Humans aren't the only animals aware of mortality. Elephants are known to grieve their dead. Crows conduct a sort of funeral for lost flock. Communal insects such as bees, ants and termites designate only certain members of the colony to be six-legged morticians.

Add to this list fruit flies who, in newly publicized research, apparently experience a shortened lifespan if they are exposed to the corpses of dead fruit flies.

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that when healthy fruit flies saw dead fruit flies, they were inexplicably shunned by other flies. More fundamentally, the death-exposed flies quickly lost their stored fat and died sooner than their nontraumatized counterparts, according to The New York Times.

The reasons aren't fully understood, but one hypothesis suggests that the flies who see dead flies take them as a danger signal, and so divert more energy into reproduction (Job One) at the expense of longevity.

Body of Knowledge

The human body is approximately 60% water — a little more for men, a little less for women, who typically have more hydrophobic fat content. Some of that water is used to produce a variety of bodily fluids and secretions.

Some are pretty obvious, such as blood and urine, but others less so, though you can't live without them (or discuss them in polite society). These include pus, mucus, bile, cerumen (earwax), sebum (a mixture of skin oils), smegma (look it up) and rheum, the watery discharge from eyes that congeals as the gunk found at the corners when you wake up. It's euphemistically known as "sleep" or "dozy dust" — less euphemistically as "eye boogers."

Stories for the Waiting Room

Klebsialla aerogenes is a nasty bacterium that is often the cause of hospital-acquired infections, linked to problems in the urinary tract, bloodstream, lungs and wound or surgical sites. New research indicates it's more prevalent in the guts of premenopausal women with depression.

What's the connection? In mouse studies, researchers found that an enzyme in K. aerogenes' genome degrades the ovarian hormone estradiol and that lower levels of estradiol are associated with higher rates of depression in women.

The mouse findings haven't been reproduced yet in humans, but they suggest another possible therapeutic target for treating depression.

Doc talk

Syncope — a fancy word for fainting

Mania of the Week

Cremnomania — an excessive or unbridled enthusiasm for climbing cliffs. An obsession with falling off cliffs tends to be short-lived.

Food for Thought

Occasionally — perhaps even with alarming regularity — there are news stories of people discovering stuff in their fast food or groceries that, politely put, wasn't ordered or desired. Examples include a frog in a bag of frozen vegetables, a serrated knife in a Subway sandwich, a severed finger in frozen custard, a tooth in a Milky Way bar, a bullet in a Costco hot dog and an oven glove baked into a loaf of bread.

In 2009, an Illinois man sued PepsiCo Inc. alleging that he found a mouse in his can of Mountain Dew. Company lawyers argued two points: first, that the mouse would have never passed through the bottling process intact and second, that the soda would have quickly dissolved the rodent into a jelly-like substance. Hmmm, that's a good point, albeit a disgusting one. The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Best Medicine

PMS jokes aren't funny, period.

Observation

"The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife." — English literary critic and writer Cyril Vernon Connolly (1903-1974). In Connolly's case, wives. The first died in 1950 at the age of 39. The second died in 1996 at the age of 80. The third is reportedly still alive, hopefully in good health.

Medical History

This week in 1985, zippers for stitches were announced by H. Harlan Stone, a surgeon who used zipper-like contraptions on 28 patients who he thought might require a second operation due to internal bleeding. The zippers, which lasted between five and 14 days, were then replaced with permanent stitches. Current surgical zippers are self-adhesive and can be used in both inpatient and outpatient cases.

Perishable Publications

Many, if not most, published research papers have titles that defy comprehension. They use specialized jargon, complex words and opaque phrases such as "nonlinear dynamics." Sometimes they don't, and yet they're still hard to figure out. Here's an actual title of actual published research study: "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity."

Published in 2005 in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, the study described problems caused by using unnecessarily long and obscure words — otherwise known as protracted, superfluous loquacity.

Sum Body

Six places that are often overlooked when applying sunscreen:

1. Neck. Overexposure to UV radiation here can result in crepey or draping skin.

2. Ears. Burns here lead to flaking, crusting and in the case of nonhealing wounds, the precursor to serious skin cancer.

3. Tops of feet, hands and fingers. Because they have minimal fat and lots of blood vessels, sun damage can increase risk of prematurely visible veins and loss of skin elasticity.

4. Lips. This increases risk of solar cheilitis, which causes discoloration, cracking and extreme dryness.

5. Eyelids. Overexposure can result in loss of elasticity and droopiness.

6. Scalp and hair. The former can become scaly and dry and blister or flake, leading to precancerous actinic keratosis while the latter can fade in color, dehydrate or become damaged and brittle.

Medical Myths

Cognitive decline with age is not uncommon, but dementia is not inevitable as you get older. Prevalence does increase with age: Approximately 10% of U.S. adults in 2019 had dementia, according to Population Reference Bureau, but that also meant 90% did not.

Last Words

"One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes." — Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). Hitchcock's funeral mass was said at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: BATCH by Wisconsin Hemp Scientific at Unsplash