Curio Cabinet

If you start feeling queasy in the car, try blasting the stereo. Scientists have found that happy music can alleviate the symptoms of motion sickness, but the specific tunes one chooses to listen to matters a lot. Motion sickness is something that happens when a person’s brain receives conflicting information from the different senses regarding their motion. So, if the eyes see that the environment around them is moving but the inner ears and muscles don’t detect any movement, that conflict can lead to nausea, dizziness, and cold sweats. This means that riding in cars, boats, amusement park rides, and even using VR headsets can cause motion sickness, which can really cut down on the enjoyment of a car trip or vacation.
 
To test their theory that music can affect motion sickness, researchers at Southwest University in China actually used a driving simulator to induce the condition in participants. Participants were also equipped with electroencephalogram (EEG) caps to measure signals associated with motion sickness in the brain. When they started feeling queasy, researchers played different types of music. What they found was that “joyful” music was capable of reducing symptoms of motion sickness by 57.3 percent, while “soft” music did the same by 56.7 percent. “Passionate” music only alleviated symptoms by 48.3 percent, while “sad” music was as good as nothing, or maybe worse. In fact, they found that sad music might slightly worsen the symptoms by triggering negative emotions. Aside from music, there are other, more conventional remedies that also help with motion sickness, like sweet treats, fresh air, and taking a break from whatever is causing the sickness. In cars or other moving vehicles, reading can induce motion sickness, so it might be a good idea to take your eyes off the page or the phone. On your next road trip, maybe an MD should be the DJ.

 
[Image description: A reflection of trees, clouds, and the sun in a car window.] Credit & copyright: Tomwsulcer, Wikimedia Commons. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

When it comes to the severity of flu infections, it’s often a matter of what you have, not what you lack. It’s common knowledge that older people are more vulnerable to the flu, and according to a paper published in PNAS by an international team of researchers, the culprit isn’t just weak immune systems. According to Kin-Chow Chang, a co-author of the paper from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at the University of Nottingham, understanding the mechanism behind severe flu symptoms in the elderly is a matter that requires urgent attention. As he explains, "Aging is a leading risk factor in influenza-related deaths. Furthermore, the global population is aging at an unprecedented rate in human history, posing major issues for health care and the economy.” To get to the bottom of the issue, Chang and his colleagues used an aging mouse model and samples of human tissue to observe how the immune system of an older population responds to the influenza virus. They discovered that older people produce more apolipoprotein D (ApoD), a glycosylated protein associated with lipid metabolism and inflammation. Higher levels of ApoD lead to more mitophagy, or the destruction of mitochondria. In the context of a viral infection, this means two things. First, since mitochondria produce cellular energy, higher rates of mitophagy means a weakened immune response. Two, the mitochondria also induce protective interferons, which inhibit viral replication. These two factors combine to make the elderly much weaker to a variety of viral infections, including the flu. People who are 65 or older account for 90 percent of flu deaths and up to 70 percent of flu-related hospitalizations, making them by far the most vulnerable population. With flu season just around the corner, this new knowledge won’t exactly have anyone breathing easy. Here’s hoping that this insight can lead to some solutions for older folks facing the flu.

Fuzzy and fossorial…what’s not to love? With their torpedo-shaped bodies, enormous, stout feet, and eyes that are practically invisible, moles have to be one of the strangest looking animals on Earth. Yet, unlike other famously odd animals like platypuses and echidnas which live on only one continent, moles are common on every continent except South America and Antarctica. It isn’t just their looks that are strange, either—most female moles have intersex qualities, meaning that they have characteristics usually only found in males.
 
Moles come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from bizarre star-nosed moles to fairly plain Eastern moles. They all share one important trait, though: they’re fossorial, meaning that they spend most of their lives underground. A single molehill (the part of a mole’s tunnel system that can be seen aboveground) can signal a vast underground network of tunnels stretching up to 230 feet. A single Eastern mole can dig an 18-foot-long tunnel in an hour. That’s pretty impressive for an animal that only grows to be around eight inches long.
 
Despite living in cozy homemade tunnels, moles don’t spend a lot of time relaxing. Their constant digging requires them to have a high metabolism, which in turn requires them to eat constantly. Moles spend nearly all their time hunting for worms, grubs, and other insects that live underground. While moles are formidable predators in their chosen environment, things are very different when they’re forced aboveground by tunnel cave-ins, flooding, or a lack of food. Moles are extremely vulnerable aboveground due to their small size and poor eyesight. Because their large feet are made for digging rather than running, moles are slow aboveground and can easily be killed by foxes, snakes, or birds of prey.
 
Despite these vulnerabilities, moles have managed to thrive throughout most of the world for over 30 million years—and it’s not just because they stay underground. Moles have a unique approach to reproduction that helps both female moles and their offspring survive. In many mole species, female moles have both ovarian and testicular tissue, meaning that they produce egg cells along with large quantities of testosterone. This added testosterone makes female moles far more aggressive than those of most other mammalian species. After giving birth to two to seven pups in a specially-made underground nesting chamber, mother moles will viciously fight off any threat to their young, including large, aboveground predators like foxes, even when there’s little chance of success. Don’t poke the mama mole!

 
[Image description: A black-and-white illustration of a mole.] Credit & copyright: Dead Mole, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1646. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Did you know there’s more to being a redhead than hair? The city of Tilburg, Netherlands, is hosting their annual Redhead Days festival, where thousands of fiery manes gather to celebrate what makes them unique. The festival began 20 years ago after Dutch artist Bart Rouwenhorst took out a newspaper ad asking for 15 redheads to participate in an art project. After he was met with ten times the requested number, it inspired him to make it an annual event that has grown in size ever since. Still, its size will always be somewhat limited considering the rarity of red hair. Even in Scotland and Ireland, where they’re more common, redheads make up only ten percent of the population, and most redheads in the world have northwestern European ancestry.
 
Redheads are rare because the gene that causes red hair, MC1R, is recessive. Despite this, redheads can still be born from non-redheaded parents. If both parents carry the recessive allele, they have a 25 percent chance of having a redheaded child. If one of the parents is also a redhead, then that chance goes up to 50 percent. If both parents are redheads, then that chance goes up to 100 percent.
 
Both hair and skin are affected by two types of melanin, which is responsible for pigmentation. One is eumelanin, which causes darker skin by providing black and brown pigments. Pheomelanin, on the other hand, is responsible for creating the pink hues found in skin. Eumelanin and pheomelanin can be found in hair, and the more pheomelanin there is, the redder the hair appears. Those who have just eumelanin will have darker brown or black hair, while just a little of this melanin produces blonde hair. A little pheomelanin in otherwise blonde hair creates strawberry blondes, and those who have much more pheomelanin than eumelanin have red hair.
 
Red hair might look great, but it does come with a few downsides. Those who have red hair are more likely to develop skin cancer, endometriosis, and Parkinson’s disease. They also tend to have different levels of pain tolerance than the general population, and they may respond differently to anesthetic and pain relievers. You could say they’re more prone to medical red alerts.

 
[Image description: A painting of a woman with red hair inspecting her hair in a hand mirror.] Credit & copyright: Jo, La Belle Irlandaise, Gustave Courbet. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.

If three bodies are a problem, how bad are four? Astronomers recently discovered a quadruple star system with some unusual inhabitants. It’s one of the first times a system with four stars orbiting each other has been found. While our own galaxy has just one nearby star, out in the vast cosmos, there are many systems with multiple stars. Most of them are binary systems, where two stars are locked in orbit with each other, engaged in a cosmic dance that will last eons until one of them explodes into a brilliant supernova. More rarely, the two stars combine into a single, more massive star. Lesser known are triple-star systems, also known as ternary or trinary systems. These consist of three stars locked in orbit, usually with two stars orbiting each other and a third orbiting around them both. Just a cosmic stone’s throw away, the Alpha Centauri system is known to contain three stars. To date, there have been multiple-star systems discovered containing up to seven stars, but the recently-discovered quadruple star system has something a little extra that makes it even rarer. Right here in the Milky Way, of all places, astronomers found a quadruple-star system containing two brown dwarfs. A brown dwarf is a rare object, also known as a “failed star.” As its nickname implies, a brown dwarf is a sub-stellar object which is too massive to be considered a planet, yet not massive enough to start and sustain nuclear fusion. Since there is no nuclear fusion taking place, brown dwarfs are cold and emit very little energy, making them difficult to find, let alone study in contrast to their brighter, full-fledged stellar counterparts. Sure, you could make the argument that having two sub-stellar objects disqualifies it from being a quadruple-star system, but who’s going to complain?

 
[Image description: A digital illustration of stars in a dark blue sky with a large, brown star in the center.] Credit & copyright: Author-created image. Public domain.