The Botany of Desire

Today during Lab we finished wacthing the film "The Botany of Desire", which is based on the book by Michael Pollan. I really liked it and though it was extremely interesting. It focused on four points:

Apples
-99% of apples were turned into cider
-People preferred cider than water because it was safer to drink.
-There is a "museum" of apples, were many apple trees are kept and are examined by scientists.
-"Cloning" the commerical apples has made them more subseptible to pests that have been evolving.
-Scientist are tryng to transfer the genes of pest resistant apples ro commercial apples.

Flowers
Tulips were a big comodity in Turky.
-People would pay insane amoutns of money for a tulip bulb of the "broken " type.
-The broken tulip was white with blue and people loved it. But then it was known that the interesting coloring was caused by a virus.
-This left people who had invested a lot of money in their tulip, in ruins.

Cannabis
-It was used to treat conditions such as asthma and cancer, and pain.
-The name "marijuana" came from Mexico in the 20th century.
-Loui Armstrong used it, as he fet it helped him with improvisation.
-It contins THC, which combines to receptors in the brain. Which was an important discovery because it proved that there are recepors in the brain.
-Appetite, pain, and memory are affected by cannabis.

Potatoes
-Originated in the Antics.
-Europeans took them to Ireland, where the Irish started cultivating them. They solved a lot of hunger problems.
-They only grew one kind, so when a fungus arrived on a ship, it ruined all the potatoes
-This killed one million people of hunger, 1 out of 8.

Color in Food, Part I: "Purple Ketchup?!"

Is the color of food relevant?

Many years ago, while I still lived in a small town in Mexico called Parral, Chihuahua (the "Capital of the World" as locals call it, when it's really in the middle of nothing), I came over to visit my aunt here in El Paso. We were having breakfast one morning when my aunt placed a purple bottle on the table. I asked my cousin what that was, feeling silly of my ignorance of "American food", and he said: "It's ketchup, we have green too!", while he poured some of it on his food.

Maybe it was because I came from somewhere where things like that didn't exist, but I just felt squeamish of eating purple ketchup and decided to pass and eat the regular kind.

Now I come to the conclusion that the color of a food has a great impact on whether we choose to eat it or not. I feel like our brain relates the color of the with the food taste of it. We've come to judge whether a food tastes good or bad according to the color it has. We also have an expectation of the color a food should be, and even if it's a couple of shades lighter or darker, we question whether it's good or not.

It's not casual that nowadays our foods are filled with artificial colorings. Color appeals to the appetite. For example: Maraschino cherries are dyed an obviously artificial looking red. But look just how cute it looks on our sundae. I bet if it wasn't a bright red, we would probably push it aside because we would assume that, since it has a dull color, the flavor will be dull as well.


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As I was researching for this post, I found that Heinz's weird ketchup didn't have much demand, and was discontinued after a few years. Indeed, ketchup should look red.

Vestigial Traits: Appendix

Some species display traits that have seemingly lost all or most of their original function in a species through evolution. A great example is the appendix in humans.

The vermiform appendage—in which some recent medical writers have vainly endeavoured to find a utility—is the shrunken remainder of a large and normal intestine of a remote ancestor. This interpretation would stand even if it were found to have a certain use in the human body. Vestigial organs are sometimes pressed into a secondary use when their original function has been lost.

One potential ancestral purpose put forth by Charles Darwin was that the appendix was used for digesting leaves as primates. It may be a vestigial organ of ancient humans that has degraded down to nearly nothing over the course of evolution. Evidence can be seen in herbivorous animals such as the koala.
The cecum of the koala is very long, enabling it to host bacteria specific for cellulose breakdown. Human ancestors may have also relied upon this system and lived on a diet rich in foliage. As people began to eat more easily digested foods, they became less reliant on cellulose-rich plants for energy. The cecum became less necessary for digestion and mutations that previously had been deleterious were no longer selected against. These alleles became more frequent and the cecum continued to shrink. After thousands of years, the once-necessary cecum has degraded to what we see today, with the appendix. On the other hand, evolutionary theorists have suggested that natural selection selects for larger appendices because smaller and thinner appendices would be more susceptible to inflammation and disease.

Evolution: Divergence, Parallelism, and Convergence

We are covering evolution, so I decided to dig out my Antrhopology notes from last semester and create some diagrams to portray the differences between divergence, parallelism, and convergence. Click on the pictures for full size!

Divergence
Related species that evolve differently as they adapt to different environments.

Parallelism
Relates species that evolve similarly as they adapt to similar environments.

Convergence
Unrelated species that evolve similarly as they adapt to similar environments.

New Species of Cockroach

Two students from Trinity High School in New York City, Brenda Tan and Matt Cost, made an interesting discovery.

"Ew I'm so gross, but everyone loves me... ♥"

These student were working on a project focused on testing the DNA of over 200 things. They found interesting things: mislabeled dairy and caviar, duster feather from an ostrich, surprisingly pure-beef hot dogs, etc. But they also discovered a new species of cockroach.

What looked like a regular cockroach didn't get a DNA match from the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank. Professor Mark Stoeckle agreed. "Closely-related species don't differ by more than one percent," he said, "while this cockroach is four-percent different. This suggests it is a new species of cockroach."

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Why do I keep writing about cockroaches?...

Max and China: A Punnett Square

Meet Max.
We got him when he was just a couple of weeks old, almost 10 years ago.

Meet China.
She belongs to the neighbors and has been Max's girlfriend for the past 6 years. We do not let Max out without a chain (because he runs away for fun), but the neighbors do let China out. They see each other usually on the afternoon when we chain Max in the front yard so he has a change of view (how spoiled!).

A a couple of years ago, China managed to sneak into our backyard and ended up carrying Max's offspring. Four puppies were born, and they looked something like this:

Yay for Photoshop cloned puppies!

Let's assume that the dominant allele for black coat is "B", and the recessive allele for the light beige coat is "b". Looking at Max's phenotype, we can deduce that his genotype is homozygous recessive, bb. But in China's case, her phenotype doesn't make her genotype as obvious.
China can be either homozygous dominant, BB, or heterozygous, Bb. Let's find out which is the correct genotype:
If China's genotype was homozygous dominant, BB, there is no way a puppy with light beige coat could be born. All the puppies would be heterozygous: black, carrying the recessive allele for beige coat.
Now we can see that the only way a puppy would have beige coat would be if China was heterozygous.