Mark Twain (the author of the observation above) was more correct than he may have understood. Alex Wakeman explains that, while most other plants have a single “most useful” element, wild cabbage has many. This makes it perfect for breeding….
Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.
Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing.
Wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea) growing in Northumberland. Source
Nevertheless, many cultures have recognized something special in this plant. By selecting plants with denser layers of leaves, ancient people created modern cabbage and kale. Others bred for the inflorescence, a dense bundle of small flowers that forms the head of cauliflower and broccoli. By favoring large, edible buds, thirteenth-century farmers living around modern day Belgium created Brussels sprouts. Under different selection pressures, Brassica oleracea has become German kohlrabi, or Chinese gai lan, or East African collard greens.
This level of morphological diversity is unusual. Modern tomatoes, for example, vary in size, shape, and color, but are all recognizably tomatoes. Since the 1920s, scientists have worked to understand how Brassica oleracea was domesticated and to deepen our knowledge of evolution and artificial selection.
By combining modern genetics, genomics, and molecular biology with linguistic, historical, and sociological sources, researchers are now beginning to develop conclusive answers…
Nearly everywhere in the world, folks use the metric system to measure things; here in the U.S. we use the Imperial system. (Note that Britain should really be a dark shade of green– i.e. a little yellow, mixed with a lot of blue. Brits may regularly use inches, ounces, miles, and pounds in everyday life, but have officially been Metric since 1965.)
Mike Sowden (amusingly and informatively) recounts the history of the metric system, then muses on why Imperial measures– the mile, the inch, the cubit, the ell– have staying power…
… Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through.
This is why I’m on the fence about Imperial now. There’s no question that Metric is necessary as a standardised, exact form used to make cars that don’t shake themselves to bits, planes that don’t fall out the sky and spacecraft that can launch themselves to interplanetary targets with mind-blowing accuracy.
But the versions of Imperial still being used by people in everyday life deserve their place in the world too.
Anyone brought up thinking and feeling temperature in Fahrenheit can tell us Celsius-reared folk something different about how we can experience the world. Anyone cooking in pounds will be thinking about food a little differently (“well, it’s just 2 cups, isn’t it?”). All these things are tiny windows into new ways of seeing what we think we already know…
See also: “The real reasons the US refuses to go metric,” and explainer from Verge Science on the last big attempt to turn the US towards Metric, why it failed, and the ways scientists and manufacturers have snuck it in anyway.
* Dave Barry
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As we muse on measurement, we might pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…
One hallmark of superconductivity is the Meissner effect, which expels all magnetic fields from a material — a property that allows a superconductor to levitate, as seen here.
The quest for room-temperature superconducting seems a bit like the hunt for the Holy Grail. A superconductor is a material that will transmit electricity with no resistance– thus very quickly and with no loss. (Estimates of loss in the U.S. electric grid, most of it due to heat loss from resistance in transmission, range from 5-10%; at the low end, that’s enough to power all seven Central American countries four times over.) Beyond that (already extraordinary) benefit, superconductivity could enable high-efficiency electric motors, maglev trains, low-cost magnets for MRI and nuclear fusion, a promising form of quantum computing (superconducting qubits), and much, much more.
Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, and has been the subject of fervent study ever since; indeed, four Nobel prizes have gone to scientists working on it, most recently in 2003. But while both understanding and application have advanced, it has remained the case that superconductivity can only be achieved at very low temperatures (or very high pressures). Until the mid-80s, it was believed that it could be established only below 30 Kelvin (-405.67 degrees Farenheit); by 2015, scientists had gotten that up to 80 K (-316 degrees Farenheit)… that’s to say, still requiring way too much cooling to be widely practical.
So imagine the excitement earlier this month, when…
In a packed talk on Tuesday afternoon at the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting in Las Vegas, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, announced that he and his team had achieved a century-old dream of the field: a superconductor that works at room temperature and near-room pressure. Interest was so intense in the presentation that security personnel stopped entry to the overflowing room more than fifteen minutes before the talk. They could be overheard shooing curious onlookers away shortly before Dias began speaking.
The results, published in Nature, appear to show that a conventional conductor — a solid composed of hydrogen, nitrogen and the rare-earth metal lutetium — was transformed into a flawless material capable of conducting electricity with perfect efficiency.
While the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by some scientists, others are far more cautious, pointing to the research group’s controversial history of alleged research malfeasance. (Dias strongly denies the accusations.) Reactions by 10 independent experts contacted by Quanta ranged from unbridled excitement to outright dismissal…
It’s Pi Day! What better way to “prove” 3.14 than with that most perfect of pies– pizza!
With Pi Day just around the corner, let’s remember what Pi is all about.
After washing your hands thoroughly, cut the crust off a pizza pie and lay it across four others. You’ll see that the crust spans a little more than 3 pies. That’s Pi ≈ 3.14.
* Peter Schjeldahl, quoting the painter John Currin
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As we celebrate the irrational, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that “Tequila” hit the top of the pop charts (sales and radio plays, both pop and R&B).
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