Causal gap of quantum physics

 A

The brain also regulates fatigue and endurance. More type I muscle,

more mitochondria, and better heart and lung function will all improve your

stamina, but the feeling of complete collapse, when you can’t go another

step, is generated by your brain. It’s an evolved survival mechanism to

prevent you from pushing so hard that you damage yourself. Endurance

training helps the brain grow accustomed to the signals of impending doom,

giving you more time before you give in to the voice in your head

imploring you to stop.

A

O

8

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

ne of the first things you learn if you study ecology is the beneficent

nature of the sun. Life needs energy, and the light from our star flows

through the living world, fueling and sustaining the earth’s ecosystems from

the lowliest slime molds up through the most majestic beasts. “We are made

of star stuff,” as Carl Sagan noted so poetically, our atoms forged inside the

bellies of old, exploded stars. Your body, and indeed your life, is also

temporary storage for the sun’s energy. Captured by photosynthetic plant

cells, sunlight was used to assemble carbon, water, and other molecules into

living tissues. You ate those tissues and their embodied sun glow, or you ate

animals that did, and you constructed your own protein robot from the

building blocks. The energy your muscles, nerves, and other cells use to

move you around and ignite your thoughts came from the fusion reactor

deep within the sun. We are solar powered.

A

UV RACE 

A

Pasteur had experimented with inoculation in the 1870s, developing

vaccinations for chicken cholera and anthrax in farm animals from less

potent (but still living) cultures of the diseases grown in the lab. He tried a

similar approach with rabies, but came to realize he had killed his lab-

grown stock of rabies viruses prior to injecting them as a vaccine. Rather

than simply being less infectious, the viruses in his vaccine were

“inactivated”: inert and unable to infect the recipient. (You could also say

they were “dead,” although that presupposes viruses are alive, which is a

matter of debate in biology.

[*2]) His rabies vaccine worked, saving the life

of a nine-year-old boy in 1885 in a highly publicized early demonstration

and placing Pasteur firmly in the pantheon of scientific greats. He had

invented the first modern vaccine, paving the way for effective and safe

vaccines that would change the planet, virtually eliminating diseases, from

smallpox to polio.

It would take another eighty years to figure out how vaccination works.

A