Naturalist Interest

First a tree story,here.

Canada’s new banknotes show wrong maple leaf

IS THERE a botanist in the house? Canada’s new $20, $50 and $100 bills appear to have the wrong maple leaf on them.

Instead of a sugar maple leaf, one of the nation’s best known symbols, the bills feature the Norway maple, a native of Europe that is so invasive in North America that some US states have banned its sale and importation.

The leaf shown on the banknotes has five major lobes, unlike any maple tree native to Canada, while the sugar maple has just three lobes, says Julian Starr, a botanist at the University of Ottawa.

The Bank of Canada says there is no error. Since no maple is native to the whole of Canada, the designers chose a “stylised blend” of leaves to avoid regional bias, says Julie Girard, spokeswoman for the bank. “This way it’s representative of all of Canada,” she says, adding that the bank even consulted a tree specialist to avoid species bias.

I also thought that this story was interesting on the possible use of rust in solar energy.
To see the rest you have to subscribe or get a copy at your library..

MOST engineers would have been horrified to find even a little bit of rust on their electrodes. But Kenneth Hardee and Allen Bard had made theirs entirely of the stuff. In their pursuit of cheap solar power, the pair had been trying to coax a current out of the cheapest material they could find. And they succeeded: exposed to visible light, it produced a small but decent current.

That happened in 1975, just as silicon was becoming the next big thing. Silicon’s greater efficiency made it the mainstay of photovoltaic solar cells, and it has stayed at the top of the market ever since. Rust simply didn’t have the electrical properties to compete. The small breakthrough at the University of Texas at Austin fell by the wayside and the only time anyone thought about rust, if they thought of it at all, was when they wanted to get rid of …

And finally. because we had discussed coevolution of plants and humans earlier today (and it is Friday night!) the article “The 10,000-year bender: Why humans love a tipple” is interesting, as well, although also requiring a subscription or a library.

EVEN if you are teetotal, you cannot deny that humans, as a species, like to drink. We consume wine, beer, cider, spirits… in fact, the fermented product of almost anything we can turn to alcohol. Our fondness for this toxic substance, the cause of so much trouble, is something of a mystery. Maybe it is enough to say that we drink because it makes us feel good. But I think that to understand our love of alcohol you need a bigger, more evolutionary, explanation.

The story of alcohol is one of an intimate relationship between humans and yeasts, an affair that began millions of years ago and is still playing out today. We like to cast ourselves as the star of this drama, but in fact yeasts are the unsung lead character. Ours is a symbiotic connection – a mutually beneficial partnership. It is also one in which the balance …

This must be Science Thursday as I found a number of articles of interest to me, anyway. And perhaps to readers of this blog. First is an article on wolves, with an excellent photo you can find here.

GOODNESS, what big teeth you have, and what close ties to humans you have! And what negative attitudes you elicit from rural people all over the world!

Behind their cultural baggage, grey wolves are an evolutionary success story, giving rise to the domestic dog 10,000 years ago and, more recently, rebounding from centuries of persecution.

“There are wild wolves galore in Europe,” says Claudio Sillero, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. “They have recolonised vast areas of their former range and live almost unnoticed in populated areas.”

A wolf was recently spotted in the Netherlands, after an absence of over a century. There are ongoing calls from ecologists for them to be reintroduced to Scotland, where they’ve been extinct since the 1700s. In the US, arguments rage over whether their numbers are high enough to sustain hunting.

These wolves were photographed playing in the Black Mountain Wildlife Park, south of Hamburg in Germany, which has more than a thousand animals in an area of 50 hectares.

“While we think of wolves as masters of the wilderness in Europe, they thrive in human-dominated landscapes,” says Sillero. “Over 3000 wolves live in heavily populated areas of northern Spain and Portugal, and wolves from Italy have steadily colonised southern France.”

French farmers may not share Sillero’s enthusiasm, but with less persecution than in the past, wolf numbers are growing. For those of us in Europe, the howl of a wolf could one day become as familiar as the cries of foxes.

Then New Scientist also has an article on the hologenome which is interesting for us human beings as well as other forms of life. It talks about microorganisms being part of us and influencing our evolution.

There was another article about the “gut brain” here.

IT’S been a tough morning. You were late for work, missed a crucial meeting and now your boss is mad at you. Come lunchtime you walk straight past the salad bar and head for the stodge. You can’t help yourself – at times of stress the brain encourages us to seek out comfort foods. That much is well known. What you probably don’t know, though, is that the real culprit may not be the brain in your skull but your other brain.

Yes, that’s right, your other brain. Your body contains a separate nervous system that is so complex it has been dubbed the second brain. It comprises an estimated 500 million neurons – about five times as many as in the brain of a rat – and is around 9 metres long, stretching from your oesophagus to your anus. It is this brain that could be responsible for your craving under stress for crisps, chocolate and cookies.

Embedded in the wall of the gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS) has long been known to control digestion. Now it seems it also plays an important role in our physical and mental well-being. It can work both independently of and in conjunction with the brain in your head and, although you are not conscious of your gut “thinking”, the ENS helps you sense environmental threats, and then influences your response. “A lot of the information that the gut sends to the brain affects well-being, and doesn’t even come to consciousness,” says Michael Gershon at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York.

Assuming that these are observation are both true of wildlife and other species, it just gives us a hint about the many things about them that we do not understand.

And for those who like to apply science to decisionmaking, here’s an article about using “scientifically proven methods” to decrease alcohol consumption.