Why Do Mosquitoes Love You, But Not Everybody?:
If you’ve ever been at an outdoor party or BBQ during the fading hours of daylight and don’t personally notice an increase in the number of mosquitoes, you’ll probably hear someone complaining about it. That’s because mosquitoes are selective insects, and some people are more likely to get bites than others.
There are a few factors that could contribute to why this happens: In one controlled study by the Journal of Medical Entomology, the bugs landed on people with blood Type O nearly twice as frequently as those with Type A. The researchers noted this has to do with secretions we produce, which tips mosquitoes off on a person’s blood type.
“These cues let them know they are going to a blood source,” Day said. “Perhaps CO2 is the most important. The amount of CO2 you produce, like people with high metabolic rates ― genetic, other factors ― increases the amount of carbon dioxide you give off. The more you give off, the more attractive you are to these arthropods.”
But what separates us from the nonliving entities that give off carbon dioxide, like cars? Mosquitoes look for primary cues in conjunction with what Day calls “secondary cues.”
Lactic acid — the stuff that causes our muscles to cramp during exercise — is one of those secondary cues, for example. Lactic acid is released through the skin, signaling to mosquitoes that we are a target, Day said. (Just one more reason why I think exercise is–ill-advised.)
Mosquitoes also have other qualities that help them pick up on secondary cues.
“Mosquitoes have excellent vision, but they fly close to the ground to stay out of the wind,” Day said. “They are able to contrast you with the horizon, so how you’re dressed matters. If you have on dark clothes, you are going to attract more because you’ll stand out from the horizon, whereas those wearing light colors won’t as much.”
A mosquito also takes in “tactile cues” once it has landed on you.
“Body heat is a really important tactile cue,” Day said. “That comes into play with genetic differences or physiological differences. Some people tend to run a little warmer — when they land, they’re looking for a place where blood is close to the skin.” That means those whose temperatures are a little higher are more likely to get the bite.
My suggestion: Just stay inside.
Not Sure How Effective Recycling Is, But At Least…:
…(r)ecycling can help to keep packaging out of polluting landfills and in circulation, reducing the need to create new materials.
But it can also strengthen the economy by supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs that stay in the U.S. Even as governments spend heavily to strengthen domestic manufacturing, recycling is already contributing to that effort, according to Earth911.
A 2024 study from the Recycled Materials Association found that recycling activity contributes $184 billion to the U.S. economy every year. It also found that the industry supports 603,000 jobs nationwide, including 175,000 workers employed directly in recycling.
Those direct jobs come with strong compensation, with average pay and benefits topping $100,000.
A ton-for-ton comparison with disposal helps show the difference. As summarized by Earth911, which cited data from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Recycling Means Business report, sorting and processing recyclables create roughly 10 times as many jobs as landfilling or incinerating the same amount of material.
Even more employment is tied to later stages of the system. Remanufacturing recovered materials is associated with about 30 times more jobs. If a fully circular system that includes reuse, repair, composting, and recycling were put into action, it could create 200 times the jobs than disposal in landfills does, according to a major study by the Global Anti-Incineration Alliance.
OK, I grant you that this is largely propaganda from the industry. Can we agree, at least, that these jobs are more valuable than those in the insurance industry where the employees’ only responsibility is to turn down legitimate claims?
The ‘Attention-Span Class Divide’:
Theatrical movie releases have been on the decline since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, dropping from 910 releases in 2019 to 670 in 2025. Box-office sales are shrinking. People are still streaming movies at home, but studios are worried. Feature films are getting longer overall, but scriptwriters are under pressure to keep acts short, with faster cuts designed to keep viewers focused.
But it may be too late. The movies were once a working- and middle-class pleasure—cheap Nickelodeon theaters sprung up in the early 1900s in cities dense with immigrants. By the Jazz Age, “movie palaces” brought in wealthy patrons too, and for decades, the cinema was an all-American activity. But today, affluent people are the most likely to say they’ve gone to a movie recently, whereas low-income people are the least likely. In one survey, 78 percent of respondents said that they considered going to the movies a luxury. Meanwhile, millions of people have started watching micro-dramas on TikTok.
This may be less a matter of changing tastes than a matter of time and money. I don’t just mean the money it costs to pay for movie tickets and streaming services, at a time when Americans are stretching for gas and eggs. (Last year, the cost of streaming increased almost 20 percent, well above the 2.7 percent inflation rate.) I don’t just mean studios’ money-saving turn to generative AI, which will inevitably lead to a decline in the quality of films. I’m talking about what not having money does to your time, and your ability to spend it.
The average American reports checking their phone nearly 200 times a day. Everyone—blue-collar moms, college students, CEOs—suffers from the distractions of carrying around the pinging, blinking pocket-size casinos that our phones have become. While our attention spans have shrunk, however, our brains have not fundamentally changed. Focus, it appears, is a recoverable asset that can be retrieved by shutting out the noise and leaving the casino. And that is much easier for high rollers to do.
Money offers the ability to buy expensive gadgets such as second, basic phones and “bricks” that can make smartphones temporarily dumb. But it also means access to resources that don’t look like resources at all: stable work, consistent schedules, chunks of leisure time, agency over how to structure your day. The ability to block out time to focus on emails, make to-do lists, or do in-depth work. To meditate, exercise, or go outside. To commit three hours to seeing a movie in a theater (or a ballet or an opera). These are things that economically stable individuals take for granted, but that evade many struggling Americans.
The unemployment rate is hovering around 4.2 percent. But if you add the “functionally unemployed”—which includes anyone making less than a living wage ($26,000 a year) and anyone who wants but can’t get 35 hours or more of guaranteed work a week—then that figure rises to about 25 percent. Nearly 30 percent of Americans are employed in gig work, which promises flexibility and freedom but is more commonly defined by a lack of steady hours and the need to constantly be on call.
Americans are spending their days hustling and waiting for the opportunity to hustle, their days broken up into unpredictable units of work and languishing. That’s stressful, and stress limits the ability to retain information and focus. In this way, precarity reduces attention spans. And the phone is always right there, whenever and wherever, offering a perfect form of mindless entertainment when your mind is on so many other things.
Don’t leave them hanging on the telephone.
Wolves Vs. Foxes–Their Differences Are Not That Similar:
Both belong to the dog family, Canidae, but they have travelled down separate evolutionary lines, with differing morphology, social lives, communication, diet and habitats.
The most obvious difference is size. True foxes are generally small to medium-sized canids. The tiny fennec fox weighs just 1-1.5kg, while the larger red fox averages 5-7kg. Wolves are built on a much larger scale. The biggest wolf in the world is the grey wolf and adults measure about 1-1.6m from head to body and can stand up to 80cm at the shoulder. Their average body mass is about 40kg, though this varies widely between populations.
Wolves are famous for their social lives. A wolf pack is usually a family group, centred on a mated pair and their offspring. Packs defend territories, communicate with howls, scent marks and body language, and often cooperate to hunt large prey. True foxes are generally less social. Many species are solitary or live as pairs for much of the year, though their social behaviour varies. Some foxes may form small family groups, especially where food is plentiful or population densities are high.
Diet is another major difference. Wolves are carnivores and apex predators, especially adapted for tackling larger prey. Across much of their range, they feed on hoofed mammals such as deer, elk, moose, caribou and wild boar. They also eat smaller animals, carrion, livestock and, occasionally, plant material. True foxes are more opportunistic. They eat a wide mix of food, including invertebrates, small vertebrates, fruit, grasses and other plant material. Their resourcefulness means that many will also scavenge, particularly in urban areas.
To sum it all up:
A fox is not a small wolf. True foxes are smaller, lighter, and usually more solitary, with a more varied diet and a remarkable ability to live alongside people. Wolves are larger, more social and more specialised for cooperative hunting, with bodies built for travelling long distances and bringing down large prey.
Howzabout a musical two-fer to usher us out:
Re recycling, I wonder if when counting up jobs they took into account the jobs of people creating more of all the stuff — and even newer and better stuff! — that gets thrown away and incinerated and not recycled, reused, or repaired. Not to mention the jobs of extracting the raw materials for all that new stuff. And shipping and handling. Granted the manufacturing jobs are likely not local or even in the USA, but if comparing jobs, then compare jobs.
To be clear, I’m not advocating against reuse, repair and recycle!