Ant Wars and Other Fascinating Discoveries: From the Science of Nature to Global Societal Issues – A Wide-Ranging Exploration on Current Events

2024-01-22 09:33:45

You tell us regarding a war…

That ants have always fought once morest termites, which are their usual… Because the world teaches me, the Megaponerea analis, is an exception among the 13,000 species of ants with varied diets, it only eats termites and sends therefore its workers attack the termite mounds which defend themselves, 22% of the attackers are injured in these wars…

… which fascinate a scientist Erik Frank, from the University of Würtzburg, in Germany, who in a study which took him three years to observe Ivorian ants in the field, and which Nature communication published at the end of December, we describes how injured ants, when they return to the anthill, are examined to find out whether their wounds are benign or infected and then, if necessary, are treated with antibiotics by nurse ants…

For diagnosis, the ants analyze the layers of lipids which protect the ants once morest drying out, and which are also a chemical signature, which announces whether one has triggered one’s immune system…

For the treatment, nurse ants dance to reach a gland on their backs, they then lick their legs and apply with their mouth the miracle ointment delivered by the gland, an ointment which contains 112 chemical compounds and 41 proteins, one of between them was still unknown to science…

… and Erick Franck would like to analyze it with biochemists and who knows, transfer it to human medicine…

What will the ant wars save us from?

Between Le Monde once more and the Obs, still on newsstands, scientists are arguing regarding an earth disease, global warming, and regarding a drug, energy transition, which in Le Monde therefore, researchers, including François Gemenne, are defending once morest the skepticism embodied by the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who dialogues in the Obs with the engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici – a fascinating exchange…

For Fressoz, I summarize, the transition is an illusion because energies do not replace one another, they pile up and add up, and in the same way he says that once the coal revolution consumed to support the mines of astronomical quantities of wood, our renewables which are progressing contribute to perpetuating the material world that we know, made of cars and consumption… In Le Monde Gemenne and his co-signatories quote Camus, “As for the future, it is not a question of predicting it, but of doing it. » The sentence is beautiful if the future is uncertain…

Le Télégramme went to question passers-by in Brittany regarding what the wind farm inspires them, 62 machines 210 meters high which should provide 9% of Breton electricity and which were planted off the coast of Cap Fréhel in the bay of St Brieuc… Hikers see a “ghost ship”, “iron trees”, “big men walking on water” “extraterrestrial creatures”… There remains the poetry..

In the Républicain Lorrain I meet a tall young man named Bjorn Duval, who lives in a farm with thick walls in Saône-et-Loire, it is important to keep the heat, and who, having fallen into unemployment, caused his basic needs at 250 euros per month, including ZERO euros of energy bill, through the gift of observation and solid knowledge: he tells and explains on a YouTube channel and in a book where he admits that his solutions are not all eco-friendly… He poses with a bike…

And we’re talking regarding another bicycle…

What does the Parisian tell us, the bike that a teenager placed once morest a pole and the bike slipped, and while sliding it hit the bumper of a 4 4 parked once morest the sidewalk…

The same evening, two women come to the teenager’s house, it is 11 p.m., they are armed and they take the teenager away… whom his mother finds in a room, framed by two mirrored cabinets and the teenager’s kidnappers tell her mother that she must give them, right now, 3000 euros to repair the damage that the 4 4 ​​suffered, which belongs to one of these families of drug kingpins, who terrify the city of Plan in Valence, in the Drôme …

She found the money in the night, the mother, and it took her time to repay her family bit by bit by taking from her unemployment benefits…

Le Parisien tells us that when she tells the story, the mother is still out of breath, as if she was still looking for her son in the night… She had never said anything so as not to be murdered… Then she decided to speak out when another of her boys, aged 5, witnessed a settling of scores… She is one of the parents of students who testified in the Prefect’s office last week, since the authorities and the media are looking into the ordeal of a city…The authorities will help it move…

There are other distant violences. In Le Figaro et la Croix you read regarding a giant temple dedicated to a Hindu deity named Ram, which Indian Prime Minister Modi is inaugurating today in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, where in 1992 a riot destroyed a mosque dating from 1528… The ceremony which does not even wait for the temple to be completed is a political affirmation for the Hindu nationalist right in power, and Ayodhya seems the new Jerusalem of Hinduism, Le Figaro tells us… A Muslim resident of the city remembers that as a child he rode his bike in front of the mosque and that then, in the eighties, the communities agreed…

And we thus measure what time has done to a country: India, which was also a secular utopia.

Libération tells us an epic story of Indian music, its crossbreeding at the end of the sixties with electronic music, artistic pride, old tapes, another truth of this country, it existed.

Les Echos, which also tells the story of the Ayodhya temple, also tells me that today’s prosperous Indians are the future of our Pernod-Ricard whiskey…

We’re finally talking regarding a fencer…

Superb on the front page of the East Lightning with a saber in his hand, Claude Gamot, a great man from Troyes, chosen to be one of the bearers of the Olympic flame in Aube, impresses us at the height of his 91 years, chic, distinguished, who tells us as well regarding his career as a fencer, his pride in having helped women’s sabre, as well as the evolution of Troyes, the glory then the decline of Troyes hosiery of which he was a great executive, he also remembers of his disappointment at having only placed fourth in the team saber at the Melbourne games in ’56: “One of our teammates, Bernard Morel, broke down.”

So I had the curiosity to go and see who this Bernard Morel was, and between the Progrès and Pays Roannais sites, I learned that he had been a team bronze medalist in Helsinki in 1952 but above all during the war a Gaullist from London, sent to France, arrested and deported to Dachau… In difficult circumstances, he had held up well!

In Slate, which cites the Guardian, I learn that an 1800-year-old Roman armguard has been reconstructed in Scotland, brass strips scattered in nature which protected an august arm… We had a genius comparable to that of ants.

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