearly $250,000 for the group’s efforts.

Another website, Outdoor Afro, tries to encourage minorities to get outdoors as well. The group’s founder, Rue Mapp, explains why she started Outdoor Afro in this NPR interview. Her site describes the group’s purpose this way:

Outdoor Afro is a social community that reconnects African-Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities such as camping, hiking, biking, birding, fishing, gardening, skiing — and more!

Outdoor Afro disrupts the  false perception that black people do not have a relationship with nature, and works to shift the visual representation of who can connect with the outdoors.

Together, these sites and expeditions hope to communicate with communities that don’t tend to participate in hiking, climbing, fishing and biking. And while they acknowledge that 12 people reaching the top of one mountain won’t solve all the problems, it can help raise awareness of the tiny numbers of minorities who hike in the first place.

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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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Okay Americans still maybe take the worst tourist pictures. Image: Nir Nussbaum

American tourists have a pretty bad reputation. They’re considered loud, pushy and whiny. There are lots of online guides to help you avoid looking like an American abroad with tips like “nothing screams ‘I’m an Ugly American Tourist’ like a baseball cap” and “quit whining about the smoke, you’re not going to get lung cancer from a two week vacation.” But a recent and extremely informal survey by Conde Nast Traveler reveals that many service workers don’t find Americans that bad at all. The editors traveled around and asked hotel managers, waiters, flight attendants, tour guides and front-desk clerks what they really think about Americans.

One front-desk clerk in France even said that they missed the American tourists. “We used to make fun of Americans for not knowing their fingers from their toes in terms of European history and geography. But since the recession, we miss them,” he said. “They’re really polite to everyone. The guests who are filling their shoes come from cultures where it’s acceptable to be harsh or abusive to people who serve you, which has been a real shock to us.” A tour guide in Berlin said that “Americans are a lot sweeter and more curious than most.” A Kenyan Safari guide agreed, saying, “Americans are probably the kindest and most generous people we work with. They’re happy with everything we show them.”

Of course, not every experience with an American is great. Especially if that American is from New York City. A hotel manager in Cambodia described New Yorkers as “are a tough lot—not go-with-the-flow types at all!” A flight attendant said that New Yorkers give her a hard time too. “New York to south Florida is one of the worst. They don’t appreciate anything. They don’t say thank you, and they don’t return a smile. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lived in New York, but there’s something about putting a bunch of New Yorkers on a plane.”

Of course, the service workers all also had tips for not annoying your host country. The biggest ones involved coffee. “We don’t do cappuccino, mocha, all those crazy things you find in America, and we rarely have soy milk,” one French waiter said. “If you want a waiter to really hate you, ask for a decaffeinated coffee, because those have to be made by hand in many cafés.”

So while Americans may still have a reputation for being brash and rude, those who are nice and don’t order decaf can leave a pretty good impression.

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Image: Rick McCharles

It’s hard to say exactly how many climbers have attempted to summit Mount Everest. As of 2011, 3,100 had logged climbs to the top of the 29,028-foot mountain. But it’s not a game from everybody. On top of dealing with the physical challenges, climbers have to be loaded. The average trip to the top costs at least $30,000.

The biggest ticket item on the bill is the permit. The Nepalese government charges $70,000 for a party of seven, and $25,000 for anyone who’s going it alone. After that, you pay camp fees to use the camps, and you pay a local government official to stay in that camp and make sure you’re actually supposed to be there.

The gear is the next big purchase. Oxygen bottles cost $500 a pop. Most climbers bring six. There’s all the normal climbing equipment, like shoes and hiking poles and tents. But in this case, climbers need a yak to get that stuff to Base Camp, which costs another $150 a day. That’s all without paying a guide and sherpa to help you along.

Interestingly, while climbing equipment (and, as a result, the safety of the climb) has changed, the cost hasn’t really. Outside Magazine writes:

The median cost hasn’t changed much over the years, despite more technology and rescue options, additional guide services, and increased government regulation. Many operations that were charging $65,000 in the ‘90s are still selling trips at that same rate in 2013. Cheaper expeditions have increased their prices due to legislation from the Nepalese government that mandated how much Sherpas and porters have to be paid, and there are more “budget” Sherpa-guided operations available, but, for the most part, Everest might be one of the few places in the world that has escaped inflation.

The ticket price of Everest is a big deal for the local community, too. Nepal makes about $3 million each year off the permits alone. And the influx of visitors helps to support guides, local food, companies, hotels and restaurants in the region. Oh, and if you want WiFi, that could cost another $4,000. But at a certain point, that’s just one more line item—and at least you’ll be able to live-tweet your trip.

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Image: Scott Vandehey

Avid users of The Pirate Bay, perhaps the best known file-sharing site on the internet, might have noticed that its URL has changed from thepiratebay.se to thepiratebay.is. Those two little letters on the end indicate a geographic move from Sweden to Iceland. But Iceland wasn’t the site’s first choice for a new home: it was supposed to move over to Greenland, but Greenland wasn’t so keen on hosting new pirate residents.

Quartz reports on why:

Earlier this month, the website sought to set up a virtual home in Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, under the name thepiratebay.gl. Its administrators feared that authorities were about to shut it down in its home country of Sweden, in a possible crackdown on the high-volume of copyrighted films, TV shows, and software shared illegally via the service. Greenland thought unfavorably about being connected to the Pirate Bay and promptly booted it out, forcing the site to return to Sweden.

Before their .se location, the pirates lived at a .org address. The site abandoned that address, because the authorities in the United States were cracking down on copyright-infringing activities. But after wandering the high seas of the internet, though, the Pirate Bay might have found a semi-permanent home in Iceland, a country that has established itself as a safe haven for data of all types, illicit or not.

Iceland began this quest with Wikileaks in 2010, announcing that they supported the project and would house the data on Icelandic soil. At the same time, they pushed forward something called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which aimed to provide a safe haven for all sorts of investigative journalism projects.

But there are some things that Iceland isn’t okay with, like pornography. The country is attempting to ban both online and print pornography right now. Which raises the question—do they realize what many people use The Pirate Bay for, in the first place?

So the pirates may have to be on the move again some time soon. Which is fitting, for their name, if annoying for their servers and tech people.

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In South Africa, one recent robbery broke the blast-open-the-safe, steal-the-gold mold of bank heists. The thieves did break into a safe and steal millions of dollars worth of loot. But they didn’t make off with gold or Picassos. They stole rhino horns—nearly $3 million worth.

The safe contained 66 southern white rhino horns, removed from the animals on the Leshoka Thabang Game Reserve to protect them from poachers who often kill the giant beasts just for their horns. The thieves apparently broke into the reserve’s office and used a blowtorch to open this safe and snag the horns.

Demand for rhino horns, which go into traditional medicine cures for everything from cancer to hangovers, is growing, and right now the going rate (just about $30,000 a pound) is higher than gold’s.

Reuters called Johan van Zyl, the farmer whose safe contained the 66 rhino horns, which weighed almost 100 pounds in total. “In my hands it is worth nothing, but in the hands of the guys who have it now, the horns are worth a lot of money,” he told them.

Part of what’s driving the price up is that rhinos are getting rarer, because they’re being poached so much. The Western Black rhino was poached to extinction just this year. Reuters estimates that last year poachers killed 660 rhinos in South Africa. This year that number could jump to 800. And 75 percent of the rhinos in the world live in South Africa.

To save the dwindling rhino population, some rangers are taking the drastic measure of poisoning rhinos’ horns to deter people from eating them.

And it isn’t only rhinos in the wild which are being attacked for their horns. In July of last year, two men cokes into the Ipswitch Musuem and ripped the horn off a museum specimen. This museum heist wasn’t an isolated event either. Here’s the Guardian:

According to the Metropolitan police, 20 thefts have taken place across Europe in the past six months – in Portugal, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and Sweden as well as the UK. Scotland Yard and Europol are now advising galleries and collectors to consider locking up their rhino horn collections or keeping them away from public view. Several institutions, including the Natural History Museum and theHorniman Museum in south London, have removed their displays or replaced horns with replicas.

Law enforcement officials think that these museum heists were all carried out by the same team of criminals, hungry for horns—although most likely the South African safe heist wasn’t related. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) called the rhino hunting situation “bleak” in 2009, and it’s only gotten worse. Until rhino horns stop being worth more than gold, it’s unlikely that the giant beasts, or their horns, will be safe anywhere.

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Image: Suzy Glass

As you get higher and higher in elevation, some percentage of people start to feel dizzy and get headaches. Sometimes they can’t sleep. It’s not uncommon—something like 20 percent of people in the United States who travel to the mountains in the west report getting altitude sickness. But a recent analysis showed that perhaps altitude sickness might not be as simple as once thought. It might be two entirely different problems.

Researchers discovered this by applying network theory to medicine, analyzing the correlations between symptoms from a sample of 300 people traveling to high altitudes. When they then mapped those symptoms as a network, they suddenly saw three very different patterns. The strongest difference was that headaches and sleep disturbances didn’t necessarily go together, according to Technology Review:

That’s an interesting result that also makes medical sense. There is mounting evidence that headaches and sleep disturbances are caused by different mechanisms. For example, headaches in those suffering from altitude sickness seem to be caused by factors such as fluid retention and tissue swelling in the brain.  Sleep disturbance, on the other hand, seems to be related to breathing problems.

It’s becoming more common in medicine to use network theory to tease apart the associations between symptoms, diseases and causes. Networks can be applied to epidemiology and pharmacology, for instance, indicating where diseases will spread and how drugs interact in the body.

When it comes to altitude sickness, the network framework can help doctors reconsider what was once common knowledge. The network can’t, however, tell them what the biological differences are between these two seemingly different altitude-related issues. For that, we still need real, live scientists to study the problem.

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Image: davidd

The set-up included a Boeing 727, 38 specialized cameras, over $500,000 worth of crash test dummies, a crew of pilots who bailed out of the plane with parachutes before the crash, and a simple question: where’s the safest place in the plane?

There’s almost nothing you can do to ensure your flight doesn’t crash. But, as Discovery TV found, there might be something you can do to up your chances of survival: sit in the back.

After crashing the 727 into the Sonoran desert, Discovery handed over those crash test dummies to Cindy Bir, a professor at Wayne State, to see who did the worst.

So what did she find? First, those people you walk by in first class (and secretly envy) die instantly. They’re at the front of the plane, so they get more of the impact. As the impact moves back through the plane, it weakens. In this experiment, 78 percent of those sitting in the back of the plane would have survived.

A few years ago Popular Mechanics looked at every commercial jet crash in the U.S. since 1971—twenty in total. They found that in eleven out of those twenty crashes, the rear passengers did much better. In five of them, the front passengers had the advantage, and in three it was a wash.

Your chances of being in a plane crash are small. But next time you’re stuck in the smelly, sweaty rear of the plane, just reassure yourself that there’s at least one advantage.

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Shrunken heads are a key part of the “scary tribal people” setup. And some cultures did, in fact, create miniature heads for religious and spiritual purposes. But how does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?

The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates. Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes:

Once removed from the pot, the head would be about 1/3 its original size and the skin dark and rubbery. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife. The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The process wasn’t done yet. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. This also “tanned” the inside, like tanning an animal hide, in order to preserve it.

Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features. The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together.

When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs. In the 1930s, a shrunken head sold for $25—$330 in today’s dollars. In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. And telling the difference between a real and fake shrunken head can be hard. In fact, one researcher claims that most shrunken heads on display at museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) are fake. Forensic researchers write about some of the ways to tell:

Tsantsas, or shrunken head, are an ancient traditional technique of the Jivaro Indians from Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. Tsantsas were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield. Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies’ heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy’s spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge. However, forgers have made fake tsantsas out of sloth heads, selling them as curios to international travelers. Morphologic criteria can help in the distinction of forged and authentic tsantsas. Presence of sealed eyelids, pierced lips with strings sealing the mouth, shiny black skin, a posterior sewn incision, long glossy black hair, and lateral head compression are characteristic of authentic tsantsas. On the other hand, fake tsantsas usually present few or none of those criteria. To establish authenticity of the shrunken head, we used all of the above-mentioned morphologic criteria along with microscopic hair examination and DNA analysis.

If you don’t have a DNA sequencer handy to identify your human head, William Jamieson Tribal Art says to look at the ears:

Imitation tsantsa are classified under two categories, being either non-human or human but prepared by someone other than the Jivaro tribesmen. As the most common non-human fakes are often made out of goat or monkey skin, one must pay particular attention to distinguishing between authentic and replicas. Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and non-human replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear. The ear should remain in its original form only smaller. Fakes generally cannot match the intricate details of the human ear.

As for many topics of cultural anthropology in which the culture in question still exists and its members would like to be treated as people, head shrinking is a bit contentious. In the Shuar culture, shrunken heads (or ”tsantsas”) are extremely important religious symbols. One anthropologist writes:

That Shuar have killed people to make powerful objects, whereas we have made powerful objects to kill people, does not sustain any meaningful distinction between the savage and the civilized.

Is is hard for many people to not see shrinking of heads as a gruesome act. (Shrunken heads were found in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, but never identified.) And many say that no new shrunken heads have been made for twenty years. In South America, many countries outlawed selling human heads in the 1930s. Whether or not heads have been shrunk since is still up for debate, but at least now you know how it happens.

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Photo: Sigismund von Dobschütz

Enver Hoxha was as paranoid a dictator as they come. During his forty-year reign over Albania, in addition to generously dishing out death sentences and long prison terms for anyone who opposed him, he organized the building of more than 700,000 bunkers, or one for every four inhabitants in his country. Dubbed the “bunkerisation” program, the shelters were finally abandoned after Communism’s collapse.

The bunkers were never used since the military threat Hoxha imagined never arrived, and their construction drained Albania’s economy and diverted resources away from other, more pressing needs, such as road and housing improvement. On average, there are 24 bunkers for every square kilometer in Albania. Most of these unsightly concrete mushrooms still mar the landscape today, from mountain tops to cities to beaches.

Most bunkers are wasting away into the landscape, but some are used as shelters for animals or the homeless, or as kitschy cafes. Reportedly, their most common use now is sheltering amorous young Albanians looking for some privacy. Wired describes the problem:

Today, Albanian authorities are at a loss for what to do. The reinforced concrete domes are as difficult to repurpose as they are to destroy. Tourists are fascinated by the bunkers strewn like confetti across scenery, but for locals they’re a largely uninteresting, if obstructive, part of the landscape.

Besides being an eyesore, the bunkers really do pose problems for people. Expatica reports:

At least five holidaymakers, including two children and a 25-year-old woman, drowned last summer in whirlpools created by streams around the bunkers which are covered by slime, cracked and damaged by erosion.

In 2009, the government set out to take some action against the bunkers, recruiting old tanks to blow the ugly domes to smithereens.  But things did not go as smoothly as planned—after two weeks only seven had been dealt with. Locals, too, usually fail at attempts to rid their land of the things. Expatica:

Some Albanians have tried to remove them on their own, but their efforts usually end in vain, leaving them resigned to living with the structures they refer to as “mushrooms.”

Some have converted them into sheds, toilets or even “zero-star hotels” for lovers, as they sometimes call the bunkers.

For curious tourists, however, some bunkers now serve as youth hostels. According to the BBC, a couple entrepreneurial students have set out to convert bunkers across the country into unique abodes for travels. If the project manages to be a success, the team said they’ll charge about 8 euros per night for the privilege of sleeping in a genuine Albanian bunker.

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The Augusta Victoria, which is thought to be the world’s first cruise ship. Photo: “Album von Hamburg”

Recently, headlines about cruise disasters—such as the Costa Concordia disaster last year in which a 4,000-person ship ran aground in Italy and toppled over, costing 32 lives—have sent jitters through the industry. While the number of people taking cruises this year is projected to increase by 3.3 percent this year, more recent stories about passengers being stranded at sea with non-functioning toilets, for example, can’t be good for those numbers. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Carnival Corp said the cruise ship Carnival Dream was stuck in port in St. Maarten after its emergency diesel generator malfunctioned during testing on Wednesday. The liner, among the company’s largest, was on a weeklong cruise and had been due back in Port Canaveral, Florida on Saturday.

The problem caused temporary disruptions to elevator and toilet services but the ship never lost power, the company said, adding that only one public toilet had overflowed.

The latest incident comes two days after Carnival said it had launched a comprehensive review of its entire fleet following a fire that crippled its Carnival Triumph in the Gulf of Mexico last month.

Over the weekend, another Carnival ship, the Carnival Elation, had to get a tugboat escort down the Mississippi River after a mechanical problem.

Meanwhile, since August 2011 cruise ships sailing to Antarctica have seen steep decline in both operating companies and passengers thanks to stricter fuel regulations and public outcry about pollution the vessels were bringing to the South Pole.

Maybe it’s time to put this form of travel to rest. After all, it’s been slowly losing steam for decades. In 1891, the Augusta Victoria set sail from the Mediterranean to the Near East with 241 passengers, marking what is thought today to be the first cruise ever. By 1900, a German designer had caught on to the idea and created the first vessel exclusively for the purpose of cruising. Unlike other ships of her time, the Victoria Luise contained only first class cabins, along with a library, a gym and a dark room for amateur photographers. From there, the luxuries on future ships only became more extravagant, as evidenced by the most famous example, the Titanic.

But by the 1960s, the cruise ship heyday had come and gone. Passengers began opting for planes for their intercontinental travel needs. By the 1980s, cruise ships had abandoned the idea of vessels as a form of transportation, shifting the industry towards vacations at sea instead. That’s now a huge industry, but with all the recent troubles, it might be time to retire the idea of giant, floating hotels. Right after the Titanic II makes it to New York.

Space suits might not be this sexy, but sex is space is bound to happen. Image: Timothy Wells

If reality television has taught anybody anything, it’s that if you put a bunch of people together in a small space for a period of time, they’re going to have sex. Space exploration is really no exception to that. So as technology progresses and people start to talk seriously about trips to Mars or other planets, the questions of love and sex in space become more pressing. But would it actually be a terrible idea to have a child in space?

Before astronauts go into space, they have to do a lot of physically strenuous tasks. Science knows quite a bit about what the adult (mostly male) body does in space, how its muscles and bones react and how microgravity effects the body. But no one really knows anything about how the female reproductive system changes or is impacted. Live Science writes about some new plant research that might provide clues:

The news that University of Montreal researchers found that reproductive processes in plants were affected by changes in gravity is very important because it gives us a clue as to how the human reproductive system might react to micro- or hyper-gravity. That study only increases my concern that there could be trouble ahead for babies conceived in space, as well as for the mothers.

If a baby was conceived in space and it did manage to grow into a fetus, no one really knows the impacts that growing up in zero gravity might have on the development of a tiny human. Would neurons and blood vessels and muscles grow and develop the same way? MSNBC reported a few years ago on just a few of the concerns:

For example, Russian studies with pregnant rats showed a 13 to 17 percent arrest in the development of nearly every area of the fetal skeleton in zero-G, he said. [NASA physician Jim] Logan also noted that the proper formation of neural connections — a process that continues even after birth — requires movement under gravity loading. Immune functions are also compromised in microgravity.

At Wired, they argue that NASA and the rest of the space agencies need to be ready to address this question, because, like we all learned from television, it’s bound to come up. They write:

We need to acknowledge that humans will bring our sexuality with us into space and that includes all the complexities of relationships as well as the relatively simple matter of bodies. NASA cannot avoid confronting those complexities, especially now that the public knows even astronauts sometimes confuse obsession with love.

“How long can humans go without sex?” is not the right question.

I don’t care if you have a same-sex crew of great-grandparents who have never had a flicker of sexual desire in their entire lives. Lock a group of humans into a ship, sail them through space and time, and it won’t take long for that deep, ancient need for touch and intimacy to surface.

Back at Live Science, author Laura Woodmansee thinks we’re just not ready to have women having babies in space:

The research that has come out today on plant sex and conception in space highlights the fact that we simply don’t know the impact space conditions would have on human conception and pregnancy. Right now, it would be unethical to conceive a baby in orbit, or even risk conception. That’s my bottom line.

But, if reality television has taught us one other thing, it’s that just because something is a bad idea doesn’t mean people won’t try it.

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In Australia, they’ve got a giant snail problem. The giant African snail is a true nightmare. These snails grow to the size of a baseball, can lay 1,200 eggs every year, survive all sorts of extreme temperatures, have no natural predators, and eat 500 crops, plus the sides of houses. Also, they carry meningitis that can infect and kill humans. Somewhat understandably, Australia isn’t pleased with any of this. So when one of these snails showed up in a shipping container yard in Brisbane, it was seized by Australian officials and destroyed, as quickly as possible.

The last time Australia dealt with the snail was in 1977, when they spent eight months hunting the invaders and exterminated 300 of them. Florida has dealt with the snail in the past too, spending a million dollars in 1975 to get rid of the snail that they estimated cost $11 million in damages each year. And last year, they were back in Miami. ABC News reports:

Officials realized they had a problem on their hands last week when two sisters flagged down a fruit fly inspector performing a routine check.

“A homeowner came out and said, I found these snails in my yard and she had one of them.  He recognized it as potentially being a giant African land snail,” Feiber said.

Officials have been focusing on the one square mile area around the home in southwest Miami. They are only 30 to 40 percent done with their investigation and have already found 1,100 snails.

These snails were so bad that NPR actually ran a story with the headline: “Miami Invaded By Giant, House-Eating Snails.”

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry of Australia has this to say about the snails:

Giant African snail originated in East Africa and is now present on most Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. The species was first recorded in American Samoa in the mid-1970s: a million snails were collected by hand in 1977 during a government campaign to reduce snail numbers, and more than 26 million snails were collected over the following three years.

The snails can come from all over. They might hitch a ride on a shipping container. Humans sometimes ship them in intentionally: In Miami, officials think an earlier snail outbreak might have come from a man practicing the African religion If a Orisha. In 1965, a child brought some snails back from Hawaii in his pocket, costing the city a million dollars and ten years of work.

All this makes it a little more understandable why Australia has spent so much energy killing this one individual snail.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Snail on an apple
Prehistoric Poo Linked Dinosaurs to Snails

Image: Mikael Wiman

When you think of naturalists, you probably think about people in green cargo pants traipsing about in the forest, writing down notes and catching bugs. But being a naturalist can be extremely dangerous. At Strange Behaviors, a couple years back Richard Conniff started collecting stories about naturalists who lost their lives on the job. He writes:

We go to great lengths commemorating soldiers who have died fighting wars for their countries.  Why not do the same for the naturalists who still sometimes give up everything in the effort to understand life?  Neither would diminish the sacrifice of the other.  In fact, many early naturalists were also soldiers, or, like Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle, were embedded with military expeditions.

So he made that list, which you can find here. Many of these naturalists were murdered by people in the regions they were working. Others died of horrible diseases. And still others lost their lives to their research subjects themselves. People like:

Abe, Takuya (1945-2000)  termite ecologist at Kyoto University, drowned, age 55, when their small boat was caught in a storm during an expedition on the Sea of Cortez.

Bassignani, Filippo (1967?-2006), Italian zoologist and lover of travel, large mammals, and the conservation of nature, died age 39, on a trip to Mozambique, after being charged by an elephant that had been wounded by poachers.

Bossuyt, Francis J. (1970-2000), University of California at Davis animal behaviorist, disappeared while bathing in the lake at Cocha Cashua Biological Station in Peru, age 30.  Colleagues found only his shoes and towel on the dock; he was possibly taken by a caiman.

Brown, Kirsty M. (1974-2003), marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, drowned, age 29, when attacked while snorkeling and dragged 200 feet underwater by a leopard seal.

Douglas, David (1799–1834), Scottish botanist and explorer, said to be the greatest plant collector ever, died age 35, on falling into a pit trap already occupied by a bull, in Hawaii.

York, Eric (1970-2007) biologist killed, age 37, by pneumonic plague after autopsying a mountain lion in the Grand Canyon.

Conniff wrote a book about naturalists a few years ago, in which he chronicled some of the more famous species seekers. He’s also written about just why so many naturalists go to the ends of the earth, risking death and disease to find their elusive subjects, and why we should remember them today:

It would be difficult to overstate how profoundly they changed the world along the way.  Many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other epidemic diseases; other species provided treatments and cures.

So hug the naturalist in your life, because her job is far riskier than you probably imagined.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Naturalist’s Pilgrimage to the Galapagos
The Lost Naturalist: A 163-Year-Old Australian Mystery