eggs
sastyk | April 16, 2012"Context is everything. Breastfeeding is almost universally beneficial in infants, but in an elderly cardiac patient, it can be fatal." - Spider Robinson
Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams' piece in the New York Times "The Myth of Sustainable Meat." McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are…
sastyk | April 12, 2012
In the NYTimes today, Nicholas Kristoff asks just the wrong question "Is an egg for breakfast worth this?" Of course, it isn't, but that's not the right way to frame this. Nothing about an egg for breakfast could be worth this in terms of animal cruelty, human health or any number of other considerations:
"It's physically hard to breathe because of the ammonia" rising from manure pits below older barns, said the investigator, who would not allow his name to be used because that would prevent him from taking another undercover job in agriculture. He said that when workers needed to enter…
sastyk | March 19, 2012The season cycled over the weekend - officially it is not quite spring, but in fact, spring now has a toe hold. Even if it goes back to chilly or even snows, the ground is too warm for it to last, by the end of an unusually warm week the grass will be green and the soil dried enough to move forward. That doesn't mean my (optimistic) plantings of peas and bok choy, spinach and sweet peas may not stagnate or my fruit tree blooms get caught by frost (we can't even say a late frost, it is two months to my last frost date, and anything can happen in upstate NY and usually does), that the boys in…
lborkowski | August 24, 2010The Iowa-based company Wright County Egg is recalling 380 million eggs, which were sold to distributors and wholesalers in 22 states and Mexico, due to concerns about salmonella contamination. The eggs have been sold under several different brand names, so if you've got eggs in your fridge you can check FDA's page for info. Salmonella-infected eggs traceable to this producer may have caused as many as 1,200 cases of intestinal illness in at least 10 states over the past several weeks. A second producer, Hillandale Farms, has also issued a recall 170 million eggs that have been shipped to 14…
cagapakis | July 10, 2010Science is cooking done in a lab. Mixing carefully (or not so carefully) measured components, heating, cooling, observing phase transitions, exploring the behavior of animal and plant proteins, exploring the properties of different chemicals, slowly changing variables to optimizing procedures. Often, feeding bacteria has a lot in common with feeding people, and I have to admit that freshly autoclaved yeast media smells delicious.
Said another way, cooking is science where at least you can usually eat the failures. My fiancé and I have been failing at making soft-boiled eggs for quite some…
edyong | March 9, 2010Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced "first drafts" of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even recovered DNA from dinosaurs. Now, a variety of extinct birds join the ancient DNA club including the largest that ever lived - Aepyornis, the elephant bird.
In a first for palaeontology, Charlotte Oskam from Murdoch University, Perth, extracted DNA from 18 fossil eggshells, either directly…
edyong | August 28, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Getting excited when fish produce sperm would usually get you strange looks. But for Tomoyuki Okutsu and colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, it's all part of a day's work. They are trying to use one species of fish as surrogate parents for another, a technique that could help to preserve species that are headed for extinction.
Okutsu works on salmonids, a group of fish that includes salmon and trout. Many members of this tasty clan have suffered greatly from over-…
edyong | June 5, 2009For humans, sex is a simple matter of chromosomes: two Xs and we become female; one X and a Y and we develop into males. But things aren't so straightforward for many lizards - many studies have found that the temperature of the nest also has a say, even overriding the influence of the chromosomes. But the full story of how the lizard got its sex is even more complicated. For at least one species, the size of its egg also plays a role, with larger eggs producing females, and smaller ones yielding males.
The discovery comes from Richard Shine's group at the University of Sydney. In earlier…
bcohen | February 23, 2009The industrialization of agriculture, egg version.
An egg factory in China. Click on image for link to original site, credited to AP Photo/Andy Wong as posted at the Globe by Alan Taylor.
The Boston Globe has an elegant photo series called The Big Picture at its website. I don't know why this isn't more publicized. Maybe it is; maybe I've been distracted. I got lost for a half hour surfing around past entries. Above is one of the images from a series, "At Work," and below are selections from that set. I put these into the series on Landscapes and Modernity here at the blog. (Try trees;…
edyong | December 18, 2008In 1995, a palaeontologist called Mark Norrell reported an amazing discovery - the fossilised remains of a dinosaur called Troodon, sitting on top of a large clutch of eggs. The fossil was so well-preserved and its posture so unmistakeable that it provided strong proof that some dinosaurs incubated their eggs just as modern birds do. And since then, two other small predatory species - Oviraptor and Citipati - have been found in brooding positions on top of egg clutches.
But a subtler look at these fossils reveal much more about dinosaur parenting than the simple fact that it existed. To…