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Birth girdles like this one, in the Wellcome Trust’s collection, were used in the Middle Ages to protect women during pregnancy and childbirth. Medieval English Birth Scroll. MS. 632/Wellcome Collection (CC-BY 4.0)
Medieval ‘birthing girdle’ contains delivery fluid, milk, and honey
Mar. 9, 2021 , 7:01 PM
More than 500 years ago, an anxious woman faced one of the most dangerous moments known to medieval medicine: childbirth. To help her survive, she wrapped a 3-meter-long belt of parchment around her heaving belly, hoping the prayers and religious symbols that covered it would deliver her and her baby safely through the ordeal. Now, scientists examining the stitched-together sheepskin parchment, from 15th century England, have found that she was still wearing it when she went into labor.
Should the finger of blame be pointed at the marmot for the global spread of the plague?
When it comes to the Black Death, rats are usually cast as the villains of the piece – and with good reason. After all, it was most likely thanks to them that the plague (
Yersinia pestis) was reintroduced to Europe. Though there has been some debate about how and where the original infection occurred, there is little doubt that Italian traders caught the disease from rat fleas in Black Sea ports before taking it back to Messina aboard Genoese galleys in October 1347. Granted, rats were probably not solely responsible for the speed with which the pestilence spread in the weeks that followed. In 2018, researchers from the universities of Ferrara and Oslo demonstrated that human fleas and lice played at least as important a role in transmission between people. But because rats can tolerate higher concentrations of the bacillus in their blood, and tend to live in close proximity to humans, th
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Grasping at seaweed The dairy industry, drowning under public scrutiny of its woeful animal welfare record and environmental destructiveness, is no longer clutching at straws, but instead is grasping seaweed. There are advertorials running about the wonders of feeding cows red algae, or Asparagopsis, in order to reduce the obscene amount of the very potent greenhouse gas methane, which is released in their belches and farts. The no doubt conservative estimate is that this makes up 57 per cent of farm emissions. It is being said that If 10 per cent of the livestock producers added 1.0 per cent of Asparagopsis Seaweed Meal to the daily feed intake of ruminant livestock, it is like removing 100 million cars off the road.
Grasping at seaweed The dairy industry, drowning under public scrutiny of its woeful animal welfare record and environmental destructiveness, is no longer clutching at straws, but instead is grasping seaweed. There are advertorials running about the wonders of feeding cows red algae, or Asparagopsis, in order to reduce the obscene amount of the very potent greenhouse gas methane, which is released in their belches and farts. The no doubt conservative estimate is that this makes up 57 per cent of farm emissions. It is being said that If 10 per cent of the livestock producers added 1.0 per cent of Asparagopsis Seaweed Meal to the daily feed intake of ruminant livestock, it is like removing 100 million cars off the road.