Are you suggesting that people selling books would stoop to planting white hair from a polar bear and claiming they saw a Yeti nearby?

I wouldn't put it past some of the "participants" (to be excessively polite) in cryptozoology to do just that.

The neat trick would be finding polar bear hair that matches the DNA from a polar bear mandible of some 100,000 years age, found in permafrost in Svalbard. Which is what the actual DNA match was.

(Caveats : the polar bear mandible was estimated at greater than 45kyr on basis of radiometric dating ; the 100,000 years is a coarser estimate from local landforms. There are probably some honest people in cryptozoology, but identifying them through the charlatans is tricky.)

Hmmm, interesting.

If I hadn't come across ("fnarr, fnarr") pole vaulting as a comparison, then I might have lit upon shooting ("fnarr, fnarr"), if only because a friend's daughter was a serious competitor for a place on the national biathlon team on that winter sports thingy recently (the thing with the logo of rings ; sorry, not a very sporty person myself). (That's cross-country skiing and target shooting, for those that don't know or have forgotten already.)

But yeah - good example with no obvious reasons for gender segregation, but the segregation persists.

Another random piece of data that floats in my mental files is that many of the biggest salmon hooked in Scottish rivers have been caught by women. And that is really confusing, particularly for the patriarchs.

I chose to use pole vaulting as an example, and yes the innuendo potential did not escape me.

Oh no - they (the IeSF) want to change the status quo. In favour of their (or their corporate overlords') wallets, of course.

But it's more akin to playing an instrument than participating a sport.

If I had a spare pair of ear defenders (or two), I'd head up the road to the local highland games (I think it's Braemar this weekend, but I'm not sure) and ask the competitors in the bagpipes competition if they're more or less sportsmen than the caber-tossers.

Can I use your name when I ask?

Pron is a sport? Sorry, "spurt."

How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers?

The Sherpas have been carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers since the early 1930s - say 3 generations. For the preceding 30-odd generations (and maybe considerably more) they've been living in the same regions carrying loads of fabrics and foodstuffs over the Himalayan ranges from the plains of India into Tibet during the early summer (after the winter snows melted), and then returning to the plains of India with loads of salt from the interior high-altitude deserts of Tibet to sell in India.

Oh, sorry, did I relieve your ignorance of the economies of interior Asia for the last (several) thousand years? My apologies - I'll let you continue in the dark in future.

It's not difficult to find these things out.

The target of my research (literature search only) was, as you say, chronic exposures. Specifically, a considerable number of oil production installations which were designed 20 years previously for "sweet" hydrocarbons (no H2S) have since had their fluids turn sour (probably by downhole bacterial decomposition of sulphate in injected seawater), resulting in embrittlement of high-pressure pipelines and plant (one set of problems) and also consistently detectable (though still sub-ppm, probably ; this is a problem since most industrial calibration samples are at 1, 5 or 10 ppm) H2S in the accommodation atmosphere. As you say, this is an under-researched area, due to H2S's well earned reputation as an acute killer.

You say "the human body has enzymes that break it down harmlessly (it is present in small amounts in the body normally). As long as those enzymes aren't overwhelmed" ; yes, the human body has enzymes that can process H2S, "as long as they're not overwhelmed." Problem is, that overwhelming happens many times that the enzyme molecule encounters a hydrosulphide ion, leaving the cytochrome enzyme literally plugged and resulting in a back-up of un-processed hydroxide free radicals. If that sounds like good news to you, then we've got different understandings of "good news". That said, though there has been some work done looking for post-exposure (to H2S) cancers and other sequels to the oxidative damage, with no strong effect noticed. (Caveat : vintage mid-1990s, and this is an under-researched area.)

This happened 30 years ago. If there was going to be a problem, it would have shown by now.

There are programmes following up people after such periods, though mostly (AFAICT) in the paper pulp industry. The exposure of some hundred thousand of people in Edmonton to several ppm for several days after a blowout ... sorry, I've forgotten the location ; about 1981, some hundred kilometres upwind from Edmonton ... Lodgepole blowout ... has produced a considerable cohort for a longitudinal study. Getting funding to actually perform such studies seems to have been difficult - probably because it would be politically inconvenient, and partly because - well, everyone knows that H2S is do-not-fuck-with stuff, so to stop fucking with it seems a pretty good start to management.

used in trauma to induce a deep hibernation like state

Yeah, I saw those reports. And I thought that sounded like pogo-sticking across really thin ice above a pool of hungry sharks. With lasers on their heads. I do understand the mechanisms they're proposing for preventing apoptosis (well, IANA metabolism researcher ; but I've forgotten more biochemistry and chemistry than most people), but that really doesn't encourage me to be on the receiving end of such treatments. I'd rather plan to avoid such injuries instead.

On a complete aside, I just discovered New Zealand's favourite part of Central Europe : Bad Aussee.

The effects clear just as fast.

Not from the research I did in the 1990s.

If you had a knock-down then neurological sequelae are a high (50% +) probability. You had a full suite of neurology tests for damage to peripheral nerves and brain damage afterwards. Didn't you? If not, get onto the medics for your employer's insurance company as soon as possible.

I'd expect you'd have to report such an injury to the local medical and health-&-safety authorities. They should have been insisting on full neurological follow up too.

H2S is really do-not-fuck-with-me stuff. Absolutely, totally, fuck-not-with material.

If there was ever sufficient there to knock you out, even for a second or so, then you came so close to being dead that you should have a coffin made up. It has a horribly well-earned reputation for pooling near ground level, then knocking people down into a pool of more concentrated gas where they then die over the next several breaths. It's not an asphyxiant like most "poisonous" gasses, but it actively gets it's way into every cell of your body and blocks vital parts of the metabolism (oxygen processing in mitochondria). In fact, it is so poisonous that that is one of the few things that helps protect people when they take a hit - it can drown your lungs and shut down your heart before it really gets a chance to destroy your brain. Which isn't much consolation.

I suppose on the good side, from the research work that I did for the trade union some years ago (on chronic exposures to personnel working on oil installations that change from "sweet" to "sour"), there is no substantive evidence of heritable or genetic damage from H2S hits. OTOH, it is unsurprising that the presence of enduring sub-ppm H2S poisoning is probably an abortifacient.

john wayne syndrome with a touch of stupidity (seriously, showed up to a complaint about a woman threatening to kill hersel with a kitchen knife and they shot her dead with 7 shots- because she had a kitchen knife)

And you let these knuckle-draggers walk around with guns? No wonder America is such a fucked-up society.

freely and easily obtainable mental health resources(*) he probably would still be alive today.
* Assuming that such things are actually available.

He was an American living in America. He'd only have had access to such resources through his (or someone else's) wallet.

Knowing only that he was an American, there's only about a 0.6 probability that he had access to health services.

Which is disgusting.

The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic.

There was a particular bacterium - I forget the name - which was found in the waste water treatment plant of a nylon-manufacturing plant in the mid-1970s ; due to it's unusual living circumastances it had developed the ability to metabolise the 6-carbon molecules which are the components of nylon, but specifically NOT to metabolise the nylon itself.

Which is a quite remarkable bit of biology - IIRC it came about as the result of an off-by-one reading of the bases in a particular bit of DNA (checking the wikipedia article, there's alternative interpretations of this, but it's years since I read the original papers ; the details of how the mutation came about don't bother me). But it's not going to clean the oceans of our wastes.

I'm not aware of any other reports of "plastic eating bacteria," in particular any bacteria that can actually digest nylon-type plastics (as opposed to the monomers from which they're formed) , or indeed any other classes of plastic, such as the poly-alkene family.

Plastics formulations have changed considerably in the last few decades. The common use of materials such as plant-based celluloses as fillers in many plastic products is changing both the economics of production of "plastic", and is also changing the way those products break down in the environment. Where in the past you'd have centimetre-scale blocks of solid polymer, now you'll find that the grains of bacteria-edible cellulose will get eaten by environmental bacteria within a few years of going out into the environment (basically, getting wet), leading to the disintegration of the bulk body into much smaller particles. They still weigh the same (less, of course, the biodegradable filler), but they're decidedly less noticeable. Which is a cosmetic improvement. But it is a cosmetic improvement, only.

Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth

Are you sure that the two are separable? While I'd like to think that it's possible for humans to live off the Earth, I'm not absolutely sure that it is possible. (Corrollary : if it is not possible for humans to live, long term, off this planet, then as a species, we're dead.)

Oh, hang on, it's an AC. You're non-existant already.

Mainland Scandanavia ; you're correct. However the Svalbard archipelago (disputed claims by both Russia and norway) is a major breeding centre for polar bears.

There's also some evidence (skull morphology from cave deposits) that the polar bear evolved due to isolation of a population of brown bears on the European Atlantic seaboard during the most recent ice age.