The Mexican President has promised to intervene to cut the price of maize flour after the price of the tortilla, staple food of the Mexican poor, jumped dramatically.
Radio 4 was reporting this morning that this was being attributed to increased direction of maize to the production of ethanol … one more reason why this isn’t really a “green” answer for transport, except perhaps on a local scale with otherwise unused materials.
A fascinating example of evolution in action: the world’s largest (and smelliest) flower, which can weigh 15lb (7kg) started out at one-eightieth that size.
Rafflesia is unusual in several ways: It has a carcass-like appearance, reeks of decaying flesh, and in some cases emits heat, much like a recently killed animal. These traits help the flower attract the carrion flies which pollinate it. Because rafflesia lacks the genes most commonly used to trace plant ancestry, the scientists had to delve deeper into its genome, looking at some 11,500 ”letters” of DNA.
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This determined that the giant flower’s closest relatives are in the Euphorbiaceae family, many of which have blossoms just a few millimetres in diameter.
Tis a wonderful world. And modern humans proved remarkably adept at exploring it, as a discovery of our direct ancestors in southern Russia about 45,000 years ago, before we were supposed to have been there, and much further north than expected, suggests. There’s also a piece being claimed as the oldest (known – the vital word The Times misses out) piece of figurative art. (Although reading between the lines it sounds like you need quite a lot of imagination to see the “figure”.)
“The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe,†said John Hoffecker, of the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States.
“It is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first.â€
Animal bones uncovered show that the inhabitants were expanding their diet to include small mammals, fish and other aquatic creatures. This, the researchers said, suggests that the people were “remaking themselves technologically†and may have used snares to trap hares and Arctic foxes, and nets for fish….
Evidence of early trading networks was thrown up by the realisation that the shells the inhabitants used for jewellery had come from the Black Sea, more than 300 miles away.
Reported in the Independent today, the short life and brutal death of a 19-year-old Pakistani bride, Sabia Rani, transported from her rural village (where she’d had a few scant years of education) to 21st-century Britain, then brutally beaten to death, in a household with eight of her in-laws, for being unable to live up to her husband’s expectations about make-up, sandwiches and going to the supermarket.
When a “holy man” confirmed she was “possessed by evil spirits”, through touching an item of her clothing, that probably sealed her fate.
Khan told his work supervisor that he was unhappy with his marriage because he had been rushed into it, and soon began kicking and beating his wife.
Leeds Crown Court heard that Ms Rani’s injuries, similar to those of a car crash victim, were so severe that she would have been in constant pain and ill for at least three weeks before she died.
Yet Khan’s sister said she had seen no evidence of injuries. She and Ms Rani had been great friends, she said.
Much is made of the difference between “forced marriage” and “arranged marriage”. Yet could poor Sabia Rani be said to have had any meaningful agency, any real choice?
A piece in the Guardian this morning reminded me I’ve been meaning to point to the work of Rose Hacker, who has started out as a journalist at the age of 100. But this is no mere novelty piece – she’s appearing every fortnight in my local Camden New Journal with a usually solid piece.
The daughter of an East End Jewish rag trade worker, she was a Labour activist and one of Britain’s first sex therapists. I don’t know if anyone is working on a biography, but if no one is, someone should get on with it.
She started the year with a piece Poverty should be history by now – words of wisdom from the old.
Australia’s small ski industry is obviously doomed, but there could soon (by 2050) be no white stuff at all in the land of the Man from Snowy River, which is really bad news for the water supplies of Melbourne and Adelaide (and I would expect for the hydro-electric scheme that runs in the area).
The CSIRO reported this week that climate change could all but wipe out snow falls by 2050. The resulting loss of run-off from melting snow would seriously reduce water levels in the Snowy and Murrumbidgee rivers.
… As the snow vanished, Professor Adams said, about half a million hectares of forest that acts as a key rainwater catchment at the head of the river would dry out, leading to massive bushfires that would destroy huge areas of mature trees.
New trees would begin growing to replace those burnt out. But, the professor said, growing trees suck up far more water than mature ones. The thirst of the regrowing forest would “sharply reduce” mountain water running into key rivers and dams, including Lake Eucumbene and Lake Jindabyne, for 30 years.
But there might be some good news in Australia’s current drought – according to this piece it might follow a historic pattern in seeing off, finally, the dreadful John Howard, Prime Minister of the 1950s who has somehow held power in Australia for the past decade and done an awful lot to take the country back half a century.
Nice to see that the new Digital Companion to the Humanities has done the obvious but rare thing of being fully published on the web, as well as on dead trees, and for free!
I’m particularly interested in the archiving section (one of my long list of things to do for the Green Party is look into that), but it covers everything from archaeology, to music research, to issues (fittingly) of electronic texts.
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