Journal of a Dutch 30-something

While the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896, it wasn't until 1924 that the first edition of the Winter Olympics was held in Chamonix in France, at the foot of Mont Blanc. Winter sports had been a part of the 'normal' Olympic Games on and of before they got their own special event. Alternatively, there were the Nordic Games, held for the first time in 1901 and then every four years afterwards, but these were very much a Swedish affair.

Because of the difficulty of hosting winter sports at the 'normal' Olympics held during the summer, the IOC asked of the Olympic host country of 1924, France, to organize a separate 'Winter Sports week' in the same year. This proved to be a great success, as over 250 athletes from 16 different countries competed. Finland and Norway won 28 medals, more than all the other countries combined... The 9 sports practiced during this first Winter Olympics were ice hockey, speed skating, figure skating, curling, bobsleigh, ski jumping, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined and military patrol (a predecessor to the current biathlon).

The IOC did not yet call this 'Winter Sports week' the first Winter Olympics until retrospectively. In 1925, they decided to make the Winter Olympics separate from the Summer edition and designated Chamonix, 1924 as the first Winter Olympics.



Also: check out this really funny interview in which one of our Dutch speedskating coaches has a lively discussion about Olympic success on American TV! (I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but I do like to see how passionately he defends The Netherlands and the Dutch sports system)

What is the oldest language in the world? This is difficult question to answer, as languages change and evolve all the time, to the extent that any currently spoken language is unintelligible to it's ancestor of just a 1000 years ago!

Most scientists agree that spoken language has been present since around 100,000 years ago. In the 19th and early 20th century it was a popular belief among scientists that by comparing modern languages the first human language could be reconstructed, the so-called Proto-Human. A few words/roots that where reconstructed in this way are 'ku' (who), 'pal' (two) and 'akwa' (water). However, there are also many critics of this method of tracing language to its roots.

The oldest written language is Sumerian (the language of Mesopotamia), which has records dating back to 3000 BC. Second comes Egyptian, with records of some 4500 years old (2500 BC). Ancient Egyptian actually partially survived in the Coptic language, which is used in the Christian services of the Coptic church. If the language has to have survived (in some form) until today, then Chinese and Greek are the oldest written languages, both first appearing around 1500 BC.

If a language has no old written records, it does not necessarily mean it's a 'new' language. For example, Albanian was first written in the 15th century AC, while archeological evidence suggests the Albanians were a separate people in the first century and probably spoke a language related to modern Albanian.

We probably all wondered once what an animal was thinking and wished it could speak, so we could ask it just that. Animal cognition is a fascinating field of study, which shows us time after time animals might be less thoughtless than we anticipated!

The animals which have shown the longest memory in a research setting have so far been dolphins. Research showed that after 20 years of seperation, dolphins still recalled the whistles of former companions. Dolphins use unique whistles, akin to our names to communicate. Dolphins which had been housed together 20 years ago, still reacted when the whistle of their former mate was played to them. They approached the source of sound and started responding with their own whistle. When whistles were played from dolphins they had never met, this reaction was not seen. The scientists were amazed about this, as dolphins only have a lifespan of about 20 years in the wild. They believe the long memory is important because dolphins form 'fluid' social groups, they may leave one group and join another multiple times in a lifetime. It is therefore important for them to remember identities of dolphins they encountered long ago to decide whether or not this may be someone they want to approach or avoid upon meeting them again.
Other animals with almost equally longterm memories are great apes and elephants.

In some memory tasks, animals might even top our human memory. For example, the visual memory of chimpanzees is amazingly strong. When presented with an image of randomly scattered numbers and later asked to identify the position of each number in order, chimpanzees did better than human test subjects. Chimps seem to posses a sort of photographic memory, remembering the details of an image even if just glimpsed for a view seconds!



( Why this subject? )

Some of you might have heard in the news that this week the very first hamburger made of cultured meat was presented to the world press in London. My professor is involved as an advisor in this development, so I've been hearing quite a lot about it.

Since the 1990's the possibility of making cultured meat has been discussed as a possible efficient and animal-friendly solution to the world food problem: the large amount of energy needed to produce meat and the limited resources we have. From around 2000 scientist have been able to grow stem cells from animals in vitro. Stem cells are a special type of cells found in most tissues which can divide to form more cells. Depending on how specialized they are, they can form only one or multiple types of cells. For the production of cultured meat, muscle stem cells are taken from a small piece of muscle. They are then promoted to divide and grow by certain proteins.

Cultured meat can be produced in small muscle fibers, for which only muscle stem cells are needed. Alternatively, real 'chunks' of muscle could be produced, but for this an artificial circulatory system is necessary and also other types of cells, such as fat cells.

The first cultured hamburger, which was presented at August 5, 2013 was made of 20.000 small strips of beef muscle. The funding for this specific project came from an anonymous donor, which was revealed at the presentation to be Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google. The head scientist of the project, the Dutch professor Mark Post said it would probably still be a decade before cultured meat can become available commercially. Challenges are among others to increase the efficiency and speed of the process, to make sure the cultured meat is completely safe and to improve the taste of the product to resemble real meat as close as possible.

If you want to know more, check culturedbeef.net

Personal note: Though as a scientist, I find this development quite fascinating, I don't think this is thé solution to the world food problem. If everyone in the Western world would eat less meat (3-4 times a week), this would reduce problems surrounding meat consumption for a large part. I'm in favour of encouraging people to take this route.

Again, sorry for my lack of posting here recently... It's been really warm here in The Netherlands and my motivation and productivity has dropped to 0. I therefore thought a nice topic for this '100 things post' might be, the way animals cope with the heat!

Most animals are clever and simply avoid being in the heat. They are active during the night or during the cool hours of the day only. For the rest of the time they retire to a cool place in a cave or burrow or bury themselves beneath the sand. The Round-tailed Ground Squirrel hibernates both during the winter and during the hottest part of the summer, simply sleeping away the heat!

Animals who do 'decide' to be active during the day, have many anatomical and physiological adaptations to keep cool. Some lizards have longer legs, so their body is higher above the ground while running and they will absorb less heat. Owls and some other predatory birds gape with their mouths open and quickly flutter their throat cavity to lose heat by evaporation of water. Desert foxes and rabbits have much larger ears than their relatives in cooler areas. These ears, with their many blood vessels release their body heat.

A little more extreme is urohydrosis, the trick vultures and storks use to keep cool. They urinate on their legs, which cool by evaporation and the cooled blood will be recycled through the rest of the body...

There's one other thing you can do as an animal living in the heat: just tolerate it. The Antilope Squirrel's body temperature can rise up to over 40 C/104 F without damaging it's organs.


Maybe if I had such ears I could also enjoy sitting outside in this weather, instead of hiding myself in front of the ventilator inside...

Kaiser Wilhelm II was the last emperor of Germany. He was also only the third of that rare species, as the German empire had not been established until 1871. He was crowned emperor in 1888 and used his power to try and make Germany as great and important as Great-Britain (Wilhelm was the grandson of Queen Victoria and looked up towards the British Empire enormously). Because of his militaristic style of government, after WWI, the defeated Germans blamed Wilhelm for the war. He was forced to abdicate and asked for asylum in The Netherlands. This country had been neutral during WWI and queen Wilhelmina was a distant relative of Wilhelm.

Wilhelm was granted asylum and in 1920 was able to buy the small manor house Huis Doorn in the middle of The Netherlands. He was allowed access to his possessions in Germany and decorated Huis Doorn with 59 train-wagons full of furniture and art objects from his palaces in Berlin and Potsdam. This was a great deal too much for Huis Doorn and most of the things were put into storage.

Wilhelm lived in Doorn first with his wife Empress Augusta-Victoria and after her death in 1921 with his second wife princess Hermine and her children from her first marriage. Wilhelm was only allowed to go 15 km beyond the boundaries of his estate. If he wanted to go further away, he had to ask permission from the Dutch government. The reason for this was that, as a political refugee, the government had in fact promised to protect him. Wilhelm hardly ever went from the terrain of Huis Doorn, where he spent the largest part of his time with chopping wood and writing his memoirs.

Wilhelm died in 1941, at which time The Netherlands was occupied by Hitler's Germany. He was buried in a small mausoleum in the garden of Huis Doorn. He did not want to be buried in German soil until the monarchy was re-established. His wish was also that no swastika's were shown at his funeral (he was opposed to the Nazi rule of Germany), but as the occupying German forces controlled his funeral, it still became a show of Nazi pride.

After WWII, the Dutch government confiscated Huis Doorn (as they did with all the properties of Germans) and the house has been a museum ever since. In June every year, a small but devoted band of German monarchists comes to pay their respect and lay wreaths at the mausoleum of Wilhelm.

If you want to see how the house looks, I went there last week and you can check my post at all_castles here

This year, 2013, in the region where I live, we celebrate that 300 years ago, the Treaty of Utrecht was signed. Now, I must admit to my shame (as I almost live in Utrecht), that I hardly knew anything about this Treaty, leading to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. I think not many of you know about this episode of history either, so I thought this to be an interesting subject for my 49th '100 things challenge'-post.

The Treaty ended the War of Spanish Succession, which had raged all over Europe between from 1701 onwards. It started with the death of Charles II, King of Spain. Charles II did not have an heir and the Kingdom of Spain (with dominions in Italy, Asia and the Americas) was a force to be reckoned with. Multiple candidates to inherit the throne of Spain stood up. First and foremost of this was the heir apparent to the French throne: dauphin Louis. Another candidate was Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor of the Habsburg empire. Both these men were cousins in the first degree to Charles II, but for both candidates a similar problem to their inheriting the Spanish crown arose: it would combine two large empires under one crown (either France-Spain or Austria-Spain) and offset the precarious balance of power in Europe.

Forces supporting either candidate fought all over Europe. Great Britain and the Dutch Republic sided with the Holy Roman Empire, while Bavaria fought with the French. Battles were won and lost by both sides of the argument, with none gaining the upper hand. In 1712, the new Conservative British parliament, seeing that a quick victory was unlikely, started negotiations.

Why Utrecht was chosen to be the place of this negotiations is not entirely sure. Perhaps because the Dutch Republic wás a part of the conflict, but not a very powerful player, so negotiating here would not humiliate or exalt any of the parties. Previous treaties had been signed in Dutch cities, such as the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678) and Treaty of Rijswijk (1697). Interestingly, the 1,5 years of the negotiations were a golden time for the city of Utrecht. A great number of parties, dinners and cultural performances took place to keep all the international guests satisfied. Economic growth and employment soared. The Calvinistic city of Utrecht had a ban on theater, but for the duration of the negotiations, this was lifted!

The most important provisions in the Treaty of Utrecht were that Philip (grandson to the King of France, son to dauphin Louis) would become King of Spain, but had to renounce his rights to the throne of France. There were also territorial changes to Spain's empire, the Spanish Netherlands and Kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia were given to the Holy Roman Empire, Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain.

Georg Friedrich Händel wrote a festive piece of music to commemorate this Treaty: the Utrecht Te Deum



Now I'm just happy that the inheritance of 'our' Dutch throne is a lot simpler and we have an interesting and festive day tomorrow with the inauguration of King Willem-Alexander!

As you can see, I'm nearing the midway-point of the 100 things challenge! To make the 50th post a little more special, I'll let you choose the subject! Be as broad or as specific as you like in the comments!

[Poll #1911239]
 

Yes, I know I've been AWOL the last two weeks... I have been very busy at work and in the evenings I only wanted to crash on the couch and watch some tv. But I hope in the coming time I'll have some more time to post here. Beginning with a 100 things challenge  post, about the subject which has been most on my mind in the last few weeks: chickens!

The current domestic chicken was domesticated from the Red Junglefowl, a tropical bird of the pheasant family and still scientifically belongs to the same species (Gallus gallus). The Red Jungle fowl itself can still be found in the wild in Eastern Asia. Three other closely related junglefowl species have most likely also contributed to our modern domestic chicken.

The exact date and place of the domestication of the chicken remains a puzzle, but it is believed to have occurred about 8000 years ago somewhere in Asia. Genetic studies point to multiple domestication events. The earliest archaeological evidence of domesticated chickens is found in China in the 6th millennium BC in a relatively widespread area. On Mesopotamian clay tablets of 2000 BC, mentions of chickens are found. In Egypt around this time, depictions of the birds adorned royal tombs. The ancient Egyptians also first mastered the art of artificial incubation of chicken eggs, freeing hens to lay more eggs.

Interestingly, it is believed chickens were first domesticated for the purpose of cockfighting in stead of eating! Until the large-scale meat and egg production of the 20th century, chickens have always been of use to humans, but have not, like the ox and the horse, significantly influenced human history.

In the olden days, scientists looking for new species and habitats would simply trek into it. Nowadays, the Internet is an unmissable help even in these areas of science. In 2005, scientists using Google Earth to look for unknown wildlife hotspots 'discovered' Mount Mabu in Mozambique, the largest area of pristine medium-altitude rainforest in Africa. The rainforest is now frequently referred to as the 'Google rainforest'.

The Mount Mabu rainforest is so unspoiled, ironically, because it is surrounded by an area devastated by the Mozambique Civil War (1977-1992). Since 2009, the forest is a protected area under regulation by the Mozambique government.

Many new species have already been discovered in the rainforest, among which are a pygmy chameleon and multiple snake and butterfly species. In addition, the forest seems to be a refuge for many species on the Globally Threatened List, new population of at least seven threatened bird species have already been found.