agriculture
mikethemadbiologist | March 10, 2009I've written about urban-based, vertical farming before. I recently stumbled across this website, The Vertical Farm, that describes vertical farming some more. It also has cool pictures like this:
(click here to embiggen)
I have no idea if this could work, and I don't think farming within cities is a good use of land (except maybe in former industrial areas--the revitalization of Detroit and Flint?). I'm also always suspicious that this resembles those "City of the Future" dioramas, which look really cool, but are utterly impractical.
Still, the pictures are neato.
bcohen | March 6, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4
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Part 4 with Christopher Henke, discussing his book Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What do you make of the intersection of STS and agricultural studies?
CH: STS folks aren't often citing rural sociology, and vice-versa. I think the connections between these realms are greater than it might at first appear. Historians of science like Margaret Rossiter, Charles Rosenberg, and Deborah Fitzgerald were writing about agricultural science some time ago (as a sociologist…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2009
I'm kidding, but ScienceBlogling Tara Smith has co-authored a PLoS One article about the emergence of the MRSA strain ST398 in Iowan pork farms. Pig farms are a tremendous reservoir of bacteria: as far as I can tell, there are about six pigs for every person in Iowa.
MRSA ST398 a methicillin resistant S. aureus bacterium that has spread epidemic through various European animal populations (particularly pigs). It recently jumped from the animal population to the human population in Europe and has begun to establish itself there in hospitals. The last thing we want is for another MRSA…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2009The emerging MRSA strain ST398 has found a new home--chickens.
MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) was first found to have swept through European swine herds from 2003-2006. Then it entered the hospital system.
In the U.S., it had not been observed in agriculture until very recently (it's ScienceBlogling Tara's fault--on a serious note, she studies this critter). It hasn't been seen in hospitals in the U.S. yet.
What's disturbing is that a recent study from Belgium indicates that MRSA is on the rise in chickens and that it's due to ST398 (this isn't a trivial thing; most…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2009Over at What's New in Life Science Research, I have a post about Potential Harm from Genetically Modified Foods that looks at the effect of GM foods on aquatic systems. Make our Benevolent Seed Overlords happy and go read it.
mikethemadbiologist | November 9, 2008The Harbingers of the Apocalypse
NOW!! Actually, it's pretty good (and it's publicly available as a pdf). ScienceBlogling Revere has a good summary.
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2008While corn, and particularly corn derivatives such as corn syrup and ethanol additives, is seen as the devil, an excellent exhibit of posters at the Boston Public Library portrays a time when corn products were seen as a really good thing:
(from here)
The exhibit is open 9-9 Monday through Friday, and 9-5, Saturday (and it's free!).
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2008
With all of the stories about bacterial contamination of food, a recent paper describes one possible way to reduce the virulence--the ability to cause disease--of the bacterium Escherichia coli.
Farms are an obvious...input of E. coli--the amount of feces that a single pig produces is staggering, never mind a thousand pigs*. The concern is that E. coli from agricultural settings can either serve as a genetic reservoir of virulence (disease-causing) genes (and antibiotic resistance genes too), or as a source of virulent E. coli strains, such as E. coli O157:H7.
What the authors of paper…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Bombus impatiens, Bumblebees, pathogen spillover, epidemiology, pollinating insects, greenhouses
Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens.
This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops,
such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses.
Image: Wikipedia Commons [larger view].
A mysterious decline in North American bumblebee populations is apparently the result of "spillover" of pathogen-infected commercial bumblebees, Bombus species, from agricultural greenhouses where tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are commonly grown…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2008...seven years later? The bad news--for years, cephalosporin antibiotics (antibiotics derived from penicillin, such as ceftiofur, cephalothalin, cefoxitin, and ceftriaxone) were used 'off-label' (meaning irresponsibly) in agriculture (italics mine):
Inspectors found a common antibiotic has been misused in animals through practices such as injections into chicken eggs and ordered farmers to stop the unapproved treatments because of the risk to humans.
The drugs, called cephalosporins, were given in unapproved doses to chickens, beef, pigs and dairy cows, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration…
mikethemadbiologist | July 2, 2008There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds. There was, however, one jarring note, and it had to do with an incorrect definition of natural selection (italics mine):
"There's no such thing as natural selection," Ziska confides. He is not, he hastens to explain, a creationist. He is merely pointing out that the original 19th-century view of evolution, the one presented by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, is obsolete. Their model presented evolution as a process taking place in a nature independent of human interference.…
mikethemadbiologist | June 6, 2008
So while I was at the American Society for Microbiology meeting this week (and my talk went fine, thanks for asking), I saw a poster by one of ScienceBlogling Tara's students, Abby Harper, about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in pigs.
In the past, I've talked about how, in Europe, there is a strain of MRSA that is sweeping through pigs in Europe, ST398. Essentially, this is a silent epidemic sweeping through pigs (it doesn't seem to cause that much disease is pigs; it's primarily a commensal). In agricultural communities, it seems to be spreading from pigs to people.…
mikethemadbiologist | May 22, 2008Photo: Architectural Design by Rolf Mohr; Modeling and Rendering by Machine Films; Interiors by James Nelms ÂDigital Artist @ Storyboards Online
A while back, I posted about apartment buildings that double as farms. New York magazine has a really interesting article about urban skyscrapers that would function as vertical hydroponic farms.
I have no idea if this "skyfarming" could work, but the idea that cities, with abundant supplies of grey water (unpotable water that can be used in agriculture), could be the next food basket is tantalizing. It could really revitalize the urban and…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2008An article in Emerging Infectious Diseases describes a joint collaboration between the CDC and Mexican health authorities that built a system to monitor the spread of Salmonella through the food chain and into people. One finding shocked me.
The authors examined four Mexican states, and the carriage of Salmonella in asymptomatic children ranged from 1.9% to over 11 percent. That's a lot of kids with Salmonella who are not exhibiting any symptoms:
Salmonella carriage was strongly correlated with contamination of meat by Salmonella* and by overall poverty. While the healthy kids had fewer…
mikethemadbiologist | April 2, 2008When I started blogging, I never (EVAH!) thought I would describe the biology of E. coli with a Tolkein poem:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
I'm referring, of course, the spinach outbreak strain of E. coli O157:H7. You know, this one:
It turns out that this particular strain of E. coli O157:…
awild | March 25, 2008
Mycocepurus smithi, in the fungus garden
An exciting week for ant aficionados! A new study by ant phylogenetics gurus Ted Schultz and Seán Brady provides the first detailed picture of attine evolution. These New World ants have long attracted the attention of biologists because they, like our own species, practice a well-developed form of agriculture. Instead of plants, these ants grow fungi, and their relationship is so specialized that the ants can consume nothing else. Schultz and Brady use data from four nuclear genes, the fossil record, and the biology of extant ants to infer an…
mikethemadbiologist | March 10, 2008I've already covered the War on Beer, but now, pizza is taking it the chops too. Have they no decency? From the Back Bay Sun:
The changing economy is not only affecting the housing market and the prices at the pump - it's also taking a bite out of local pizza makers' profits. The rising costs of two key ingredients in the perfect pie - flour and cheese - have been making pizza joints around the Back Bay take a second look at their production costs and even their pizza prices.
"The costs are just getting crazy," says Doug Ferriman, who would know as the owner of Crazy Dough's Pizza at 1124…
mikethemadbiologist | February 25, 2008
This is really cool: a building that is not only environmentally friendy (low energy use, low impact building materials, passive heating and cooling, and so on), but also comes with its own hydroponic garden system.
What's neat is that this isn't vaporware--China is in the process of building a bunch of these. Here's how much green stuff the building will have:
Look hydroponicy stuff:
Some more:
And:
It's got all sorts of convection air current stuff:
And the apartments look nice too:
I wonder if it will have termite problems though....
mikethemadbiologist | February 13, 2008How antibiotic resistant your E. coli are has to do with where you've been, not what you eat.
A recent study isolated E. coli from 567 newly hospitalized patients and 100 vegetarians (one E. coli isolate per person), and screened them for resistance to X antibiotics, including ciprofloxacin, nalidixic acid, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (the primary treatment for E. coli-related urinary tract infections), ceftriaxone, and ceftazidime (the last two indicate the presence of an extended-spectrum beta-lactamase, and can only be reliably treated with carbapenems).
The only significant risk factors…
mikethemadbiologist | February 10, 2008There's a good chance that the air during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 will be harmful to the athletes. Now they also can't eat the food (italics mine):
When a caterer working for the United States Olympic Committee went to a supermarket in China last year, he encountered a piece of chicken--half of a breast--that measured 14 inches. "Enough to feed a family of eight," said Frank Puleo, a caterer from Staten Island who has traveled to China to handle food-related issues.
"We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested…