Posts Tagged ‘spit’
Orthodox Jews in Israel spit on “immodest” 8-year-old girl
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up pledges to curb Jewish zealotry in Israel on Sunday after an 8-year-old girl complained of being menaced by ultra-Orthodox men who deemed her dress immodest.
While his conservative government insists such incidents are fringe phenomena in the mostly secular country, Netanyahu’s repeated announcements on the matter reflected concern about widening religious and political schisms…
Netanyahu said he had ordered law enforcement authorities to crack down on “whoever spits, whoever lifts a hand (in violence), whoever harasses” and to remove street signs segregating men from women in some ultra-Orthodox districts.
Surprising news about spit
Because the human body harbors 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells, scientists are trying to understand more about the bacteria we carry. The human mouth is a major gateway for bacteria into the body and it contains a diverse array of microbial species. Yet scientists know little about this diversity and how it relates to diet, environment, health and disease.
“We are interested in this because by studying the bacteria we can get more insights into human populations than we would get from just studying the human DNA,” Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, who led this study…
But when comparing samples from different geographic areas they found not much variation, suggesting that bacteria within the mouth of a person’s neighbor is likely to be just as different as someone on the other side of the world.
The findings could help better understand human migrations and populations as well as providing background for future studies looking at the influence of diet, cultural factors and disease on differences in saliva bacteria.
“The saliva microbiome does not vary substantially around the world,” Stoneking said in a statement. “Which seems surprising given the large diversity in diet and other cultural factors that could influence the human salivary microbiome.”
Who’da thunk it?
OK. Aside from my predictable smartass remark, I really am surprised. Because anyone who’s traveled through strongly divergent cultures knows there is a noticeable and immediate difference between nations and cultures in another bodily fuid – sweat.
True, there’s perhaps more of an influence of cuisine; but, I would have thought the results were similar in saliva. Now, I have to learn more. As ever.
