I don't watch very often anymore since I saw a Derby that was clearly rigged some years back (the horse that looked like he had the most speed was held back hard all the way to the wire -- if his jockey had let him out he'd have won by several lengths) but I happened to see this year's Preakness. And yeah, American Pharaoh looked to me like he had a lot left, in fact I remarked on that after the race.

All racing does is formalize what horses will do on their own. Pasture horses sometimes suffer similar injuries just doing what horses do, which commonly is run full-tilt in a group for no visible purpose. I've seen untrained horses do that, even to the point of exhaustion and laming.

I'd hazard that on a per capita basis, racehorses probably have fewer such injuries than average, because they're a helluva lot more valuable and are far more closely watched and vetted than the average horse. The main difference is that when they have a major injury, the whole world hears about it.

Since the study compared eating placentas to eating placentas, what does that have to do with anything? What was goofy was the relative dosage per body weight.

Just because you swallow the hormone doesn't mean it necessarily acts on the wrong organ system. It will still behave the same in the body, since it can't do otherwise (it can only mate up with its own receptors). Otherwise we wouldn't have oral hormone replacement therapy (or oral contraceptives, for that matter), which is commonly used for estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid.

Not blind assumption; understanding of biochemistry and hormone systems. Hormones have broadly the same effects across species, and dosage matters.

What would be a lot more informative is an analysis of what hormones are found in a human placenta, and in what quantity and concentration. But "We tried a microdose and nothing happened" isn't exactly definitive.

Actually, all it showed was that the effect wasn't present at the dosage used. The rats are eating the entire placenta. If a human consumed an entire placenta, the dosage would be different, and you might see a quite different physiological response. Underdosing a hormone can actually have a paradoxical effect (low dose can be just enough to make the body think it doesn't need to manufacture any of its own, so the serum level of that hormone can actually go *down*).

Not really, because hormones are cross-species, and do much the same jobs in every organism that has 'em. We use hormones from various livestock to treat human hormone deficiency; we can be affected by plant estrogens as if they were animal estrogens. Studying hormone interactions in rats creates a good starting point for where we should study human hormone metabolism, but at a vastly accelerated rate (you can examine the hormones during rat births every few weeks; you have to wait 9 months to examine hormones during human births).

From the NIH article, it sounds like what eating the post-partum placenta mostly does is act as short-term birth control by depressing progesterone production. (I wonder what the effect would be from a pre-birth placenta?) Which might have evolved as a way of preventing next-litter competition from arriving too soon in those animals that cycle again immediately after birth.

Indeed, a very lame excuse. Those bus stops shouldn't let people hang around waiting for a bus; anyone might loiter, and public decency would be offended! 'Course when you've got a captive audience like that, well, it must be hard for a hardworking cop to resist.

My college roommate got arrested for sitting on a public curb enjoying the evening (this was in 1973), tho I imagine it had more to do with that he would not give the cops his name. Why wouldn't he give his name? His family had escaped from Soviet Ukraine just after the Stalin era, and he took Constitutional freedoms seriously; you are not required to identify yourself if no crime has been committed. Next morning the judge released him, but even so -- it's the kind of thing that should never happen in the first place.

That leotard thing under the armor, it's black, right??

Makes about as much sense as the rest of this...

Actually in some states (CA for one, IIRC) it IS illegal to carry a toy gun unless it's clearly marked with bright pink. Cuz, ya know, realism kills.

Smart criminals will just apply a little spraypaint to their weapons to disguise them as toy guns.

I don't know what they're going to do about the hot-pink rifles they sell at Murdoch's and Cabella's... are they already legally toy guns??

The trouble with loitering as a crime is that it's too open to interpretation. Standing on the corner watching cars go by? That's loitering. Walking down the street with no particular destination? That can be loitering too. Too often it boils down to "We don't serve your kind here" rather than being an act which causes harm.

A contrary explanation might be that TSA gate monkeys know their job is nothing more than harrassment, so they choose to ignore 95% -- finding 5% is just enough to keep them employed.

Per the last stats I saw, home ownership in CA is actually higher than average. A great many hovels are owner-occupied, especially in the rural areas. And there's an astonishing lot of CA that still doesn't have electric service, including well-populated canyons -- some within 15 miles of Los Angeles.

Canyons get started by water, but it doesn't take much -- just enough of a ditch to generate a bit of wind. Windblown sand does the major carving after that.

I had the same thought -- what would that do to relieve stress on the host populations? Some might expand to where they're better off if we harvest more of 'em.

Fleas, ticks, chiggers, hookworms, whipworms, horseflies, deerflies, doubtless others (especially the wide array of parasites found in Africa and Australia) ... can't think of any downside, other than possibly to their own parasites. Oh well!

I read somewhere that anemia due to the arctic's twin-engine mosquitoes is the leading cause of death in caribou.