Clean Water ACTION!!!!!

I started a job at Clean Water Action this week, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm totally ripping this line from a coworker, but I came for the job and am staying for the people. Also, it's been tiring as I try to recover what were once my legs from these gelatinous twigs that replaced them over the winter. The organization is an environmental non-profit founded as a result of the Clean Water Act back in '72, so it's pretty well established, and we're doing great work all the time to keep the Great Lakes and Michigan's freshwater resources clean. Right now, we're working on putting pressure on Governor Snyder and DTE Energy to adopt more renewable energy. We still get about 60% of our power in Michigan from coal, and it's the greatest source of Mercury in our water. You should totally donate. Also, if you're a Michigander (or even if you're not and would like to speak your mind, anyway) contact Governor Snyder and let him know you support increasing clean energy. We are also working to improve infrastructure around Lake St. Claire to deal with stormwater runoff. Any time it rains heavily (like my observation day for CWA, in which I was peeling my materials from my clipboard and wondering when the dilophosaurus would show up), all of the trash, oil drippings, fertilizer, etc. ends up washed down storm drains into Lake St. Claire. Help us put in porous pavement, rain gardens, and rain barrels to keep the lake clean! Again, we'd love your support!

What did you expect? Potty mouth and sarcasm? This is serious!

Herbs and Shameless Wooster Pandering!

While I was gone at the lovely College of Wooster for the weekend, I left some seeds to sprout in a cheap 36 seedling planter. I went to Science Day to see my my old advisor, learned that Mateer is still old and full of dead birds with no immediate plans to replace it, checked out the flowers (below), and had entirely too much fun with some friends I haven't seen in a while. While I was gone, the seedlings sprouted! I planted six each of basil, thyme, chives, spearmint, cilantro, and oregano (left to right below). Hopefully, the heights of each plant relative to each other will give me a nice dome of green, and I'll use the same arrangement when I transplant them. Planting shorter herbs on the outside helps to get a large amount of biomass out of a limited flat surface. The little bastards started to sprout while I was away, so hopefully I'll have a nice kitchen herb garden in a few weeks! The thyme is doing the best at the moment, but I really hope the cilantro gets it together, since some obnoxiously large percentage of my summer diet is swimming in the green wonder.

This is a pretty tree. Behind the tree is Scovel, where poor, innocent biology majors are forced to learn about z-orbitals and shit.

Feels Like a Good Day to Learn About Aeroponic Gardening!

I've thought about hydroponic gardening for a few years now, and it always seemed like an epic chore to keep all of the pumps working with timers and keep a huge reservoir of water sitting around. It really seems better suited to a large scale, so a setup in a small apartment didn't seem feasible. A year or so ago, though, I stumbled across an article on how Singapore has been solving its vegetable import problem with aeroponics. Likewise, NASA is all over that, since they also suffer from a lack of arable soil in their tin cans. I anticipated and was correct in assuming that I would have a tiny apartment right now, so I began to study the topic online. What did I find? Cannabis. Lots of cannabis. Happy 4/20, everyone (here in Michigan, anyway, even if Blogger wants to suck and be on west coast time). Just to reiterate, vegetables. This is for VEGETABLES.

NO. That is NOT what I meant.

Anyway, the basic design of an aeroponics system is as follows: Get some nutrient-rich water into a reservoir, pump it through nozzles to mist plant roots in a soilless medium, and the mist is recycled back into the reservoir. Of course, the benefits of aeroponic gardening include the facts that disease is less of a problem, growth is fast, conditions are tightly controlled, and it can be done easily indoors. Sounds like an ideal setup for something. Chia Pets, perhaps. In the image below, basket pots are suspended over the reservoir, surrounded by nozzles. This is a relatively common design.

If you look at this decidedly non-sketchy gardening blog, the system it proposes looks strikingly similar to the one above. This is a nice design for a single plant. I particularly like the power cord hole. A grommet (apparently a real word outside of claymation) will keep your pump cord from getting frayed. Also, this plan actually gives you a suggestion for a pump. They suggest an ActiveAqua PU250 pump. Of course, there are problems with this. It looks well-suited for one very nice tomato plant, but If we wanted to grow some radishes or herbs, that one large basket is kind of crappy. Bit ironic that someone would use something as utilitarian as IKEA furniture to grow a $100 tomato plant. Anyway, you demand a stable supply of varied vegetables so you don't have to subsist on raisons and baby carrots, and with great vegetables comes great need for a bigger pump than that PU250. Most sites recommend no less than a 350-gallons-per-minute pump. Overall, the design could be a little more practical. As for the problems, no need to worry, because business hippies have your back: There is a great design here with in-depth instructions. When looking at graduate programs in ecology, I saw pictures of almost the exact same planter in botany labs, from the outside at least. What is really great about it, though, is the guts. There's a simple but elegant, H-shaped branching of pipes that can hit a lot of basket pots at once, allowing you to grow many plants.

You know, those plumbers down the street always smell like patchouli. (Really, I can do this all night.)

Assuming you don't buy a light, you can put this whole contraption together for around $100. A light can be bought for another Benjamin (yes, I just said that). Seriously, if you've grown herbs and veggies with soil planters before, the costs build up on you quickly, so this is actually a pretty cost-efficient system. If you keep it clean, you can probably reuse it from year to year without replacing much but the pump. Also, it is possible to keep this organic. There is a liquid, organic fertilizer called compost tea. It's basically just like brewing tea, except instead of vitamin-rich, aromatic tea leaves, you use moldy plant trash. If you want to get really fancy, there are ways to incorporate aquaculture into the system, but that's for another day. If you want to see what this looks like scaled up, and why it could very well be the future of urban agriculture, check this out.

They Climbin' in Yo' Window, They Snatchin' Yo' Parsley Up!

Fuck.

Invasive species. Annoying, ecosystem disrupting, sometimes delicious invaders. Generally, people uneducated in ecology or apathetic assholes end up transporting species across natural barriers that they never would have access across. I've worked with buckthorn and lady beetles, and I've applied for jobs fighting zebra muscles, but, apart from cane toads, this one gets closest to a B-list horror film. Snails the size of rats have invaded Florida. It's tough to feel a shiver of terror at a snail, but these suckers will eat at least 500 species of Florida plants and the stucco on your house, they carry a scary meningitis called rat lungworm, and their pointy, waffle cone shells will end your tires. I doubt the snail is going to get out of the road for you, so take a spare tire if you're going to Snail World Disney World. Here is a video of a dog and his awkward cop person explaining how to not bring about the snai-pocalypse. Let the playlist run, and you can watch random people hate on snails.

Your Kitchen is a Lab! No, Not For Meth.

A while ago, the good folks over at Science Friday let me in on a great cookbook called The Science of Good Cooking that combines chemistry and biology with practical cooking advice. I love to cook, but a quick page through this book showed me that any self-esteem where cooking is concerned is totally unfounded.

Titrations still haunt my nightmares.

At heart, though, it's just a cookbook full of those little in-depth fact boxes you find in science textbooks, if they were fun to read any other time than when you have actual test material to study. The dedicated scientists of America's Test Kitchen perform legit experiments on variations of popular recipes for you, so you don't have to dig through Paula Dean and Food Network websites yourself. If you're too cheap to buy a cookbook, which you probably are if you fall into the demographic that reads this blog (the book was an awesome gift from my father), give a listen to the Science Friday interview with the authors. They'll tell you why your crappy plastic cooking bowls mess up your eggs, why olive oil smokes up your kitchen like a Phish concert, and why Tesco isn't the only problem with store-bought ground beef. How do they do all of this? Science, bitches. Sweet, savory science. Below are a couple of pages from the book that convinced me to buy a cheap slow cooker and make the honest-to-god worst Cajun food I have ever tasted. That has nothing to do with the book, though. "Make it up as you go" only works for various fried things, apparently. Also, water and more chicken are not a substitute for chicken broth. The meat was tender, though, so at least a certain book knew what it was doing.

"Wanna know why your meat could be used to build suspension bridges? Buzz saws. You melted the angry enzyme buzz saws of doom, and now your proteins are like ramen noodles. You should be ashamed of yourself." Verbatim.

BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL

Bill Nye, alias "The Science Guy." The man is a hero. I wanted to do biology as early as sophomore year of high school, and who do you think made science fun? Teachers? Okay, I had a few great ones- I'm talking to you, Jenny Veatch. Still, who doesn't remember that time Bill dressed up as a soccer player and showed our solar system to scale? Or, in more recent news, that time he begged creationists to not raise their children to be scientifically illiterate? Their scientifically illiterate parents didn't take it so well. Whether or not you agree with Bill's bluntness, I know his program enriched my childhood, big time. It really makes the difference to teach a kid the scientific method (Just ask The Science Guy himself). It allows him or her to test the world earlier and more reliably, so even an impressionable child can be assured of their facts. Bill's program was for children's minds what Mr. Rogers' program was for the soul. What's really important, though, is that the man knows how to par-tay.

BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL

Baby, we're gonna produce biofuels like it's 1999.

I'm glad Matt McGrath over at the BBC has draw attention to the issues with how we produce biofuels. Corn. Corn everywhere. That is how the Midwest is, and the U.S. has a healthy export market for food as a result. The environment does not like monoculture. Despite our rush to deforest the world for the sake of more corn, we have, for some odd reason, decided to turn 40% of our corn into biofuel. Some Brits think a similar set of incentives for the UK would be madness. Gotta say that I agree. Food crops aren't good choices for producing biofuel efficiently, especially corn. Water efficiency alone makes it a dangerous endeavor. On top of that, instability in food prices become a terrible repercussion. If you think the Egyptian revolution was all about tyranny and oppression and whatnot, food prices also had a role to play (Update: Yeah, it fell out pretty much like this). Of course, people are dreaming up awesome alternatives to our Macgyver-ed production methods every day, but we might want to rethink our current policies and incentives.

Life finds a way.

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

STAPH used UPPER RESPIRATORY TRACT INFECTION! It's super effective!

Via xkcd

Size Matters!

Time for a double feature. As it turns out, the size of your wobbly bits might matter to heterosexuals of the opposite sex. These articles from The Atlantic report two studies. The first has do do with women's preferred penis size, and the second has to do with men's preferences for women's breast size. After all, what the world needs now is love sexual insecurity. Anyway, apart from both spawning bad innuendo, what these studies have in common is that they each showed computer models of men or women to the opposite sex to test the relationship between isolated physical traits and sexual attraction. Low and behold, sorry, nineteen out of twenty men, women really do prefer willies in the 95th percentile or above. If you or a loved one fall below that line, though, have no fear. Shoulder-to-hip ratio matters more by far.

"This is how to compensate, apparently."

-Science

The other half of our double feature is a little more interesting. I mean, sure, junk size matters to women, and, paradoxically, even more to men. "So, why is the equivalent study on the opposite sex 'more interesting?'" you ask, contemplating how the notion that men love large breasts could possibly be news, given that there are infinite expanses of the internet entirely devoted to enormous mammary glands. Seriously, by some measures, 40% of the internet is porn. Trudge through that sometime, and you will confirm that the data is skewed towards preference for larger breasts. Whoopdeedoo. Here is why the study is interesting: Men who idealize large breasts are more sexist. Yes, that guy staring down your cleavage is an asshole, but he might be staring down your cleavage because he is an asshole. Glad we straightened that out. It's not just men who are negatively sexist, either. Turns out men who held "benevolently sexist attitudes towards women" also preferred bigger boobs than their non-sexist counterparts. To clarify, it's like how that guy who assumes your Asian American friend is good at math has benevolently racist attitudes. Unfortunately, the journal article costs money to view, but the abstract is available here.

Subtlety is an art. 

WTF, Evolution?

You ever have one of those days where you see an animal like the pistol shrimp (below), or a hippo, or that pile of dead lady beetles in your light fixture, and you think to yourself, "What the fuck, evolution?" Me too. Here is a Tumblr for people who like crazy animals that make no sense. Also, if you get bored of that, one can spend hours on Cracked.com mulling over crazy animals in articles like this one.

Stop global warming and starvation with...cows?

Recently a new hot topic has emerged on the global warming scene, but it's not what you think.  And it's not even really about global warming--helping reverse climate change is more of a bonus.  The issue is desertification, the process of fertile land becoming infertile, which is a much bigger issue than you might think.  I mean sure, there's deserts everywhere, the Sahara's always been there, it just has a dry climate, no big deal.  What a lot of people don't realize is that the Sahara is constantly growing, and African countries like Mali have less fertile land left every year.  Hell, even the region of the Middle East that was named the Fertile Crescent is now basically a dust bowl.  But a growing segment of researchers see a solution to stopping and even reversing this widespread desertification in a way that seems totally counterintuitive at first--we need more cows!  In short, a lot of ecosystems in the world evolved a dependence between local flora and the grazers that feed on it, and undergrazing can be just as bad or worse for the long-term health of the land than overgrazing.  Allan Savory, who's devoted his life to figuring this out, lays it out in this sweet TED talk:

As documentary filmmaker Peter Byck emphasized on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday, the conversion of desert back to productive land has a global benefit as well--reversing climate change!  There's no bigger carbon sink than living organisms, so every acre of land that can become repopulated by plants and the animals they support is that much less carbon floating around in the atmosphere.

It should be noted that there is still scholarly disagreement about how best to implement grazing and/or whether this is all anecdotal bullshit, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and dare to be optimistic about what seems like a too-good-to-be-true solution, and I hope that it stays in the climate change discussion.

"Let's Plant Some Shit!"

I have become used to farmers markets and yuppie, organic, grass-fed, etc, etc selections the last few years. Ann Arbor is rife with the stuff, but I am well-aware that it's not like this everywhere. In some communities, finding fresh food isn't even an option, and people don't know enough about where their food comes from. I'm certainly no expert, but my senior thesis was on natural pest control in agriculture, and the whole ordeal just left me sketched out by modern farming practices. Did I mention that modern milking practices will give the men-folk testicular cancer? It's really no surprise that I know a million organic farming activists thirsty for the blood of Tyson and Monsanto executives (exempting the vegetarians, of course). I love The Atlantic, and this article brings up a few interesting points about the stigma against farming in communities of color and the difficulties minorities face in farming. Even better, there is an amazing TED Talk by Ron Finley of South Central L.A. about his work promoting gardening and food sovereignty in underprivileged neighborhoods. If you can only spare the time to watch one video, that one is the gem, but also take a look at Pam Warhurst's talk about growing and eating the landscape, like some kind of 3-D Pac Man.

That Sticky Icky... Icky!

The Feds are preparing to ban another generation of fake pot. Personally, I'm glad to see a disturbance in the market. The chemical cocktail sprayed on herbs and sold as incense is as dubious as when salvia was sold under the same conditions. Granted, it won't give you LSD-esque hallucinations like salvia, but it can cause heart problems, seizures, breathing problems, and a whole host of other fun side effects.

I mean, really, look at that eye. This product is sourced by Sauron.

In other words, everyone jokes at the cliche of a stoner who had a bit too much of Hobbiton's finest pipe weed and thinks his heart is beating out of control, but if you know someone who presents the same symptoms from synthetics, she might actually need medical attention. Hundreds of people have been hospitalized in Michigan the last couple years. Fundamentally, chemical-laced herbs and cannabis are two very different classes of drugs, and brands such as K2's label by the media as "synthetic marijuana" is wildly misleading and dangerous. I would like to think that a new wave of legislation will kill fake pot for good. Chemists will always be one step ahead of legislators, however, and I doubt this is the last we will see of synthetic "marijuana".

Chimps and Uncomfortable Questions About Morality!

It's kind of a pity that Light Years gets shoved in a corner of CNN that very rarely sees the light of day. Same for Schools of Thought. Anyway, there's a cool interview with Dr. Frans de Waal about his work with chimps. Frans was apparently one of Time's most important people in 2007, because people love chimps and watching them perform shenanigans for researchers. Yes, they're all furry jerks, but they empathize and show reciprocity, which apparently makes some religious figures and philosophers uncomfortable. So, skim those copies of The Origin or The Republic, and go start an internet fight! He also has a great TED Talk (below) about ethics in primates and various other mammals. There are monkeys and elephants.

Welcome to Another 20-Something's Blog!

I was a biology major, and during my year since graduation, I've spent a lot of time working odd jobs, and almost as much time messing around on the internet, trying to keep a working knowledge of cool stuff in science, politics, and daily events. This blog is for channeling that into something more productive than day dreams. You may enjoy checking in from time to time if you like to waste time on the interwebs, take an interest in science, question why politics have to be so complicated, and laugh it all off. Here is a comic for reading this far. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is underrated.