RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Trees!
There is, apparently, a singular key to the health of forests all over the world. So say researchers from The Center for Tree Science, The Morton Arboretum (Lisle, IL), and from Tuscia University in Italy and the University of Barcelona in Spain, in an article in Nature Plants: “Old and Ancient Trees Are Life History Lottery Winners and Vital Evolutionary Resources for Long-Term Adaptive Capacity.”
Yup, that’s the key: some ancient trees.
Those scientists say that
Weighed?
For those struggling with body image issues, even going to the doctor can be stressful, it appears.
Checking your weight at your physician’s office is standard practice (but not for dermatologists!). So if you have to hop on to a scale in the middle of a busy hallway at your doctor’s, well, that can be embarrassing for the self-conscious. And apparently that results in weight-worried patients avoiding health checkups altogether.
So More-Love.org has created a solution.
Recognition!
Yenny Seo is special. She is one of the few who fall into the category of “super-recognizers.”
As a child, this gal often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Gosh, while watching a movie, she could even recognize those extras in it who had also appeared fleetingly in other movies.
Ms. Seo:
It’s always been quite fun for me. Especially as a child. I remember
Intelligence?
There’s always the smartest kid in your class. The one who knows everything, aces every test, memorizes historical dates, names, places, recites the multiplication tables and the alphabet backwards and forwards, and in medical school can remember all the histories, medications, and lab values of his patients without the need for notes. And all the esoteric anatomical landmarks. And so on. Always the smartest kid.
That one, we’d predict, was headed towards being a rocket
New!
Well, what about that? We humans have a body part that’s never been seen before! Whodda thunk it?
So claim anatomy researchers from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in “The Human Masseter Muscle Revisited: First Description of Its Coronoid Part,” published in the Annals of Anatomy last month.
As one correspondent reported, it’s a jaw-dropping discovery. Literally. Because the masseter muscle is a muscle in our lower jaws essential for chewing. It’s the hunk
Alone?
They say that “loneliness” is the pain of being along. And the glory of being alone is “solitude.”
Over the past few years, for most us—and not just for some who have chosen singleness and celibacy as a lifestyle—being alone has become quite a reality. Sheltering in place. Socially distancing. Exposure and infection quarantining. Etc.
Whether this becomes loneliness or solitude is a different question.
The last few years have also brought out significant research
Speech?
Egyptian mummies are strange and mysterious and intriguing.
[And BTW, we have one here in Louisville, in the Boyce Library of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that dates back to 700 BC (the mummy, not the seminary). More about that another time.]
A few weeks ago, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that two ancient mummies, one male, one female—unearthed at a site in Mimya, Egypt, as part of an excavation under the auspices of the University
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.