Human Flower Project
Science
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Ho Chi Minh City, VIETNAM
Sunday, April 24, 2011
An Eye for Plants
Direct experience is the best launching pad for botanical education. Put aside the microscope, and let naked fingers and eyes do the studying.
A walk in the park in Mendicina, Italy, with botanical vision
Photo: Desi
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
Horticulture today focuses systematically on scientific principles applicable to the cultivation of garden and ornamental plants, including fruits, vegetables, flowers, and landscape and nursery crops. In addition, horticultural scientists explore and explain the many contributions of plants to a healthy environment for human life and well being.
Liberty Hyde Bailey, co-founder of the American Society for Horticultural Science [ASHS], was both a horticulturalist and a botanist. Cornell University curator Elaine Engst writes, “He worked to remove the barriers between theoretical botany and practical horticulture. He believed that horticulture should be an applied science based on pure biology, and that it should reflect the application of basic botanical knowledge. As early as 1885, in a speech titled “The Garden Fence,” Bailey urged botanists and horticulturists to reconcile their interests by ‘getting the science from the field and laboratory into the garden’” (Cornell University Exhibition—L.H.B.: A Man for All Seasons; Elaine Engst, curator, 2004).
Reading the second edition of Bailey’s Lessons with Plants (1899) has been inspiration for us – as it should be for anyone interested in plant science.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Nuclear Power and Plant Life
Nuclear radiation doesn’t just affect people. What are its damages to plants and potential plant benefits?
Japanese nuclear facilities damaged by 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, 2011 have the region and the world on alert for the effects of radiation.
Image: WKRG
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
Current events in Japan have focused the world’s attention upon the effects of nuclear radiation on people. And now we learn that radiation has damaged spinach crops and milk supplies in the vicinity of the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Plant. (On Tuesday, the New York Times reported, “The government found radioactive materials at levels exceeding legal limits in 11 vegetables in Fukushima Prefecture…. Shipments of the affected vegetables from Fukushima Prefecture ended on Monday.)
Radiation indeed does have the potential to harm plants as well as humans, yet, as may come as a surprise, radiation also has been used by botanists to mutate plants intentionally, with the goal of developing new and desirable traits.
Full understanding of radioactivity and its effects on living things requires a grasp of both quantum physics and elementary particle physics; here are some basics.
As of March 2010, scientists know of 118 different elements that together comprise all chemical matter. The phenomenon of radioactivity is observed in heavy elements such as uranium. Radioactive elements are present in nature, and they can also be separated or made with sophisticated tools like centrifuges, cyclotrons, and nuclear reactors.
A radioactive element contains an unstable nucleus which spontaneously changes into a stable element via a process called “radioactive decay.” In this process, energy is released in the form of fast moving particles and waves – what we call “radioactivity”—emitted as alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays. It is this nuclear energy that, among other effects, can cause damage to living organisms—including plants.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Photography: Endebted to Lavender
Photo-archivists have discovered that dried lavender oil made possible the world’s first photograph.
A coat of dried lavender oil and bitumen on a silver plate made photography possible
Photo: Niepce.com
Photography, real photography – with smelly chemicals and reels, and paper in shiny black pouches – requires a conceptual step we never mastered. As with molds in sculpture, you have to work through an inversion. In the old fashioned darkroom, photographers develop the negative and are somehow able to “see” what the photographic opposite will look like once that negative’s exposed to light, stopped, and fixed on paper.
There’s at least one too many formal abstractions in all this for us to comprehend. (There’s also the trick of getting unprocessed film out of the camera, spooled, and locked into a canister, all done in the dark…another story.)
Historians have held a long running debate about who first figured out the intricate process. Who “invented” photography, orchestrating light and chemistry to sustain an image?
Recent studies at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles now point to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a Frenchman. Beginning around 1793, he experimented with what he called “heliography” at his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône. Produced long before safe-lights and film canisters, his first works were actually thought to be etchings. Not so. By 1826, after three decades of experimentation, Niépce made what experts now consider the world’s first photograph.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Neroli Beats Xanax by a Nose
Scientists in Taiwan have shown that the essential oil of bitter orange flowers is a more effective anxiolytic than Xanax. Stop popping. Start daubing.
A study of neroli’s psychic benefits was carried out by/on gerbils; swimming makes them anxious.
Photo: Still Breathing
We’re as socially anxious as the next person, perhaps a little more so. So we sympathize with those who habitually “take the edge off” with chemical power tools.
We also sympathize with those who’ve “tooled” themselves dull (or newly edgy). Good news from Taiwan for us and for all those numb next-people. A group of researchers has found that neroli – the essential oil of Citrus aurantium var. amara or Bigaradia, enjoyed as a relaxing fragrance for more than 400 years - has proven more potent against anxiety than Xanax.
Granted, the experiment was done on swimming gerbils, but it’s still a very hopeful result.
Ying-Ju Chen, a nutritionist at Providence University, Taiwan, and a research team tested the swimming duration and distance of three groups of gerbils: a control group, a group treated with Xanax, and a group that had inhaled neroli fragrance.
The rodents that had sniffed neroli oil swam longer and and less frantically (measured by the distance they covered) than did the control group or the Xanex-fed gerbils. (Being tossed into water tends to make gerbils anxious.)
“This study provides evidence-based data on aromatherapy using neroli in the treatment of anxiety,” Chen et al concluded.