Make you Fink on Friday

We think we can outsmart nature.

But we are wrong, so terribly wrong. Nature wins every time. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about floods, erosion or even the smallest things like cockroaches.

Yes, that ghastly insect we all love to hate.

They make women scream, men stamp on them at every turn, we poison them and try to eradicate them, but they are still with us; and Mother Nature is making sure they will be with of us for a long long time yet.

Cockroaches lose their ‘sweet tooth’ to evade traps

Dr Coby Schal: The cockroaches spit out the glucose “like a baby rejects spinach”

A strain of cockroaches in Europe has evolved to outsmart the sugar traps used to eradicate them.

American scientists found that the mutant cockroaches had a “reorganised” sense of taste, making them perceive the glucose used to coat poisoned bait not as sweet but rather as bitter.

A North Carolina State University team tested the theory by giving cockroaches a choice of jam or peanut butter.

They then analysed the insects’ taste receptors, similar to our taste buds.

Researchers from the same team first noticed 20 years ago that some pest controllers were failing to eradicate cockroaches from properties, because the insects were simply refusing to eat the bait.

Dr Coby Schal explained in the journal Science that this new study had revealed the “neural mechanism” behind this refusal.

Jam v peanut butter

In the first part of the experiment, the researchers offered the hungry cockroaches a choice of two foods – peanut butter or glucose-rich jam [known as jelly is the US].

“The jelly contains lots of glucose and the peanut butter has a much smaller amount,” explained Dr Schal.

“You can see the mutant cockroaches taste the jelly and jump back – they’re repulsed and they swarm over the peanut butter.”

In the second part of the experiment, the team was able to find out exactly why the cockroaches were so repulsed.

The scientists immobilised the cockroaches and used tiny electrodes to record the activity of taste receptors – cells that respond to flavour that are “housed” in microscopic hairs on the insects’ mouthparts

“The cells that normally respond to bitter compounds were responding to glucose in these [mutant] cockroaches,” said Dr Schal.

“So they’re perceiving glucose to be a bitter compound.

“The sweet-responding cell does also fire, but the bitter compound actually inhibits it – so the end result is that bitterness overrides sweetness.”

Highly magnified footage of these experiments clearly shows a glucose-averse cockroach reacting to a dose of the sugar.

“It behaves like a baby that rejects spinach,” explained Dr Schal.

“It shakes its head and refuses to imbibe that liquid, at the end, you can see the [glucose] on the side of the head of the cockroach that has refused it.”

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So, we’re not about to be rid of these horrid creatures anytime soon.

Mother Nature is winning the battle.

 

What happens when you steal from nature

The last two hundred years technology has gone ahead in leaps and bounds, but now some are paying the price.

An example, we have always considered water to be plentiful, but now we are finding it’s not.

I read a post yesterday, that shows how we waste when we have plenty, then cry when the plenty runs out.

Turning Kansas into a desert

“In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.” – Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly

The farmers have used nature’s reserve water supply and now they have nothing. The water from the aquifers is not to be used, it is what keeps the planet healthy and once it’s gone, it’s gone, for good.

This is not only happening in Kansas, but in Colorado and Texas as well.

Change the World Wednesday – 22nd May

The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, ‘Go!’ -a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’. – E. M. Kelly

— Daniel (@QuotePlayground) May 22, 2013

You could of course extrapolate that to “Go green!” and Let’s go green!” and then it has a lot of meaning for the whole process of CTWW. The people who participate in CTWW challenges are leaders. The ‘goers’ are the politicians. The leaders get things done, the politicians wait for things to be done.

So, stealing Small’s thunder for a bit; let’s get more things done!

My torre serving more as a liquor cabinet

Moving along…

My torre arrived and is installed; as predicted it came wrapped in plastic and had some thin polystyrene pieces protecting the layers. The main package was cardboard, so the pollutant waste was less than I had thought.

On Thursday, I bought a new coffee table. I won’t bore you here with the whole story, should you feel the need to be bored click on the link for the full saga; I can assure you that the first half of that post is less than boring, you may be shocked or indeed it may pique your interest.

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Having got this far… I need more coffee.

BRB

Out of yesterday’s coffee for a quick fix; have to brew some more.

Oh, so you’re just going to have to sit there and wait.

If you think I am going to write something of interest before the coffee is ready, then you’re wrong; with a capital WR!

I don’t care, it’s just the way things are.

If you try to get anything tangible from me at this point, you are wasting your time and placing your life in danger.

And, don’t start with that “you’re addicted to coffee routine” again… I am NOT!

The crisis has been averted, coffee is ready, resume your places everybody, the post can continue.

*as if nothing untoward happened*

Yesterday, I bought one of those economic lightbulb thingies. Basically, it was in a fit of pique because my last incandescent burned out in less than two months. I also gave a fleeting thought to economising.

It wasn’t one of those squiggly ones, they are terrible; everytime I see one, I want to reach for another bottle of wine.

Gone is the soft warm glow of my 60w incandescent. Instead, this post is being brought to you by the harsh white glare of austerity; I feel like a Greek… maybe I could get an EU bailout, they seems to be all the fashion.

Click on the banner for the full post

This week’s CTWW.

Level 1 (The Green Novice) – This week, for at least one full day, disconnect from the Internet except as needed for work (this includes hand-held devices).

 

OR …
Level 2 (The Advanced Greenie) – Disconnect from the Internet, except for work, for the entire week.

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There are more Levels, but in the need to economise, you’ll have to click on the banner to see them, that is should you feel the need to seek a higher plane than us lowly beings down here.

A blathering wreck

This one is terrible. In 24 hours I would be a blathering wreck without even considering the consequences of a whole wekk. (Typo left to show how nervous I am) I would feel like Oklahoma, devastated. I don’t want to look like Hilary Clinton!

Seriously, my PC is 24/7, even when I am sleeping my PC is working. How else am I going to pirate English textbooks like a responsible teacher? Of course, I can do without the movies and music, but my pursuit of perfecting the English language is my greatest virtue… in fact, it is my only virtue.

I am going to have to claim ‘work’, not because of the overnight downloads, but because of my blogs. I drink coffee, I am a serious blogger. Many of you may/may not be aware that I have eight blogs and they take a lot of work to maintain my target of a daily post on them all; as it is I don’t always achieve my tally.

Probably more important is the high possibility of a systems failure if I switch the PC off; sometimes it restarts good, but other times I have a bitch of a job. You see my PC is a girl and suffers from PMT = PC mental tantrums.

Not Lixo, but you get the idea

I do, however, switch off the monitor physically overnight because Lixo can’t sleep; he sits up all night in my chair trying to catch the status bars on the downloads as the creep across the screen.

Then he spends all day sleeping on my clean shirts. He says he is ironing them, but I don’t believe it, because an iron doesn’t leave cat hairs over the black one.

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Some of this post has been serious, some parts not so serious. That’s what happens when you overcaffeinate.

Simple Green Ideas

If you’ve been using computers for as long as I have, you’re bound to have an old one lying around the house or garage.

A little imagination…

…and you’ve got a new mail box.

Monday Moaning

This is a reblog from:Angies Grapevine

Your Banana May Contain……..

It’s becoming harder and harder  to know whats in and on our food!

Soy sauce may contain gluten;  ice cream may have tree nuts in it, salad mix may be tainted with E. coli.

But there are some foods that are so pure, so uncomplicated, that they are just what they are, right?

Like bananas.

NOT!

As Science Daily reports, scientists have come up with a new spray they say will prevent bananas from ripening into brown mush for almost two extra weeks.

What’s the big deal you ask?

Well, let me tell you,  the spray is made from chitosan, which is derived from the shells of shrimp and crabs.

Can you imagine the simple banana carrying a warning label “This product may contain shellfish byproducts.” If sprayed this lovely yellow, handy fruit would be  off-limits to hard-core vegans and to people who suffer from shellfish allergies.

The chitosan-based spray is not available commercially yet, so no bananas are being treated.

Personally I think they should leave well enough alone, bananas are great just the way they are, when they get too ripe their great for baking, smoothies and face masks

Opinion:

I agree with Angie,they just can’t leave well enough alone.

One of the purest foods and they are going to stuff it up just like the rest.

It appears that chitosan is already in our world:

“Chitosan has a number of commercial and possible biomedical uses. It can be used in agriculture as a seed treatment and biopesticide, helping plants to fight off fungal infections. In winemaking it can be used as a fining agent, also helping to prevent spoilage. In industry, it can be used in a self-healing polyurethane paint coating. In medicine, it may be useful in bandages to reduce bleeding and as an antibacterial agent; it can also be used to help deliver drugs through the skin.

More controversially, chitosan has been asserted to have use in limiting fat absorption, which would make it useful for dieting, but there is evidence against this.

Other uses of chitosan that have been researched include use as a soluble dietary fiber.” – Wikipedia

From WebMD:

“Chitosan is POSSIBLY SAFE for most people when taken by mouth short-term (up to six months) or applied to the skin. When taken by mouth, it might cause mild stomach upset, constipation, or gas.”

Warnings on the same site for pregnant and breastfeeding women, also for people with shellfish allergies. If you take warfarin, don’t take chitosan as it could increase the blood thinning.

POSSIBLY SAFE:

That means they don’t know. If you read about the myriad of uses, the fact that they don’t know is worrying.

Chitosan absorbs fat. Many things we eat/take are absorbed by the fat, if the fat is not present then vitamin deficiencies (A, D & E) may occur; similarly oral contraceptives may be less effective.

Nature Ramble

To be alone in the dawn chorus reminds us how precious life is

Many of the birds that enchant us in our woodlands and gardens are under threat. We must cherish them

Star of the dawn chorus: the nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos). Photograph: blickwinkel/Alamy

International dawn chorus day is today [4th May]. If that does not light you up, you should perhaps move to the latest coverage of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and other human folly. For here we are going to “clear from the head the masses of impressive rubbish”, as Auden put it, and think about rising at dawn like our ancestors and hearing birdsong spread to the far horizons.

It seems odd to designate an entire day for the dawn chorus because most people only become aware of it after the main event has happened, early on the first Sunday of May. But this morning’s concert (around 4.30am), which you perhaps missed, was one of many in a season that will last until Glyndebourne and possibly even Glastonbury. If you manage to attend just once during the piercing glories of this spring, when the blossom and trees have never seemed more miraculous, you might change yourself for ever or, at the very minimum, experience half an hour that you’ll never forget. To walk alone in the dawn chorus in some woodland or in the park, or simply standing in your back garden, reminds you how precious it is to be alive.

If this is a little too Buddhist or new age for a newspaper column, I make no apologies. Some of the best moments of the past month for me have been to wake at 5am (easily achieved by drinking a lot of water the night before) and fling open the windows to hear – in roughly this order – blackbirds, robins, wrens, chaffinches, pheasants, owls, blackcaps, dunnocks and goldfinches, against the soft pulse of scores of cooing pigeons and, maybe in the distance, a cuckoo.

I am evangelical about this moment, partly because, as my colleague Catherine Bennett reminded me, this is what life was like before the Industrial Revolution and the incessant noise of our world. Dawn is the one time that there is almost no road traffic. Noise from aeroplanes and trains is minimal and the fool across the way, with his bass guitar, is asleep or pharmaceutically coshed. If you rise at dawn at this time of year, you snatch something of our forebears’ experience.

International dawn chorus day is, I discover without much surprise, a British invention. Whatever our self-denigration and decline, you cannot take away from the British a genius for the appreciation of nature, particularly birds, as expressed by writers such as WH Hudson and, more recently, Michael McCarthy, author of the wonderful Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo. Birds fill the imagination of artists from Chaucer to Vaughan Williams, though I don’t sense any great interest in Shakespeare, apart from mention of swans, for obvious reason, and crows making wing to rooky woods, which he uses to create atmosphere.

International dawn chorus day began in 1984 courtesy of the Urban Wildlife Trust, at Moseley Bog in Birmingham, which has since become a nature reserve. To be honest, there’s not a lot that is international about it. I found three events in the US and a handful in Europe. But in Britain, there were 43 scheduled for about 4.30am today…

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Spring *Dawn Chorus* ~ 2 minutes 30 second

Birds UK ~ British Bird Bee Butterfly wildlife videos at You Tube ~:-)

Simbird.com ~ My bird website is at http://simbird.com

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Nightingale ( Luscinia megarhynchos )

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Recycle your Mason Jars…