Tag: Health

Understanding Jerusalem Syndrome and Its Global Counterparts | October 01 2025, 16:10

Listening to Sapolsky in the background, he mentioned Jerusalem Syndrome. It’s when a deeply religious American Baptist from the southern USA, having saved money and prepared, arrives in the Holy Land and sees that Jerusalem is just another city: traffic jams, smog, noise, pickpockets, McDonald’s—everything like that. And then—an interesting feature—in all cases, the person tears up sheets, takes off their clothes, and suddenly finds themselves on the streets of Jerusalem, dressed as if in a toga, begins to preach on the streets, calling for a simpler life and all that.

A psychiatric team arrives, takes the person to the hospital for a few days, everything becomes clear, they send him back home, and he never encounters this syndrome again.

Each year in Jerusalem, about up to many dozens of cases are recorded. It’s a recognized syndrome, about which scientific articles are published.

Sapolsky says that if hotels in Jerusalem always had, for example, checkered sheets instead of white ones, which seem to “invite” one to don a toga, it would help prevent the crisis.

But amusingly, there’s a twin brother of this disorder, the Paris Syndrome, which for some reason mainly affects the Japanese. Japanese tourists come to Paris because they are attracted by the culture, language, literature, and history of France, as well as the landmarks of Paris. However, once there, they encounter difficulties such as a language barrier (surprise surprise!), differences in mentality, and disappointment from the reality of Paris not meeting their expectations.

There’s also a milder version called the “Florentine Syndrome.” This often happens during a visit to one of the 50 museums in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance. Suddenly, a visitor is overwhelmed by the depth of feeling the artist has imbued in the artwork. At this point, they acutely perceive all emotions, as if transported into the space of the image. Victims’ reactions vary up to hysteria or attempts to destroy the painting. Despite the syndrome’s relative rarity, guards in Florentine museums are specially trained on how to deal with its victims.

Overall, be careful with syndromes when you’re traveling.

PS. This image was made for me by google. In the second image, a guy in a tie tells a tearful girl 脆培, which seems just a meaningless set of characters, something like fragile culture. But when I asked ChatGPT, it told me it resembles 脱げ (nugu) — undress 🙂 if you ask Google Gemini to redo it, Google gives the same picture, where he’s also shouting 暁は, but at the same time, he has already taken off his shirt. But that’s also unclear what 暁 – it’s dawn. Generally, with Japanese, LLM is bad. I’ll leave the second image in the comments. By the way, there are several differences there, you can play a game to find ten differences. They are amusing

Echoes of Anthrax: The Amerithrax Investigation Unveiled | September 02 2025, 13:33

From the museum of the day before yesterday. Probably, some of you remember the notorious case in 2001: shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the USA experienced a series of bioterror attacks: someone mailed letters containing powder with anthrax spores (Bacillus anthracis). This led to the deaths of 5 people and infected 17, but it could have ended much worse for the entire planet. The investigation, known as “Amerithrax,” was conducted by the FBI in collaboration with other agencies and became one of the most complex in history.

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For those who might not know — the inhalational form of anthrax has a mortality rate of 85–90% without treatment. Symptoms appear after 6 days, by which time dozens will be infected. It can’t be destroyed — spores remain viable for decades in the soil. For example, on the Scottish island of Gruinard, they lingered for nearly 50 years after wartime testing. Only after 50 years had passed and after 280 tons of formaldehyde solution had been sprayed across all 196 hectares of the island, and the most contaminated topsoil around the dispersal site had been removed, did the island become relatively safe. Thus, anthrax could easily be more terrifying than a global nuclear war.

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So, returning to the subject. Initially, suspicions fell on various individuals, including Iraq or Al-Qaeda, but no evidence was found.

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The key breakthrough was scientific examination. Scientists analyzed the anthrax strain from the letters — it was the Ames strain used in American laboratories. Using microbial forensics (genetic analysis), they identified unique mutations in the spores that narrowed the source down to flask RMR-1029 in the USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

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In other words, every living being has names and genealogy from birth, it’s just a matter of willingness to dig into the genealogy. Apparently, controlled substances have their own registry office, so to speak.

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Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist who worked there, was the custodian of this flask and had direct access (although more than 100 others did as well).

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Later, investigators gathered circumstantial evidence. Ivins had been working late at the lab just before the mailings in September and October 2001, which was inconsistent with his usual schedule. He could not convincingly explain these hours. Moreover, in early September 2001, he was vaccinated against anthrax, which seemed suspicious. The FBI also accused him of attempting to mislead the investigation: he allegedly provided false anthrax samples to divert suspicion and attempted to frame colleagues. In 2001, Ivins sent an email to colleagues offering the Ames strain for analysis, which might have been an attempt to cover his tracks.

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Behavioral signs also played a role. Ivins suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, especially after another suspect (Steven Hatfill) was cleared in 2008. In June 2008, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic, where during therapy, he made statements that the FBI interpreted as “denials without denial” — for example, that he “had no heart for killing” and did not remember participating in the attacks.

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By 2008, the investigation had narrowed down to Ivins. When he learned that charges were being prepared against him, on July 29, 2008, he took a lethal dose of Tylenol (acetaminophen). Formal charges were never brought. In 2010, the FBI officially closed the case, declaring Ivins the sole perpetrator.

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However, the conclusions remain controversial: the US National Academy of Sciences noted in 2011 that the genetic examination was not convincing enough for a definitive conclusion, and some microbiologists, victims’ families, and politicians demanded further investigation. As of now, no new discoveries have been made, and the case is considered closed.

Exploring the Boundless Spectrum: The World of Animal Hearing | August 29 2025, 17:56

From my notes as I read Ed Yong’s Immense World—

“..It is known that the range of audible frequencies for animals is different from that of humans, but I didn’t realize just how different. Imagine the highest pitch in the world—it would be just under 20 kHz, as it’s considered the upper limit of the audible range. Both the upper and lower limits tend to decrease with age. Most adults can’t hear sounds over 16 kHz. Anything above 20 kHz we call ultrasound.

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So, it turns out that our closest relatives, chimpanzees, can hear up to 30 kHz, dogs up to 45 kHz, cats up to 85 kHz, mice up to 100 kHz, and moths even up to 300 kHz. Imagine, there are so many high-frequency sounds around us, and how rich their sound world is compared to our limited one. It would be interesting to wear headphones that compress the range from 20-40000 Hz to 20-15000 Hz. Many animals, such as mice, actively use ultrasound for internal communication, beyond the hearing range of their predators.

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And when the topic of ultrasound comes up, it’s impossible not to mention bats with their echolocation. Turns out, it’s a wildly interesting topic.”

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Probably everyone knows that bats successfully hunt in caves, where no light penetrates at all, and they don’t crash into stalactites and stalagmites. There’s an English saying, blind as a bat, but actually, they can see. Some species see better, others worse. But let’s talk about echolocation.

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In general, it’s just radar. The bat screams, the sound bounces off a tree, comes back into its ears, and it gets information about how far away the tree is and whether to slow down or not. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. “Engineering” ones.

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Firstly, high-frequency sound attenuates quickly, so you need to shout very loudly for something to bounce back from a few meters away. Beyond that, bats simply don’t “see.” So, they do indeed shout very loudly, and it’s a directed scream. Specifically, they measured 138 decibels, the sound level of a jet engine if you stand next to it. But in the ultrasonic range.

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Secondly, when they scream so loudly, they need to plug their own ears so as not to kill their sensitive apparatus. It turned out that they have special muscles that block the inner ear during the scream.

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Thirdly, both they and their prey are on the move, very fast and erratic. Meanwhile, the speed of sound is about 343 meters per second. The bat’s brain must calculate the difference between the signal and the echo, taking into account both its own movement through space and the movement of the prey. It turned out that the bat’s vocal muscles can contract up to 200 times a second. Moreover, the frequency depends on the phase of the hunt. 200 times—that’s the final phase, when the moth is right in front of the nose, and tiny movements need to be tracked.

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Fourthly, the bat’s brain also has to cope with creating interference between what was shouted out two moments ago and what was shouted out a moment ago. Considering that the sound can echo off the far wall and the near branch. Plus there are waves from the cries of other bats, and they’re usually very numerous in caves. To manage this, they seem to throw a bit different modulation, plus this musculature allows them to “fire” very short pulses—a few milliseconds—and to renew pulses at their own frequency through very short intervals. Imagine what kind of computer in their brains performs the inverse Fourier transform.”

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So, all this works pretty well in small groups. But for example, the Brazilian free-tailed bats live in groups of millions. Really, together 20 million mouths shout something and wait for their echo from the walls and each other. You can’t just pick modulation and frequencies that easily, but somehow they manage. Not perfectly, and if they gather in a really big bunch in the cave, then they perform their commute to the hunt and back to the cave “by memory” – probably due to issues with echolocation. When a “door” was placed at the entrance to the cave, a bunch of bats crashed into it.

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Fifth, consider how they determine distance. It’s necessary to calculate the difference between the signal sent and the signal received (amid a bunch of noise from other bats), and for hunting, it needs to be calculated very precisely. And sound of course isn’t light, but 343 meters per second is also a lot. So studies have shown that bats can recognize differences as little as 1-2 millionths of a second, which allows them to determine distance to fractions of a millimeter. In other words, our eyes are significantly less accurate than their ears.

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Plus, a moth is actually a fairly complex 3D creation that reflects sound differently with its different parts. Otherwise, bats would eat everything that moves. They recognize. In complete darkness. A mouse’s scream contains a whole palette of frequencies, which reflect differently off parts of a moth, and the mouse’s brain somehow manages to translate this into a coherent picture. Moreover, for each of the constituent frequencies, the delay will be its own.

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Then, all this information is layered over time. Roughly speaking, a snapshot from one point is combined with a snapshot from a point a half meter to the right, then from a point half a meter forward, and so on many, many times, which enhances “sharpness” and detail. Overall, it’s the same with us – we only see the spot in front of us clearly while the rest is constructed by the brain. But the brain of a bat weighs 1-2 grams against our half kilogram.

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Think about it, you’re flying with such a built-in radar, and in front of you are two branches at the same distance, which produce essentially the same echo for their ears. And to distinguish them and understand that it’s not one object but two, you really need an advanced brain.

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So, they send pulses lasting 1-20 ms, plus longer pauses between pulses. The pulses are complex in terms of frequencies, so such bats are called frequency modulation (FM) bats. But there are about 160 species that have a much longer cry—many tens of milliseconds but with short pauses, and instead of a complex gamma of frequencies, these use a pure “note.” These bats are called CF—constant frequency. So here’s the thing with these bats—there’s a problem with the Doppler effect, which is an increase in frequency as the distance decreases. Since their brain is tuned to a strict frequency, like 87 kHz for example, they might lose their prey if the echo that reaches their ears is shifted in frequency. And what they do—they shout at a sound speed lower, so that after the Doppler effect it arrives at the correct frequency for the brain.”

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Incidentally, their radar has two modes—forward and downward, the echoes from which are processed separately. The downward radar provides information about position in space, and the forward radar—about the position in space of the prey.

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When I researched the subject, I found that yes, after 20 kHz humans hear nothing, with one exception—frequencies of 2.4 GHz and 10 GHz, which actually belong to the microwave range. Yes, humans can “hear” these frequencies, but not with the ear, but “hear.” This phenomenon is called the microwave auditory effect or the Frey effect. Initially, this effect was registered by people working near radars during World War II, and the sounds they perceived were not heard by others. It turned out that when pulsed or modulated microwave radiation was applied to areas around the cochlea, it was absorbed by the tissues of the inner ear, accompanied by their thermal expansion. In the course of this process, shockwaves are produced, perceived by humans as sound, which no one else hears. It was also discovered that with the appropriate choice of the modulating signal, it is possible to transmit information to a person in the form of individual words, phrases, and other sounds. Depending on the radiation parameters, the sound created in the head can be irritating, cause nausea, and even disable. The volume of the perceived sound can be changed, but acoustic trauma is not possible, as the eardrum does not participate in the process at all. Generally speaking, the method of specifically transmitting sonic messages that are absolutely inaudible to others opens up a whole bouquet of possibilities. I wonder if research is still being conducted on this topic. Google shows that they used to be pretty intense.”

I once published this along with a video, and Facebook reckons that if you publish a video, the text should be one, at most two lines. And in the end, almost no one saw this text. Everyone just watched the video of a bat flying around my apartment 🙂

Unlocking Smartwatches with Unique Heart Rhythms: A Missed Opportunity? | August 06 2025, 16:43

Why has no one made it so that smartwatches only unlock on the wrist of their owner, reading their unique heartbeat or other biometric data? This is in addition to having the owner’s phone nearby.

Officially, you can’t disable this in the settings of an Apple Watch — Apple intentionally made it such that when you put on the watch for the first time each day, it always requires a code, even if the iPhone is nearby. This is due to security policy: the watch may end up on someone else’s wrist, and the phone may just be nearby.

Moreover, every person has unique heart rhythm patterns, which include, for example, slight variations in the intervals between heartbeats, characteristics of the heart signal shape, and how the heart responds to different stresses. These microscopic differences create a unique picture” of heart rhythm that is difficult to fake or replicate. Watches have quite a lot of time, after being worn and before they are needed unlocked, to collect, process, and decide whether to unlock or not.

Decade Without Police Sirens: A Personal Observation in Public Safety Trends | August 02 2025, 23:48

Interestingly, I haven’t heard a single car siren in almost ten years, except from medical and fire vehicles. At least around here, it seems even the police don’t use them for their purposes. Apparently, the reason is that a police car with a siren behind is perceived as a command to stop and be ready to show your documents. But fire trucks and ambulances, it seems, always use theirs.

Many people don’t know that what we think of as an ambulance doesn’t really exist here. That is, you can call 911 and request a medical vehicle, and they will come, but it’s usually only done in truly critical situations—like a heart issue or if you’ve fallen from a staircase and can’t get up.

This service, EMS, always sends a bill. The minimum is $550, but typically more than $1000, depending on the type of vehicle sent—which depends on what was said on the phone—and how many miles it is to the hospital.

If transportation to a hospital is necessary, an insurance company, Medicare, or Medicaid initially pays for it. The patient might only need to pay the difference—for example, a co-pay or a deductible. If the person is unable to pay due to financial hardship, CNS will not send the bill to collections nor will they recover the debt.

If you call 911 and report that someone has fallen from a ladder, especially with a suspected head, neck, or back injury, the dispatcher will send a full fire & EMS response. That means, besides the medics, this big red fire truck shows up. It arrives not because there’s a fire, but because it is staffed with EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) who can begin assistance even before the ambulance arrives. Additionally, fire stations in the area are positioned such that the nearest fire truck can get there faster than a free ambulance.

In various incidents, if you can get to the hospital on your own, experience shows that it’s often necessary to go if you want results. This is not free either. Every such visit costs me $200 (insurance pays ten times more), but as it turned out later, it was always worth it. You just need to know where to go, and choose large facilities where the queues are shorter.

How Frequent Tick Bites May Reduce Lyme Disease Risk | July 01 2025, 04:38

#science Today I found another tick on me; it didn’t have time to latch on, but did manage to bite. And like before, I suffer from these tick bites being very itchy and taking a long time to heal. A couple of times because of similar symptoms I ended up in Emergency, where I was diagnosed with Lyme based on symptoms and put on doxycycline, but later tests did not confirm Lyme, though I already took the doxycycline. And if there was anything, it’s long dead. Question is, why do ticks love me so much.

I just found an interesting scientific article about this. “Hypersensitivity to Ticks

and Lyme Disease Risk” (link in comments)

The authors say that many people living in areas with a high prevalence of tick-borne diseases such as Lyme develop a more acute reaction to tick bites—redness and severe itching, a dermatological-hypersensitivity reaction—that’s exactly my case. They analyzed 1,500 cases and concluded that the more frequent a person’s itching after a bite (more than 3 times a year), the lower their chance of contracting Lyme disease—the risk was reduced by about 7 times (odds ratio ~ 0.14, p=0.01).

They write that this is linked to the fact that the itching helps to notice the tick sooner, consequently – remove it faster and prevent the infectious agent from entering the body (borrelia is not transmitted immediately, but after 1–2 days). There may also be immune mechanisms that interfere with the tick’s feeding and transmission of borrelia.

Conclusion: Recurring reactions to tick bites (itching + redness) create a kind of “anti-tick” immunity. This reduces the risk of contracting Lyme disease, and likely, could be the basis for developing a vaccine against tick pathogens. Quite intriguing, because such medications exist for dogs (full protection against ticks), but haven’t been invented for humans yet.

Risks of High-Pressure Activities on Eye Health and Hearing | June 28 2025, 23:52

Interesting. I learned, for example, that the human retina is not really attached to the vascular tunic, but is held in place only mechanically by intraocular pressure. Because of this, those who jump from heights or engage in diving, and generally anything that increases intraocular pressure, are at risk of retinal detachment.

(By the way, about pressure, I had a slight barotrauma in my left ear today during airplane landing: after landing there was a lingering feeling of stuffiness and muffled sounds, and while in the air it even hurt a bit. That is, some traces of sensation remained several hours later, but probably, by tomorrow morning I will recover fully).

https://youtu.be/QmX60IgWCGk?si=GrWzDtuZTpFeig-X