tomato
gregladen | May 28, 2012First, I want to say that tomatoes are a fruit. Here is a scientific definition of fruit:
Fruit noun, plural: fruits
(1) (botany) The seed-bearing structure in angiosperms formed from the ovary after flowering.
source
See? Tomato is a fruit.
Having said that, in common English parlance we do not call a tomato a fruit. We put the tomatoes in with the vegetables. Is this because we are unknowledgeable? No. It is because we are wise. Anyone who reads Fortune Cookies knows this:
Knowledge is knowing that a Tomato is a Fruit. Wisdom is not putting a Tomato in the Fruit Salad.
There are two…
jhalper | August 15, 2010When you look over the assortment of sizes, shapes and colors of tomatoes displayed in the market, do you stop to consider the time and effort that went into developing them (more than ten years to create a new commercial cultivar)? But a variety of sweet, pink-skinned tomato that's popular in the Far East could speed-up the breeding of new cultivars in this region. In the search for the mutation that gives these tomatoes their pink hue, Weizmann scientists discovered a "master" gene that regulates the levels of hundreds of tomato metabolites. That gene, say the scientists, might be used as a…
edyong | March 17, 2010In Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story, Dr Henry Jekyll drinks a mysterious potion that transforms him from an upstanding citizen into the violent, murderous Edward Hyde. We might think that such an easy transformation would be confined to the pages of fiction, but a similar fate regularly befalls a common fungus called Fusarium oxysporum.
A team of scientists led by Li-Jun Ma and Charlotte van der Does have found that the fungus can swap four entire chromosomes form one individual to another. This package is the genetic equivalent of Stevenson's potion. It has everything a humble, Jekyll…
sciencewoman | July 27, 2009Sprinklers. Wading pools. Picnics. Dogs. Playing with Minnow. Hanging out with good friends. The hallmarks of well-spent summer weekends. Just don't forget the cucumbers...
One day's worth of cucumbers, after a few days of rain. This picture was from a few weeks back, and fortunately the cucumber flux has eased somewhat, but it's still difficult to maintain the cucumber mass balance in our house. Anybody want some?
What do you do with so many cucumbers? Make 2 versions of cucumber-tomato salad for a friend's house-warming party, and bring 2 extra cucumbers as her housewarming gift. Too bad…