Superweeds “I’ve never been trained as an evolutionary biologist — you know, formally — but basically, what I feel like I try to do in my career is try to stop evolution,” Pat Tranel, a crop scientist says. “And it’s a pretty powerful force. It’s pretty hard to stop.” ~ H. Claire Brown We’ve […]
Category Archives: radiation
I met Paul Kilburn at the turn-off into the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, decommissioned a few years before. Paul and his volunteers had permission to collect native seeds from the buffer zone around the facility that had been created to provide both a security barrier from outside intrusion and physical separation from what was […]
“But what about the plutonium?” he said, “If you breathe in even one atom, you’ll get cancer and die.” It was a chat over breakfast with the old guys, and the subject of Rocky Flats, the nearby old nuclear weapons plant, came up. Following clean up, it was scheduled to become a wildlife refuge open […]
He rolled the dice again. This time, he was mimicking what he and his colleagues have been doing quietly around the globe for more than a half-century — using radiation to scramble the genetic material in crops, a process that has produced valuable mutants like red grapefruit, disease-resistant cocoa and premium barley for Scotch whiskey. […]
Since 2009, the world has been stuck on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis and what we need to do to avoid it. How do we feed nine billion people by 2050? ~ Sara Menker “Take a look,” he showed me a photo of a basket of apples wrapped in cellophane. “Apples […]
I know a guy who collects minerals. He’s retired and has a place in the mountains where he can wander out to old mine dumps looking for likely stones. Sometimes he sieves the waste rock piles to find interesting stones. Often he’ll use an old Civil Defense Geiger counter to help sort the rocks, since […]
First there was the high-pitched whine, increasing in intensity. The woman looked through the swirling dust storm frantically. Suddenly, bursting out of the dark, giant pincers….Them! It was my favorite movie as a kid, and one I shared with my son when he was old enough. Even compared to the special effects available twenty years […]
Writes of Nature 