{"id":257851,"date":"2023-07-14T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=257851"},"modified":"2024-01-04T17:01:17","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T17:01:17","slug":"a-renegade-sea-otter-is-terrorizing-california-surfers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/07\/14\/a-renegade-sea-otter-is-terrorizing-california-surfers\/","title":{"rendered":"A renegade sea otter is terrorizing California surfers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: “Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline \u2014 in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. \u201cAt first, we were like, \u2018Look how cute?\u2019 But then it bit down on the board and chewed off a piece, and we were like. \u2018What\u2019s going on?\u2019\u201d said one surfer. He said the otter<\/a> jumped on his board and began biting it. He tried to flip the board, but the otter got right back on \u2014 and started lunging at him. An adult sea otter can weigh 30 to 100 pounds, and reach 5 feet in length. The force of an otter\u2019s bite has been estimated to be 615 pounds per square inch, while a wolverine\u2019s can reach 1,720 pounds per square inch. The average person\u2019s bite force is about 162 pounds per square inch.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America suffered from an opioid crisis following the end of the civil war<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily: “When veterans of the US Civil War returned home, one of the barriers many faced to reintegrating into civilian life was opiate dependency. Prior to the Civil War, American doctors prescribed opiates, including opium, morphine, and laudanum, for a vast range of conditions, from painful injuries to loose bowels to fever. But\u00a0doctors, and many members of the general public<\/a>, were well aware of the dangers of the drugs. An 1849 article in\u00a0Scientific American<\/em>\u00a0described addicted men as \u201cready to sell wife and children, body and soul for the continuance of his wretched and transient delight.\u201d But they had little choice but to offer opiates to soldiers who otherwise would have been useless due to pain, vomiting, diarrhea, or other debilitating conditions. Some soldiers also took opiates before battle to calm their nerves.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is an edition of my daily email newsletter. You can find past versions and sign up for it here<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Could new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic treat addiction?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Sara Reardon for Scientific American: “Some users of Ozempic, the popular diabetes drug that can help people eat less and lose weight, have been noticing a welcome side effect. An increasing number of people who use these injections to help control their food cravings say other cravings disappear as well\u2014including ones for nicotine, alcohol, gambling, skin picking and other compulsive behaviors. The abundance of anecdotal reports has made researchers wonder whether Ozempic and similar <\/a>weight-loss drugs can serve as a basis for antiaddiction treatments. \u201cIt does make a lot of sense,\u201d says Lorenzo Leggio, an addiction researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.* Ozempic, one of the brand names for the drug semaglutide, targets a hormone that tells the body when it is full and, through mechanisms that are not fully understood, weakens the brain\u2019s association between food and pleasure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A third of North America\u2019s birds have vanished<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal for Nautilus magazine: “For weeks, Adam Smith had been crunching the raw data from more bird statistics than anyone had ever tried before\u2014thirteen different bird counts and millions of radar sweeps. He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years<\/a>, his calculations found, a third of North America\u2019s birds had vanished. \u201cWell, that can\u2019t be right,\u201d he thought. \u201cI must have made a mistake somewhere.\u201d Smith, one of the hemisphere\u2019s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while and then it dawned on him. \u201cThis would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we weren\u2019t even aware of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Singapore has the first automated salmon vending machine<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Atlas Obscura: “In January of 2019, a new ATM was unveiled in Singapore\u2019s Wisteria shopping mall. Instead of cash, however, this machine dispenses 200-gram fillets of frozen salmon from the fjords of Norway. Today, dozens of salmon ATMs dot the island city-state. Manish Kumar, founder and CEO of Norwegian Salmon Pte Ltd, has a stated goal of making his beloved salmon available to all and affordable<\/a> for everyone. By cutting out the cost of storefronts, staff, and distributors, he\u2019s able to sell his fillets for S$5.90 ($4.25). And by holding them under -4 degrees F, the fish stays fresh for up to two years. The company decided on Singapore because of the country\u2019s vending-machine culture (Singaporean machines vend everything from ice cream to luxury cars).”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zoo warns visitors not to show videos to \u2018fascinated\u2019 gorillas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Verity Bowman and Susie Coen write for The Telegraph: “He is not the only teenager to have become so enthralled by mobile phones that it impacts his relationship with his family. But Nassir, aged 13, is a Western lowland gorilla and his behaviour so concerned Canadian zookeepers that they have put up signs around his enclosure asking visitors not to show him any more footage. Videos and photos shown to apes on mobile phones \u201ccan be upsetting and affect their relationships and behaviour within the family<\/a>\u201d, the signs at Toronto Zoo read. Zoo patrons have taken in recent years to showing gorillas videos on their phones and recording the reaction to share on social media. But it has left some of the animals glued to mobiles. Toronto Zoo says that Nassir is the \u201cthe epitome of a teenager\u201d who is \u201cfascinated by videos and screen time would dominate his life if he had his way\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not flat, we checked<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From Amazing Astronomy on Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From Susanne Rust for the Los Angeles Times: “Since mid-June, an otter has been attacking and terrorizing surfers off the Santa Cruz coastline \u2014 in at least one case, stealing a board. In recent days, the attacks have grown increasingly aggressive. \u201cAt first, we were like, \u2018Look how cute?\u2019 But then it bit down on … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A renegade sea otter is terrorizing California surfers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257851"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257907,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257851\/revisions\/257907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}