Hello yes I am the baby box turtle, please assemble the press before I complete my emergence

American Toad (Anaxyrus americanus - formerly Bufo americanus) slough

Like reptiles, amphibians shed their skins as they grow larger.

However, unlike reptiles, amphibians almost always consume their leftover moults. This serves hide their presence to predators, as well as to regain some of the calories lost during growth. As amphibians shed more often than reptiles, they lose far more of their available protein and carbohydrates to shed skin, and if they were to just leave it laying around, they’d be wasting calories that they didn’t need to let go of!

Amphibians and Reptiles of the Chicago Area. Clifford H. Pope, 1944.

Keeping up with science!

Remember when science was a great thing in peoples' eyes? Science cured syphilis! Science gave us the smallpox vaccine! Science gave us the polio vaccine! Science brought livelihood back to the south [23:00 into podcast]!

Science is more fascinating and pioneering today than it ever has been. We've mapped our entire genome (after discovering DNA itself), cloned animals, performed surgery with robots, found ways to calculate the age of the universe, and that's not even getting into the mind-bogglingly fast growth of the computer sciences and, well, the internet itself.

We could certainly do with a few more pro-science posters around, these days. It's your friend, not your enemy!

Poster from Library of Congress collection of WPA posters. Illinois (Chicago) poster intended for use in schools, libraries, and public places. Created by Shari Weisberg, 1939.

Hot Time in the Old Town

The pavement and asphalt is literally blowing up on our highways from the heat today, so let's take a quick look at another historic heat wave in history. Not that this one is a historic wave, but it's certainly a record-setting spike.

(most information from the great book Hot Times in the Old City)

1896: New York City. Chicago.

In August 1896, over 1500 people in Chicago and New York died over a 10-day period as a direct result of 90+ degree heat and intense humidity. This was more than the New York City Draft Riots and the Chicago Fire combined, but rarely is remembered as one of the great disasters in American history (much like the Peshtigo Fire that occurred on the same day as the Chicago fire but killed more than 10x as many people but that's another story...).

Even though the East Coast and Midwest United States have and had routine heat waves and intense spikes in heat, the length of this one combined with the 90% humidity and the stepped-up enforcement of vagrancy laws (kicking people out of the public parks at night, where they would sleep to try and get some fresh air) caused unprecedented deaths over a short period. The fact that almost 95% of those who died were living in tenement housing led to it not being very widely reported, and over the long-term, not very widely known at all. The tenement housing sounded bad enough as it was, but it must have felt like roasting in an oven or a living hell during this wave. There was no air circulation, no running water, people were living five to six people per room, and the extra floor space in the tenements was being rented out by single men who would be working long days under the sun, six days a week. The roofs and fire escapes were being used so that people could get out of the unlivable conditions inside, but they weren't much better. There was no wind, the humidity didn't drop, and the nighttime temperatures only dropped down to the high 80s.

When Teddy Roosevelt wrote to his sister before a vacation right after the heat wave subsided, he wrote:

Indeed, then-police-commissioner Roosevelt's championing for the poorest of the poor in New York was one of the few things that prevented more deaths. The factory bosses and those who oversaw manual labor had no mercy on anyone affected by the heat. The Mayor only called together his board of commissioners on the very last day of the wave. Roosevelt saw after the first couple days the dire conditions and personally oversaw the distribution of ice, as well as walked the back alleys of the worst-affected neighborhoods to see how people were using the ice. It was this heat wave that cemented his staunch position as a champion of tenement reform.

Wood-cut of tenement life during an 1882 "heated period"

People don't remember heat waves, even when they kill thousands. They kill slowly. They don't freeze you to death or cause you to die by sickness; people don't die from fire or injury. They wear people down and dehydrate them, people collapse, die of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Even today, people forget that not a decade ago over 40,000 people died in one summer as a direct result of the heat in Europe...

Cadavers set up for the first day of gross anatomy lab at Rush Medical College in Chicago, IL, around the turn of the century.

First Aid rooms at the International Harvester Company, in Chicago, Illinois. Keeping the men and women at the factory in good health included immediate treatment of any wounds or injuries sustained on the floor (as opposed to the initial Industrial Revolution attitude of "GET BACK TO WORK"). After all, an infected wound slows down production of armaments and ammunition for the boys in the trenches...