I'm starting to wonder if I can even write a post that doesn't involve spiders or ants at this point. But the week starts of with quite a monumental leap forward so check it out!
Monday: Speed Breeding Crops
Several teams have gotten together and managed to create a complete generation of wheat crops in only 8 weeks, allowing 6 full generations annually. This kind of acceleration in crop growth could be revolutionary!
This comes at a time when such progress is desperately needed. While middle class western people sheltered in their fear of the unknown try to ban genetic modification, millions, or billions around the world are in desperate need for a more resiliant source of food in a time of severe climate change, and a larger supply of it. This could be the ticket.
Not only does this created a larger yield of food supply, but with such fast generations, it's also easier to test genetic combinations to improve that much needed resilience to say, heat or flooding.
Such fast breeding typically leads to stunted crops that yield few seeds, but these ones are bigger and better than ever. This is done by an intense, 22-hour regime of LED lights specifically designed to optimize photosynthesis in a controlled greenhouse. The LEDs are a critical difference, since they are low cost and far more efficient than the traditional 'sodium vapour' lamps that typically waste a lot of energy on lots of heat and little light.
This technique has overcome a substantial bottleneck in this area of study and has been compared to the likes of the green revolution following World War 2. Let's hope this isn't the last we hear of it!
Tuesday: Jamaican Invasion!
Look at all those snidey, despicable trees
Is it the American scum? That dirty British Empire?
A... tree?
A brutally invasive tree from Australia, the Pittosporum undulatum was introduced into a botanical garden in Jamaica back in the 19th century. Presumably they didn't know it was brutally invasive at the time, though maybe Australia is playing long war games.
It's fast growing, glossy and bears small, sugary, orange fruit, giving the tree the nickname 'mock orange'. Ignorant native bird species of Jamaica have been foolishly dispersing these tasty treats, and when Hurricane Gilbert hit the nation 29 years ago, well, that sprerad things even more. Now what!
Well, why is it invasive, and why does it matter? It's invasive because it's fast, and faster than everything else. It matters because it is killing of many native species that cannot compete, many of which are endemic to the region. It turns out that now, the Pittosporum accounts for 10% of all tree stems on the island. This has greater side effects than you might think.
By out-competing the species bromeliads, they are removing one of the most important food sources of an endangered Jamaican blackbird, that feeds off insects living in its rosette-shaped leaves.
But on the very same day, I was reading about a mechanism of evolution that has gone underappreciated, called the KtW theory, or Kill the Winner. This is kind of a slightly more complex form of the LIon King's Circle of Life. basically as a winner in an evolutionary arms race dominates, those that prey on that species has a larger pool to feast on, which diminishes their population, killing the winner and allowing another species to come to the foreground for the time being until another pathogen or predator or whatever comes along. This goes a long way to explain diversity much better than the originally simpler Darwinist approach.
To me, I take a George Carlin stance on this. Biodiversity is being killed off by... the natural world? Let it happen. The above observation demonstrates that Jamaica isn't going to become a one-tree state, and if it does, I don't see why it's a problem. Let life become extinct with dignity. In this case, humans simply brought a couple of seeds over, nothing more than a hurricane or migratory bird wouldn't do. If trees were being replaced with factories, i'd feel more concerned. I dunno, do y'all agree?
Wednesday: Smallest Rainbows (Made in Spider)
Peacock Spiders! Constantly amazing little critters. And they are small, and that makes them even cuter. They are spider ambassadors, whose one goal is to teach humans to embrace spiders and stop seeing them in such an ugly light.
The Maratus robinsoni species contributes to this goal with a truly beautiful spectrum of colour, covering the entire rainbow. This is pretty impressive. Usually these creatures or others will use a wonderful array of iridescent colours but typically around the blue spectrum only, or green and black or orange and yellow. To do the entire rainbow is a pretty neat trick - and also practical for us humans and our 'technology'.
A lot of effort went into figuring this out:
The team investigated the spider's photonic structures using techniques that included light and electron microscopy, hyperspectral imaging, imaging scatterometry and optical modeling to generate hypotheses about how the spider's scale generate such intense rainbows. The team then used cutting edge nano 3D printing to fabricate different prototypes to test and validate their hypotheses.
They found that the spiders have tiny, special abdominal scales that:
...combine an airfoil-like microscopic 3D contour with nanoscale diffraction grating structures on the surface
I'm sure you can see why I quoted all that rather than trying to reword it. The scales separate light with their curvature at different wave lengths, isolating different colours in a way that is far finer in detail than is currently possible for us puny humans, so once again we must learn how from nature.
Once mastered, this ability of spectral manipulation could be used in such grandiose things as fine-scale resolution missions in space, and miniaturized chemical detection tools. Nice one peacock spiders!
Thursday: Suffocating Oceans
Did you know that the Ocean has Oxygen? Well, according to GOON (lol. It's actually GO2N - the Global Ocean Oxygen Network), not enough. Vast swathes of the ocean have an oxygen content so incredibly low that it cannot support life.
But this isn't the issue in itself, the issue is that in the last 50 years, the amount of ocean unable to support life has increased fourfold. In coastal areas, this number is tenfold.
Did you also know that half the world's oxygen comes from the ocean? Not so trivial now eh? I know you were thinking that don't lie.
These growing dead zones are called 'dead zones', and they are the absolute bottom end of death, but even just lower-oxygen zones can stunt growth and lead to disease, and together, this lack of oxygen has a huge domino effect on marine life, and directly humans, who struggle to find fishing grounds, like the $10,000,000 fishing industry in a single Philippines town. Tourism fades away too, as coral reefs suffocate.
The cause? Climate Change. The solution? All the usual stuff. stop being so wasteful, watch your carbon footprint. Seriously.
Friday: Chinese Moonsects
Oddly I couldn't find a picture of the moon with insects on it, I'm afraid
I feel like that's a cute subtitle, shut up.
While the west are adamant on ensuring we don't contaminate the solar system with our bacteria that can potentially latch onto our spacecrafts, China is deliberately sending insects and plants to the moon! Why the hell not?
The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) will send its Chang 4 mission to the far side of the moon (I just happen to be listening to Us and Them as I type... creepy) with potatoes, silk worms and seeds to 'study the effects of gravity'. I can only assume the actual reason is to build a giant laser weapon on wheels that can be wheeled around to the Earth-facing side when ready to attack.
In the meantime, they will build a little ecosystem up there, within a basin that apparently has a large source of water ice, possibly left there by numerous meteoric impacts. The basin has areas of permanent shadow, and so no chance for the sun to evaporate it, and thus its a veryr interesting area for science in general.
The question of whether life can grow in low gravity is an important one for the future steps of mankind, and since Mars isn't that much bigger than the moon, it's a good starting point. So far from my own knowledge, bacteria and other small life have little problem and even flourish to a greater extent in space. So this will be intriguing to say the least.
I do like the potential new space race between various nations. There's no imminent war like last time, and now we have Russia, The USA, the EU, India, China and more upcoming nations and groups all getting in on it.
Awesome.
There we have it! Sure glad I changed the title, justifying my increasing lateness for this post. Will go back to Mondays in theory next week!
All images CC0 licensed