There’s A Whole Bunch Of New Stuff Under The Sun

There’s A Whole Bunch Of New Stuff Under The Sun

I’m sure kids are still bored out of their skulls and believe there’s nothing to separate them from being beasts of burden. But they need to prepare themselves for a very exciting future by keeping their bow, stern, port, and starboard lobes snapping and cracking. There is so much going on each day it’s very hard to keep up.
Sixty-five years ago my brothers, sisters and I were milking about 25 cows by hand twice a day. Boring—except when the cow wrapped her tail around your neck or got pissed at a cold hand and put her foot in the pail. I know something about robotic milking systems, but I was reminded in a Forum article about the dairy farm of Andy Johanson of Northwood and how far we have come in those decades from a warm hand and a cream separator.

I was also thinking of the engineering, metallurgy, plastics, electronics, computer systems, and other exotic areas of study such as physics and biology that went into the development of robotic milking systems. Such developments may keep us ahead in the world contest of nanotechnology.
If we produce men and women like the 20 who have been selected for the All-USA College Academic Team this year we will be OK in the world war of ideas. Two are majoring in chemistry, five in sophisticated areas of biology such as molecular and cellular, two in English literature, three in international relations, one in history, two in psychology, three in geological science, one in classics, and one in law. If we continue to make third-class autos and second-class electronics we are never going to lead the world again. We need to travel on new avenues and streets.

The Little People Of Flores

We will need all of these academic areas and then some if we are going to solve the mystery of our three-foot tall relatives discovered in Indonesia about five years ago.  Just where do they fit on our family tree? Some say the skeletons and skulls found to this point belong to humans afflicted with genetic or pathological disorders, but their brains are in proportion to their size and weight. Their brains are one-third the size of ours, encased in a skull the size of a grapefruit.

Some researchers are starting to get serious about solving this mystery of the little people. There are elephants and other animals that have stayed “little.” There are human dwarfs and pygmies in Africa. But the “hobbits,” as they are called by the researchers, are not like the pygmies at all. The hobbits were capable of making stone tools similar to other early humans. Researchers have determined that they lived up to 17,000 years ago on tiny islands in the Indonesian archipelago. There the trail ends—so far. It’s important that we solve the mystery of the little people because the answers may change our ideas about evolution, religion, genetics, and other interesting puzzles of man.

Bees And Their Daylight Smorgasbord

It may be important to discover how some flowers tell time. In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus in his “Philosophia Botanica” suggested that enough flowers of different types could make a 24-hour botanical clock. Olivia Judson, a scientific writer with the New York Times, covered this subject and others in her column “Let’s Hear It For The Bees.”

Catmint flowers open up between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Orange Hawkweed presents itself between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. Marigolds open at 9 a.m. There are many others that open on the half-hour and hour. EVidently plants have routines determined by some mysterious internally generated system. About 300 years ago a French astronomer put a Mimosa plant in a dark cupboard. The plant still closed and opened periodically as if it were out in the daylight—and all the leaves moved at the same time each day.

Plants also have a schedule of when they release scents. Plants that are white or pale release their scents as the sun goes down. They attract pollinating moths and other night-flying insects. Flowers of a specific species all produce nectar at the same time each day.
Bees with their centimeter-length bodies and tiny brains with only a million neurons have cataloged all of this useful information. At 10 a.m. even stupid bees start to keep their appointments. They hit the lilac bushes and trees. This is their appetizer. At 11:30 they have wine at the peonies. Then they start the smorgasbord of the day.

Flowers have their productive times and their down times. Bees have this all figured out. They change flowers and times weekly, depending upon their calendar of events. Bees also have their own global-positioning system. They communicate with their fellow bees by “waggle” dances and wing movements where the good restaurants are. They can tell other bees where the good chow is within a 15 kilometer range. Bees have a flexible restaurant-hunting method through their ability to learn colors, odors, shapes, and routes. They have to be quick and accurate. After all, we have been stealing their honey for thousands of years while suffering just a few stings.
Bees and flowers point out that we need to learn an awful lot more about Mother Nature before she does us in.

The Little Insect That May Save Our Bacon

With the knowledge and tools we have available today we should be able to discover the secrets of the little people and flowers, plants, and bees without too much of a problem. But it’s the termite that might save us in the end. An article by Lisa Margonelli called “Gut Reactions” in a recent Atlantic magazine outlines scientific work on termites which just might be the answer to our energy problems.

It seems the 100-million-year-old termite has over 500 genes for enzymes able to break down the cellulose in wood and grasses. We aren’t bothered much by termites in God’s Country but we lived in the South long enough to know you got a termite inspection before buying anything built of wood. Many a bootlegger has strolled out on a porch only to go through it. New Orleans was and is famous for having empty studs, walls, timbers, and floors completely hollowed out by termites. The estimate is that little wood eater destroys about $11 billion worth of real estate each year. But now they could also be our salvation.
We have discovered we can make ethanol from cellulose in wood and grasses. But Mother Nature has covered the sugars in wood with lignin, a substance that adds strength to the cell walls of cellulose. The sugars are so hard to get at because they are protected by a very complex system of chemical bonds we haven’t learned to get through yet. So far we are only able to produce about 1.5 million gallons a year, or about one percent of a day’s U.S. gas consumption. But the termites have figured it out long ago.

Termites chew off a hunk of wood and send it to their gut, just like we do a prime rib. In the gut these complex bonding materials are stripped away to reveal sugars, C02, hydrogen and methane—all components of ethanol.
Our Department of Energy is now in the middle of sequencing the DNA of termites so they can determine which of the 300 microbes and 500 different genes in the gut of the termite removes the lignin and degrades cellulose. This is much more complicated than manufacturing cars. That’s why we have to keep putting money into all phases of education. Making gas tanks for the Hummer can be done by Black Forest elves. Filling that tank with fuel made from cellulose may be our “industrial revolution” of the future.

We have many very bright, educated people involved in this project. We have a Joint Genome Institute working on identifying the right genes and DNA. We have researchers from Caltech and a San Diego biotech company named Diversa gathering termites from around the world for sequencing. In just ten years the process of sequencing has been developed to the point that we can do in an hour what took a year back in 1998. We may beat Mother Nature yet.
We are examining termites in rather exotic places. We have termites on the International Space Station being carved up by astronauts. We also have Phd scientists dissecting Texas cowpies for termites. (I can imagine some parent saying, “I spent $100,000 on your education—and you are doing what?”) The ranchers were a little surprised when they were asked to sign waivers on the cowpies just in case some intellectual property became valuable in the production of cellulose ethanol! I think these are exciting times for curious people—particularly for those college students who are at the top of their academic game.

An old Chinese proverb states: “May you be cursed to live in interesting times.” I guess such a supposition rests on the interpretation of “interesting times.” I think “cursed” should be changed to “blessed.”