#because... really... mixing Bug and Plant DNA

[songbirdsia]

[quitealotofsodapop]

MvA assorted headcanons

General:

So many years together has made the core monsters inseperable. If something affects one member, it affects the group.

All. The. Monsters. Are. Family.

It takes Susan a while to understand inside jokes and past incidents because of being the most recent addition.

There are Other anomalous creatures kept in Area 5X, but they are either non-sentient and/or are too dangerous to be kept around the more human-friendly monster group.

Area 5X is so gotdang big because they were expecting a lot more kaijus like Insecto to crop up. Sadly not many have surfaced to justify the space.

There’s a hangar in Area 5X full of wrecked UFOs. Some are spacecraft wreckage while others are stuff like weird meteors (Susan’s is in there), and at least one alien creature that got crystallised upon entering Earth’s atmosphere.

There’s significant difference in staff employed at different points throughout the past 50 years. There are far more women on the Area 5X worksheet than back in the 50s, and the guards are generally more sympathetic towards the monsters. Many modern staff members have been reprimanded or let go for failing to uphold secrecy, or for unnecessary cruelty towards the monsters.

Budget cuts were a legitmate concern up until the Battle of Golden Gate Bridge. The facility was far more barebones and sterile before the government had to formally recognise Area 5X’s importance. There have been a lot of redecorating at the facilty since the fat checks started coming in.

Putting individual characters under read due to length.

Susan:

Enjoys many hobbies considered stereotypically feminine; baking, sewing, cosmetics, etc...

Grandparents and extended family are farmers or are atleast connected to the business. Modesto is the agricultural centre of California after all. Her parents were the first of their generation to go against the mold and seek out white-collar careers.

Studied cosmetology in school and was working at a beauty salon to save up for her and Derek’s wedding.

Is very athletic and grew up doing a number of physical extracurriculars like cheerleading, dodgeball, and roller-derby.

Grew up being teased for being the shortest kid in her class/family. They still tease her for it.

Greatly fears causing collateral damage and/or harm to others through her size.

Has issues with anxiety, worsened only by her new job as “savior of earth”. She wishes for a confidant to tell her worries to.

Married life with Derek was doomed to fail. Susan had a plan in place for what came after the marriage, and focusing 100% on Derek’s career was not it. There’s also the line from Derek’s mother about Susan being “the weatherman’s wife”, implying that she was to be the homemaker and not have a career of her own. It’s possible that Susan was planning to settle down and have kids with Derek, but the lack of control she had in moving to Fresno implied that more was going on.

Is currently “taking a break” from love and dating, despite gaining many new admirers.

Tries her best to return to Modesto to visit her family and friends whenever possible, though work often keeps her away for weeks at a time.

If she retains her height-shifting abilities as in the series; Susan goes through really bad “growing” pains.

Link:

Was frozen in his relative late-teens during a cold snap. Got shifted around until he ended up somewhere in Greenland before being discovered by modern humans. Post-thaw he went a bit wild, swimming frantically back south to try and find his old enviroment.

Was one of many scrappy youngsters in his troop, with a number of adoptive parents. The strongest ruled the troop, and Link was fairly weak in comparision to the leaders. He had gotten into a fight the day of his freezing (over something silly in hindsight) and swam away to sulk. When he didn’t return after the cold snap - the troop accepted that he had likely died out on his own.

Likes to freak out humans by making up weird biology facts about his species and ones he’s fought against - like joking about laying eggs or having his tail dettach and regrow like a lizard. However there’s some things he has to ask about, because he doesn’t have medical knowledge or words to describe something.

A lot of his macho behavior came from imitating the guards who kept watch on him. 1950s violent military alpha males aren't a very good role model for someone who doesnt know what societal norms are yet. Link was a lot more insufferable back in the day but chilled out as he began interacting with other walks of life.

Has a high paternal instinct and immediately becomes softer around kids and smaller animals.

Has body language similar to a cat/alligator. Slaps his tail when angry or in deep thought. And yes; Link purrs/rumbles when happy.

Loves monster movies - especially the ones where the monsters “win”. He cried when he saw “Beauty and the Beast” and then immediately booed loudly when the Beast turned human.

Does Not Trust doctors or scientists due to bad past experiences. Will only go to Dr Cockroach and Monger if he ever gets hurt/ill. Gets stressed fast if he has to be in a waiting room or doctors office.

Link had no idea what gender indentities or orientations were until recently - he did come from a pre-human civilization that really didnt mind/care about the schemantics. It took him some time to wrap his head around it. He identifies himself as bisexual after much thought and many hours alone on the computer.

Don't press him about his body. He's built different from humans and cis people. He will punch anyone who doesnt respect his or anyone elses identity.

Has been in love before. It didn’t end well.

Will occasionally wear clothes, but finds it a challenge to find anything that fits him. Will give any shoes he finds to Dr Cockroach and BOB to eat.

The best driver/pilot out of all the monsters.

Dr Cockroach:

True name is Jaques-Yves Herbert. Prefers to just go by "Dr Cockroach" because he dislikes the association with his birth family.

Picks up human languages very easily, although not as quickly as he can understand animals.

Parents were a mixed scientist couple. His father was an aggressive “Strong British Man” that would beat him son down for not following orders or for not meeting his standards for a man. Dr C turned down both chances to attend his parents funerals.

This man isn’t straight. He probably uses old-fashioned slang when asked about romance such as; “I am Uranian” or “I wear a green carnation”. It took Susan a few times to realise what he meant, as she is used to a more open minded enviroment.

Got the idea of transforming into a cockroach from reading Franz Kafkas “The Metamorphosis” as a child. He sympathized with Gregor’s abusive situation, and began considering the possibilties of how one could survive better as a creature like a cockroach.

Studied in biology and entomology in the Uk before moving to the states to follow engineering. Obtained his degree in Dance as a “side gig” in University.

Has been barred from free access to the coffee maker/machine due to overnighters. Once stayed awake so long that he forgot the letter “R”.

Owned a terrarium of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches throughout college. He mourned each of them when his roommate’s iguana got into the tank.

Was a "beatnik" back in the day and still kinda is. Embraces and encourages modern counterculture as he himself was not given such acceptance in his youth. He has however shamefully eaten his old Lenny Bruce album.

Hasn’t actually aged physically since his transformation. He attributes this to the fact that certain athropods can’t age physically beyond maturity. Link is very jealous.

Has obtained more degrees while in captivity, as Monger allowed him access to research and learning materials. He has however had his allowances revoked for previous escape attempts/doomsday devices.

Does still enjoy human food, but the cockroach instinct of "eat detritus" tends to overrule his eating choices. Can’t cook either.

Ironically a terrible driver. The damages from previous drives has made Monger restrict him from operating even a razor scooter.

BOB:

Pretty much considers himself human. Was created by them, raised by one (Monger), and talks like one. Gets sad when he's reminded that no other humans are blue blobs like him.

Absorbed some dna from the scientists present at his "birth", leading to his eye, speech, and omnivorous diet.

Doesnt actually need to breathe (as he can just absorb oxygen through his mass) but the fact that humans Do means that BOB thinks he has to as well.

Shares some physical characteristics with tomatoes/nightshade plants, as he is technically half tomato. He refuses to eat tomatos for this very reason, considering it cannibalism.

Attracts garden pests looking for a tomato plant. This unwittingly makes BOB a pretty good bug zapper.

Still retains his "mental broadcast" ability from "BOB's Big Break" although at a more subtle level. He tends to parrot the things he accidentally "eavesdropped" on.

Is empathetic, and can tell when others aren't doing ok emotionally. Will flop down on someone who’s really sad to comfort them. No brain, only heart.

Best cook out of the monsters. If he doesn’t forget what he’s making at least.

"Whats a gender? Can I eat it?"

Insectosaurus:

Core body is that of a Japanese Silkmoth, although she ended up being spliced with other animals present on the island during her initial mutation; namely ants and ground squirrels.

Eats over a literal ton of mulberry leaves per day. Also enjoys oranges.

Secretly wishes to be more humanoid.

Was only able to pupate and transform due to physical trauma. It seems that her transformation was like a “power-up” that required her to be in geniune distress for it to activate.

First language is Japanese. She learned it from the intial recovery team, and later developed an understanding of English from years in Area 5X.

Goes into torpor in cold weather. Pretty much impossible to wake her up for missions during Winter, as she needs to “rev up” before becoming mobile.

Still very much Link’s best friend. Still enjoys sports, chicks, and beer.

Monger:

Full name is; Warren Rex Monger.

Is very protective of the monsters and will defend them to the death.

Pretty much raised BOB (as seen when BOB was a baby blob in “Night of the Living Carrots”), and considers him his “freaky gelatinous son”.

Has a reputation of being a “control-freak” due to his aggressive overseeing of the monsters’ containment. This toughness is partly because of incidents that occured without his knowledge. Lets just say some scientists have been wedgied/fired for running experiments on the monsters without Monger’s approval.

Has a very “Ron Swanson” emotional response and view of the world. Crying is acceptable only at funerals and at the Grand Canyon (if he hadn’t lost his tear ducts in the war).

Has been married multiple times. Will not confirm or deny if he is currently seeing anyone.

Invisible Man/TiM:

Legit got out but no one at Area 5X is sure how. He suffered a geniune medical emergency and disappeared after surgery. The other monsters were informed that he died from complications to deter them from getting escape ideas.

Is able to be detected in Infrared light. Dr Cockroach managed to rig up goggles to view TiM in case of injury and to foil pranks.

Was a scientist working on an invisibility potion for the military and used himself as a guinea pig. Hasn’t actually been able to replicate his results since - thinks the effect may have been caused by a genetic abnormality.

Dr Cockroach and him are massive rivals. Both actually met eachother pre-transformation through a CalTech expedition. This makes the pair one of few people that have seen the others human face.

Is 100% naked. Was forced to wear clothing once this was discovered.

A massive prankster and a cynic. Him and Link were a force to be reckoned with.

Has revisted the facility multiple times and has started a number of ghost stories.

Any additions are welcome! I proably have alot more to dump about. Might make one of the alien characters from the series

[a-silent-symphony]

Nightwish’s Floor Jansen: “The way that things are now aren’t the way things are for life”

The gospel according to Nightwish singer Floor Jansen

It’s been eight years since Floor Jansen joined Nightwish, and in that time her already considerable star has only risen further. In 2020, she remains one of the most recognisable women in metal: a supreme talent and fascinating personality who has helped Nightwish into their most successful years ever. An unlikely career path for someone who originally just wanted to be a biologist and hang out with a ton of animals…

I never stood still as a child

“My dad was an ambitious man, so if there was a business opportunity, a better job to get, he would move. Let’s not forget that in those days there were no cellphones; it’s not like you could stay in touch through that, so if you moved you basically would never see [your friends] again. I don’t know what it would be like to grow up in one place and make friends there that you keep for life. I’m married to a man who has had that. Today he had one of his best friends over that he knows from primary school – now we have kids, they have kids of the same age and that kind of stuff. I think that’s romantic to me. But maybe because I moved too much, it was easy for me to emigrate [away from the Netherlands later in life]. I still miss people, but it’s easy for me to adapt to places, and put a value on actual friends that last.”

The only constant is change

“Life is flexible. I wouldn’t want to teach my daughter that the way that things are at the moment are the way things are for life, because it’s not. Life will change constantly, and I think it’s very healthy that it does. Sometimes people need to get out of their comfort zones to keep their energy going, to not fall asleep on the spot. Safety is a very strong thing in our human nature, but from where I’m standing I think it’s a good thing to get out of that comfort zone.”

I wanted to be a biologist

“It was my love for nature. That’s not something that came when I joined Nightwish, I’ve had it since I was a kid. I feel very strongly connected to it, and to the wellbeing of everything around me that lives and breathes, including plants and trees and, of course, animals. I didn’t really understand what a biologist does; I just wanted to work with nature, be a part of it and understand it better.”

The Gathering changed music

“They were life-changing. They came on the radio with Strange Machines from their album Mandylion. They really kickstarted quite a bit [of a movement] in the Netherlands and around there after. [After Forever] happened to start around the same time as Within Temptation. Nightwish were before us but still beginning to reach internationally around the same time. But, for me, the thought that I could sing in a metal band had never occurred to me before The Gathering.”

It wasn’t hard to become a vegetarian

“It was very easy for me to give up eating meat – a longer thought about what’s happening to the animals that need to be mass-produced to feed this human race. It’s not fair to them. I am not against eating other animals, but I don’t like the way we keep them, or the things we have to artificially make in order for them to not have mass disease outbreaks.”

Although hunting is actually cool

“Since I moved to Sweden and I basically live in the woods, I’ve learned a lot about hunting, which is still a very difficult subject for a lot of people, and especially people who are not close to nature. The closer you get to nature, the more part of it you become, and in nature, other animals hunt. In Sweden, as an example, they hunt to preserve the species. It all has to be done with a quick death, no suffering, it’s very important that they don’t suffer. The people that do it have a great love and respect for nature and the animals. And I gladly have a part of that – it turns out I am quite a good shooter! Though I would never actually go into the woods and hunt…”

Having a beetle named after me was unexpected

“That was weird! Ha ha ha! It’s special! That’s another connection back to nature, but yeah, fantastic, a real honour. There is now a tiny little bug [Tmesisternus floorjansenae], just a centimetre long, that has part of my name, just because the biologist loves my music so much. That’s exactly how it went! Ha!”

My daughter probably has metal in her DNA

“But we love music in its diversity, so she’s grown up with all kinds of stuff. Old McDonald Had A Farm is still way more popular than metal for her. You’ve gotta start with the classics!”

And if she wants to be a musician, we’ll be there

“We’re dreading that day because we know the struggles [Floor’s husband is Sabaton drummer Hannes van Dahl]. But if she has a talent for it she just needs to go and do it and believe in herself. Stay behind yourself, even when things are getting hard. It’s nice that mum and dad have some experience in it, but she needs to have her own back if she wants to really make it.”

Being famous is weird

“We moved to a very remote area in Sweden a year and a half ago and we didn’t really tell anybody anything about us. We think it must have been the previous owners who told people of the area who we were, because we thought that we had anonymously snuck in! The truck that helped us move emptied and left, and then this tractor came up to the property. A guy came out and was like, ‘Hey, I’m one of your neighbours – we heard that the Nightwish singer and the drummer from Sabaton just moved in, so I just thought I’d come and say hi and introduce myself!’ So, it was obvious that everybody knows, but maybe that gave us a good start because they’re all very cool people and we get along just fine.”

I was on a Dutch show called Best Voices

“It’s a show about the best singers of the Netherlands, people that have already had a career. People are put together on an island, and we go and play each other’s music to each other. Every singer came with a list of favourite songs, and the others picked one of those that they’ll sing as much as possible in their own style – and we all had very different styles! There was an opera singer who I did Phantom Of The Opera with, there was a pop singer, a singer-songwriter, a partially Dutch and partially Latin American guy who does reggaeton, a rock guy who I actually did know… it was a super-wild mix of people, all coming with different styles of music. It was a challenge for me, but I thought it was a huge opportunity for me to join and give the Dutch people an insight into my world without scaring them away. And that really worked! The way that the Netherlands is perceiving me has changed, and doors have definitely been opened.”

Certain interview questions can annoy me

“What I’m sick and tired of in interviews is when I have to answer a question that has already been partially answered by the person doing the interview. A question that’s asked with, ‘You must be feeling…’ and then comes an assumption. ‘I can really imagine it was difficult to write this album…’ OK, so the question is…? Assuming emotions and assuming things... I’m sick and tired of [interviewers] steering [me] into the direction of the answer..”

I'm not sure why Nightwish connect with so many people

“There must be something in the atmosphere in the music that goes beyond complexity or the genre. There’s something that has been connecting people to the band, and still does. We’re still growing! I do think that the songwriting is really, really good, even when it’s complex. I think people are open-minded to it – just because the radio thinks they need to feed the audience three-minute songs, it doesn’t mean that everybody in the world can’t deal with more. Maybe people find it refreshing when it goes a little bit beyond that. People can naturally feel when it’s good music. But, everything still needs to work. The stars need to be aligned, and then there’s hard work and [us having] great love for what we do.”  

Published in Metal Hammer #336

[ferrisnotbueller]

HIS WAREHOUSE SPACE...

Ferris occupies a room on the top level. It’s not hidden whatsoever, and you’re practically in his territory the moment you step up the stairs. His mattress on the group is always unmade and covered in white sheets and a white duvet. He always has a couple of books, some pens, and, of course, charges on end tangled in his thick covers. He rarely sleeps under the covers, or even in his bed, he can usually be found cat-napping under or on top of his desk, in the dining room downstairs, or on the couch in the farthest corner of his room. He doesn’t keep a bedside table, but he has a few vintage fruit crates lining the walls next to his bed - all of which are filled to the brim with random books he’s picked up. They’re mostly genetic study books and psychology novels, but there’s a few good fictional pieces added into the mix. He’s especially a sucker for Nancy Drew novels and Stephen King books. He has one rug under his bed, which is coated in old cans of Monster Energy Drinks, and old stains. He found it at a Goodwill and thought it had some classic charm; the rug is a braided, brown rug that has some holes in it. Most of the holes are covered from being placed under the bed.

On the wall next to his bed he keeps several different diplomas from his past. His doctorate, his masters, and his bachelors, all lined up in a pretty, straight line. They say his full name, but he could care less. He likes to look at them and imagine the scenarios of what could have been if he hadn’t have chosen Reato. Some nights, when he really can’t fall asleep at all, he’ll stare awake at them for hours.

On top of his crate-bookshelf, Ferris has placed more energy drink cans, and there are a random assortment of notebooks. He keeps a Kikkerland retro alarm clock next to the clutter, and has it set for random times he knows he needs to be awake for. The sound it makes is shrill and overly loud, but since he’s in an open space the echo muffles the sound quite a bit. On the walls around his open space, he has plastered several calendars and information cork-boards to keep track of his ideas and dates. If someone walked into his room, they might think a reclusive, conspiracy-theorist lived there instead of a criminal genius. He also has a small, plastic trash bin in one corner that is rarely changed. The mice and rats like to dig into the empty bags of chips and candy, as well as the useless pieces of paper he has kept.

He has a single wood desk, under his window. It holds the most clutter out of every other area of his room. It’s filled to the brim with notebooks, his laptop and desktop, his pens and highlighters, as well as more makeshift shelves for the remainder of his books. The windowsill is lined with empty coffee cups he was too lazy to take down, and one or two house plants to give it more of a homely feeling.He read somewhere that taking care of plants has a positive correlation to increases in happiness, but so far he hasn’t really been taking care of the plants. He always has something going on with his desk, and if someone was to move a single thing it’d leave Ferris absolutely devastated. Although it looks chaotic and unorganized, he has a method to his madness. One of the desk drawers is a stash for his newest collections of snacks and candy. If you’re looking for something to chew on, Ferris has got quite a few snacks stashed away.

WHERE YOU’LL FIND HIM...

The window next to his bed leads out to the roof of the warehouse, and is almost always open (except during the nights that he actually falls asleep). He has also set up a napping place on the roof. He moved a couple of blankets up there and set up a tent and pillows to sleep in on nights when his room feels too closed in. Sometimes during the day he’ll even move his work up there, so he can have a more productive working space. The roof is his favorite location in the warehouse. Although it’s bare, it’s fairly quiet and it’s got a beautiful view of the rest of Las Vegas. If the view of the inside of the warehouse is trash, the view from the outside is pure gold.

Ferris keeps a couple of his notebooks in his little tent, as well as some more of his snack stash. Any of the snacks he takes up to the roof are left unopened to avoid any kind of bug problem in the tent. He may be uncaring towards the clean condition of the room, but for the roof he’s very diligent about how tidy it is.

His second favorite space is the kitchen, he loves to sit atop the counters and eat his assortment of cereal.

You might catch him in the garage when he has no other place to go. It’s not his favorite spot, but it can be a quiet work place. He’s interested in the several cars stashed inside, and always wonders how Reato got the money to invest in the cars. He chose to store more of his drinks in the mini-fridge located in the corner of the garage. He counts them every night before he goes back up to his room to ensure that not a single one will be stolen without his knowing.

WHERE YOU WON’T FIND HIM...

He tends to stay away from both the main office and the dining room. Both spaces are where he has the hardest time focusing, and where everything feels the most uncomfortable. He is only in either room if there is an important meeting that has to occur. Otherwise, he tries to stray from going into either room longer than to pass through.

He is also rarely in the parking lot or outside of the warehouse. He chooses to spend his time inside his own room or on the roof, mainly. He doesn’t make too many trips into the outside world. It’s just an extra thing to add onto his already never-ending mental to do list.

HIS WAREHOUSE HABITS...

His diet consists of coffee, Monster Energy Drinks, Redbull, Sour Patch Kids, Snickers, frozen pizza, soft pretzels, barbecue chips, dill pickles, and macaroni + cheese.

He leaves his glasses around the warehouse randomly, and probably has to replace them consistently because people always step on them.

The way you can tell if Ferris has been in a room is if there are empty bags/cans left behind his, his glasses, his laptop, or whatever book he is reading. He usually forgets items behind in rooms that he exits.

His nap-times can get pretty hectic and unscheduled, but usually you’ll catch him napping on his tiny couch from 5am-7am, on his rooftop lounge from 12pm-3pm, on his desk from 4:30pm-5pm, and on his bed from 1am-3am.

Will wake up if anyone walks into the room, or even whispers, while he’s sleeping.

He has a jar titled “Trip Fund” that he adds a dollar to every single day (sometimes more). He hopes that it will add up to be enough for the next time he skips out on town.

He does not have any social media, and only keeps a burner phone so he can keep track of his fellow Reato members. He also has an email, but it’s got a highly cryptic username that couldn’t trace back to him.

He rarely gets drunk, but when he does he becomes the next Aristotle.

Wipes off his diplomas every fucking day, bro.

Makes random information boards around the warehouse. There is probably a few Dermot Valentine boards randomly located in the kitchen.

Catch him running random experiments with no relationship to Reato’s goals. He might be in the kitchen extracting strawberry DNA or in the garage trying to find a method for gas saving.

He never cleans up after himself (woops).

He leaves out bowls of cereal everywhere (woops).

He is mostly a recluse, but he usually will talk to anyone who he comes across. He isn’t too reluctant to stop and chat for a minute or two.

[ezatluba]

The northwest corner of Newark Bay is the kind of place comedians have in mind when they mock New Jersey as a cesspool. The grim industrial coast the bay shares with the Passaic River is lined with the hulks of old chemical plants that treated their surroundings like a toilet. The most infamous of these facilities produced nearly a million gallons of Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant whose extensive use during the Vietnam War has caused generations of suffering. The Agent Orange plant discharged unholy amounts of carcinogenic dioxin—so much, in fact, that New Jersey's governor declared a state of emergency in June 1983. Though the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a $1.4 billion cleanup effort, the waters closest to Newark's Ironbound neighborhood remain highly contaminated; there are few worse spots in America to go for a swim.

And yet upper Newark Bay is not devoid of life. Beneath its dull green surface teems a population of Atlantic killifish, a silvery topminnow that's common along the Eastern Seaboard. These fish are virtually indistinguishable from most other members of their species, save for their peculiar ability to thrive in conditions that are lethal to their kin. When killifish plucked from less polluted environments are exposed to dioxin levels like those in the bay, they either fail to reproduce or their offspring die before hatching; their cousins from Newark, by contrast, swim and breed happily in the noxious soup.

Eight years ago, while he was an associate professor at Louisiana State University, an environmental toxicologist named Andrew Whitehead decided to find out what makes Newark's killifish so tough. He and his research group collected sample fish from an inlet near the city's airport and began to deconstruct their genomes, sifting through millions of lines of genetic code in search of tiny quirks that might explain the creatures' immunity to the ravages of dioxin.

In late 2014, two years after having moved to UC Davis, Whitehead zeroed in on the genes linked to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, a protein that regulates an array of cellular functions. When most adult killi­fish encounter dioxin, this receptor's signaling pathway revs to life in the hope of metabolizing the chemical invader. But try as it might, the protein can't break down the insidious substance. Instead of acting as a defense mechanism, the frustrated signaling pathway wreaks havoc during development—causing severe birth defects or death in embryos. “If you inappropriately activate this pathway when your organs are being developed, you're really hosed,” Whitehead says. But that ugly fate never befalls the Newark Bay killifish because their bodies are wise to dioxin's cunning; the genes that control their aryl hydrocarbon receptors, which have slightly different DNA sequences than those found in other killifish, lie dormant when confronted by the toxin.

As he explained in a landmark Science paper in 2016, Whitehead and his colleagues also discovered that Newark Bay's killifish are not alone in using this clever genetic tactic to survive in tainted water. He identified similarly resilient killifish in three other East Coast cities whose estuaries have been befouled by industry: New Bedford, Massachusetts; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Portsmouth, Virginia. Since killifish never roam far from where they're born, these resistant populations must have developed the identical tweaks to their genomes without mixing with one another—or, put more plainly, the far-flung fish all evolved in remarkably similar ways in response to the same environmental pressures. This is compelling evidence in favor of the notion that evolution, that most sublime of nature's engines, is not some chaotic phenomenon but, rather, an orderly one whose outcomes we might be able to predict.

Whitehead's work on killifish is one of the signature triumphs of urban evolution, an emergent discipline devoted to figuring out why certain animals, plants, and microbes survive or even flourish no matter how much we transform their habitats. Humans rarely give much thought to the creatures that flit or crawl or skitter about our apartment blocks and strip malls, in part because we tend to dismiss them as either ordinary or less than fully wild. But we should instead marvel at how these organisms have managed to keep pace with our relentless drive to build and cluster in cities. Rather than wilt away as Homo sapiens have spread forth bearing concrete, bitumen, and steel, a select number of species have developed elegant adaptations to cope with the peculiarities of urban life: more rigid cellular membranes that may ward off heat, digestive systems that can absorb sugary garbage, altered limbs and torsos that enhance agility atop asphalt or in runoff-fattened streams.

The story that the pioneers of urban evolution are piecing together is tinged with darkness.

Whitehead and his colleagues, many of whom are at the dawn of their careers, are now beginning to pinpoint the subtle genetic changes that underlie these novel traits. Their sleuthing promises to solve a conundrum that has vexed biologists for 160 years, and in the process reveal how we might be able to manipulate evolution to make the world's cities—projected to be home to two-thirds of humanity by 2050—resilient enough to endure the catastrophes that are coming their way.

Weary as we are of despairing over the mass extinctions being caused by hyper­development, it's tempting to take comfort in the ability of some animals to shrug off our brutalization of the planet. But the story that the pioneers of urban evolution are piecing together is tinged with darkness.

When Carlen started the doctoral program at Fordham in 2015, other students had already claimed some good animals for study—rats, salamanders, coyotes—but no one had yet staked a claim to a bird. She nabbed pigeons.

Charles Darwin's place in the scientific pantheon is deservedly secure, but he made his share of blunders. One of the gravest was maintaining that the effects of natural selection, the linchpin of evolution, could not be observed in a single human lifetime. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species in 1859. “And then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.”

But soon after Darwin's death in 1882, the first wave of biologists to have grown up on his teachings took note of a curious occurrence in the realm of insects: During the second half of the 19th century, the predominant color of England's peppered moths had steadily shifted from mostly white to almost entirely black. One theory was that the bugs' wings were being tarnished by all the coal soot in the air, a result of the boom in heavy industry from London to Newcastle. But Darwin's disciples came to suspect that natural selection was at play. As England had become more urban, moths who possessed the rare mutation for black pigmentation appeared to enjoy a fitness advantage over their white peers.

It wasn't until the 1950s that Oxford University's Bernard Kettlewell conducted a legendary experiment that demonstrated why the black moths had evolved much faster than Darwin thought possible. Over a three-year period, Kettlewell tracked the fates of hundreds of marked moths that he released in two English forests, one by the pristine southwest coast, the other near the polluted metropolis of Birmingham. In the Birmingham woods—a stand-in for the industry-ravaged landscape of the Victorian era—black moths avoided predation by birds because they blended into the soot-stained trees; the white moths, by contrast, were easy to spot and thus became snacks for sparrows. The opposite occurred in the coastal woods: The black moths stood out when they alighted on the light-colored trees and were gobbled up.

Kettlewell's experiment on “industrial melanism” became a staple of high school biology textbooks because it succinctly illustrates how species can, when subjected to intense environmental pressures, evolve in a matter of years rather than over millennia. But the next few generations of evolutionary biologists were less attracted to hives of human commotion like Birmingham. Researchers raised on episodes of Wild Kingdom and the books of Jane Goodall gravitated toward fieldwork in remote places populated by animals they'd never otherwise encounter. Their mentors encouraged them to go abroad because they knew that faculty hiring committees were wowed by the exotic. The road to a tenure-track job ran through the jungles of the Amazon, not the parking lots of Houston or Columbus, Ohio.

For the first chunk of his career in evolutionary biology, Jason Munshi-South harbored all the standard romantic notions about which projects he should pursue. He studied the mating habits of tree shrews in Borneo and the demographics of elephants in Gabon, while earning his PhD from the University of Maryland and doing a postdoc at the Smithsonian. But in 2007, Munshi-South became an assistant professor at Baruch College in New York City, shortly after which his first child was born—two events that curtailed his globe-trotting. Restless, he looked for ways to scratch his fieldwork itch within range of the subway. His search for convenient subjects led him to study the white-footed mice that have colonized New York's parks.

Munshi-South and his assistants trapped scores of live mice and clipped off bits of their tails to get genetic material. Financial constraints and the state of technology at the time meant Munshi-South couldn't sequence the animals' entire genomes. Instead he used a shortcut called transcriptome analysis, which centers on the messenger RNA molecules that carry DNA's instructions for protein synthesis into cells. Since only the crucial bits of an organism's DNA get written into messenger RNA, researchers can work backward to infer, with impressive precision, the composition of the genes where it originated.

Munshi-South found there was scant gene flow between New York's various white-footed mouse populations—mice from the Bronx showed no signs of having recently mated with mice from Manhattan. Of greater note, however, were the sharp genetic differences between city mice and their country relatives: The city mice had conspicuous alterations in genes linked to metabolism, immune response, and detoxification. (“Linked,” of course, is a word that oversimplifies the relationship: Traits are usually the product of a complex stew of interactions among genes and with the environment.)

As he sorted through the possible reasons for these changes, which included the need to tolerate a certain type of poisonous fungus, Munshi-South came to realize that his side project was destined to become his life's work. He was now enamored with the idea that urban cauldrons of noise, heat, and filth are not only as authentically “natural” as any other habitat but also the perfect venues in which to observe evolution at its fastest and most inventive. A bearded and slightly cherubic man, Munshi-South speaks engagingly about his epiphany despite the notable softness of his voice. “For most organisms, cities are incredibly stressful,” he says. “So you'd expect that the evolutionary responses would have to be pretty strong for them to exist in that environment.”

Scores of evolutionary biologists are now investigating how city-dwelling creatures have adapted to life among buildings, traffic, and discarded Big Macs. These are some of the most intriguing urban evolution studies to have emerged in recent years.

Munshi-South next turned his attention to Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, an especially reviled New York City inhabitant. Though the rodents have been darting around America since colonial times, Munshi-South was stunned by how ­little was known about the genetic reasons for their success. “There was a golden age of rat research in Baltimore in the '40s and '50s, out of Johns Hopkins, which was mostly done in the interest of public health,” he says. “They did things we wouldn't be allowed to do, like they'd go catch 50 rats from one place and dump them in another place and see what happened. And that would basically cause a rat war.” But no one in recent years had spent much time pondering whether rats might be evolving in sync with the cities where they abound.

Not long after moving to Fordham University in the Bronx in 2013, Munshi-South started setting traps in New York's dingiest nooks: subway platforms, storm drains, and the grease-slicked pavement outside pizza joints. (Unlike white-footed mice, brown rats tend to be too vicious to be collected alive.) In just a few years, the genetic tools at his disposal had become exponentially more advanced. It was now possible to sequence the whole genomes of individual rats for a reasonable price, and he could compare his results to a Rattus norvegicus reference genome that had been compiled as part of a federally funded project. Munshi-South and his collaborators found evidence that the genes controlling the olfactory sensors of New York's rats have been dramatically transformed by natural selection. The researchers believe the alterations in the genes' DNA sequences are linked to the rats' ability to navigate New York's subterranean passages, which are bathed in an ever-shifting barrage of smells.

The concept of rats evolving quickly enough to handle whatever humans throw their way has captivated the general public, and Munshi-South has become his field's preeminent evangelist—the scientist likeliest to pop up in a panel discussion to explain how cities are shaking up the genetics of wildlife with astonishing swiftness. But he's only the most visible member of a community of researchers, each focused on an animal usually thought of as mundane.

So when Munshi-South coauthored a 2017 Science review paper entitled “Evolution of Life in Urban Environments,” he was able to list more than 100 recent and ongoing projects involving a range of city-dwelling organisms: moths that shed their species' fatal attraction to artificial lights, finches able to communicate above the din of traffic, swans that possess a genetic variant that makes them less nervous around humans.

When I asked Munshi-South why urban evolution is suddenly hot, I expected him to cite the proliferation of accessible DNA-sequencing technologies—an obvious boon to smaller, more unconventional labs like his that struggle for funding. But his primary explanation was more of a downer: He sees a kind of resignation to a dark environmental future, especially among younger biologists who have no memory of more idealistic days and who see little point in examining any instances of evolution that aren't driven primarily by human activity. “I don't want to call it capitulation,” he says, “but it's kind of reconciling with our changed world.”

Jason Munshi-South, who has studied the adaptations of city rats and mice, has become the preeminent evangelist in the field of urban evolution.

On a pleasantly bright morning last February, Elizabeth Carlen took me to the northern Bronx to catch pigeons. A Californian who's now a doctoral candidate in Munshi-South's lab at Fordham, Carlen has spent the past four years studying the genetics of one of New York's most common birds. It is a line of research that requires her to trap hundreds of pigeons and collect samples of their blood.

Carlen and I camped out by a triangular patch of asphalt along West Kingsbridge Road, across the street from a check-­cashing store and a carnicería. Whenever a flock of pigeons alighted to peck at the stale bread crumbs that elderly locals leave on the pavement, Carlen would fire her ­flashlight-shaped net gun at the throng. A few birds would inevitably become entangled in the nylon net, and Carlen would kneel down to untangle them one by one before drawing a vial's worth of blood from a vein between their toes. Once each needle prick had clotted, she would let the pigeon flap away toward the eaves of an abandoned red-brick armory.

On several occasions, the loud thwump of the net's deployment startled passersby. In one instance a bemused woman pushing a cart filled with groceries came over to ask—with more than a hint of suspicion—what on earth we were doing. Carlen had a disarming reply at the ready: “I'm a scientist and I'm trying to find out how New York pigeons are evolving.” She then invited her inquisitor to hold and release a pigeon who'd already provided a blood sample. An ecstatic grin spread across the woman's face as she cradled the docile bird in her hands; as Carlen would later note, people tend to feel a sort of primal joy when given the rare opportunity to handle wildlife.

As she drove us north on I-87 with a sizable amount of pigeon blood in her trunk, Carlen recounted the roots of her obsession with the oft-disparaged “rat with wings.” Her love for biology dates back to early childhood, when she was enthralled by the brittle stars and hermit crabs she saw in Baja California's tide pools during family camping trips. But she didn't have a clear sense of how to turn her passion into a lifelong career until April 2012, five years after she'd obtained her bachelor's degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was then that she heard Jason Munshi-South discuss his research on the public radio show Science Friday. By the time the episode ended, Carlen had decided that urban evolution was her calling—a way to explore the ingenious ways in which nature refuses to be squelched by human dominance.

Carlen went back to school to pursue a master's in biology, with the express goal of gaining the technological chops necessary to join Munshi-South's lab. When she started the doctoral program at Fordham in 2015, she was required to pick a New York City animal as her specialty. Munshi-South's other students had already nabbed some good ones—the rats, the salamanders, the coyotes who lurk around the rim of Queens. But no one had yet staked a claim to a bird.

A bit of work has been done on the evolutionary adaptations of urban pigeons, but the field was mostly wide open for someone like Carlen. “Basic things, like what a pigeon's range is, how long they live—people probably assume we know all that already, but we don't,” said Carlen, now 35, who was wearing an I STAND WITH REFUGEES T-shirt beneath her coat, along with frayed black pants she doesn't mind getting blotched with droppings. She added that she's even had trouble finding preserved pigeons in the archives of natural history museums, complicating her efforts to compare today's birds to those of decades past.

After stopping in a casino parking lot to harvest blood from a few last pigeons, Carlen and I headed toward Fordham's biological research station, located on a bucolic former estate in the suburban town of Armonk. That is where Carlen sequences the DNA in the blood samples by a employing a technique called ddRAD, which uses a special enzyme to isolate the most revealing portions of an organism's genome. Carlen's priority at the moment is to sketch out how the myriad Columba liviapopulations found between Washington, DC, and Boston are related—essentially 23andMe for the Northeast Corridor's feral pigeons.

Her long-term goal, however, is to divine the birds' recent genetic adaptations. One mystery she's eager to solve is whether urban pigeons have lately evolved the means to process refined sugar without suffering health consequences—a trait that would explain their ability to subsist on diets rich in discarded cookies and doughnuts. (Carlen has already used off-the-shelf blood glucose monitors to determine that, against her expectations, New York pigeons who feast on sweets do not suffer from hyperglycemia.)

“If you can't pick up a dead raccoon for your best friend, what kind of friend are you?”

As we rounded an uphill curve near the field station's entrance, Carlen hit her Subaru's brakes and glanced back through the rear window at an enticing slab of roadkill. “Should I go back and get it for Kristin?” she asked. “I mean, if you can't pick up a dead raccoon for your best friend, what kind of friend are you?”

The friend she had in mind is Kristin Winchell, a 35-year-old postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis and one of urban evolution's foremost stars. She and Carlen, who first met at an academic conference five years ago, rarely see each other in person but text multiple times every day. Along with Lindsay Miles, who studies milkweed insects in Toronto, they also coedit Life in the City, the flagship blog of the urban evolution movement, which highlights discoveries being made by young researchers. And whenever Carlen comes across potentially useful roadkill, she scoops it up and freezes it for Winchell to eventually sequence. (The “trash panda” by the field station turned out to be too smooshed to be of value, so she left it.)

Kristin Winchell studies lizards that are native to Puerto Rico. “People didn't think animals could adapt on human time scales,” she says. “So people are excited that some animals are dealing with what we're doing to them.”

As a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Winchell chose to focus on Anolis cristatellus, a lizard species native to Puerto Rico. She collected lizards in both unspoiled forests and from the densely populated neighborhoods of San Juan, Arecibo, and Mayagüez. She quickly noticed that every city lizard had significantly longer limbs and larger toe pads than their forest-dwelling counterparts—morphological differences that, unlike the majority of urban adaptations, can be seen with the naked eye.

To test how these differences affect locomotion, Winchell built a series of straight, 1.5-meter racetracks. The tracks were made from common Puerto Rican building materials such as painted concrete and aluminum sheeting. She then unleashed the lizards on these surfaces, and the city natives beat the country bumpkins without fail. The morphological changes had clearly made the city lizards consistently faster sprinters—a crucial fitness edge in urban environments, where the reptiles are vulnerable to feral cats and heat while skittering across wide-open expanses.

The lizard races may have been clever, but they didn't prove that the city lizards had actually evolved. Before even running the races, Winchell developed a way to show that the changes had a genetic component and were therefore heritable. Adaptations can often be the result of plasticity—the capacity of individual animals to change in response to stimuli during their lifetimes, yet remain unaltered at the genetic level. (Think of bodybuilders who manage to develop improbable physiques by subjecting their muscles to stress; their offspring do not inherit that appearance.)

Some urban evolution researchers fear that, in their rush to trumpet exciting results, fellow scientists aren't differentiating between plasticity and natural selection. “To only look at traits but not do it experimentally doesn't give you the opportunity to understand whether that trait is genetically based,” says Max Lambert, a postdoc jointly at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, who is studying how red-legged frogs are adapting to life in polluted stormwater ponds. “And overselling the field as being all urban evolution does a disservice to getting the public to understand what evolution is.”

Mindful of the distinction between evolution and plasticity, Winchell conducted what is known as a common garden experiment. She collected adult lizards from Puerto Rico, bred them in her Boston lab, and then took eggs from both city and county lizards and hatched them in an incubator. Once the babies hatched, she distributed them to isolated cages in which the conditions were identical: Each contained a single turtle vine and a wooden rod measuring three-quarters of an inch in diameter, for example, and each was bathed in 12 hours of UV light per day. After a year of raising the lizards on live crickets dusted with vitamins, Winchell examined their legs and toes. Her measurements and observations, which she published in a 2016 paper in the journal Evolution, confirmed that the urban lizards were true products of rapid evolution.

Winchell, who intends to investigate the evolution of squirrels and raccoons in St. Louis, Boston, and New York, understands that her work might provide a rare source of hope for those anguished by depressing environmental news. “People didn't think animals could adapt on human time scales,” she says. “So people are excited that some animals are dealing with what we're doing to them.” Those survivors, though relatively few in number, possess genes that have much to tell us about how to prepare for our hostile future.

In 2016 Andrew Whitehead coauthored a seminal paper on the rapid adaptation of killifish in Newark Bay.

As the severity of the climate crisis becomes more apparent with each record-­breaking heat wave or melting slab of Arctic ice, humankind is coming to terms with the fact that much of the damage we've wrought is irreversible. That means making peace with the permanent disappearance of a fair portion of the animal kingdom: According to a May report from the United Nations, at least 1 million species are in imminent danger of extinction, including 40 percent of amphibians and a third of marine mammals. Even if all nations were to magically cooperate and take unprecedented steps to protect bio­diversity, it would be too late for thousands of species.

Like so many of their scientific peers, urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help us make this new environmental reality a bit less grim. On the surface, at least, their inquiries can seem largely aimed at addressing theoretical matters—notably the issue of whether the evolution of complex organisms is a replicable phenomenon, like any ordinary chemical reaction. Cities provide an accidental global network of ad hoc laboratories to test this question: Office towers the world over are fabricated from the same glass panels and steel beams, night skies are illuminated by the same artificial lights, auditory landscapes thrum with the noise of the same cars, food waste comes from the same KFCs and Subways.

This urban sameness is allowing researchers to determine whether isolated populations of the same species develop similar adaptations when placed in parallel environments. “What cities offer us is this amazingly large-scale, worldwide experiment in evolution, where you've got thousands of life-forms that are experiencing the same factors,” says Marc Johnson, who heads an evolutionary ecology lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Laypeople can be forgiven for not instinctively sharing that enthusiasm, however: At first glance, settling the decades-long debate over evolution's replicability doesn't appear likely to make our post-climate-change lives any less hellish.

But in the quest to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, urban evolution researchers are also revealing the fundamental genetic attributes that make some species adept at adjusting to urban life—intelligence that could give us the power to forecast evolution's winners and losers in a world that's increasingly hot and crammed with people. When he concluded that killifish in four US cities had developed the same form of toxin resistance, for example, Andrew Whitehead ascribed the species' evolutionary success to its high degree of genetic diversity—that is, the killifish genome naturally contains an abundance of genetic information that isn't usually expressed. So the key to desensitizing the aryl hydrocarbon receptor was probably already present inside killifish DNA, and natural selection simply brought it to the fore.

“When the environment changes very rapidly, and changes in a way that poses fitness challenges, then species that are going to be able to adaptively respond to that are ones that already have the necessary genetic diversity in hand,” Whitehead says. “The environment is changing right now. You can't wait for migrants. You can't wait for new mutations.”

Urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help make the reality of a ravaged environment less grim.

Perhaps the greatest asset any creature can have hidden in its genome, of course, is the capacity to withstand heat. With global temperatures set to rise by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, the species likeliest to survive will be those that develop traits to guard against the broil. Today's cities, which are typically 2 to 5 degrees warmer than their surroundings, offer a sneak preview of how evolution will reshape wildlife on a sweltering planet.

The humble acorn ant is among the city-loving harbingers of the genetic churn that lies ahead. Two researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Sarah Diamond and Ryan Martin, have found that acorn ants they collected in both Cleveland and Knoxville, Tennessee, are able to thrive and reproduce in much warmer conditions than those from rural habitats. They hypothesize that natural selection may have favored urban ants whose genes manufacture more robust heat-shock proteins. If they can sort out the genetic markers linked to that suddenly useful trait, we may be able to tell which other species have the potential to adapt when the mercury rises and which are in danger of roasting into extinction.

Diamond hopes that evolutionary prediction will lead to smarter conservation choices. “If we know which taxa are most vulnerable to urbanization,” she says, “then we can do something about it before biodiversity might be adversely impacted.” That could involve simple things, such as building strategically situated green spaces within cities. In extreme cases, though, our only option for preserving some species may be to uproot and transport entire populations to distant lands.

There is an intriguing flip side to the idea that urban evolution research can be used to rescue species that lack the capacity to flourish in megacities: If we can identify which animals are genetically primed to adapt well to living amid glass and steel, we might be able to use that knowledge to engineer a more hospitable world for ourselves. That's because certain species, once tweaked in clever ways, have the potential to help heal the environment.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to

Climate Change

Take oysters, whose feeding process involves filtering harmful bacteria and contaminants out of up to 50 gallons of water per day. The gelatinous mollusks were once abundant in America's urban rivers and bays, but they were largely gobbled up by shellfish lovers decades ago. By the time anyone realized it might be environmentally wise to have massive oyster beds in places like New York, it was too late for the populations to be easily revived: Underwater landscapes had been ruined by decades of dredging and dumping, as well as saturated in anthropogenic pollutants that cause fatal oyster diseases.

One solution is to toughen up oysters by tinkering with their DNA. A blunt method of doing so would be to use Crispr, the gene-­editing technology that promises to give us the power to add, delete, or scramble an animal's nucleotides at will. But such an approach remains in the realm of the hypothetical for now, and it's possible the traits we desire in our oysters—disease resistance and faster breeding cycles, for example—are too complex to be created through simple snips and splices.

Fortunately there's a more nuanced option at our immediate disposal, one that makes use of the genetic insight now being gathered by urban evolution researchers. If we can peer deep into genomes and identify the species most likely to develop the specific traits we crave, we can place those animals in environments where natural selection will do the dirty work of shaping them into long-term survivors.

“Like, we could select for oysters that are most effective at growing huge beds and filtering water and protecting us from storm surges,” Jason Munshi-South says. “We want to look for these urban-adapted genotypes and see if we can harness them to clean air and cool things down, provide some service.”

Certain urban design choices can help us nudge evolution in whatever directions we choose. It is in our best interest, for example, to encourage the proliferation of the frogs that have adapted to living in man-made ponds where both storm runoff and toxic chemicals collect. These amphibians prey on mosquitoes and other insects that can carry disease, a threat likely to increase as the world heats up. So it would be smart to establish connections between ponds where the pollution-resistant frogs are abundant and those they've yet to colonize—say, by digging narrow tunnels beneath roadways. Bats are also desirable in cities for their pest-control talents; can we encourage them to adapt to urban areas by favoring particular types of artificial light, or by making sure the sonic environment won't interfere with the way they hunt?

Granted, a certain amount of hubris is required to believe we'll soon master the wondrous mechanism that turned lone cells into whales and giraffes in a mere few billion years. But as evidenced by the terrible environmental bind we've gotten ourselves into, hubris is what Homo sapiens do best.

[rearadmiralanarchy]

All right fellas... Time for some SCIENCE

I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile and have finally decided to sit down and (likely badly) explain how that rocky alcohol from chapter 4 of the Firefly AU could work.

Now, bear with me because this will get long, but also keep in mind that brewing science, microbiology, ecology, climate science, chemistry, and physics are all not my field of expertise (hell I don’t even have a field of expertise, I’m just a humble lab technician with a biology degree) but I will do my best here.

Now then let’s get started with the basics.

Anaerobic Respiration through Ethanol Fermentation.

Fermentation reactions are used for making everything from biofuel, alcohol, and cheese, and are generally the less preferred pathway for making energy. They are typically defined as an ox/redox reaction that results in energy and a byproduct from breaking down sugars using enzymes. The one I’ll be looking at is one that produces ethanol specifically, and goes a little something like this:

C6H12O6 (sugar) --> 2C2H5OH (two ethanol) + 2CO2 (two carbon dioxide)

Now, compared to other energy producing cycles, this one sucks, and is only really used when other cycles are unavailable but sugars (glucose is preferred, but xylose, sucrose, cellulose, lipids, and starch all work too) are abundant. The byproducts of this reaction (the ethanol and carbon dioxide) are actually often toxic to whatever is using this process... which is why we use stills, centrifuges, genetic engineering, and bioreactors when we are trying to take advantage of the cycle.

Most organisms that undergo Ethanol Fermentation are microorganisms (yeasts and bacteria) but some genetically modified plants can undergo the process (and give us biofuel) and so can some fish (because reasons). For alcoholic beverage production, both yeast and bacteria are often used and each have their pros and cons.

The basic necessities for delicious alcohol production are an abundance of simple sugars (or at least an enzymatic way to break complex carbohydrates down), a good environment, and some specialized genes. Which means it’s time for some world building to create the best bioreactor.

Now, according to the description of the planet in chapter 4, most of the oxygen was found in deep valleys and ravines lining the planets surface with a toxic, unbreathable atmosphere above. The microorganisms responsible for fermentation lived underground and the drinkable alcohol came up from natural springs, and had a metallic and almost earthy taste. This could be possible if the atmosphere was made up of a mixture of air (oxygen and nitrogen), and let’s say methane, with some carbon dioxide, most of which would need to be in the cave systems (to keep it anaerobic). The atmosphere would more than likely have some extra stuff in very low concentrations, so let’s focus on these for now.

Based on density of gases, methane is less dense than air (let’s base the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen on our own planet just to make the planet mostly inhabitable) and would thus tend to be a little bit higher in this hypothetical planet’s atmosphere. If we say these planetary wide ravines and valleys are super deep and this planets atmosphere is a smaller size than ours, this would give us our toxic (at higher concentrations or where it displaces too much oxygen) and unbreathable atmosphere (where you would also not want to light a match). Arguably that might make landing a spacecraft a bit difficult since you’d have to be wary of accidentally exploding, but I did say it would be hard to get this liquor and exploding certainly makes things difficult.

Now that our atmosphere is vaguely established, the next step is sugar (which is always my favorite step). Sugar, specifically glucose makes life go around. Literally. Living things love breaking down sugar (since, you know, it is fuel), but they also love making sugar and use it for all sorts of things (at least they do on Earth). So let’s assume that what we got here is good enough for this hypothetical planet and assume that life there is also a series of proteins, DNA, carbohydrates, and lipids in various arrangements.

“Life finds a way” isn’t just a pretty phrase. It is highly accurate, and so it’d be no surprise to find a thriving ecosystem in say- an underground cave system. We have plenty of models here on Earth to choose from as well- but our main focus is finding stuff that can be broken down into sweet, sweet sugar.

Now on Earth, most of what we use for ethanol production is plant mass due to the high concentration of cellulose, maltose,and sucrose which are all found in plants. Now, finding a plant in a cave is... well kind of weird. Plants typically rely on photosynthesis for their sugar production, utilizing various pigments to convert sunlight and CO2 into glucose and O2- however life always finds a way.

And that is unfortunately often found through the form of parasitism.

It’s hard to imagine a plant being a parasite but we are, in fact, about to celebrate a holiday in which one is very prominently displayed so...(hooray for mistletoe). Parasitic plants tend to develop ways in order to feed off other plants, usually by siphoning nutrients straight from the roots of their victims. If there are plants able to thrive in the valleys of the planet, parasitic plants might be able to leech off their roots. It might be tough to get through all the stone between surface and cave, but there is also another way.

Decomposers and detritivores are often overlooked, but play a truly important role in breaking down and recycling organic matter. Often the role falls to things like fungi, bacteria, larvae, and worms, but there are some plants (such as some orchids) that fall (albeit loosely) into this category. The term is “myco-heterotrophy”, in which there is a plant+ fungus relationship that is not always mutually beneficial. Overall it’s a pretty cool set-up, but I won’t go into too many details because this would get 10x longer.

Between saprophytic plants and parasitism, plants have found ways to thrive without sunlight, and if we fill these cave systems with consumers (such as bugs and fish), saprophytes all vying for detritivore supremacy (yay poop-eating), decomposers like bacteria and yeast all hard at work cleaning up the aftermath... well that would vaguely take care of our food sources.

These microorganisms will, of course, need the appropriate genes to be able to break down less simple sugars (starch, lipids, cellulose) as well as ones that will let them turn that sugar into ethanol. Arguably this is the easiest part, as such genes are pretty common. What is a bit more tricky is finding genes that allow for tolerance. Alcohol tends to have a low pH, making things a bit more acidic, it also can act as it’s own inhibitor as well as being toxic in high concentrations. Inhibitors are things that can cause a process to stop- which is why having a high tolerance for both acidic environments and high concentrations of alcohol would be key.

Now having a steady flow of diluent (a solution that dilutes) would help with the accumulation of too much alcohol, which takes us finally to the good stuff. Alcohol is typically mostly water by volume (beer is a good 95% water), so a spring that is actually water (or in this planet’s case, fancy mineral water) washing that alcohol away into a spring would work just fine to keep concentrations from being too high.

Now, depending on how mobile or immobile the fermenting microorganisms are can affect the actual alcohol taste and production. This can take the form of natural aggregates (clumps) formed through flocculation (an actual brewers term, wow!) in which all the microorganisms sort of bunch up and then fall out of solution and become a sediment at the bottom of wherever they are. The second form is through something like a sponge, where bacteria or yeast can get trapped and the solution can still move through. The third form is just free-floating microorganisms.

If the microorganisms clump together, not all of the sugar will be converted into alcohol, but it will be less dry and strong as if they are all suspended. If the microorganisms are stuck in a bioreactor, they can produce way more alcohol. No matter which of the three, the end result would still probably be a very fancy mix of alcohol, mineral water (due to erosion and to fulfill the taste requirements in the chapter), and given the production of CO2, carbonic acid (carbonation).

Long story short, cave crawlies and weird stuff got broken down in a cave full of mostly CO2 and very fancy mineral water and turned into ethanol, where it sprung from the surface of a mostly inhospitable and slightly flammable planet in bubbly springs and then some truly adventurous people would try it and decide it was good enough to drink. Some time later, Guido Mista would try some and go, “yeah this is weird but not too bad,” and buy a bottle for the road.

Here are some very good videos on the basics of the cellular processes mentioned above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP21LH3T9yQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6mRPgvAEOc

Some other sources I used

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/ethanol-fermentation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/fermentation

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4001

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-8137.1994.tb04272.x

Hope you enjoyed my probably improbable science!

[thecoroutfitters]

If I were told that I could only grow one vegetable (err…technically fruit, but that’s irrelevant) in my garden, I would pick tomatoes. Why? Because they’re delicious, nutritious, easy to grow anywhere, and you can use them in so many ways that you’d likely never get sick of them. You almost have to grow tomatoes for survival if you want your garden to be complete.

Just a single cup of tomatoes provides about half of your RDA of Vitamin C (move over orange juice), 25% of your RDA of Vitamin A, some Vitamin K just for kicks, and minerals including iron, potassium, folic acid, Lycopene and calcium. Plus, tomatoes have been linked to cancer prevention. Not too shabby for a little red, yellow, green, purple, orange, black, or pink fruit/vegetable, is it? Oh and did I mention that they come in an array of colors?

But which ones should you grow? How long do they take? Do they have particular needs? How much space do you need? There’s definitely a bit more to growing quality tomatoes than just grabbing a pack of seeds at the dollar store, but throughout the following paragraphs, you’re going to learn enough to get you started.

Different Types of Tomatoes

Many people grow several different varieties of tomatoes because there are so many uses for them. Just like anything else, most tomatoes are better for one purpose than another. For instance, if you want to grow tomatoes for juice and for eating raw, you’ll likely want two different types of tomatoes.

Of course, there are definitely good all-around tomatoes, but variety is most certainly to spice of life. And since there’s very little difference in planting and growing, why not grow different ones best suited to your individual needs?

Here are some of the reasons you may want to grow tomatoes:

Slicing, or eating tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes for salads

Plum tomatoes for eating or cooking

Juice tomatoes

Sauce tomatoes

Whole canned tomatoes

Tomatoes for chutneys.

Now, think about it. If you want to slice a nice, meaty tomato to put on your burger, you want plenty of “meat,” right? But if you want to can whole tomatoes, you’ll want something a bit smaller, and with a different consistency. And of course, if you want a little tomato for a salad, you need yet another type.

That’s the beauty of tomatoes; there are hundreds of options. All you have to do is find the ones you like best!

Learn from our ancestors the old lessons of growing and preserving your own food for harsh times. 

Types of Seeds

There are four main types of seeds out there: GMO, hybrid, heirloom, and open pollination.

GMO

These seeds have been genetically modified at the DNA level in a lab. They’re meant to make the seed better in some form or another. However, because the plant has been altered at the genetic level, you may find it difficult to get the next generation of seeds to grow, or to produce tomatoes that are the same as the ones in the first generation.

Hybrid

These are often mistaken for GMO, but they’re vastly different. They’re a naturally-occurring plant that occurs when one variety pollinates with another. Think of the hybrid as a family – a mother and dad get married and have a child that shares their traits – hopefully the best of each parent.

Hybrids have no problem growing but may not be consistent from one generation of seeds to another. First generation plants and fruit tend to be more consistent in size and shape and are often more disease resistant than heirlooms, but you don’t know what you’re going to get next year.

Open-Pollinated

These plants are the result of plants that are grown close together pollinating each other in a natural manner. You’ll have some genetic variability because of this, and when the seed is saved, those traits are passed onto the next generation. Open-pollination tomatoes are often regionally unique and have unusual shapes, colors and flavors.

These are the seeds that most farmers count on, because they’re reliable. You can save the seeds with a high degree of confidence that they’ll grow next year.

Heirlooms

The queen of seeds. Heirloom tomatoes come from seeds that have been carefully preserved for generations – usually 50 years or more. They’re carefully tended so that the traits are consistent from one generation to another. The one trait that heirlooms have is that the fruit can vary greatly in size and shape even on the same plant. That’s not always the case, and it’s not really a bad thing – just something to make note of when you’re growing them.

Heirlooms grow consistently from one year to the next, so you can save your seeds and have the same exact plant next year.

So What Seeds are Best?

Many people grow hybrids and love them; for that matter, I have too. But if I’m saving seeds, it’s the ones from my hybrids and open-pollinated ones because I know that they’ll grow and I know what I’ll get. 

Growing Conditions

This is yet another trait that I love about tomatoes – no matter where you live, there’s a variety that will grow for you. Well, almost. If you live in an area that has no warm weather to speak of, or an extremely short (less than 50 day) growing cycle, your choices are limited unless you want to grow them inside, or in a greenhouse.

Altitude affects every single aspect of growing – temperature, soil conditions, precipitation, and humidity. In high-altitude climates, you often have short growing seasons, soil that’s either rocky and alkaline or shaded and acidic, too much rain, not enough rain, and a ton of wildlife that’s just waiting for you to grow them some delicious food.

But don’t despair, you can grow great tomatoes just about anywhere you want as long as you’re willing to put in the effort.

What do Tomatoes Need to Grow?

I read a story about a couple who invested all of their summer into a tomato crop only to yield a single fruit. They’d gone out of town one weekend and forgotten to tell their friends to water them, and that’s what did it.

Now of course, that’s a tall tale, but it’s not far off. Tomatoes need a consistent amount of water, especially when the fruit is ripening. But if you water them too much during this period, they’ll be washed out and flavorless.

So if your tomato could pick its ideal situation (and it can because if you don’t listen, it won’t grow) what would it be? There are some variances in their needs, such as length of growing seasons, but in general, the necessary components to successfully growing tomatoes are:

Temperature – tomatoes need an average of 3-4 months or warm, fairly dry weather to grow and produce well. In order to “set” fruit – a gardening term that means that your plant will produce fruit after flowering and pollination. Generally, they need nighttime temperatures of 55-75 degrees F for this to happen. They won’t develop the proper color if night time temps are above 85, and most will quit growing if nighttime temps are over 95 degrees. Now, there are tomatoes that thrive in hot weather, so if this is your situation, do some research and find them. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

Sunlight – Your plants need at least 6 and preferably 8 hours of sunshine per day. If you live somewhere temperate, 8 is great. If you live in the sweltering south, then 6 with a nice shady afternoon will be appreciated.

Consistent Watering – This part is SUPER important. You want your soil to be moist but not wet. Too much will kill the plant, too little will stop the fruit from growing, or will give it a poor texture and flavor if it does grow.

Proper, regular feeding – Tomatoes like nitrogen in the soil, so prepare the soil with ripe compost and a scoop of aged manure in the bottom of the hole when you plant it. Another trick is to add some Epsom salt to the soil monthly.

You can do this via just sprinkling a couple teaspoons around the plant, or by mixing a couple of tablespoons in a gallon of water and watering your plants with it. Be careful though, because too much nitrogen will give you a beautiful plant but will delay ripening. Add nitrogen when the top leaves turn yellow and the stem turns purple.

Loose soil that drains well – honestly, they prefer this but will grow in nearly any type of soil as long as you provide the proper nutrients. If you have plants that harvest early, sandy loamy soil is best. Plants that bear fruit late like heavier loamy clay. They also like slightly acidic soil with a pH somewhere between 6 and 7.

Take Care of the Roots and Leaves – tomatoes are a good plant to start inside because if you live in most zones, you want your plants to be 8-10 weeks old when you set them out 2 weeks or so after the last frost. It’s important that you wait this long because if you get an “oops” freeze, your plants are done.

You also need to protect them from wind that can break them and try to keep the vines off of the ground to help protect them from mold and bugs. Bugs love tomatoes, so be proactive in your insect prevention and check the leaves, top and underside, regularly.

Planting Your Tomatoes

Ok, not that we have that set aside, let’s talk about how to grow your plants. This is the exciting part – well, one of them anyway!

It’s best to prep your soil a week or two in advance by turning in some aged manure and compost. A bit of Epsom salt may help too, if your soil is low in nitrogen. Rest easy – though salt will kill your soil, Epsom salt isn’t actually sodium – it’s actually magnesium and sulfur. The magnesium helps your plant absorb nitrogen.

Some people just dig the hole for the plant and plop a trowel full of compost/manure in the bottom. This may be OK, but make sure that both are well-aged so that you don’t burn up your plants. I’d recommend mixing it into the soil.

If you started your plants from seeds, they should be at least 8 weeks old now, and you should harden them off for a week or so before you plan to plant them out doors. This just means that you’ll start putting them out for a couple of hours per day, protecting them at first from the sun and wind, then gradually increasing their time spent outside so that it’s not such a shock when you actually transplant them.

Now, let’s plant. You can plant them in your garden, or tomatoes make excellent container plants. 5-gallon buckets work great.

Dig a hole with your trowel about 6-8 inches deep. Remember that your soil should be loose. Pull off the bottom few leaves  of the plant, then put it in the ground so that the root ball is buried and the remaining leaves are above the surface of the ground.

Plant them about 2 feet apart.

Water well to help reduce shock to its roots.

Stake or cage immediately. This doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but trust me – in a few weeks when they’re growing like gangbusters, you won’t find it nearly so easy as you do right now.

Water your plants well for the first few days to help prevent shock and help it to acclimate. Water consistently throughout the season so that your soil stays at about the same saturation. In some growing conditions, you may be able to get away with watering once a week, but 2 or 3 times is better. They’ll need about 2 inches per week.

Just a tip here – using homemade mulch is a great idea because it helps hold moisture in AND it helps fertilize at the same time. You can put the mulch down when you plant or you can wait a few weeks to do it. Don’t forget about liquid manure compost, either.

Keeping a steady fertilization schedule is good, too, Follow the tips above about that.

When your plants begin to vine and you get them staked, it’s a good idea to pinch off sucker leaves – those leaves that don’t lead to more vine but only exist to suck the moisture from your plant.

Wait for your bumper crop of tomatoes to appear!

Video first seen on Rogers Gardens. 

Preservation Methods

Now comes the fun part. The best way that I like to preserve my tomatoes is in between two slices of bread – oh wait, it doesn’t last long like that! Seriously though, there are a number of ways that you can preserve your tomatoes. Each way ends up using a canning method, but there are many different ways that you can prepare them for preservation including sun-drying and adding to olive oil, or dehydrating.

Juicing and Sauce

I can’t even tell you how many tomatoes I’ve mashed through a sieve with a wooden  pestle to make juice! All you need to do is cut your tomatoes into quarters and toss them into a saucepan. Bring them to a boil for 5 minutes to soften them up and get the skins all loose. The juice will start separating out.

After they’ve simmered for that five minutes, turn off the heat and pour some of them over into your sieve or food mill (which is over a pot or bowl, of course) to separate the juice from the skins and seeds. Mash them through and pour the juice back into a pan and bring to boiling again for another 5 minutes, then can.

You should add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint just to boost the acidity enough to preserve it. I also add in a teaspoon of salt per quart (1/2 tsp. per pint).

Water bath can as usual or 35 minute for pints and 40 minutes for quarts. If you’re pressure canning, it’s 15 minutes for pints and 20 for quarts.

Note that your juice may “clarify”, or separate so that the bottom is dark red with the tomato pulp in it and the top is almost clear. This is perfectly normal – just shake it up before you use it.

If you want to make sauce instead of juice, it’s simply a matter of cooking it longer so that the water evaporates and the juice thickens. You can make plain tomato sauce if you want, but this is a great time to jazz it up by adding seasonings such as garlic, oregano, rosemary, etc. Think spaghetti, pizza, taco sauce, etc.

Whole, Crushed or Diced

Blanch your tomatoes for just a couple of seconds – that is, dip them in boiling water for 10 seconds then toss them into an ice bath. An old Italian guy (because nobody knew more about tomatoes than this guy) taught me that if you slice a small ‘x’ somewhere on the bottom of the tomato, it makes it easier to peel. The skin will fall right off and you can proceed to the next step.

Once you get the skins off, cut away any bad parts or green sections. If you’re canning them whole, stuff them into the jars. If you’re halving, quartering, dicing, or crushing them first, do it now. And add them to the jars and top with water so that you leave 1/2 inch headroom, at least. Add lemon juice and salt, seal, and can.

Paste

The process of making tomato paste is similar to making the juice except you cook it WAY down into a super thick sauce, then add olive oil and salt and bake it in a 200-degree oven, spread evenly in  pan, until it’s the thickness of tomato paste.

Chutney, Salsa, Etc.

This is possibly the best part! Make your favorite salsas and chutneys with tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, and other spices and can them up so that you have some of this deliciousness year round!

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into growing tomatoes, but there are so many different ways that you can use them that it barely qualifies as work. It’s like growing an entire winter’s worth of possibilities all with just a few plants.

Study what kind of tomatoes you want to grow and get started! What are some of your favorite tomatoes? Do you have a recipe or an idea you’d like to share?

Discover how our forefathers produced their own food during harsh times! Click the banner below for more!

This article has been written by Theresa Crouse for Survivopedia. 

References:

http://leitesculinaria.com/87323/recipes-homemade-tomato-paste-conserva-di-pomodori.html

from Survivopedia Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[sk-salazar]

Could White Diamond be some kind of goddess or mythical mother?

So, at first, I theorized that White Diamond could've been a fusion. Reasons why that theory works: -She is never mentioned when Blue and Yellow are talking. And apparently, Gems don't talk about fusions unless they need to use them. (With the exception being Garnet, of course.) -Pink (a color related to red), Yellow and Blue are (basically) primary colors. Mixing them in different combinations can create all the other colors of the rainbow. And all the colors of the rainbow come from refracted white light. (And what are Gems, if not beings of light?) However... Reasons why that theory does NOT work: -There is only one Gem and it's not placed anywhere that could indicate a fusion. Unless fusion works differently between diamonds, that's one of the biggest factors. -The current Great Diamond Authority insignia excludes Pink Diamond, since she is a defunct leader. So why wouldn't they also exclude a defunct fusion? Without Pink, Blue and Yellow could only fuse to create a Green Diamond. -I assumed that the White Diamond Moon Base mural contained all the diamonds' planets, including Homeworld. But then I looked at her mural to count her planets and moons. When matched up with the other diamonds' conquests, it's not quite right. There are too many moons and none of Yellow Diamond's solar systems. Then it dawned on me that all this evidence could point to something different. White Diamond could be some kind of goddess or just a great, powerful creatrix who originally created her diamond "daughters" out of love (because NOW we know that the diamonds actually have feelings, apparently) and created Gems to serve and glorify them. (If you'll allow me to use Christianity as an example throughout this post, I'll explain the ways in which White Diamond MIGHT be a goddess.) Think of it as White Diamond being God, the diamonds being humans (like Adam, Eve and Lilith) and other Gems and aliens from conquered planets being nothing more than animals and plants, made to serve the prime creation. Maybe Yellow and Blue don't talk about White together because it's been eons since they've last seen her. (I'll come back to that later.) Maybe her power and understanding goes beyond death, rendering her reaction to Pink's death somewhat irrelevant. In Christianity, we call God our Father, because we believe He authored all of our creation. BUT, unless they're highly zealous, you don't see Christians using God's name as a household name. When grandma dies, we don't talk about how God is shaken up with her death. We don't talk about how God dealt with her death. This is because we know that her end has brought about her return to Him. Perhaps Gems (or at least the diamonds) believe that the light that composed their being (a soul) escapes its materialistic shell (the gem itself) and returns to the creatrix in some cosmic life cycle. But if that's the case, why leave her on the Great Diamond authority insignia? Just because God isn't a household name, doesn't mean that predominantly Christian nations keep Him out of their governmental affairs altogether. You still see His praises and Judeo-Christian imagery on currency and government buildings. We don't really think about it being there, yet the government keeps it there as a reminder of who we owe our true obeisance to. Similarly, Gems may not think of Mother White every second of their lives. But they know they owe their existence and purpose to her. Going back to the diamond colors, let's revisit what I said about refracted light. White light filtered through a prism creates rainbow light. There are two main components to a Gem's full being. The light that creates their projection and the physical crystal or gem that houses it. Mother White's own white light, which we can consider a kind of cosmic DNA, has potential to create Gems of every possible color. If we're going by my goddess theory, Mother White wanted some little ones to keep her company. So she authored their creation by filtering her light through her physical gem vessel (basically a prism) into Homeworld's mantle and birthed beings of light in primary colors. (And those beings would go forth to author the creation of beings of secondary colors and tertiary colors, as well.) The only problem with this theory is of course, Pink. If Mother White put forth diamonds in the primary colors, why not create Red Diamond instead of a Pink Diamond? Well, maybe Pink had a bit more of Mother White's light-DNA than her sisters. But still... And finally, I answer this question: What's the deal with White's mural? If I claim that she's a creator goddess, why destroy planets to create beings who will be nothing more than servants? Well, creator goddesses can sometimes possess a dichotomy. Aside from having a penchant for creation, they can also be capable of destruction to foster the act of creation. Her diamond daughters were brought forth for love and companionship. But that's where her direct tenderness for another being ends. She may have used seeds of her own light to bring forth new Gems, but they were created through some crude, inferior womb in the mantle of another planet. They were meant to be differentiated as servants, not as her chosen creations. Scientists have recently discovered planets made largely of diamond. Perhaps Homeworld is one of those diamond planets. But because the diamonds themselves are so large, their birth took a massive toll on Homeworld. From that point on, they had to protect their planet by birthing Gems on other planets. After leading by example for so many eons, Mother White probably retired from conquering planets and told her own daughters to "be fruitful and multiply". From that point, Yellow and Blue ruthlessly created their own variations of Gems, while Pink probably hesitated. And like mother and father goddesses of so many different myths and pantheons, Mother White probably decided to ascend to some higher throne to leave her daughters to learn from her and manage their collective empire themselves for thousands of years. I dunno, you guys. I know this theory is trippy and bizarre, but I'm tired and it just bugs me WHY no one in the show has mentioned White Diamond at all. Please bombard me with your own theories and/or corrections to my theory. :3

[ricardiasdubious-blog]

EARTH IN PERIL FINAL (THE TREES PART 2: DR. EDDIE BONDO)

           Edward Bondo would become responsible for the death of billions as well as his own. It started out innocent enough, like most of the problems man had created. The world was growing and wouldn’t stop. The natural world needed to be controlled. The mass experimentation became so abundant kids could splice tomatoes and apples with take home kits you bought from the toy store. The creations weren’t meant to last more than a couple of hours after splicing was finished. The never did, the abominations would be inedible in their short lifespans and would mold within the first hour even with refrigeration. That is how Edward Bondo was introduced to science and the wonderful world of gene manipulation. He was a tall, lanky boy, sullen blueish grey eyes, and a small cropping of black hair on his head. Although, what really stood out was his intelligence and ingenuity. He was able to start splicing and creating things, far more complicated. Frogs with bugs was one of his first living splices. He kept up with the latest in the splicing industry. It was when he was in high school he was introduced to chemicals and splicing them to create new chemical concoctions. Edward was the type of kid in any of his classes that question everything. It was his chemistry class he questioned in the most.

“Mr. Rand, what made you get into chemistry.” Edward asked his aging teacher.

“Bill Nye of all things actually, but I fell in love with the research aspect of it.” Mr. Rand replied.

“Mr. Rand, how did splicing become so mainstream?”

“It was corporations pushing their limits to find the cheapest most effective way to make something, splicing things, eventually, made things cheaper and more effective.”

“Mr. Rand what do you mean by eventually, were their failures?”

“Of course, Edward there were failures in everything, chickens not being able to lay eggs because of a new steroid. Tomatoes would ripen so much they would explode when being cut. It was really hectic for a while.”

“Who made it non-hectic?”

“The Crafters Corporation, that’s enough questions Edward. Class is about to start.”

           Edward couldn’t focus for the rest of class. He was on his phone researching everything he could about The Crafters, the slogan being, “Making A Better World, Literally”, catchy and simple. Their website was full of some of their crowning achievements, such as a chicken that was able to function and live properly with double of everything. Four legs, four breasts, four wings, they even had two heads.  The description said that they mixed the DNA of a chicken, octopus and cows in order to achieve it. Another one was a cream that de-aged people’s skin, it had some spinal/brain fluid from a turtle and a little bit of horseshoe crab blood spliced into it. Truly and incredibly fascinating how far the limits of nature can be pushed. Edward was enthralled and felt like a little boy shopping at a toy store with the science he was staring at. One of the last tabs Edward was able to look at before Mr. Rand caught him being distracted was the internships offered at The Crafters Corporation “to help develop the brains of tomorrow”

           Edward finished at the top of his class at Canon high school, although opted out of giving a valedictorian speech because he had a fear of public speaking. He already had several offers from gene manipulation schools, his senior capstone dissertation on “The Future of Gene Manipulation: Man’s Destiny to Rule” was published in a couple of academic journals. Edward went to the best of them all, C.I.G.M. or the California Institute of Gene Manipulation. It was there that he found a true passion with the chemical side of manipulation by splicing man-made chemicals with the genes from plants and animals. In some of his first courses he was introduced to the world of pesticide manipulation. Naturally the pesticides they studied were ones that would kill weeds and invasive species while not bringing harm to the plants people wanted. While intriguing it wasn’t exactly what Edward wanted. He wanted to not only kill weeds and keep the nice plants safe but improve them with the pesticide. Edward experimented on everything from bushes to trees, flytraps and tulips. He was attempting to find the correct combination of plant DNA because at the Institute they gave limitations. His professor stated that they were to replicate the pesticides currently on the market, and they were only allowed to splice lifeforms that used photosynthesis as a food source.

Edward was successful by using a base weed-killer and splcing it with the Sorcratea exorrihiza, a walking palm tree from Ecuador. He passed the class and earned the jealousy from his classmates for finding such a curious and strange tree. He was able to find the correct balance between the weed-killer and the ‘walking palm’. His pesticide was able to travel from plant to plant and notice the key genes that made a bio-form as a weed or a wanted plant. He found continued success with the trees of the world in his other classes as well. Edward also noticed in his History of Gene Manipulation class that only a few scientists have messed with the genes of trees. Edward always being the questioner, started his research on tree gene manipulation. His interests eventually turned into his doctorates dissertation. After, his graduation and another speech being avoided he started his internship at The Crafters Corporation. He started as a low-level aide to Dr. Adam Crake, head of the pesticide division. Edward made himself stand-out with his work just as he had in high school and college. He started, like all interns at Crafters, running for coffee, cleaning labs/equipment after use and listening to every word the doctors and scientists employed by The Crafters Corporation.

Dr. Crake was portly man, with a doorknob like chin and small spectacles and always wore a very colorful bowtie, he told the class on the first day that he got his bowties specially ordered. The bowties were spliced with cuttlefish DNA and it would change color depending on the tone of his voice. Edward returned to his work from college, except taking his pesticide to improve and protect trees instead of suburban garden flowers. He took his base weed-killer and started to explore in his free-time as well as when they allowed the interns lab time to work on their projects. The ones with the most effective pesticides would be hired. The rest of the interns would be sent along their way to future endeavors but were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements under penalty of being black-balled and sued. What Edward was able to do was astounding, he spliced the Sorcratea exorrihiza, “walking palm”, with that of a polar bear, tiger, and spore-dispersing fungi so the pesticide could travel by air. He took his new pesticide which he called Detoxinate Harm 23, or DH-23 to an air tight testing area within the Crafters Corporation compound because he wouldn’t want the pesticide to get out if its effect had been detrimental rather than helpful towards the trees. The 23 in DH-23 were the 23 lifeforms deemed the most destructible or harmful towards any give tree species. Edward’s primary targets were various species of bark beetle and poison ivy vines. In the testing area, he had five species of tree, two of each.

           One would have bark beetles in it and the other with poison ivy vines on it. He applies his pesticide to the roots, bark, branches and leaves of each tree, then monitored the health of the tree as well as the beetles and vines. After two days of monitoring, recording, and sleeplessness, the beetles appeared outside of the tree and had fallen around its base, dead. The vines had withered and fallen just like the beetles, at the base of the tree. Edward smiled with excitement and emailed his bosses about his success. The next day, after he caught up on his sleep. They celebrated his success and cracking open a bottle of champagne. After all of the trials and testing other above him had to do, the pesticide was put on the market after about two months. It began to be sprayed onto the devastated Yellowstone trees, the titan-like Redwoods in the northeast, and the forests throughout the world to protect them from killer beetle or vine species.

           When all the testing was finished, the trees Edward used were planted around the Craftsmen Compound as a living trophy to his accomplishment. Although, his trophies would soon become his killers. The trees began to move out of their planted positions, but people didn’t notice until their roots began to break apart the concrete. Their spores had been released and had attached to all the trees in the area. Eventually, the trees surrounded the Craftsmen Compound and it was when the people were inside that they began to attack. The redwoods came crashing down onto the labs and raised back up by the other trees. The branches of the cedars and poplars and oaks began to reach through the holes the redwoods had created and take people through them. Edward saw Dr. Crake taken into the branches, they reached under his skin until he was dead from the trauma. Then the trees kept him there as blood leaked out of him and dripped into the tree itself. Others were being taken by the roots, dragged underground to be buried alive or worse. Edward stood in horror as more and more people suffered the same fate as Dr. Crake, all the while the redwoods crashing down on different areas of the compound. Edward and a few others tried to run but anyway out was blocked by a wall of trees. The screams went on into the night and continued as the trees slowly encircled Edward and those who remained. After all the food ran out in the compound and the water fountains sprouted branches people became frantic. One by one they were taken into the branches or down to the ground, they were helpless to stop them. A janitor told Edward and the others he tried to call the cops, but he was told they were getting thousands of calls about the same problem. Eventually, it was just Edward left and after two weeks of no food or water, the trees roots encapsulated his lifeless body and pulled it under. There were no screams or cries for help, just the rustle of leaves as the wind blew.

(Thank you Dr. Battista and my Earth in Peril classmates for wonderful discussion, plus the depressing talks on the end of the world. Also, Battista as a dystopic leader of an ecological cult.)

[pharmanswerspod]

Essential Oils - Crash Course

Always choose quality oils - this mainly ensures that impurities are removed and the risk of irritation is reduced.  Always read the instructions and ALWAYS follow them.  Some require dilution, some require carrier oils.  Mix appropriately, FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS. Some basic science: the reason you can smell something is because some compound that makes up the thing you’re smelling is volatile (and in chemistry that means easily evaporated into the air).  So, some part of that thing evaporates into the air and floats in your nose and lands on your olfactory center in your nose (a special patch of tissue that has a lots of “keyholes” for different shapes of molecules).  That center sends the message to your brain and your brain translates it as smell.  There are a few families of molecules that contribute to the smells desired in essential oils.  All of these families are labeled as “organic molecules” - not in a chemical-free USDA kind of organic, but in a chemistry way - they are built around chains of carbon atoms.  Many of them are put together so they are volatile (evaporate-able) yet stable (don’t crumble to bits).  Nature can make build these chains as big as they want until they’re just so big they fall apart (unstable).  Of course, the larger they get, they harder they are to get off the ground so to speak (evaporate into the air for you to smell).

One group of molecule that is found in a lot of natural sources is called terpenes.  Terpenes are why some bugs leave a smelly residue on your hand, and why tree resin and sap smell, and why some plants smell when you break their leaves or stems.

Phenols are another volatile compound that are detected by your sense of smell.  Natural ones are kind of fun - chili peppers, oregano, thyme, cloves, roasted coffee.

Esters are volatile compounds that are produced by some fruits - apples, pears, bananas, strawberries.

Aldehydes are responsible for the smell of cinnamon, vanilla, and cilantro.

As aromatherapy, Essential Oils are mostly harmless.  Honestly, I think the biggest harm is when they are promoted as “cures” or “treatments” of things.  A little secret about our sense of smell - because it has such a strong direct connection to our brain, science has found that our sense of smell “memory” is stronger than any other stimulus.  Meaning you smell something familiar and the number of memories and stories your brain can connect is much larger than the memories recalled from sound or sight.  And even though those volatile molecules that go in your nose send really strong signals to your brain, those oils do not soak into your body by just smelling it.  Aromatherapy works probably because of the chemical cascade it triggers in the brain after you smell the scent - whether it be a memory trigger that starts an even more complex cascade of brain chemicals or just a basic brain chemistry cascade.  But I also think power of suggestion is at play - does the scent of cedar help you feel calm and cozy because of pure chemistry or is it because cedar is promoted for calming that you’re able to say “oh yeah, I feel calmer with cedar”. Some say it’s calming because because it reminds them of being out in the woods - is that a pure chemistry thing or a memory cascade thing?  What if the smell of cedar reminds someone of the forest fire that burned down their house?  No matter what pure chemistry or advertisements say, cedar will never be calming to them! While writing this piece, I read some articles about “essential oil chemistry” and there were claims about those compounds I listed above regarding cellular and DNA repair.  There was no resource links to indicate where that information came from, and I could not find any other reputable sources to support those claims.  It is still difficult to decide how much of these compounds actually circulate in your body, and if it’s enough to produce a noticeable change.  One thing I do know for sure, any results someone gets in a lab, even if it’s repeatable and generally agreed as true, does not mean it works that way in the human body.  So if compounds found in pine oil kill microorganisms in a petri dish, please do not assume that it is going to kill microorganisms in your house, much less your body.  Your body is too complicated for there to be a “simple” answer to what ails it.   Another little bit of science:  a majority of the moisture in your skin is oil based.  So when you put oils on your skin, the gaps that allow your natural oil out are more willing to allow and outside oil in.  This is useful when science develops medicines that they want to soak into your skin - whether the purpose is for it to just work locally, or whether the purpose is to avoid the destruction of a drug by your stomach acid or a filtration process of your liver known as “the first pass”.  But it can also be dangerous because oils that easily gain access to your body can also carry dangerous things into your body.  Hardware store solvents like paint thinner and WD40 can be dangerous and soak into your skin (and possibly take other chemicals with it).  Ok, enough of the scary stuff - but this science of the skin is how carrier oils work, they act as the doorway into your skin for the EO compounds as well as keep them there for a prolonged period of time.  I know the logic is if you rub your EO mix on places where blood vessels are close to the surface (hands, wrists, face, feet) then it will get into your bloodstream.  I’m not convinced that’s such a good thing, especially if you are not aware of the purity and quality of the oils you are using.  But I’m also not clear on how much actually soaks far enough into your body to reach your bloodstream.  I think a majority of the time, your body is just acting as your own personal diffuser (and I find EO’s more pleasant than lab-created perfumes). As for ingesting EO’s - DON’T BE STUPID!  You may read things and they say “your body is built to protect itself….” but obviously things can get through that protection. Your skin is your body’s biggest defense, but as we talked just a second ago, oils are really good at getting through that.  They may also say “if they’re made it nature, they should be safe to eat…” you don’t eat poison ivy do you??  Even Bear Grylls taught us that some plants are not friendly to our bodies (on the outside or the inside), so why would we believe that everything that produces oils would be safe?  A pharmaceutical medication called Digoxin was originally developed from the foxglove plant. Please don’t ingest foxglove - digitalis poisoning is a real thing and can cause symptoms as severe as life-threatening arrhythmias.  If I had to come up with my own rule, it would be this:  if you would normally eat the thing the oil is made from, then it MIGHT be okay.  You don’t eat pine bark do you?  See, to me, that’s silly.  On the other hand, lemon oil?  Okay.  Orange or grapefruit? okay.  Peppermint and cinnamon?  Eh. My thought on this:  If you want more spice in your life, add more spices to your life.  Salt and pepper are boring! Season your food with herbs and spices (freshly picked or ground ones are preferable) - and you can have more benefits than you’d care to count including the natural oils from those natural products). The other problem is that anyone can go on the internet and join or create a program and come out the other side with a “certification” of some kind.  On every EO site, brochure, and label, companies should be using a statement that reads something like this: *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent disease. That means “no one is watching us, and as long as we don’t use certain keywords, we can say whatever we want, and no one will check up on us, ask for our recipes, or try to prove us wrong.”  So words like “therapeutic grade” are just bogus fluffy words they want to use to convince you they’re “better” or “safer”.  As much as I don’t like overbearing governmental regulation and I know lobbyists have deep pockets in some branches (that’s another soap box), but there are groups that grade foods as well as chemicals to determine their purity and quality before they are allowed to be put in products that humans will eat.  The USDA puts grades on many agricultural products to determine what’s safe for humans to eat, while the FCC judges lab-produced chemical.  And I know many of the items on the FCC’s list (including food preservatives and coloring agents) are under scrutiny based on “pure and high quality, but really safe?”. But I have not found this level of transparency in EO manufacturers, thus they will not be going in my mouth. The last thing I’m going to mention is the logical fallacy of Appeal to Ancient Wisdom.  This is the misconception that the oldest treatments for ailments are the best because they are the oldest.  If you want to hear about some of the stupid and horrific things ancient (and not so ancient) people did in trying to treat and heal people, listen to the podcast, Sawbones, they go over it a lot.  Now, I’m not trying to negate what ancient cultures have contributed to the increased understanding of the human body and compounds found in nature.  Science has actually proven the benefit of some ancient but now modernized treatments, but that doesn’t mean the “truth” of all ancient medicine is now proven true.  This is a classic case of “when you know better, do better.” Modern science has allowed us to gain understanding of how diseases are caused rather than blaming it on “Evil”.  Microscopy has allowed us to see things that are way too small for our eyes to see - including things that make us sick and things that our bodies are made of.  The scientific method gave us a process to be able to test and retest theories and processes, and accept them as true rather than a “one and done” type of experiment.  Evidence-based medicine allows the modern world to make objective decisions about treatment and healing, so someone’s personal feelings about you or spiritual beliefs about the cause of the illness do not affect the quality of your care.  I say all of this to say EO’s may have their place in your health plan, but please don’t assume that they are superior because they’re “natural” or because they are “ancient”. Bottom line:  it’s ok to diffuse them in your house - they smell good.  it’s ok to put them in your body lotion or massage oil or face moisturizer - they smell good.  I’d prefer you not swallow them, but if you’re going to swallow them, you BETTER be talking to a physician or practitioner who knows a thing or two about the human physiology and biochemistry and has real and solid credentials (and not just internet-created ones). And for heaven sake’s don’t take advice from Dr. Google!

[liliannorman]

Desert trails and microbial life excite this soil scientist

Lydia Jennings has had many interests throughout her life. As a child, she trained as a dancer. But her brother insisted she’d be speedy if she ran like her siblings. So in high school, she traded her ballet slippers for running shoes. Running soon became a huge part of her life. Then an injury prompted an identity crisis. Jennings was forced to think about who she was outside of running. A growing interest in science helped answer those questions. 

At the time, Jennings didn’t think about becoming a scientist. She didn’t learn about careers in research until college. No one in her family did science as people usually think of it. But Jennings — a member of two indigenous tribes (the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Huichol of Mexico) — now realizes that many in her family had scientific knowledge. They picked it up though gardening, their Indigenous culture and the healing practices handed down through the generations.

Jennings realized that she could do research that would benefit her community. That led her to soil science. She now studies how bacteria and plants bounce back after their soil environment has been disturbed by mining. In this interview, Jennings shares her experiences and advice with Science News for Students. (This interview has been edited for content and readability.)

What inspired you to pursue your career?

Well, I’ve always loved being outside. So that’s a really big part — just being outside and getting to know the earth around me. Running has also inspired me. I love to run. In high school in New Mexico, I was starting to see all these patterns outside. I noticed where plants grew, and how the soil in the shadowy areas of the mountain differs from soil in the more sun-exposed areas. In science classes, I then learned the language to describe what I saw out there running. 

In graduate school, I would be on the trails and I’d get to experience with my feet what I was studying. Once I was running in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona after a huge rain event. The normally dry soil was saturated with water. I noticed that there was water on the soil surface. That’s rare because we have such sandy soil. And I thought about the soil properties and equations to calculate how much water the soil can hold. I also thought about the pressure that my foot applies to the soil, which was making the water come to the surface.

Lydia Jennings collects soil samples at a reclaimed mine in Southern Arizona as part of her research. Julia Nielson

My classmates during college at California State University in Monterey Bay played a big part in my career, too. I got to really know them. My biology classes would go on camping trips. Everyone was as excited about science as I was. I loved that. It was such a great place to be nerdy. In some of my high school classes, it wasn’t cool to be nerdy. But in my first year of college, it was just so fun to be outside together pointing out plants, bugs and animals to each other.

How did you get where you are today?

It’s kind of been a meandering path. I took science classes in high school. But the idea of a job doing research wasn’t something I knew about. I got into research because of a professor that I had at Cabrillo College, a community college in Santa Cruz, Calif. He pointed out that I was good at science and noticed how excited I’d get about it. So I did a research internship with him and he was an important mentor for me. I remember how proud he was when he learned I was accepted into graduate school.

Explainer: What is a mentor?

After that, I studied environmental science, technology and policy at California State University. It’s was such a stunning environment. You have both the redwood forest, with trees older than any human alive, and the incredible ocean. Living there, I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. But I considered that I’m from the desert and marine biology wouldn’t help me serve my home community. 

So I took a couple of years off and worked at a field station in Big Sur in California. I studied water pollution. During that time, I was able to think about how I could use my science skillsets to serve the places I’m from. I thought about their environmental issues, including those caused by mining. So many indigenous communities and places in the Southwest are impacted by mining. Mining can disturb soil ecosystems that take thousands of years to form. And digging things up can create air pollution. 

Right now, I’m in the process of talking with tribal leadership about what environmental programs we might want to look into. We’re thinking about environmental health or education programs for our community. So, finally, my intellectual and cultural and moral interests have found a place to come together. 

How do you get your best ideas?

A lot of times, it happens when I’m out on a run. I’m a trail runner. Trail running is when, instead of running on roads and pavement, you’re running on dirt trails or mountain trails. Trail running sometimes is a mix of hiking and running. That’s when I feel most at peace. I’m able to do some thinking then, too. 

Once I was on a run and was thinking about what wasn’t working in my experiments. I came to this realization that, oh, it’s because I’m not using these specific pipette tips. It’s a small thing. But when you’re working with tiny amounts of DNA, that makes a world of difference. 

Also, having conversations with friends and family members who can help me see my blind spots is really helpful.

What’s one of your biggest successes?

Winning certain awards is really valuable. So it was really nice getting the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship (a prestigious award for graduate students), and being selected for the American Geophysical Society Voices for Science (a program that trains scientists to be better communicators). 

It’s also really valuable to have the people in my life recognize that I’m not only a scientist, but I’m also a good friend and community member. Those are really important successes to me as well. That’s because being in science can be hard. You’re constantly doing a balancing act. You want to get work done and be productive but also build friendships, take time to relax and enjoy life. 

What’s one of your biggest failures, and how did you get past that? 

One of the biggest failures was when some experiments were not working like I’d hoped. I was quantifying the amount of DNA from microbes in soil samples. I’d done this for bacteria. I was now going to use a new method for fungi. At that point, no one in my research group or even in the recent past had worked on fungi. So I had to go through old lab notes to figure out the protocol. 

I spent six months on it, and I was getting results that I couldn’t reproduce. My advisor and I had to have a really tough discussion about whether it was worth working on this for six more months. We decided to replace it with different experiments. 

That was really hard for me because I felt like I was failing. But the other method I used provided really compelling results. It told a different story. In hindsight, I don’t feel like this was a failure, but I had to get creative to find an alternative. 

I think that when you have failures, they provide some of the biggest lessons. Now I feel like I know that protocol inside and out. 

Jennings loves to play with her puppy Salchicha. Gaberial Vega

What do you do in your spare time?

I like to trail run and just be outside. I also like to camp and rock climb. Any of those fun outdoor activities — that’s what really makes me happy. I also like to cook. And I like to play with my puppy Salchicha. She’s a blue heeler. That’s a little cattle dog. She’ll be a good runner when she gets older. 

What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you were younger?

I wish I had been told that it’s OK to try a variety of things to find out what you’re really passionate about. I think, especially in science, that we have this tendency to think that you have to do very specific steps to be successful. But it’s really important that students experience many different things. You might never know what you’re in love with or really passionate about unless you try it. 

When I was an undergrad, I was working two, sometimes three, jobs. I didn’t have time to think about what makes me happy or about my long-term goals. After college, there was so much pressure to go right to grad school. But I didn’t. I took a couple years off to really think about what I wanted to do. I did field work and laboratory work. And I developed a range of skillsets. I’m really thankful for that whole experience. Because it helped develop me as professional.

This Q&A is part of a series exploring the many paths to a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It has been made possible with generous support from Arconic Foundation.

Desert trails and microbial life excite this soil scientist published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

[ezatluba]

Mysteries of the Moo-crobiome: Could Tweaking Cow Gut Bugs Improve Beef?

March 6, 2018

MENAKA WILHELM

Someday, we might be able to customize the microbes we feed cows to help reduce their methane emissions.

Like the human gut, the belly of every bovine contains a microbial engine — engines, really — since cows have four-part stomachs. Those unicellular inhabitants do most of the digestive acrobatics of processing a cow's gnarly, fibrous diet of grains, hay, and grass. They're also responsible for some of the cattle industry's greenhouse gas contributions, since, as it turns out, cows don't make methane. Microbes make methane.

Given the microbes' giant role in digestion, animal scientists see them as an avenue to potentially improve livestock — tweaking microbes could prime cows to make more meat while eating less food, or maybe even lower the amount of methane that cows release.

That's a quest that takes researchers into the bovine digestive system. A cow's largest stomach compartment, the rumen, is where a lot of the microbial magic happens. There, a mob of microbes tackles whatever a cow eats. "These bugs are capable of breaking down all sorts of weird and wonderful complex carbohydrates," says Mick Watson, an animal scientist at the University of Edinburgh who is tracking these microbes.

And the work these microbes do is very important. "A lot of times, in animal science, we say we don't really feed the cow, we feed the rumen microbes," says Kristi Cammack, who directs the West River Agricultural Center at South Dakota State University.

But the moo-crobiome is complex. Before anyone can approach the question of which microbes might best affect meat and methane production, it would help to know which microbes are already there and what they're capable of doing.

So Watson and his team recently took this kind of roll call, checking off a clipboard of microbes from 43 Scottish cows' digested food samples. Among the throng of organisms they found there, they sequenced the full genomes of nearly a thousand bugs, using the DNA sequences to see which enzymes each microbe uses to help with digestion. Their work appeared Wednesday in Nature Communications.

Taking attendance turned up some of the usual microbial suspects. There were several strains of the archaea microbes that use hydrogen to make methane — the gas from cow farts and burps that warms the atmosphere. The DNA sequencing also shed light on many new digestive enzymes — enzymes that looked like they'd be useful for breaking food down, but didn't match what's been seen before.

Finding new digestive enzymes is exciting, Watson says, because it could potentially open the door for cow diet improvements. The ideal, he says, would be to "rationally choose the right bug, for the right diet, for the right animal" — kind of like customized medicine.

There's some precedent for this, as science writer Ed Yong mentions in his book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us And A Grander View of Life.Australian livestock researchers once solved some goats' digestive issues with a specific plant by feeding them microbes isolated from Hawaiian goats who munched the same plant without trouble. But the Australian goats were lucky; their issues came from a single plant, so they just needed to sort out that one thing.

The microbial holy grail for something that depends on many factors, like meat production, will be harder to come by, Cammack says. That's partly because it's not totally clear whether the microbes are really controlling things, or if cows that are already predisposed to the right kinds of production — more meat and milk with less feed — just tend to harbor a certain kind of microbe. It's probably a mix of both.

There's even more complexity: the interplay between cows and their microbes matters, but so do the dynamics between different microbes themselves. Although it might be possible to wipe out the methane-makers, it's not clear how their communities would fare without them.

Such intricacy hasn't stopped cow probiotics from hitting the market. A company called Zaluvida makes a feed supplement called Mootral that uses citric acid and garlic ingredients, claiming "long-lasting reduction of methanogenic bacteria in the microbiome of the cow." But there's more guesswork than thoughtful design behind most animal probiotics on the market, Watson says. Also, the only known methanogens belong to the order archaea, which aren't technically bacteria.

So it's a bit far off, but eventually, concretely identifying which microbes or communities of microbes help cows digest best could improve bovine eating and burping habits. And there are plenty of enzymes and microbes to explore.

"It's a whole new little world encapsulated in this rumen," Cammack says.

[thecoroutfitters]

It’s almost that time of year again – time to set out your plants and get that beautiful garden growing! But, one of the biggest problems that many of us face is that we grow our own food to avoid chemicals, but we need fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to really get the most out of our labor.

Don’t worry – there are excellent organic options to help your garden grow.

Read the article below to discover them!

Seeds

You’re not going to grow anything of quality if you don’t start with good seeds. It’s easy to go the cheap route and buy seeds at the dollar store, but do your research. This isn’t the place that you want to skimp because if you do it right, you’ll only have to buy seeds once because next year, you’ll use ones that you harvest from your own crop.

Now, you’ve likely heard of GMO, which stands for “genetically modified organism.” Scientists literally modify the DNA of the plant to make it “better.” Of course, we know that actually means, “more profitable,” not “more healthy.”

Because science tinkered with the natural structure of the plant, the seeds are unreliable. You may get great results by replanting them, or none of them may grow. Besides, GMO have been linked to several different illnesses. Skip them.

You want to go with heirloom seeds because they’ve been carefully cultivated from one type of plant for generations. They’re reliable and safe. To learn more about the different types of seeds, check out this article.

These lessons of yesterday will teach you the basic skills for survival cooking! 

Organic Fertilizer

In the event SHTF, you might not be able to run down to the garden center and pick up a bag of Miracle Gro. Why would you want to even when you can? You can make your own fertilizer at home that’s every bit as good as the store-bought stuff, and you know exactly what’s in it.

But what if your tomato plants grow just fine? I’ll be rude and answer a question with a question. How do you know that they’re growing fine? Sure, they may be growing and producing, but here’s the thing – our soil is depleted.

That means that what passes for a tomato today likely only has a fraction of the nutrients that it had 100 years ago. Too many seasons of constant planting without a break has sucked all the nutrients out of the soil, and if there’s none in the soil, well, there’s none in the plant.

So you need fertilizer. Your compost is going to be a huge part of that, but you can also add nutrients in other ways, such as by mixing Epsom salt around your tomatoes and peppers or by mixing a bit of diluted vinegar in if your soil isn’t acidic enough. Check out this article for more tips for fertilizer, but don’t skip it, whatever you do!

Video first seen on GrowVeg. 

Compost

This is probably the most proactive step you can take for a healthy garden, but to do it right, you’re going to need to do it right. You can put many things, from food scraps to paper and ash in it, but there are definitely some no-nos.

Now, before you start saying that you can’t have a compost pile because you don’t have a big enough area, let me stop you because you only need an area the size of a bin to have a compost pile … err, bin.

Oh, and you can have liquid manure compost – aka manure tea – too. It’s exceptionally good for plants that require extra nitrogen. Manure tea is exactly what it sounds like – manure that’s been steeped in water. It’s a bit involved and takes some time, but it’s well worth the end result. It’s especially good for plants with deep roots.

Herbicides

Oh, those nasty weeds. Of course, if you’re container gardening, it’s not such a hassle, but if you have a traditional garden, it’s a real pain, literally and figuratively. And if you opt to use commercial herbicides, you’re often defeating one of the purposes of growing your own garden  by using chemicals on your food.

Fortunately, you have many natural options that will work just as well as harmful chemicals. First, mulch is an excellent idea for several reasons. It helps keep the weeds to a minimum, it holds the moisture in the soil, and it acts as a natural fertilizer when it breaks down. That’s assuming you make your own mulch, which is cheap (or free), or buy organic mulch, which is NOT cheap or free.

Another option that isn’t exactly an herbicide but works as well as one is to use landscape fabric, which you can also make yourself from recycled sheets, feed sacks, etc. Or, you can buy it. It prevents weeds from growing by blocking out the sunlight. A natural result of this is that it helps hold moisture in the soil as well.

Boiling water works, too. It’ll kill a weed quick, but this isn’t particularly effective if you’re treating your entire garden.

Borax, bleach, vinegar, and salt water are also effective herbicides though you may need to repeat the process. Add a little liquid dish detergent to each for an extra boost. Be sure to spray these only on the leaves of the plants that you want to kill because none of them discriminate.

Be careful not to saturate the soil because all of them alter the pH and can have catastrophic effects on your plants.

Video first seen on Grow Your Heirlooms. 

Insecticides

This is the big bad of the chemicals that most people consider necessary to growing a healthy, productive garden. And it’s true – nothing will wipe out a garden faster that a horde of hungry aphids, beetles, or other flying or crawling creatures.

Fortunately, you have options here, too, and some of them, such as dish detergent, serve double duty and kill weeds, too.

Neem is probably the most effective. It’s been used for centuries and has more than 50 natural insecticides. Since it’s safe for you, your pets, and your plants, you can use it without worrying about damage. The only problem is that the bug has to actually eat the plant to die, so if you have an infestation of something, you may have some losses before you win the battle.

Himalayan salt kills spider mites. Just mix 2 Tbsp. of salt in 1 gallon of water and mist onto infested areas.

Chrysanthemum flower spray is lethal to insects because it paralyzes their nervous systems and immobilizes them. Just boil 3.5 ounces of flowers with a liter of water into a tea and spray directly on the plant. The spray stores for up to 2 months. Add some neem oil to give it an extra boost.

I call this the pizza spray – it’s made of 1 clove minced garlic, 1 medium sliced onion, and 1 tsp. cayenne pepper. Add them to a quart of water and let it soak for an hour. You don’t want to cook it; just let it soak. Add a tablespoon of liquid soap and spray directly onto the plant. This will stay potent for a week or better in the fridge.

Grind a couple of handfuls of dried chilis and add to a cup of diatomaceous Earth, then add 2 liters of water. Let it soak overnight, then shake it up and apply.

Other natural pesticides include orange oil, citrus oil. Eucalyptus oil, soap, and mineral oil. Dilute them with water and spray directly onto the plant.

Note that, with the exception of the soap, all of these concoctions are drinkable (though I don’t imagine that you’d want to) so you’re not going to poison yourself.

Critters

Bunnies and deers are really cute until you find them eating your carrots and corn. Then, not so much. As a matter of fact, so may say that they’d look delicious on  a plate side-by-side with said veggies after they’re busted dining on your labors.

I once lost an entire crop of cherries overnight because apparently the birds had been waiting for them to be perfect just as I had, but they were up earlier than I was. Two words – bird netting.

But, they do have minds of their own and aren’t easily deterred. Some good ideas that may help you keep from feeding the neighborhood wildlife instead of saving it all for yourself are as follows:

Marigolds. Rabbits, deer, and other wildlife hate the smell of them so plant them around your perimeter. You can also build chicken wire fences around your garden, or around the plants that you’re worried about.

Raccoons and some other animals hate the smell of Epsom salt – which, by the way, isn’t a salt so it won’t kill your plants. Just sprinkle it around the perimeter of the garden. It also increases the magnesium in your soil, so your plants may thank you.

Solar motion-activated lights may help scare them off, especially if you relocate them regularly so that the animals don’t get used to them.

Finally, you can cover your plants at night using tulle netting – that gauzy stuff that a bride’s veil is made of. For that matter, if you’re only covering it at night, you can use light sheets or other fabric that won’t break the plants.

We’ve covered most of the ways that you can grow a healthy, delicious garden without worrying about chemicals leeching into your foods. Plus, most of these suggestions are free or super cheap, so it’s a win in all directions!

Do you wonder what are the secrets that helped our grandparents grow their own food to survive during harsh times?

Click the banner bellow and uncover them!

If you have any more ideas about organic remedies to keep your survival garden healthy, share them in the comments section below. Happy gardening!

This article has been written by Theresa Crouse for Survivopedia. 

from Survivopedia Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag