Thanks to She Who Would Not Want To Be Named for sending me a link to a really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times: Plants have been engineered through the dark arts of gene splicing to detect TNT at a level of sensitivity one hundred times greater than bomb-sniffing dogs.
In the presence of TNT vapors the leaves of the engineered Arabidopsis and tobacco plants blushed from green to white as chlorophyll drained out of the leaves. The process took several hours, so just imagine how slowly an airport check-in would move. Still, I think I’d rather be scanned by a plant than a radiation-emitting strip-search machine.
The research was published Wednesday in PLoS ONE under the catchy title “Programmable Ligand Detection System in Plants through a Synthetic Signal Transduction Pathway.” (Somebody please help scientists come up with titles that make sense to the rest of us.) The title in the Times is maybe even worse, in an insulting way, “Plants that Earn Their Keep.” Do plants have to justify their existence? Why does a plant have to “do something useful” in order to earn a place on this earth? Grrrrrr. Arrogant humans!
Anyway, airline travel has been at the front of my mind recently as I brace for a trip in a few days to Philadelphia. Monday I was brave enough to add the weather report to my desktop. Yikes! I’m not sure that I even recognize the weather icon for last Wednesday. It’s definitely one that’s never appeared on any San Diego forecast I’ve been around for!
In the general Philly area both Longwood Gardens and the Morris Arboretum have conservatories. Unfortunately I’m not likely to have much time to do sightseeing, but it’ll be interesting enough to see what some people call winter. But if there’s anything on the “must see” list, let me know.
Let me finish my ramble by returning briefly to the unpleasant topic of airline terrorism to say a couple words about these photos that were in the news a year ago that many of you recognize.
These are shots of the alleged “underwear-bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, probably taken during while he was attending school in London. I looked quickly at the main subject–really, what can a photograph tell you about a person? Maybe that a seemingly normal-looking person can attempt to do some awful things? Maybe that this person was not so isolated as not feel the peer-pressure to buy a hat with a Nike swoosh?
What I focused on next–and some of you gardeners out there have already guessed it–is the amazing backdrop of colorful foliage. What are those plants?, I asked myself. Then my brain wandered off into other areas: Did the suspect enjoy plants enough to think that this would be a scenic location for a portrait (on at least two occasions, looking at his change in clothing)? Or maybe the photographer dragged the resentful and unwilling subject out into the cold, into these spots with the colorful backgrounds?
I don’t know. The only possible answer I can pull out of all this is that the backdrop is the kind of foliage that people in areas of the world colder than mine get to experience.
Other than that I’m left with questions, only questions…
I had the chance to fast-forward through a documentary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Owning the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy science of geoengineering, in which scientists and charlatans attempt to modify the earth’s weather.
As one cautionary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hatfield who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hatfield set up his apparatus on the eastern edge of town and got to business seeding clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 people were dead in the ensuing flooding. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a charlatan taking advantage of a natural weather occurrence. Whether this sort of weather modification actually makes a difference in practice is in dispute. ]
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, is interviewed and gets some of the better lines in the film:
“One of the great sadnesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warming get completely out of control is [these geoengineering proposals] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…
“The 20th century taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that scientific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trouble. Any sort of solution that we could introduce that was actually going to lower the temperature of the world several degrees—you know, whatever geoengineering solution—is inherently a big scale scary as hell.”
Interestingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or looking out at the world from the climate controlled space of a car interior. All that reinforces one of the film’s points that we’re a culture that has cut ourselves off from what the environment brings us naturally.
I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some people are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the perfect temperature. Just extrapolate that out onto the entire earth and you can see that coming up with a scheme to modify weather so that everyone is happy is bound to be an impossible task.
What if Siberia decides it wants to grow tropical mangoes and geoengineers a frost-free climate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What happens to the rest of the world?
I looked west this morning while I was having breakfast and saw the first rainbow I’ve seen in months, maybe years. Although it was cool outside I had to go up to the deck to check it out. The rainbow was just a short piece of an arc rising from the ocean, but in this land of little rain you take what you get.
The rainbow was just about the last official act of a set of four consecutive storms that delivered over six days almost as much moisture as we received all of last year. And by “storms” I do mean real storms with rain, hail, thunder, lightning and tree-toppling winds. But for most of us in town things went as well as could be expected.
At work eucalyptus trees cracked and fell, buildings leaked, flows of water and mud threatened to invade several buildings. Walking outside entailed wading through puddles or jumping from one high spot to another.
At home power flickered on and off a few times. The back yard laked up briefly, but nothing that looked like it was going to come in the house.
Hail came down a couple times, but nothing was hurt. These pellets were about the size of peas.
Rain was heavy. These little buckets to catch roof runoff were full within the first 24 hours.
A potted Kalanchoe prolifera on the roof deck–seen here on the right–blew over. While the base must weigh 75 pounds when soaking wet, the plant is tall and proved no match for the blasts of wind that came through. This photo was shot after the plant was righted, so you can see it wasn’t bothered by spending some time sideways.
A survey this morning showed the trays of bog plants full of water, flooding the pots. These swamp dwellers are adapted to a little flooding, and in some areas people overwinter the rhizomes underwater so they don’t rot.
In fact, the parrot pitcher plant from the Florida-Georgia area, Sarracenia psittacina, can be found completely submerged over the winter. Its traps are unique in that they’re adapted to catching swimming as well as crawling creatures, so it’ll find something to eat, whether underwater or above.
The culvert in city easement behind the house filled with water. It makes me want to establish a little vernal pool in the muck at the bottom. I wonder if it would work in this location. Some of the most endangered plants in my area can be found around vernal pools and nowhere else.
The cooling weather and moister weather greens up the plants that have been dormant through the dry season. In the back Coreopsis gigantea leaves begin to sprout on what had been little brown trunks. But in the foreground you see all the weeds that accompany the season. These are mostly seedlings of a few mizuna plants, a Japanese mustard green, that I let go to seed a decade ago.
…and when life gives you young, weedy, tender mizuna sprouts, why not pick mizuna greens? These will be in tonight’s salad.
So you can see we came through pretty well. The main casualty was Scooter, the cat, who’s used to occasional times outside to sun herself. I think the “Can I go outside, please?” expression is pretty clear on her face here.
She did get to go out this morning, at last, and so did I. While I appreciate the rain, a little respite between storms doesn’t hurt, both for cats and humans alike. It also gives the waterlogged ground to dry out a bit or to let the water seep down farther.
If the weather forecasts are right, we’ll be getting another storm on Tuesday, but it won’t be anything like the almost continuous rain we just had. After 3 years of bad drought, we’ll take whatever rain falls, even if we don’t get any more rainbows with it.
I find weather and climate to be amazingly fascinating things. The media must not believe that the rest of the public thinks the same way, judging by how they always seem to need to sex up the topic.
“Flooding! Mudslides!” was how Weatherbug packaged the recent early winter storm heading for California.
Thinking that dry little San Diego stood a chance of getting some real rain out of the storm, I put out a couple trays of potted carnivorous plants in hopes of giving them a taste of real water from the sky. And along the eaves of the house I placed some buckets to catch rainwater that I could use later.
Unfortunately I was duped by all the buildup. Imagine my disappointment when I came home last night and found the buckets as empty as a bin of free hundred-dollar bills and as dry as the Baptist potlucks of my early teen years. We are talking dry.
Often by the end of September we have the first of the autumn rains. But not this year.
Still, the days are cooling. The skies are home to more and more clouds that look like they could deliver some precipitation. The rains didn’t come this week, but they’ll come.
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