Geese

Okay. So this is why spring is no good for my homework. I'll be trudging along through my reading on Romanian economic crises, and then the faint sound of the geese honking on Henry Crown Field comes through the window, and I think, "I wonder if Canada geese are good to eat?" ... and my fingers stray towards Wikipedia to find out ... and I have to go "No, Louise, no," and force myself to go back to Romanian pyramid schemes.

(ETA: Turns out they are.)

the story of the Poop Tomatoes

Looking for jobs and found an organic farm in Naperville. I had no idea we had organic farms so close. It looks sweet, if unproductive toward future career, because you get paid partly in vegetables.

So then I read up on organic farming. Turns out the USDA has standards for organic farms to be certified organic, one of which -- about how long animal manure has to be "cured" before you can harvest vegetables off the land where you use it -- brought back a story my parents told me once. It has poop in it!

My parents moved to Mokena, a town which (then) was in the boonies surrounded by farms, a year or two before I was born. They built the house we lived in there. So obviously they didn't have a lawn at first, just dirt. They saw an ad in the paper for (treated) sewage fertilizer: the state would come and spread it on your lawn for free. So they did.

The crop that came up that first year after they spread the sewage wasn't grass: it was a verdant field of ... tomato plants. Hundreds of tomato plants.

Turns out tomato seeds pass unharmed through human digestive tracts and survive to germinate.

So come July my parents had a bumper crop of tomatoes, dozens of pounds, on their hands. They brought them to work and everyone thought they were the tastiest tomatoes ever.

Best story ever yeah?

I love science

1. According to my bio book, "physiologists have been attempting to find a substitute for blood ever since 1878," when some fool T. Gaillard Thomas "attempted to transfuse a patient with whole milk instead of blood."

2. The relationship between hair length and humidity is used in an instrument called a hair hygrometer. So THIS is what people do when they grow up and become real scientists.

Early human diet a hard nut to crack for U of C prof.

My first science column for the Maroon is up!

What did our early African ancestors eat to survive in tough times, and how do we know...based on only their skulls and some sweet computer technology? Find out here!

Hemochromatosis and my weakness

I have a terrible weakness for one kind of evolutionary genetics theories. This is the kind where recessive gene disorders are explained by saying that 1 copy of the gene gives you an advantage over some other disease or condition. For example, 1 copy of the sickle-cell anemia gene is supposed to confer resistance against malaria, etc.

The reason why I call it a weakness is because though these theories are REALLY attractive, evolutionarily-speaking, sometimes they have holes.

So I'm writing my Celtic Societies paper on another one. This one is called hemochromatosis. It's supposedly the most common recessive genetic disorder in Europe and the U.S., although it's most common in people of Northern European descent (aka "Celtic" peoples). 1 copy helps you store more iron; 2 copies and your body builds up so much iron over a lifetime that you get heart and liver failures and maybe even turn a little gray.

It's been said, and I want to say, that the hemochromatosis mutation happened after humans switched to agriculture (about c. 2000 B.C.) because there isn't much iron in grains, so it was evolutionarily useful for people to store more iron.

And yet, geneticists have only traced the hemochromatosis mutation back 60 generations or so, which puts it after 1 A.D. or 2,000 years after that mutation would have been suddenly useful. And if it was so useful, why didn't it explode across all newly agricultural societies?

Sigh - another hole in my favorite brand of theory.