Charged Magazine

Category: vintage science

science history, scientist spotlights, scientist interviews, science jobs

  • Cultural Collisions with Gringo Perdido

    Cultural Collisions with Gringo Perdido

    t-shirt graphicsIn case you’ve ever wondered what happens to the items that are too lame to re-sell in thrift stores in our culture, they eventually get boxed up and shipped off by charity foundations to developing countries. So, rural Guatemala in the early 90s was a walking rainbow of all the poor US fashion choices of the prior decades. It is nowhere more evident how weird is US culture than through the silk-screened, ironed-on legacy of our t-shirts. Everyone appreciates a free t-shirt in any culture, but this forgotten subset of t-shirts winds up on the backs of people who don’t understand what they say. So, while making friends at my field sites I sometimes wind up translating people’s t-shirts for them, because they ask me to. Ok, some of these are so obvious that no one asks (“Coca-Cola”), others require a bit more explanation (“Cheers. Where everybody knows your name” or “Styx”), and others are just inexplicable (like “I’m with Stupid →” or, even worse “Le Shirt”—in case you don’t remember, there once was an ill-advised culture rage in the US to label objects with text bearing their nominate noun in English, and the article in French–Le Car. Le Bag.). Do you get it? I never did, even at the time, and now I have to try to explain it to a curious Mayan guy while we are both trying to communicate using fractured Spanish skills.

    Here‘s how this usually plays out, if the two of us are hiking along or resting on a rock or something:

    Friend: Hey, can you tell me what my shirt says?
    GP: “A Night to Remember. 17 June 1981.” I think it was probably a party for young people of some sort.
    Friend: Do you remember the night?
    GP: No. I wasn’t at that party.
    Friend: Do you think the person who bought this shirt remembers the night?
    GP: I don’t think so.Friend: I don’t get the point. Why would you buy a shirt to wear to just one party?
    GP: I don’t either. Hey, what kind of frogs do you see around here?

    The t-shirt situation got the better of me one day. I was riding in the back of a Toyota taxi-truck, standing up with a group of local women and we were all headed off, but not together in any sense, to the market in the next town down. Mayans, I learned, have core muscles that would put a yoga instructor to shame. The ubiquitous Toyota taxi-trucks have an iron bar welded lengthwise down the middle of the truck bed, so you can hang-on while trying to stand up vertically in the back of a truck pitching along on an impossibly rutted dirt road. Well, only gringos actually need or use that bar. So we are bouncing down this road and I look like a broken pirate-ship mast flailing back and forth holding onto the bar for dear life, as I am very much taller than all the perfectly vertical seemingly motionless women filling the rest of the truck bed. A very important player in the Toyota truck-taxi system is the branch trimmer guy. He sits motionless cross-legged on the top of the cab of the truck, without holding on at all, and uses his machete to whisk away errant branches that might tear out a passenger’s eyeball. I am convinced that this guy is somehow glued or bolted to the cab of the truck, but he is not. He can just do this. But, even though he is sitting on the cab of the truck, I am still taller than him; this is a problem for me, as you can imagine with the branches and all.

    discosucks

    Ahead I saw this very, very old gentleman walking on the side of the road in over-sized gym shorts, sandals, a hand-woven straw hat, and a loose black t-shirt. He had his machete in one hand, a walking stick in the other and was slowly walking on the side of the road. He heard the truck come up behind him, and turned to make sure he was out of the way. That’s when I fully can regard his t-shirt. There it is— in all its 70s iron-on white fuzzy font glory, the phrase that helped galvanize punk rock:

    Disco Sucks

    I was left speechless at this unexpected cultural collision, and I foolishly turned my head to watch it go by. I heard an unprecedented little yelp from the typically stoic Mayan women who always utterly refused to acknowledge my existence in their midst. I turned back forward just in time to a get slammed in the forehead by a large rock-solid un-ripe mango. I saw stars as it whipped my head backwards, like a losing boxer, and I saw it retreat into the distance, pendant and wobbling like a yodeler’s uvula in an arched maw of jungle vegetation. Then it fell to the roadway. I swear I heard a minor giggle emit from somewhere in the back of the truck, but I won’t ever be sure. Everything was spinning and I thought I was going to vomit on my fellow passengers. Back in camp that night, I nursed my swollen skull and demolished ego and wondered if the branch-trimmer guy was mad at me for ruining a snack he had been nurturing on his route for weeks. I still don’t like disco.

  • The Ballad of Gringo Perdido

    The Ballad of Gringo Perdido

    Herpetology and getting lost. These are the two driving themes of my life. They have shaped my career and enabled me to discover species new to science, but they have also cost me relationships, frustrated everyone close to me, and nearly cost me my life. Without them I would be a different person, so this is a ballad to the lost art of getting lost.

    After college, I left Santa Barbara, California to go to graduate school in Texas and study under a mid-career hotshot who specializes in Central American herpetology. He is a gringo North American but was raised in Guatemala and moving in-and-out of that culture is the norm for him. In the first year of my grad program I got the assignment of my dreams. I was to be delivered to a coffee plantation in a remote region Guatemala to conduct a survey of amphibians and reptiles. I was to do an ecological transect of herpetological diversity up the face of a very steep mountain in the Sierra de las Minas, in the state of Alta Verapaz. Although the area had certainly been populated since at least the Classic Maya Era, no biologist had ever worked anywhere near the region. If you look at a map of Guatemala, you’ll see a huge lake (Lago de Izabal) in the eastern part of the country. I was about 20 miles west of the lake, in the Polochic Valley, at the base of the north slope of a mountain called Cerro Raxon.  The village/plantation is called Pueblo Veijo (Old Village) in reference to the fact that the site had been inhabited by native Maya for millenia.  The problems turned out to be: 1) I spoke not a word of Spanish; 2) although I grew up in Europe (army brat) and was accustomed to being immersed in foreign cultures, I’d never been to Latin America beyond a couple family fishing trips to Baja California; and 3) Guatemala was embroiled in a horrific genocidal civil war (that was purposefully instigated by the US-CIA in the 50’s, by the way).

    The day before I went to the airport my mentor gave me some topographic maps of my study site and said “If you get pulled over by anyone that looks like police or army, don’t let them see these maps because they will assume you are there to inform the indigenous insurgency and you will be arrested. Oh, and don’t bring those Vietnam-era military field boots you wear. They are US-Military issue. Get some boots that look more like a tourist would wear.” So I borrowed money from my parents and bought some brightly colored boots from the local REI. I put the maps in the bottom of my bag of gear.

    I swear never again to travel so ignorant of my situation.  It turned out that speaking Spanish would have been only of partial utility, as I was sufficiently remote that most people there spoke Q’eqchi’, one of the many dozens of very distinct Maya languages in the region, and only a bit of Spanish. Every time I ventured beyond the main part of the coffee plantation (as was my task as a herpetological surveyor),  I encountered Mayan villagers who would drop everything and run away from me.  I was terrified. If they were scared of me, then there must be something that I should be scared of as well. Since my return, I have built a small library on the recent history of Guatemala, and I now know what I did not know then. It turns out that the chinks I saw in the concrete-block walls in the nearby town of Telemán were from a massacre only a couple of years prior to my trip.  Genocidal civil wars are real, and they are incredibly ugly.

    I had an ecological transect to conduct, and I finally got myself up to the highest village on that slope of the sierra, a tiny Mayan village they called Peña Blanca (“White Stone” because there was a big one there) in Spanish, or some other name I never managed in Q’eqchi’ (Mayan dialects include glottal-stops in mid-syllable, so they are essentially impossible for the non-native speaker). The people seemed nice in Peña Blanca, and they did not run away from me. I set up a camp outside their village, with their implied permission. The first two nights I had a small crowd of people around me watching as I made a crappy camp dinner and prepared my specimens, samples, and notes. None of us could really talk to one another, but I managed to get across that I hoped to camp there, wished them no trouble, and planned to wander around outside the village looking for snakes and frogs and such. They were cool with that, and even brought me all the snakes they killed in their cornfields every day (very useful specimens for me).

    After a few days I hiked back down to my main camp on the plantation and got read the riot act by the fascist, racist Guatemalan manager for having “anything to do with those rebels on the mountain” (recall there was a civil war going on, essentially between aristocrats like this guy and the Mayans in the mountains). About a week later I went back up the mountain to my camp, but this time not a single person would come anywhere near me. I was there for about three days when it dawned on me that I was doing a bad thing—my self-serving data collection for my degree was severely compromising their daily life. No kids were playing outside, and the men were sneaking off before sunrise to tend the corn.  I assumed they returned from the fields, but I never saw them. Evidently, someone had spread word that I was not what I seemed. I felt terrible, but packing up camp and leaving was not such a simple affair because I was so far up on the mountain. So I had to spend that night there, and planned to leave the next morning—carrying what I could on one trip (it took about three trips to get all my stuff up there), and leaving everything else for them; things I naively hoped could be useful (e.g., sleeping bag, not a bottle of formaldehyde).

    Evening set, it began to rain, and I realized that this was my best and last chance to sample the highest part of the mountain because I never intended to return. Nocturnal amphibians and reptiles move in the rain, and it started to rain to rain really, really, really hard so I did get some good samples. Around 1:00 am I was exhausted and turned to go back to my camp. On the way back I took a wrong fork in the trail (it was still really raining and, if you wear glasses like I do, one cannot look around during a rainstorm; you look straight down, at your feet) and I wound up not in my little encampment, but smack in the middle of this village. I was disoriented, wet, cold, and scared. As I looked around, my mega-flashlight (standard issue in my line of work) was beaming through the twig huts and wakeing everybody. I could hear commotion coming out of the huts. My first thought was of regret—oh, darn, now I’m waking everybody up! Then I started to hear machetes tinging, guns being loaded and cocked, and saw barrels sticking through the slats. I’ve since learned that it was standard practice for Guatemalan Army squads to wipe out “rogue” villages by sending in troops in the middle of the night—with mega flashlights—to massacre and set fire to entire villages. I was mortified, and terrified. So, I just started yelling “Gringo perdido, no hay problema” and “Culebra! Rana! Sapo!” at the top of my lungs. That all translates essentially into “Lost white-boy, there is no problem. Snake! Frog! Toad!”  Meanwhile I dashed in the nearest direction that did not have a hut. I clawed my way up through a steep muddy corn field and finally found my camp. At the first glimmer of daylight I left and never went back up there. I regret that I caused them so much distress, I really do. I’m glad they did not shoot me. But given what I’ve learned since then, I’m amazed that they did not. I’m convinced that those few words in Spanish, “Gringo perdido, no hay problema” and “Culebra! Rana! Sapo!” saved my life.

    I’ve returned to Guatemala many times since then, but things have changed. The war mellowed out, even if the original tensions remain. I never travel alone. I’ve learned Spanish (but no Mayan dialects, beyond a couple of animal names).  And I am not so naïve. To be sure, there were many more adventures and misadventures over the years, including a murder right in front of my face, but nothing since, anywhere, has been so personally transformative as that particular night. I have a one-man punk band called Gringo Perdido and some friends use the phrase as a nickname for me. No one wants to be known for being an uninformed, unintentionally inconsiderate, disoriented boob, but a colleague of mine returned from Guatemala recently and said,  “Joe, do you realize that every young biologist in that country knows that story?” Gringo perdido, no hay problema.

  • Creepy costumes: radioactive Madame Curie

    Creepy costumes: radioactive Madame Curie

    This year for Halloween, why not celebrate Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize?  The good news (for you, not for her) is that she died a gruesome death as a result of exposure to the radioactive chemicals she studied so she makes for a spooky costume.  Even now, her lab notebooks are so radioactive that researchers that want to look at them have to wear lead aprons!  Madame Curie’s official cause of death was anemia, so a little yellow or gray makeup would be appropriate.  You can mimic radium by cutting open an activated glow stick and pouring it in a test tube or flask (she used to like to carry her chemicals around in her pocket).  I found a Victorian-era skirt at a vintage clothing store, but any dowdy dress will do….creepy AND geeky! Happy Halloween!!!

  • Body snatchers: grave robbing for medicine

    Body snatchers: grave robbing for medicine

    NOTE: This post is not related in any way to the 1956 sci-fi film that depicts an extraterrestrial invasion where the invaders “steal” human bodies. This is NOT a review of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (though I do highly recommend the film).

    Rather, this is brief overview of a period when robbing bodies, often from graves, was used as a means to provide physicians with subjects for dissections.

    Body snatchers at work. A painting on the wall of a public house in Penicuik, Scotland.

    When?

    Body snatching was most prevalent during the seventeenth to nineteenth century, though there have been reports of this activity occurring as early as the fourteenth century.

    Why body snatching?

    – Surgical practice (High Demand): Most fifteenth century physicians scorned and considered it degrading to work with their hands; They often stood by patients they treated and ordered servants to perform what they thought should be done by hand. This disconnect between the physician and surgery created a void in anatomical and surgical knowledge. During the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish physician, led a movement to fill that gap. His efforts culminated in the publication of De humani corporis fabrica, one of the greatest anatomical textbooks. During that time, Vesalius traveled around Europe performing dissections himself, generating interest in surgery and leading physicians to embrace the values of a hands-on approach to medicine. This surge in interest in surgical practice created a great demand for bodies to be used for dissection.

    – Shortage of bodies (low supply): Two centuries ago most states did not permit the use of unclaimed bodies for dissections and most of the states that did limited them to executed criminals. However, this was not enough as executions were few in the states. For example, Massachusetts executed less than 40 persons from 1800-1830. In addition, as the number of medical schools increased, so did the demand for bodies. This legal blockade created a shortage of bodies available for medical schools forcing them to turn elsewhere.

    –Body decay (high turnover): Lack of refrigeration was a common problem back then; not only did it spoil food, but it spoiled bodies. This meant that there was a high turnover rate; physicians had a limited time frame to dissect and study bodies after death. This created a situation where there was a constant demand for bodies.

    SOLUTION: Where can you find a large supply of bodies? Graveyards.

    Who stole bodies?

    -At first, grave robbers were medical professionals, students, and hospital porters who stole bodies for their own purposes. However, as time passed, medical schools advised students, faculty, and personnel to avoid engaging directly in stealing bodies. From there grew a class of individuals known as resurrectionists or body snatchers, men who made a living exhuming corpses and selling them to schools. Eventually, body snatching organizations/gangs started to appear. As laws were put in place, robbing became more profitable; their task became increasingly difficult and dangerous, and the price of their commodity increased.

    -Since body snatching was an arduous task, it was often men who participated in this activity, though women were sometimes involved in non-physical tasks or snatching bodies not yet buried (falsely claiming a body to be buried).

    Whose body was stolen?

    -Race, sex, and social status did not matter. Nobody was safe from disinterment.

    Note: Though records show that people of all race, gender, and social status were victims, the golden era of body snatching coincided with the period of racial and social inequality in the states. This meant that immigrants, blacks, and the poor were most often targeted.

    The Art of Body Snatching:

    Many considered body snatching an art. Some texts describe the act in lengthy detail spanning several pages, detailing tactics on how to procure bodies as efficiently as possible. I will spare you from the lengthy details without skipping over the essential techniques.

    Step 1: Secure knowledge of a prospective burial: Information of a burial was usually supplied by mail or messenger. Such a message was often sent in code and not directly to the resurrectionists, but through some intermediary, such as a druggist.

    Step 2: Scope the location: The grave should be accurately located during daylight hours so that a search in the dark would be unnecessary. A common method was to reconnoiter as a hunter. A stranger would appear in the neighborhood on the day of burial with a shotgun over his shoulder, apparently hunting small game.

    Step 3: Wait until nighttime

    Step 4: Begin the disinterment

    • Plan: At least two men and a watcher/driver were needed in a disinterment. One man remained with the transport; that person would drop off the other three at the location and return at a specified time. The other two removed the body.
    • Execute: The process of disinterment was fairly straightforward:  a hole would be dug directly above the coffin, the coffin would be opened, and finally, the body would be pulled out. Since graves were dug to be about 5 ft deep (from the top of the coffin), extracting a body could be quite laborious. To make the extraction easier, resurrectionists used a modified pole to drag bodies out of graves. This pole was hooked at one end and had grips at the other (similar to the letter ‘J’). The hook would be placed under the chin of the deceased and the men would push or pull the body out using the other end of the pole. As you can imagine, this ‘hooking’ technique often caused damage to the corpse.

    Step 5: Clean Up: The grave should look as it did before the disinterment to avoid suspicion and capture.

     

    Ethics

    The seventeenth to nineteenth century was a great era for medicine. Discoveries in anatomy led to improved surgical treatments and healthcare. However, people often forget that many of these advancements came at the expense of bodies being robbed. Families would go to cemeteries to pay respects for loved ones only to find the grave(s) in disarray, or would pay respects without knowing the remains of their loved were gone. Until the adoption of more coherent and stricter laws regarding body donation, many physicians considered body snatching a necessary evil.

    __________________________________________________

     

    Sources

    Nuland, Sherwin B., Doctors: The Biography of Medicine. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.

    Waite FC. 1945. Grave robbing in New England. Bull Med Libr Assoc, 33:272–294.

    Humphrey DC. 1973. Dissection and discrimination, the social origins of cadavers in America 1760-1915. Bull NY Acad Med, 49:819–827.

    Frank JB. 1976. Body Snatching: a grave medical problem. Yale J Biol Med, 49:399-410

    Regis Olry. 1999. Body Snatchers: the Hidden Side of the History of Anatomy. J Int Soc Plastination. 14(2): 6-9

    Image:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Body_snatchers_at_work,_Old_Crown_Inn,_Penicuik.JPG

  • The movie “Contagion” is so realistic it’s boring

    The movie “Contagion” is so realistic it’s boring

    I have been looking forward to seeing the movie Contagion since it came out last year and I finally got to see it last night. I am a big fan of outbreak/apocalypse/zombie-type movies and, since I’m an immunologist, I thought this would be right up my alley. Boy, was I wrong. The problem with the movie wasn’t with the premise (a new flu-like virus makes the jump from an animal reservoir to humans and starts spreading rapidly), the casting (Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne), or the science (mostly spot on). The problem was that the movie was way too realistic.

    Hmmm, let’s see, we’ve got politicians and public health officials trying to keep the public from freaking out, a corrupt blogger/homeopathic proponent trying to get people to take an herbal remedy to recover from the virus (while he’s invested in the company that makes it), a protective father/widower (Matt Damon better watch out or he’s going to be typecast soon!), mass riots and looting, a dedicated scientist who makes a vaccine in no time, and the ultimate recovery of the country and the economy.

    Wait, huh? Where are the zombies? Where are the ghost towns? Where’s the blood oozing from eyeballs? This is just like what would happen in real-life if a virus wiped out 1% of the population of the Earth. People would be scared. People would lose loved ones. People would get sick and recover and then we’d move on. I don’t need a movie for this! There are way more dramatic things happening in the world right now! I think some character development could have saved the movie, but there were so many story lines going on at the same time it was impossible to get invested in any one character and the story lines never really converged.

    SCIENCE CRITIQUE: the screenwriters of contagion mostly did a good job with getting the science right and the set designers made things look pretty good. Only a few things stuck out. In one scene they were rotating a ribbon diagram of what was supposed to be the virus and its human receptor and they were describing four proteins, but it only looked like there were two on the screen.  It also didn’t make a lot of sense that Kate Winslet’s character, a CDC EIS officer, was explaining basic epidemiology to a group of state health department officials (don’t they have degrees in public health?). But the labs looked good and the CDC really looked like the CDC (although I’ve never been in a BSL4 lab).

    The bottom line: see the movie if you want a preview of what the next terrible outbreak will be like, but stay away if you’re looking for zombies …

  • Celebrate DNA Day with a Chocolate Smoothie!

    Celebrate DNA Day with a Chocolate Smoothie!

    Happy DNA Day!!!!

    So, it’s April 20th and you want to celebrate DNA day, but aren’t sure how?  What about making chocolate smoothies in honor of Alfred Hershey and Barbara Chase, the rockin’ scientists whose experiment finally convinced everybody that the information for your traits (i.e. genes) was contained in DNA rather than in protein, which was the other contender .  They made their discovery 60 years ago so now’s a good time to call them out.

    Now, 1952 was a prosperous time in America and while folks were makin’ babies, watching TV and buying $0.20/gallon gasoline to fuel their big, beautiful cars, Hershey and Chase were hanging out on Long Island at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, mixin’ up phage (bacteriophage) and E. coli.  Phage are viruses that infect bacteria and when they do that they bring genetic information along with them.  Hershey and Chase had the genius idea that if they labeled the different parts of the phage with radioactivity and then tracked which parts went INTO the bacteria, they could figure out what genes were made of.  So, they labeled the phage protein with radioactive sulfur or the phage DNA with radioactive phosphorous and added it to the bacteria for a little while.  Then they used a blender (like the vintage Waring blender pictured here) to knock off any parts of the phage stuck to the outside of the bacteria and, lo and behold, the radioactive DNA was inside the cells carrying the genes and the radioactive protein got knocked off of the cells and floated away.

    The results of the Hershey Chase experiment paved the way for the golden era of molecular biology and actually made people care about the big paper Watson and Crick put out the next year that proposed the structure of DNA.

    So, HAPPY DNA DAY! Here’s how you can use YOUR blender to pay delicious tribute to these important scientists.

  • Even though Kim Kardashian’s marriage didn’t last, her engagement ring will. Like forever.

    Even though Kim Kardashian’s marriage didn’t last, her engagement ring will. Like forever.

    I have a joke for you:

     

    How long does a two million dollar engagement ring buy you with everyone’s favorite (well, mine anyways) Kardashian sister?

     

    As Kris Humphries found out, about 72 days.

     

    Sorry Kris, but at least you should take some comfort in the fact that the ring you gave Kim will sit as shiny as it is right now until it’s ready to win hearts and headlines once again. At least the platinum band will anyways. What I’m referring to as the simply staggering resistance of Platinum to oxidation, more commonly known as rust or tarnish.  Platinum, along with gold and to a lesser extent silver are  the only metals on the periodic table that enjoy this distinction. As a logical consequence, these metals were some of the first discovered by ancient peoples because they would have quite literally been found lying on the ground, super shiny. In fact, gold was the first metal discovered ever and goes back as far as the entire history of… well as far back as recorded history itself! I like to imagine when cavemen discovered gold they tried to eat it before proposing to cave ladies with chunks of the stuff. Given that these un-reactive metals are now relatively commonplace, the idea of a metal that doesn’t rust may not seem that cool but trust me, it is.

     

    So why aren’t these magical metals applied to more commonplace items where rust is a concern? The obvious answer is their astronomical expense. Unfortunately the expense of platinum, gold and silver is not because they don’t rust but because they are super rare, representing some of the rarest elements found it the earths crust. Even if they were more common, each of these metals are extremely ductile and malleable allowing them to be easily fashioned through pulling and hammering into jewelry but preventing their use as structural metals. Gold’s softness is the origin of the quintessential gold rush miner biting into a dubious coin to ensure it’s authenticity. Thus even if you wanted to and were rich and crazy enough to do so, it would be unwise to make solid gold or platinum rims because they would buckle when popping over a curb.

     

    The diamonds in Kim’s ring are another story. Formed from carbon under extreme conditions of huge temperatures and pressures, diamonds are chemically identical to pencil lead but differ in the way the atoms are arranged. Instead of being soft enough to smear onto a sheet of paper when pressed by hand, diamonds are the hardest naturally occurring substance on earth. Ironically, according to calculations using thermodynamics, a discipline used to determine the equilibrium structure for a given set of conditions and composition, diamonds should not even exist outside of the extreme conditions in which they are formed! Instead, thermodynamics predicts that diamonds should deteriorate to graphite (pencil lead) at the temperatures and pressures found around Kim Kardashian’s hand. Then why don’t they?

     

    To answer that we can consider again our friends platinum and gold. It is not exactly correct to say that these metals can never oxidize, but more accurate to say that without a huge input of energy they never will. Meanwhile, metals like iron actually give off some energy when they rust. From the standpoint of iron, it is energetically favorable to rust than remain as elemental iron in the presence of oxygen. A good analogy to this kind of “favorable energetics” is a cart balanced at the top of a hill – the cart has potential energy that is converted to kinetic energy and then depleted  when it rolls down the hill. An unfavorable energy case would be a cart in a deep valley. Even though the cart could reach the top of the hill, someone would have to push it up there. Maybe you could get those cavemen to do it by feeding them gold. To transform diamonds into graphite and oxidize platinum will take energy. Lots of energy. So unless Kim visits the National Ignition Facility, an active volcano or these guys, her ring is staying put. Just maybe not on her finger.

    Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net