Strange But True | Eastern Shore March 2010
Healthy Horseshoe
They aren’t the most popular of Maryland crabs, but for the medical community the horseshoe variety, or
Limulus polyphemus, is certainly the most useful. An extract from the blood of the
horseshoe crab, called “lysate,” is used to test the quality of certain medicines. Though not endangered, horseshoe crabs have a declining population that is having a ripple effect on the populations of their natural predators, such as diamondback turtles and a shorebird called the Red Knot. The Delaware Bay is the largest breeding ground for these crabs, though they’re prevalent
throughout the middle and lower Chesapeake Bay.
YouTube goes to college
Named one of 2009’s best websites by both Time and PC Magazine, AcademicEarth.org
collects and displays videos of actual lectures from America’s best colleges, and it’s all
available for free. Each lecture is presented in a single web video and is filed alongside
every other lecture in the course. You can audit Yale professor Benjamin Polak’s Game
Theory course (the site’s most popular under Social Sciences) or sit in on Michael
Sandel of Harvard’s lecture, “The Morality of Murder,” without taking Justice: What’s
the Right Thing to Do? (the corresponding course and the site’s most popular under
Humanities). Just think…you can now use the Internet to procrastinate more
important matters, but you won’t feel quite as guilty.
Name That Cow
According to a study that surveyed several hundred
British dairies and published in the journal
Anthrozoös, cows that are given unique names
produce an average of 258 more liters of milk a
year than those without names. More research is
required before any attempts are made at offering a
firm conclusion on the findings, but the basic rationale
behind the study is that cows are likely to be
treated better if they have a name—and when
farmers treat them better, the cows are calmer,
happier, and thereby produce more milk.
A Presidential History
Chartered in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College’s presidential connections go beyond its namesake Founding Father. Franklin Delano Roosevelt received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the college on October 21, 1933, when he delivered a 22-minute speech at the inauguration of Washington College’s new president. Harry S. Truman joined the ranks of honorary Doctor of Laws degree recipients at the school’s commencement ceremonies in 1946, as did Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. And though John F. Kennedy delivered an address on disarmament at Washington College in 1960, it wasn’t until the school’s 200th anniversary in 1999 that another president was so honored: George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, were also recipients. Visit Revcollege.washcoll.edu for an enlightening history
on Washington College, including full transcripts of the remarks delivered by each of these former presidents, as well as actual footage of FDR’s 1933 address.
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