A Visit to Biosphere2

I recently had the opportunity to visit Biosphere2, the famous/infamous futurist biology experiment from the early 1990's. The early scenarios where a crew lived inside the airtight system got a lot of bad press, mainly due to what seemed to be bad planning. Insufficiently cured concrete and highly enriched soils consumed oxygen at an alarming rate, while the cloudy el Nino year reduced the amount of photosynthesis inside. I had heard at the time that the members of the space frame supporting the glass were obscuring more sunlight than they allowed for. The oxygen partial pressure was equivalent to that at about 14,000 feet before some outside air was pumped in. If all this happened now, it would still be running as a reality television show.

All that is past and now the facility is now a University of Arizona research center for students and visiting scientists. I took a guided tour while visiting Tuscon. It's really a blast to walk around and see the different climate regions - check out the album below.

BioSphere2_2009

Link to their website: http://www.b2science.org/index.html

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo

Okay, I was out of town when Virgin Galactic unveiled SpaceShipTwo, so here belatedly is the link to VG's site and a sexy picture.

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/spaceshiptwo-roll-out/

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...Yes, another invasive species post!

Hemlock Wooly Adelgid is a tiny little bug that has devastated the Hemlock population on the East Coast of the U.S. since it was introduced from Asia in the 1920's. If you have hemlocks nearby, you have probably seen the white puffs of their egg sacks at the base of the hemlock needles. Science Daily is reporting on the release of Laricobius nigrinus beetles into some Cornell reservations in an experiment to try and control the Adelgids. They say the beetles only prey on the HWA - and I hope they're right!


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091113124302.htm

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
I guess she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
I guess she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
I guess she'll die.
...

Drinkmaster Bartending School

"Give me a Woo Woo, a Sex on the Beach, and a Fuzzy Screw!" And I was filling three highball glasses with ice, metering out the vodka, Peach Schnapps and fruit juices with hardly a thought. Monday I had never even heard of two of those drinks, but this was Thursday. I was standing behind the training bar at Drinkmaster Bartending School, taking their Master Bartending Course, and having the time of my life.


I didn't know what to expect the first day, when I finally found the nondescript stairway in Downtown Crossing. I stepped out of the elevator and into a bar. Wait, it wasn't exactly a bar, because there was a desk with a computer there and some people waiting on couches. But the rest of the room - dominated by a large L-shaped bar, beer taps, and rows of bottles in front of a mirror - was a reproduction of the familiar bar landscape. All of it was set up to make the classroom identical to a real drinking establishment.

That first day we learned to nail the free pour - being able to pour a solid ounce is a critical skill in most bars and we practiced that until it was second nature, pouring the colored water that substitutes for alcohol into a measured glass. The booze in the bottles was fake, but they had the original labels and were in the special order they belong in on the back shelves (hey, there's a system back there!) I was like a pig in mud. It was a throwback to my old laboratory days, with a little showmanship thrown in.

So for four hours a day for five days, we students came in, put down our bags and got behind the bar for some quick review of the previous day's drinks before the instructor came and we started in on some new drinkables. The instructors were old hands behind the bar and they led us through drink recipes and how to remember them, wine and beer service, and the subtle performance art of slinging perfect drinks under fire. There were fifteen of us, with only two women and something like 6 of us over 21. We had our share of Natty Light drinkers (really, why take the course?), a few decent hands with an opinion on alcohol, and one forty something (ahem). By our final exam, everyone had their techniques and recipes down, though the Brazilian guy kept asking me which garnish was the lime and which the lemon.

Walking out of there I felt like a whole new world was open to me! I would take a job in a sleepy bar one night a week, see how it went, and go from there. Maybe I could work in a swank place like Drink, stay up late, get to know all the knowable people in Boston. But really, who am i kidding? My bed starts calling me by ten, and if I am not asleep by eleven I am a zombie the next day. But at least I got to see another interesting way to make a living. And I have a lot more respect for a bartender that does a good job under pressure.

SpaceShip Two Unveiling December 7

Virgin Galactic just announced December 7 is the date for the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo!

It will be the world's first commercial passenger space ship and it makes the sci-fi addicted kid in me cackle with glee.

Advanced materials and systems, cool design, no threat of slashed funding every four years...if Virgin Galactic can pull this off I may forgive Sir Richard for the non-functioning TV screens on my last Virgin flight.

Virgin Galactic has a pretty fancy, albeit grandiose Flash website if you want more pretty pics: http://www.virgingalactic.com/

Packing a Pint of Pickled Peppers

Like the squirrels running around burying acorns, the changing leaves and chilly winds have me dragging out the canner and putting things up for the  winter. When the summer tomatoes were red and voluptuous I jarred tons. Now all I have left is my meager crop of hot peppers, mostly habaneros. That citrusy heat and sunny color is very welcome in January. It's kind of late for a canning recipe, but here it is in case you're a procrastinator like me. Bostonians can get canning equipment and instructions at the Salem Street Tru-Value Hardware store, in the North End.

2 c. white vinegar (5% acidity)
4 c. water
2 Tbs. sugar
1 tsp Salt
Various fresh hot peppers
Sprigs of fresh Mexican oregano
Garlic cloves

Scrub the peppers and cut the tops off or cut several slits in each. Large ones should be cut in half.
Get a big canning pot boiling and boil some canning jars and lids for 10 minutes. Leave them in the hot water.
Mix the vinegar, salt, sugar and water and bring to a boil. Keep it boiling. Take your jars out of the hot water and drain. Then put the peppers in,along with a garlic clove and oregano sprig for each jar. Pour the boiling vinegar mixture over the peppers in each jar (keep your face away - boiling vinegar/habanero steam is powerful!) Leave 1/2" air space at the top of each jar. Pop on the lids and the bands, tightening the bands just finger tight. Put the jars back in the canner and boil for 15 minutes. Remove the jars from the water and let them stand on the counter until you hear the lids pop - that means they have sealed properly. Tighten the bands well. Then just let them cool, and store in the pantry. Keep them in the fridge after you open them.

Try the Violet Fizz

We got some new syrups from Monin the other day. They've got good concentrated flavor and we use them for cooking and drinks all the time. Here's a refreshing cocktail, the Violet Fizz, that has a beautiful deep purple color and a slight flowery flavor.

Fill a highball glass with ice.

Add 1 1/2 oz. Vodka

1 1/2 oz. Violet syrup*

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Fill with club soda

Stir gently, garnish with lemon.

*Available online from Amazon or other online retailers.

Update: I seem to have reinvented the wheel! There is another recipe out there for Violet Fizz, and it uses crème de violette and sugar instead of the syrup. Sounds even better but the liqueur is rather hard to find.
 http://www.cocktaildb.com/ingr_detail?id=132

Foraging for wild plants with Russ Cohen

Russ Cohen has a day job at Mass Fish and Wildlife, but around here he is known for being an expert forager, that is he does a lot of his food shopping in the woods. I originally looked him up to see if he could tell me about the Harvard mushroom club, where he sometimes speaks. Well the mushroomers never got back to me, but looking at Cohen's page reminded me of my college years in Binghamton. To the detriment of my social life I spent a lot of time in the woods up there, tracking animals and eating dubious trailside herbs. It was a very focused time for me - I was able to lose myself in nature in a way that hasn't happened since. (Oh, I do "get lost" plenty, but I've become pretty good at getting un-lost too, luckily. But that is another post.) So I signed up for a wild food walk down at Drumlin Farm, which is an Audubon wildlife refuge in Lincoln, Mass.

Affable and bearded, Cohen certainly looks the part of a wild food expert.  Before we got out in the field he told us a little about himself. He works for Mass Fish and Wildlife, but he has been interested in wild edible plants since he was a teenager. He has been teaching about wild edibles for over 30 years and has a recent book out: "Wild Plants I have known...and Eaten."

As the twenty five or so of students settled in, he whetted our appetites with some delicious Autumn Olive fruit rollups he had made. This was really good stuff, not "good stuff considering", so I couldn't wait to find the plant. He also explained a little about foraging safely and with care for the environment. His brief philosophy of mushroom foraging, "avoid the ones with gills and you've eliminated 90 percent of the poisonous ones" is an example of his practical, to the point teaching style. He was happy to stop and examine some mushrooms one of the students brought and used it as an opportunity to teach us about their basic ecology.  We all gathered around while he checked them out (edible, technically, but in the way that a kitchen towel is edible) and even the budding mushroomer wasn't too let down.

Without further ado he led us out to the farm, stopping frequently to point out unassuming trailside plants that turn out to be delicious. Cohen encourages restraint in harvesting wild plants, reminding us to leave enough for it to regrow. That being said, he pointed out a few invasive plants that are edible. Those are no holds barred. For instance Japanese Knotweed, which springs up in eight foot high thickets along highways and trailheads throughout the region, turns out to have delicious young shoots in spring and makes a great rhubarb substitute in pies. The more people eat, the better, as far as he is concerned.

Passing into the organic farm area, Cohen tramped down a defunct melon row, the vines dead and overgrown by weeds. From this unpromising lane of shaggy greenery he pulled a handful of different tender edibles including amaranth,burdock, purslane and mustard, chickweed and thistle. From there we continued into an upland forest where he showed us mulberries, hickory and walnut trees, and the elusive Autumn Olive. As soon as I saw the  beautiful gold speckled red berries I knew I had misidentified this shrub for perhaps fifteen years, thinking it was poisonous. I guess that alone was worth the price of admission.

We continued into a boggy area where he identified some mushrooms for us and answered a few questions. Then our time was up, so we walked back to the parking lot with a new way of looking at the trailside greenery.

 I am starting to realize that this is what I chase in life - always new eyes to see the world. Every time I delve into some unknown field (bartending? really?) I find more meaning in the things I see every day.

More info on Russ Cohen and the walk schedule: http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm

Book Review- Sand: The Never Ending Story, by Michael Welland

If you are at all interested in geology or just into the one-word-title genre (Cod, Salt, Longitude, ...) then you should check out Sand, by Michael Welland. Yes, it is about the stuff on the beach. Welland is a geologist and (yet) has a clear writing style. He deftly mixes the technical details of dune formation with historical and personal anecdotes. In one of my favorite passages he traces the path of a grain of sand from its parent stone to the ocean. Along the way he manages to tell us about history, geography and how sand has affected both.

He has a literary bent and brings in a wealth of scientific and literary references. The book ranges beyond the Earth, with some really fascinating discussion of sand on Mars, Venus, and Titan. There is an extensive bibliography for further reading.

I had a course in geological oceanography back in grad school, but I still think this book is approachable by anyone. Give it a try- you will be amazed at what you learn and how fun it is learning it.

Sand: The Never Ending Story.
Michael Welland
Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2009.

The Acorns are Back!

By now it has become abundantly clear that last year's distressing lack of acorns is not going to be repeated.

If you are not from the Boston area you may not have heard what happened last fall. As the summer came to a close I started to notice that there were no acorns falling in the back yard. Walking in the woods near my house I made an effort to look for them...and nothing! I soon learned that it wasn't just a local phenomenon - people all over the Boston area were noticing the same thing. Various articles and blogs were discussing the unsettling situation. Various forestry types explained that oak trees do go through cycles of acorn production, and last year they just fell into synch.

Sure enough, I am seeing a good crop of them this year. So here's to the acorn - my favorite symbol of potential and hope for the coming year!

Update: Mother Earth News has some good information on gathering and preparing all sorts of wild nuts:http://www.motherearthnews.com/Nature-Community/1988-09-01/A-Fall-Field-Guide-to-Nuts.aspx

The Beetle Invasion

A friend of mine lives in Worcester MA, and at work the other day he was describing how the city was cutting down trees like mad, even on people's private property, in an attempt to halt an outbreak of the Asian Longhorn Beetle.

It sounded like a pretty dire situation, so I asked another friend in the DEP in New York. And yeah, it is pretty dire, but the ALB is just one of a trio of nasties coming to a forest near you*:

Asian Longhorn Beetle: Arrived in the US from China about 20 years ago, likely in some shipping crates. The larvae eat the cambium of many different hardwood trees, including maple, birch, horsechestnut, poplar, willow, elm, ash, and black locust. It has the capacity to devastate the populations of these trees, because it currently has no natural predators in North America.

Worcester is attempting to eradicate the outbreak by cutting down, chipping, and incinerating all infected and nearby trees. I hear that after protests the city has stopped cutting trees on private property but this may allow the infestation to leak out. Outbreaks have been seen in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.
City of Worcester: http://www.ci.worcester.ma.us/cmo/beetles.htm
General Information: http://www.uvm.edu/albeetle/

Emerald Ash Borer: Also attacks hardwood trees, this time Ash. Found in 2002, this native of Asia also likely arrived in wooden packing materials and could wipe out ash populations in North America, killing trees in only a couple of years. Its growth is highly dependent on temperature and is a likely factor in the outbreak. Thanks, global climate change.
http://www.emeraldashborer.info/files/MacFarlaneashpdf.pdf
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/emerald_ash_b/index.shtml




Mountain Pine Beetle: Saved the best for last. This beastie kills mainly lodgepole pine, which is an extremely valuable tree for lumber. In British Columbia, the Ministry of Forests reports that about half of their pine trees have been killed by this pest, as of 2008 that was 14.5 million hectares. The current continuing outbreak is in large part due to climate change; historically the frigid winters there killed of most of the larvae, but the recent stretch of mild winters has allowed the beetle to proliferate. http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/mountain_pine_beetle/



I for one am a bit freaked out. Here I was all worried about the Wooly Adelgids on my one Eastern Hemlock. This phenomenon is something to take note of though - increasing global temperature don't just mean milder winters, it also means the spread of things normally restricted to warmer zones. And if some dying trees don't worry you, I have two words: tropical diseases.

* Images from Wikipedia.

Google Earth gives you the moon.

If you don't have Google Earth by now, what's wrong with you?
This is one of the best free applications on the internet. In a nutshell, GE shows you the earth in all her glory, natural and manmade - with a fun and intuitive interface.















So, why does the picture show a big crater? Because besides the Earth, GE also will show you the stars, Mars, and the Moon. Did I mention this is all free?

Not to be confused with Google Maps, Google Earth is an installed application available for download. The basic version is free, with the option to pay for the Pro version. But the free version is so good I have only rarely been tempted to pay.

I can't begin to cover all the things that GE can do - you will have to be amazed for yourself. Suffice it to say that if it can be related to a location, you can see it in GE. Besides the fantastic aerial views of the ENTIRE PLANET, there are zillions of overlays that you can download, such as real-time traffic and weather. There are overlays showing details of current events like wars and natural disasters. There are even "sightseeing" tours that will bounce you from one beautiful/ancient/weird landmark to the next. (And as for the bouncing...call me immature, but it still thrills me.)

Google has sucked up an astounding amount of data and sprayed it down in such a fun, intuitive format that I frequently find myself browsing the planet, studying an aerial view of a famous landmark, clicking a user-uploaded panoramic photo of the area, to clicking a link to the restaurant I saw in the photo, to ... Anyway it feels a lot more active than watching TV.

And if you are into making your own adventures, you can easily import waypoints and routes from a GPS. Why not make a Revit or Sketchup model of your house and drop it right into the map to see how that new addition would look in the landscape?

Enough jibber-jabber. Go get Google Earth and get lost.
http://earth.google.com/moon/index.html

Reality: Annotated Edition

while I wasn't looking, the whole concept of augmented reality suddenly got real. Not too long ago, having useful data superimposed on your view was something requiring bulky hardware to deliver dubious results. Ultranerds stumbled around MIT campus with headsets and battery packs.

Then GPS got cheap and small, and wireless bandwidth opened up. Google made huge geographical datasets freely available. Then the chocolate inevitably ended up in the peanut butter when smart phones with GPS and compasses arrived. So now your phone knows where it is and which way it's facing, and it can look up the locations of things in that view. It doesn't recognize the Statue of Liberty but it knows it should be right ... there!

So far it looks like only the iPhone 3GS and Google's Android phones will be able to get the chocolate in the peanut butter. However any device with GPS, a magnetometer and web access could do it, theoretically.

Acrossair's application finds the subway stations around you and the distances to them. Hold the phone up and you will see the stations overlaid on the image. They say this is coming as soon as Apple approves it:http://www.acrossair.com/apps_newyorknearestsubway.htm

Layar is an augmented reality application for Android (Google' mobile OS) phones. Here's a demo showing real estate data overlaid on the camera image. http://layar.com/

A Swedish firm with the awesome name The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) wants to take it further. This is using face recognition to put data around peoples' faces: http://www.tat.se/site/showroom/latest_design.html

TAT would pull a bit of second life (remember that?) into first life by adding face recognition. They're calling this a "Concept", so don't expect to see it too soon, but it sounds doable: an iPhone can broadcast its location and ID so your friends can locate you. Set up a separate public profile that anyone can see. Then the chocolate and peanut butter thing happens on your friends' phones, and suddenly your Facebook status is floating over your head.

One last thought: Forget about getting un-lost in the city for now. I can't wait to see what games people make with this!

Indian Pipes on a wet morning.

Here in the Northeast, it has been raining for three weeks. It is supposed to clear up just in time for the 4th of July, but until then it seems like Spring refuses to end.

Coming in out of the rain is supposed to be a sign of intelligence, but if like me you are undeterred, a rainy hike can be a great chance to see the woods in a different way.

Up in the Middlesex Fells reservation, just north of Boston, the wet weather is encouraging lots of decay, and the Indian Pipe plants (Monotropa uniflora,right) are springing up everywhere.

I had known since cub scouts that despite their ghostly white color they are not fungi but true vascular plants lacking chlorophyll, but after doing a little research I find they are even more interesting than that.

Indian Pipes are parasitic plants that use decaying plant matter for their nutrients. But here is where it gets interesting- they can't get the nutrients directly. Instead they tap into the mycelia of a Russula fungus.

Emetic Russulas are common woodland mushrooms with a pale red cap and white flesh. They tend to be found near Beech and Pine trees, because they have a relationship with those trees. They tap into the tree roots and send nutrients to the tree in return for sugars. The Indian Pipe imitates the roots of the tree, allowing it to steal some nutrients from both the tree and the fungus.*

So the next time you see some Indian Pipes near a shady path,remember the unseen network below your feet.

http://ecolibrary.cs.brandeis.edu/display.php?id=Indian_Pipe_parasitic_plant_Massachusetts_DP136

* Keep in mind that a mushroom is only the reproductive part of a fungus. The fungus itself is a much larger underground network of fine tendrils called mycelia.