I Won't Fuck Us Over, I'm Mr. November

for the impossible soul

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npr: Ooooo. jtotheizzoe: Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way? First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of. If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here). With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones. This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!   (via Discover Magazine)

npr:

Ooooo.

jtotheizzoe:

Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn

Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?

First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.

If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).

With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.

This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!  

(via Discover Magazine)

155 notes

npr:

There was a lot of excitement in New York this week as the mayor, the president of New York University, and a lot of other dignitaries crowed around a podium in Brooklyn. The announcement: NYU is joining the effort to create a powerhouse tech triangle in the city’s most populous borough. The university plans to take over the mostly vacant MTA building at 370 Jay Street to house a new Center for Urban Science and Progress.  The building will undergo a massive renovation (as depicted in the above photo and rendering, courtesy NYU).

Officials proclaimed many benefits of this project to the development of Brooklyn’s downtown. But the new graduate program itself is intended to contribute knowledge and expertise to an emerging global industry — the business of smart cities — according to CUSP ‘s new director, physicist Steven Koonin. Koonin has formerly served as provost for the California Institute of Technology, chief scientist at BP, and an undersecretary at the Department of Energy.

James Garrett, the head of Civil Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (one of CUSP’s academic partners), gives an example of the kind of project students might tackle. Imagine a network of sensors that monitor the integrity of underground water pipes throughout a city to warn of a potential water main break. Now, envision testing that kind of system in a city as complex as New York. The goal, he says, is to understand “how systems interact with each other and to use New York City as a living test bed.”

The nascent smart cities field is being pioneered by technology corporations such as IBM and Siemens. Steven Koonin tells NPR that “urban science” is about “understanding cities in a detailed systemic way.” He likens the study of a city’s networks of roads, pipelines and even health care to systems biology. “In many fields of science, the data is king. The goal is to move to a really data driven approach in cities … to improve efficiency, resilience and quality of life.” 

Franklyn Cater                                                                                                                                                  

My school just consumes everything in it’s path.