Jul 02 2008
Science Daily is a great site for weird stories. Here are some snips from the past few days.
In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.
Watermelon may have a viagra-like effect: Continue Reading »
Jun 18 2008
My friend B. wrote me this:
So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.
And I replied:
Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?
The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Continue Reading »
Nov 17 2007
When “Lexicographers at Oxford University Press [recently] observed that this social transformation [resulting froma concern about the sources of one’s food] is having a noticeable effect on the English language” they could have also noted a recent uptick in the use of the word “biodynamic.”
Biodynamic farming involves a strict adherence to ritual that, according to a theorist quoted in an article in Mother Jones, “makes typical organic farming look like strip mining.” I first heard the word a couple months ago at a vineyard fieldman’s breakfast in Washington wine country. The practice stems from the theorizing of Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and involves the ritual preparation of, well, preparations more commonly known as compost teas. The vineyard owner I talked to admitted that there was an almost complete lack of science behind these preparations, one of which involves stuffing cow poop in a slaughtered (gratefully and ritually, of course) cow’s horn and then burying it for six months. But, as Novella Carpenter writes in the Jones article,
In the early 1990s, John Reganold, a soil science professor at Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, started comparing conventional and biodynamic farms. His research, published in Science, found that biodynamic farms had higher quality soil than conventional farms and were just as economically viable. Later studies found no difference between biodynamic and organic crops, and Reganold noted that no one really knows how the preps work. “I’m not an organic freak,” he told me, yet he called biodynamic “the most holistic system I’ve seen.” Continue Reading »
Nov 06 2007
I’ve suggested before that plants are the ultimate selfish genies. Or geniuses. Red queens in green drag
In the mean time, here’s a tantalizing tidbit that underscores just how dependent we are on plants. Norm Lewis is a scientist at Washington State University’s Institute for Biological Chemistry. I’m a news writer for WSU and, more particularly, for the College of Ag, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, of which the IBC is a part. Lewis’s work interests me professionally, since I’m paid to be interested, but also because it’s straight up cool: I’ve learned from these scientists to never turn my back on a plant, much less an entire monocropping field of them.
Lewis and his crew of researchers, in the words of a Newswise press release,
has cloned six genes coding for different forms of the enzyme arogenate dehydratase (ADT), which converts a compound called arogenate into phenylalanine.
A description of phenylalanine’s fate underscores its central role in terrestrial plant life and the importance of the enzymatic reaction that produces it.
Phenylalanine is converted into phenolic compounds that are the building blocks of many of the plant world’s most distinctive and important substances, including the pigments in flower petals and chemicals that protect leaves, stems and bark from ultraviolet radiation. Perhaps the best-known end product of phenols is the one that allows trees to stand upright.
But, the release continues,
Phenylalanine is more than a precursor to other important compounds. Since it is an amino acid, it is used as a building block itself in the production of proteins. That happens in animals as well as in plants; humans and other mammals, however, can’t produce phenylalanine. We obtain it by breaking down proteins in the food we eat—either plant material, or the meat of animals that ate plants.
We’re getting close to the big-bang heartbeat of the living world here or, at least, to identifying a strand that weaves all life together.
Lewis said our reliance on plants to make phenylalanine means the reactions that produce it are as crucial to our survival as they are to that of plants.
“If these don’t exist, we don’t exist. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
Oct 12 2007
Snips from the Washington Post:
Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”
No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.
The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.
Sep 02 2007
review by Brian Charles Clark
Mushrooms. Molds, and Miracles
Lucy Kavaler
backinprint.com, 2007
God is fungi. God is the stuff of the web—the food web, the web of life, call it what you will—and without fungi, we’d be less than dead; we never would have existed—“we” meaning every living thing on the planet. Fungi are everywhere, and everywhere essential, and what is god if not the ultimate mixmaster, the one who breaks it all down so the big bang beat can begin again?
“The process of decay,” Lucy Kavaler writes, “is… essential in making room on this small planet for new living things.” Kavaler wrote that line just a couple years after Carson’s Silent Spring was published. “The development of life on earth is related to the evolution of fungi.” Continue Reading »
Aug 02 2007
You have to ask of the solo insect, fly or bee: who do you work for?
insectophobia is killing my country.” (to paraphrase Graham Nash)
I just swatted a fly. A big, fat solo fly. (Need I say black?)
Can you believe something like one-third of the world’s energy out-take goes to ag inputs? Fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, jesus christ water. Most of that is nitrogen (fertilizer), because we kill the plants that fix the nitrogen and feed the insects that thwart the pests that kill the plants we really want to eat or process.
We are food miners and we don’t have enough insects. Damn.
Aug 29 2005
Here’s something that supports my long-held thesis that scientists make the best science fiction writers not because they know so much about science but because they’re so damn weird:
“…if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”
From Nematodes and Their Relationships, 1915 by Nathan Augustus Cobb, the “father of nematology in the U.S.“
May 15 2001
essay by Brian Charles Clark
I. Liquid Manifesto
Like a sacrificial virgin balanced on a ziggurat in an earthquake, Jean Genet step-dances in fits and trances, and in his resolute Fall disavows the validity of received notions of ontological and epistemological positioning. Genet’s narrators are Schroedinger’s cats: undecidably both dead and alive. Genet’s narrators are also liquid. These narrators, as for example Jean in Funeral Rites, rise to the level of their surroundings in a dialogical environmentalism (in the sense that the mental is enturned: en-vir–always already turning again) that has them “communicating” (in the sense that a dance is a communion) with “the other” (a prescriptive term about to be overturned) outside of the space-time continuum of Newtonian physics and Cartesian ontology, but still within the purview of persistent and visionary rhythms. Continue Reading »
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