From EurekAlert: “The American Society for Horticultural Science has published multimedia podcast files of 98 horticulture presentations from the 2007 Annual Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.” Check out, in particular, James Nienhuis of the University of Wisconsin, Dept. of Horticulture, talking about Renaissance art and agrobiodiversity, more specifically vegetable domestication. Wonderful stuff.
Bon appetit
Never rains but it pours. More food stuff from bookforum.com.
More “contaminated” bison
The ancestors of the bison, or buffaloes, of Catalina Island off the California coast arrived as movie extras in 1924. Scientists have always thought they were more likely to be pure-bred than many of the other buffalo that roam North America, because they’ve effectively been in isolation. Turns out it ain’t so. Nearly half the animals shipped off the island have maternal cow genes. Scientists believe the cross breeding probably occurred before the buffalo were shipped to Catalina — and nothing since 1924 has selected against it.
P.S. As the commenter to our original piece pointed out, nobody seems to have looked for bison genes in cattle. Why not?
Roman antibiotics
Also from Tangled Bank comes news of a study looking at the evidence for various infectious diseases from the skeletons of people killed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. ((That’s the one that also destroyed Pompeii, though in a somewhat different way.)) Among the diseases was brucellosis, evidence for which was also gleaned from the carbonized cheeses found at the site. Herculaneum was apparently famous for its goat cheeses, which seem, however, to have been badly infected. Which is all amazing enough. But one of the commenters on the article points to another paper which adds a twist to the story.
It seems the inhabitants of Herculaneum, despite their brucellosis and tuberculosis, were relatively free of non-specific bone inflammations. And that may be because:
Pomegranates and figs, consumed by the population, were mainly dried and invariably contaminated by Streptomyces, a bacterium that produces natural tetracycline, an antibiotic.
Is there similar evidence from contemporary populations of the protection conferred by natural antibiotics?
Scottish oaks
Protecting an ancient oak forest in Scotland.