James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

An Asian Chestnut growing in Iowa

Apologies in advance, this entry isn’t as tightly edited as I prefer but I’m still swamped.

The American Chestnut. Once three billion chestnuts grew in the Eastern US. Reading the wikipedia page today the discovery of individual trees that have survived long enough to flower is worthy of report. The culprit, a bark fungus introduced from Asia. Asian Chestnuts can survive the infection, but American ones had never had the evolutionary pressure to develop ways to survive. Conceptually it’s the same as when people who’ve lived for many generations without exposure are exposed to smallpox, (although if it came down to it, I’d choose losing three billion trees in a second over the millions of people killed by smallpox).

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I’m going to be in SF for a big part of the day attending Hardly Strictly Bluegrass a free music festival, so I probably won’t have time to write anything too interesting today. So it’s a a day for linking to other people’s cool stuff:

• This guy created a map of every McDonalds around the country. Pretty fun, though I don’t share his despair at their frequency. I’ve done a lot of multi-day drives and the great thing about franchises is being able to pull into a place where you know the menu, and the prices for lunch or dinner even if you’ve never been in the state before. I remember getting Subway the first time I drove through Laramie, WY. The counterexample was stopping at a cool looking diner in north eastern Missouri getting stared at as we walking in the door, and feeling awkward the whole time about being the only people under fifty in the whole joint.
• California is still working on a plan to build a high speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Which would be great for traffic, the environment, and poor grad students who want to see more of the big cities before I return to my midwestern homeland. The downside is $45 billion for 800 miles (>$55 million per mile) seems like a ridiculous price tag.
• Check out the Ig nobel awards. A humorous set of reverse nobel prizes, this year awards for things such as a doctor publishing on have cracked only one set of knuckles for decades with no ill effects and a study of whether you’ll do more damage by hitting someone you don’t like with an empty or full beer bottle.

Hope ya’ll are having a good Saturday.

Now for a brief detour into the animal world, which includes humans. A story recently went up on slashdot describing a new generation of artificial hearts that are less bulky, last longer, and are suitable for more people. The reason it makes a website like slashdot is that it accomplished all that by switching to a continuous pump.

Normal artificial hearts mimic our biological ones, pumping blood in in pulses. Think of it like waves crashing against the shore.

The continuous pump is more like the water flow in a river, constant in both direction and pressure.

Why am I mentioning this? Because it is an example of what is natural and what saves peoples lives being very different. And if the continuous pump doesn’t sound that unnatural to you, consider that people with these new artificial hearts have no pulse.

Not having a pulse might substantially reduce the risk of strokes (my own speculation). Strokes are caused by blood vessels bursting open in the brain, and a low constant pressure is going to put less strain on the walls blood vessels than high pressure pulse. It’s the different between pushing a wall and punching one.

On a less serious note, leaving aside the real issues with artificial hearts, consider the potential of marketing these pulseless hearts as elective surgery. One long and expensive surgery, a couple of months de-tanning, and all sorts of cheesy pick-up lines become available to a guy interested in seducing the vast numbers of vampire obsessed women in America. Something about checking for a pulse and femoral arteries suggests itself.