via Boing Boing by Andrea James
In 1997, ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs convinced a Costa Rican orange juice maker to to dump their waste peels in a clear-cut abandoned pasture that was in a national park. Twenty years later, the enriched soil nourishes tropical forest again, according to a new report.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Giorgia Guglielmi in Science
The saying “you are what you eat” is particularly true for female honey bees, which grow up to be either small, sterile workers or large, fertile queens depending on their diet. Previously, many researchers thought that something in the food fed to young queens – a secretion called royal jelly – was what made the difference. Now, a new study suggests it’s signaling molecules in the grub of young worker bees that keeps their sexual development in check. That diet, a mixture of pollen and honey called “beebread,” is shot through with a special kind of microRNA (miRNA), noncoding RNA molecules that help regulate gene expression. To find out whether these miRNAs were the culprit, scientists added them to the diet of larvae raised in the lab. These larvae developed more slowly, with smaller bodies and smaller ovaries than larvae fed food without the supplement, the team reports today in PLOS Genetics.
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via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
Often regarded as the father of Western philosophy, René Descartes (1596-1650) is mostly remembered by the pithy summary of his method: Cogito, ergo sum - 'I think, therefore I am'.
Descartes shifted the philosophical debate from the question What is true, which implies a God as the ultimate guarantor of truth, to What is certain, requiring that human intellect alone sort the knowable from the unknowable.
But the cogitating Frenchman did even more than this. He also was a mathematician (developing analytic geometry) and a scientist (contributing to the field of optics), and had a thing or two to say about the cosmos as well.
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via the Guardian by David Levene
The summer of love is perhaps most closely associated with San Francisco’s hippy movement, which reached its zenith in 1967, but a similar phenomenon was seen in many other parts of the world that year, particularly in London.
It was a summer during which Procol Harum released A Whiter Shade of Pale, The Beatles put out All You Need is Love, and Pink Floyd were playing psychedelic gigs at the UFO Club in Tottenham Court Road.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Maanvi Singh in NPR
In medieval Europe, those who could afford to do so would generously season their stews with saffron, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. Sugar was ubiquitous in savory dishes. And haute European cuisine, until the mid-1600s, was defined by its use of complex, contrasting flavors.
“The real question, then, is why the wealthy, powerful West — with unprecedented access to spices from its colonies — became so fixated on this singular understanding of flavor,” Srinivas says.
The answer, it turns out, has just as much to do with economics, politics and religion as it does taste.
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via New Statesman by Jason Murugesu
Kew Gardens
Civil rights issues are not just for humans. Ecologists at Kew Gardens have discovered that certain plant species use “toxic nectar” to repel the “wrong type” of bees from their flowers.The “wrong type” of bee in this case is a short-tongued bumblebee. They visit all types of plants and are termed generalists. In tough times however (austerity has affected us all) these bees must resort to robbing nectar from plants which have their nectar deeply hidden, and are usually only pollinated by long-tongued bees. Short-tongued bees, on the other hand, chew through the hood of the plants' flowers to better access the nectar. This method is to the detriment of the plant as the bees bypass its reproductive structures.
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via Big Think by Paul Ratner
Astrophysicists from the University of Toronto used the natural patterns of Saturn’s moons and rings to compose two pieces of music.
They did it to celebrate the upcoming end of the Cassini probe, which after twenty years will be decommissioned next month by being crashed into Saturn while gathering more data.
The team included astrophysicist Matt Russo, who along with fellow postdoctoral researcher Dan Tamayo, created the music and played the million-kilometer-long intergalactic instrument. They were joined in the project by the musician Andrew Santaguida.
To accomplish the feat, the scientists relied on the data of orbital resonances from Saturn’s moons and the trillions of particles floating in its ring system, as gathered by Cassini. Orbital resonances reflect the gravitational influences exerted by celestial bodies when they move past each other. The repeating patterns can be transformed into musical harmonies.
Continue reading Unfortunately the stunning image will not allow itself to be copied!
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Diphylleia grayi, the "skeleton flower" is normally opaque white but when it rains, the petals become transparent until the flower dries. Nanotechnologists are developing new materials inspired by the flower's structure that could lead to the likes of new underwater goggles that repel oil.
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and enjoy a fascinating video.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Margaret Drabble at the TLS
Horace Walpole by Rosalba Carriera, 1741 © ART Collection/Alamy
The forty-eight large volumes of the Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence march along three open shelves in the Rare Books and Music Room of the British Library. They occupy a lot of space. Their indexes and footnotes are formidable. This monumental undertaking by W. S. Lewis, the great, wealthy and obsessed scholar and collector, was launched in 1937 and brought to completion after his death in 1979. Volume One contains correspondence between the Revd William Cole, an antiquarian, and Walpole. (The opening salvo from Cole is engagingly and somewhat informally described by Lewis as “incredibly dull”). Lewis justifies his decision to publish not chronologically, but by correspondent, by arguing that the vast collection of some thousands of letters fell naturally into divisions by subject matter, as Walpole “selected his correspondents with a subject more or less in mind”. So each individual correspondence, according to Lewis, tended to have its own theme – the social, the literary, the Gothic, the antiquarian, the political, the historical. When a correspondent died or “cooled off”, he or she would be replaced by another with similar interests, so a kind of coherence continued. On this principle Lewis gives us separate volumes dedicated to letters to and from such figures as the Florence-based diplomat Sir Horace Mann (eleven whole volumes to himself, in Lewis’s phrase a “great Andean range”), the Parisian hostess Madame du Deffand (six volumes, in French), the Countess of Upper Ossory (three volumes), while others, less attentive, less long-lived or less prolific (including the poet Thomas Gray and the writer-philanthropist Hannah More), are obliged to rub shoulders and share space.
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via Big Think by Robby Berman
Yes, we know, “no pain, no gain,” but too much of a good thing…
Accident Claims Advice has put together an infographic of inventors who wound up being killed by their inventions, or as the infographic puts it, “Inventing your own demise.” No doubt not what these folks intended, but, hey.
For every Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity who died of exposure to the materials with which she bravely worked, there’s a Horace Lawson Hunley, the inventor of a hand-powered submarine who decided to take command during a test run and promptly drowned everyone on board, including himself.
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