An Evolutionary Whodunit: How Did Humans Develop Lactose Tolerance?

Thousands of years ago, a mutation in the human genome allowed many adults to digest lactose and drink milk.

iStockphoto.com Thousands of years ago, a mutation in the human genome allowed many adults to digest lactose and drink milk.

iStockphoto.com

Got milk? Ancient European farmers who made cheese thousands of years ago certainly had it. But at that time, they lacked a genetic mutation that would have allowed them to digest raw milk's dominant sugar, lactose, after childhood.

Today, however, 35 percent of the global population — mostly people with European ancestry — can digest lactose in adulthood without a hitch.

So, how did we transition from milk-a-phobics to milkaholics? "The first and most correct answer is, we don't know," says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London in the U.K.

Most babies can digest milk without getting an upset stomach thanks to an enzyme called lactase. Up until several thousand years ago, that enzyme turned off once a person grew into adulthood — meaning most adults were lactose intolerant (or "lactase nonpersistent," as scientists call it).

But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure.

"Something happened when we started drinking milk that reduced mortality," says Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist at Colorado State University and an expert on Paleolithic nutrition. That something, though, is a bit of a mystery.

The Clues

Milk, no surprise, is pretty nutritious. It's got protein, a bunch of micronutrients, lots of calcium and plenty of carbohydrates. For the ancient Neolithic farmer, it was like a superfood, says Thomas.

Even lactose-intolerant adults could have benefited from milk. Chemical evidence from ancient pots shows that these long-ago farmers learned to process the milk into cheese or yogurt, which removes some of the lactose.

But around 8,000 years ago in what's now Turkey — just when humans were starting to milk newly domesticated cows, goats and sheep — mutations near the gene that produces the lactase enzyme started becoming more frequent. And around the same time, adult lactose tolerance developed. The mutation responsible for that may be between 2,000 and 20,000 years old; estimates vary.

But in order for that new trait to have persisted over many generations, something unique must have given milk drinkers an evolutionary edge.

A Tale Of Famine And Deadly Diarrhea

Thomas thinks a combination of two reasons may explain the persistence of the lactase mutation in Northern Europe.

First, the farmers that settled there came from the Fertile Crescent, and they brought crops native to that region, like wheat and barley. But with Northern Europe's shorter growing season, these crops were more likely to fail, causing famine.

Additionally, the colder Northern European climate lent itself to natural refrigeration. "If you're a farmer in Southern Europe, and you milk a cow in the morning and you leave the milk out, it will be yogurt by noon. But if you do the same thing in Germany, it'll still be milk," says Thomas. A healthy lactose-intolerant person who drank that still-fresh milk would get a bad case of diarrhea. "But if you're malnourished, then you'll die," Thomas says.

In times of famine, milk drinking probably increased. And the very people who shouldn't have been consuming high-lactose dairy products — the hungry and malnourished — would be the ones more likely to drink fresh milk. So, with milk's deadly effects for the lactose intolerant, individuals with the lactase mutation would have been more likely to survive and pass on that gene.

The combination of famine and longer processing time for milk is "kind of like a double whammy," says Thomas, who has yet to publish his theory. Under his scenario, the lactose tolerant wouldn't always have had an evolutionary advantage, but for short periods of time, having that genetic mutation would have helped. "Over a long run, it's modest; but over short periods of time, it's extremely high selection" for the lactose tolerant, says Thomas.

Scientists may never discover the reason why adult lactose tolerance evolved so quickly. Other researchers have suggested that fresh milk provided a more pure fluid alternative to contaminated water sources in arid environments; that milk fat gave people a fertility advantage; or that milk drinking might have been associated with social prestige. Cordain argues that milk gave humans an advantage against malaria in Africa and Southern Europe, and rickets in Northern Europe.

"Whatever constellation of factors was involved, they're going to be different in different regions," says Thomas. "But the selection pressure might have been equally strong in East Africa and Northern Europe, for example."

It's hard to tell how prevalent lactose tolerance has been over time. But so far scientists have found evidence of adult lactase persistence in ancient skeletons in Northern Europe, Scandinavia, southern France and elsewhere. Thomas and his colleague Oddný Sverrisdóttir of Uppsala University in Sweden recently discovered lactase persistence in Spanish remains from about 5,000 years ago and hope to publish their research next year.

Thomas thinks that as genetic and archaeological technology continues to develop, modern science may someday reveal the culprit. But it might take a while because the research — like our genes — is still evolving.

View the original article here

The Renaissance Man Who Got It All Wrong

In A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, John Glassie writes of 17th-century Jesuit priest and scientist Athanasius Kircher, a renaissance man who studied magnetism, Mount Vesuvius, even the blood of plague victims. The only problem? His theories were often wrong.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY; I'm Ira Flatow. You've heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Newton, maybe even Pascal and Hooke, all Renaissance men who, between them, innovated in painting, sculpture, physics, math, chemistry, astronomy, architecture, philosophy, the list goes on. But how about Athanasius Kircher? Yeah, have you heard of him? Not ringing - no bells are ringing?

Well, he was a contemporary of many of these greats and a priest and a scholar who studied Egyptian hieroglyphics, magnetism, philosophy, music. He studied the blood of plague victims through an early microscope. He even hiked into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius to pursue his study of volcanoes and magma. Maybe a little crazy like a lot of other pioneers.

Impressive résumé, right? The only problem is he got a lot of stuff wrong. Whoops. You can read about his misadventures in my next guest's new book, "A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change." Very entertaining. John Glassie is the author of "A Man of Misconceptions" and a former contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine. He joins us in our New York studios. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

JOHN GLASSIE: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: Tell us about why don't - we haven't heard of this guy? He did all that stuff, we never heard of him.

GLASSIE: Well, it's a good question. Historians have become increasingly interested in him in the last couple of decades, I would say, but, you know, there wasn't a popular sort of version of his story out there. So I - that was one reason why I felt like I had to do it. I think he isn't a household name or even remember mainly because, you know, he didn't have one single achievement that he could be remembered for.

But he did play a pretty significant role in many different fields.

FLATOW: But if he was wrong in so many of them, how can he play a role in those fields?

GLASSIE: Well, there are a couple of different ways, maybe, in which that could be. One is I've begun to feel a little bit guilty about the title of my book, "A Man of Misconceptions."

(LAUGHTER)

GLASSIE: And I'm very fond of this fellow, and...

FLATOW: He's growing on you.

GLASSIE: Yes, absolutely. Well, after working on it for some time, you know, that's probably what happens. But, you know, he wasn't wrong about everything. He was a man of misconceptions certainly, but that's kind of a conceit that through the course of the book I begin to undermine because you realize that many of his misconceptions were misconceptions of the time, many people held them, and they're misconceptions really from our modernist point of view.

And this was just a crazy, crazy time. So it's really about a kind of perspective. It's a mindset that I was trying to sort of get into with the story of this fellow.

FLATOW: Give us a flavor of the time. What was going on around his peers and going on in the world at that time?

GLASSIE: Well, I mean, you can start off, he was born on the eve of a witch hunt, and...

FLATOW: Not a good start.

(LAUGHTER)

GLASSIE: In 1602, you know, and he was - you know, he was steeped in a lot of the, you know, the mystical and magical thinking of the pre-scientific era. 1602, you know, that's several years before Galileo published "Starry Messenger," you know, the - his observations of the four moons around Jupiter and so on. And he died in 1680. That was several years before Newton published the "Principia."

So this is - he lived 78 years, whatever that was. This is really the period that we now have a two-word label for, the scientific revolution. So he was steeped in these older notions, but he actually did - he adopted, he was an early adopter of technologies like the celestial tube, as they called it, or the telescope, the microscope.

And - but he was probably still too steeped in the -in sort of the older methodologies to really make too much progress in what...

FLATOW: The world was changing or just changing around him, and he couldn't keep up with it, and...

GLASSIE: He couldn't keep up with it, yeah, although he certainly tried. I mean, you know, this guy had more energy than I've ever, you know, than you can imagine. And, you know, he published something like 30 books in almost as many subjects. You mentioned a lot of them.

FLATOW: Right.

GLASSIE: And he - those books served as sort of benchmarks of learning of the time. They were encyclopedias on whatever it was: optics, even music, that kind of thing. And even though they contained many propositions that could then be proven wrong by experiment, which is by the way a pretty valuable service in a way, you know, they were important works that almost all the major figures of that time had to contend with.

FLATOW: You've likened him to a kind of Forest Gump of the 17th century.

GLASSIE: I have, yeah. I mean, well, the thing is - the only difference is that Forest Gump, you know, was this innocent, naïve, you know, sort of - had a kind of pure quality to his character. Kircher was a courtier, a careerist. He was not above fibbing if it suited him to get ahead in his career. But he was, in the way that Forest Gump was, kind of one or two degrees of separation away from so many kind of characteristic moments of the time and also as well as people.

So as I say, you know, born on the eve of a witch hunt, he was kind of thrown around in the turmoil of the 30 Years War. He arrived in Rome in 1633 just months after the Galileo trial. He was in Rome in 1656 for the plague, you mentioned the plague, and...

FLATOW: And he survived.

GLASSIE: He survived, yeah. Well, they actually - the entire city went - they had a fairly sophisticated sort of system in place to try and shut it down, and 15,000 people died in Rome apparently at that time. At the same time, in Naples, something like 150,000 to 250,000 people died. So Rome actually had a very sophisticated system in place.

But he did survive that, and that's when he looked at a lot of the plague victims under a microscope, which was probably the first time anybody had every looked at human blood through a microscope.

FLATOW: And what did he actually examine? Did he make an observation and a contribution after the observation?

GLASSIE: Well, he did. You know, it's not clear how sophisticated the microscope was that he was using, whether it was a compound microscope, even, and it's not clear entirely what he saw. But he claimed to have seen an innumerable number of invisible little worms, and he determined from that that plague, and that all disease, was a living thing.

And so he's been - there's a debate. I've said, you know, I don't know - it's ongoing. I don't know how active it is, you know, about whether he should be given credit for the germ theory of disease.

FLATOW: Instead of Pasteur, who came later.

GLASSIE: That's right, yeah.

FLATOW: Yeah, oh, so he saw something, didn't know what they were, but he thought that's how they - this spread from one person to another, through these little worms or something.

GLASSIE: That's right, and this actually was connected to his - he had sort of animistic kind of view of the world, and it was connected to something that he called universal sperm, this notion that there were little seed-like things, but life force, without and about, you know, most everything, kind of bizarre.

FLATOW: Talking with John Glassie, author of "A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change." Is it true that Kircher actually coined the term electromagnetism?

GLASSIE: Yes, I thought so until today, when I was checking it.

(LAUGHTER)

GLASSIE: And it looks like...

FLATOW: Never quite ever done with anything. I know how that is.

(LAUGHTER)

GLASSIE: Well no, it's - I think so, and there's a general consensus that yes, although - but as I say, I saw something today that suggests that maybe William Gilbert, you know, who wrote about magnetism, he wrote in this important work in 1601 about magnetism. But, you know, it's not, it's not the amazing coinage that we sort of think of, in a way.

Electron is the Greek word for amber, right.

FLATOW: Right.

GLASSIE: Which when you rub it, you know, against different materials or whatever, it creates static electricity. So this was, you know, just a way of describing a phenomenon that, you know, he saw was related to magnetic attraction and repulsion.

FLATOW: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. Tell me the story about the sunflower seed clock, something that I think might be better suited to Ripley's Believe It Or Not! than the halls of science.

GLASSIE: Yes. Well, it's a great story. He came out - he arrived in France in 1633. If I go on too long, just - you'll have to just stop me.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. I love these stories. Go ahead.

GLASSIE: He arrived in France in 1633 after - sort of as a refugee from the Thirty Years' War, came into sort of - came into the fold - under the fold of some French sort of experimental philosophers, and he talked up the sunflower seed clock to them.

FLATOW: A clock made out of sunflower seeds.

GLASSIE: What it was is that the seed was supposed to be able to drive the clock. And the idea was that the - that in the same way that the sunflower, the flower itself, turns and follows the sun during the course of the day, that the seed had the same property. He actually attributed it to a kind magnetic attraction of the sun. He believed - this connects, again, to almost this notion of universal sperm that I was talking to you...

FLATOW: Right, right.

GLASSIE: ...these invisible energies, these kind of cosmic influences and attractions and repulsions. So the notion was that the seed contained - you know, was pulled by the sun to drive up a clock. The seed was embedded in a cork in a tub of water, and it was shown, in certain cases, you know, to, when he displayed it, to - no matter which way, whatever you did with the cork, it would go right back and display the accurate time.

FLATOW: Wow.

GLASSIE: But it was really a parlor trick because there was also a magnet embedded in the cork. And so if he had enough time beforehand to set this parlor trick up, before people arrived to see it, he would figure out, relative to magnetic north, where the sun would be, and he would set it up so that it would always show the correct time.

FLATOW: Was there money on these things riding on it? Are you going to make any money from, you know, for being a charlatan in that sense?

GLASSIE: Well, I think that - it's funny, you know? I mean, I think that what he wanted to do was I think he wanted to try to convey what he actually believed the truth was about the way the universe worked, that there were, indeed, these kinds of energies. And even if he could not make a sunflower seed drive a clock, it was an analogy.

FLATOW: Yeah. Ah.

GLASSIE: This was the kind of thing that he wanted people to understand. Well, this happened to be at the time of the Galileo trial, by the way, and people kind of twigged on this as a way - that, you know, maybe there was something here. If this was true, then maybe this could actually help make Galileo's case...

FLATOW: Ah.

GLASSIE: ...that the sun had this attractive power. And so among sort of French intellectuals, there was a bunch of correspondent - correspondence. Mersenne, now famous for his prime numbers, wrote to Descartes and talked to him about this, and Descartes responded, said, well, thank you very much for having written to me about this. I find this to be very fascinating. If it's true, it's certainly, you know, very curious and wonderful, although I don't - I'm not convinced that this is the case, though I don't hold it to be impossible.

FLATOW: Yeah.

GLASSIE: And then, in fact, even years later when Kircher published his major work on magnetism, Descartes read sort of an enhanced description of the sunflower seed clock and wrote to - I don't know if it was Constantjin or Christiaan Huygens right in my mind right now, but he had correspondence about this, and he said, you know, I heard about this sunflower seed clock several years ago.

Father, you know, Mersenne wrote to me about it. I still don't think it's possible, on and on and on. But it - and, you know, he was making it sound as if it was completely absurd, but it wasn't so absurd that he didn't...

FLATOW: Yeah.

GLASSIE: ...want to try it himself.

FLATOW: That's right.

GLASSIE: So Descartes tried this thing. It's - well, it turns out, of course, it did not work.

FLATOW: Yeah. Of course not.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR, talking with John Glassie, author of "A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change." Speaking of an eccentric, you write in him about how he hiked into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius.

GLASSIE: Indeed he did.

FLATOW: Everybody's a little nutty.

GLASSIE: Well, not to mention this is in the aftermath of a devastating Earthquake in 1638 in Southern Italy there. He had been down in Malta and on Sicily, exploring the caves, the catacombs, the grottoes, the inland seas, the underground passageways and so forth. He was beginning to develop theories about the interior of the Earth.

FLATOW: So he went down there to explore.

GLASSIE: So he went down there. There was only one way to find out.

FLATOW: To go down there and take a hike.

GLASSIE: And get some empirical evidence and go on down there.

FLATOW: Wasn't he afraid of the lava or anything that might come out of that?

GLASSIE: Well, I think he was, but, you know, look, he was a, you know, he was a crackpot, but he was a - someone who had genuine passion for knowledge. He had sort of, you know, the right idea, you know, as far as that goes. And, you know, he described - there's, you know, these great passages about - you know, that he wrote about that exploration.

You know, he said that he felt that he was, you know, facing the habitation of hell. And he describes the sulfurous odors and the, you know, the racket, the noise and rackets of the rocks falling into the, you know, the molten lava and so forth. It's fantastic.

FLATOW: So he was actually that close to the lava.

GLASSIE: Well, I don't know how close he was, frankly, but it was inside the, you know, the crater of Vesuvius, that I think, you know, he really began to develop his notion of the - you know, what the interior of the Earth was like. And, you know, these were theories that he ended up publishing, I guess, about 30 years later in a major work called "Mundus Subterraneus," you know, which means just subterranean world or underground world. And that was kind of a major work of what we call - now call geology, and he published - excuse me - he published these wonderful, sort of, schematic diagrams of the Earth with networks of fires and also ocean leading all the way down into the center of the Earth.

FLATOW: Oceans of lava?

GLASSIE: Oceans of water.

FLATOW: Of water, going down into the center of the Earth.

GLASSIE: There were this, you know, there was a symbiotic system going on down there in his mind.

FLATOW: Well, if you want to - we're run out of time, but you want to read lots more about this. I highly recommend reading John Glassie's book, "A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in the Age of Change." And that guy is - say it for me, Athanaius(ph).

GLASSIE: Athanasius.

FLATOW: See, I going to close, Athanasius Kircher.

GLASSIE: That's right.

FLATOW: Thank you for taking time to do this today.

GLASSIE: Thanks so much.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Stay with us. After the break, we're going to talk about the psychology of New Year's resolutions, why it's so hard to keep it? Stay with us. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Making Resolutions That Stick

Vowing to stop smoking, curb spending or exercise more this January 1? Nearly half of U.S. adults will make year-end resolutions to change for the better in the coming year. Clinical psychologist John Norcross talks about how to increase the odds of success.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Up next this hour, the psychology of New Year's resolutions. Oh yeah, the making, the breaking, the keeping of New Year's resolutions. According to my next guest, between 40 to 50 percent of us participate in that annual holiday ritual, the making of New Year's resolutions. And each year we resolve what? To quit smoking, join a gym, live on a budget, lose weight, drink less. Make up your own, insert it right there. And believe it or not - believe it or not - a large percentage of people who make resolutions actually do stick to them.

So why do these folks have the right stuff, while the rest of us can't keep that promise? My next guest is a clinical psychologist who has studied the successful and the not-so-successful resolution makers, and he has some suggestions for those of you vowing to make a change coming January 1. One of those suggestions has to do with having someone phoning you a few times and reminding you of your resolution. We'll hear more about it from Dr. John Norcross, he's a clinical psychologist and a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Scranton. Thanks for talking with us today.

DR. JOHN NORCROSS: You're welcome, Ira. Happy holidays.

FLATOW: Happy holidays. Well, why do we normally take this time of the year to make resolutions?

NORCROSS: It begins with history. Worshippers in ancient Roman times would offer resolutions of good conduct to the god Janus, the two-faced deity looking backwards and forwards. And since that time, it's become a socially-sanctioned time where the plate is clean and everyone has a new opportunity.

FLATOW: And I mentioned a few of the resolutions we hear about, what other kinds of popular resolutions are there?

NORCROSS: Well, they are. The popular ones that you've identified: the losing weight, starting exercise, stop smoking, being nicer to someone in the family is also - makes the top five. And when the economy begins to slide, you start seeing a rise in financial resolutions - the budget, save money and so forth.

FLATOW: Are there some behaviors - some resolutions - that are harder to keep and to change than others?

NORCROSS: No, it's not so much the resolution as it is how attainable or realistic the goal is. You know, someone says I'm going to lose 50 pounds and keep it off this year versus I think I'll struggle to keep 10 off - that's a little more realistic. So, it has more to do with the realism of the resolution than exactly what the behavior is.

FLATOW: Let's talk about some of the things you can do to be more successful in your resolutions. How can you be more successful?

NORCROSS: Well, it all begins on or before January 1 by making realistic, attainable goals. We say if you can't measure it, it's not a very good resolution because vague goals beget vague resolutions. From there, one needs to establish genuine confidence that one can keep the resolution, despite the occasional slips. We call this self-efficacy. That's not general self-confidence, rather it's specific conviction that you can change a behavior.

FLATOW: So, you have to not be unrealistic to begin with - with what you can - you know, instead of saying I'm going to lose 50 pounds, I'll lose 10 pounds.

NORCROSS: Right. Or I'll go to the gym three times a week instead of saying seven times a week.

FLATOW: Yeah. So it goes to you're setting yourself up for failure right from the beginning?

NORCROSS: Right. Grandiose goals beget resignation and early failure.

FLATOW: I was surprised in reading your paper about actually how many people are successful in...

NORCROSS: Oh, yes. We say the glass is proverbial, half-empty or half-full, here.

(LAUGHTER)

NORCROSS: In two of our longitudinal studies, 40 to 46 percent of New Year's resolvers will be successful at six months. So, the half empty is, it's true, most people fail. But 40 to 46 percent is pretty impressive. Particularly when you compare it to the people who don't try and therefore have, in our research, 0 to 4 percent chance.

FLATOW: Do people start fast and then just peter out?

NORCROSS: That's exactly right. When you look at what we called the survival curves, about 75 percent of resolvers will be successful for one week, and then that just gradually drops down to about the 40 to 46 percent at six months.

FLATOW: Interesting note from your papers: You report that the success rate of resolutions is 10 times higher than the success rate of adults desiring to change behavior but not making a resolution to do it.

NORCROSS: That was our last study, that's exactly right. You know, I was tired of people saying resolutions never succeed, we shouldn't even try them. And I said, well, wait a minute, these are life-sustaining behaviors. What's the alternative? So, the alternative was to track people starting before January 1st with the same behavioral goals, with the same motivation to stop or to take the resolutions but who just weren't going to do anything then. And that's - and only 4 percent of them were successful at six months. So you go from 4 percent, all the way up to 44, 46 percent by taking a New Year's resolution seriously and trying to do something about it.

FLATOW: So it almost seems like the people who make the resolution are more serious about completing it than the people who just say I'll do it.

NORCROSS: That's right. They move from thinking about it to doing it. What we call from the contemplation stage to the action stage.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And you also report that a few simple things can move people from the contemplation to the actual state. And one of those you report is making a phone call to a friend who's got the resolution. You say as few as three phone calls will get them going.

NORCROSS: The buddy system works.

FLATOW: It does?

NORCROSS: And the buddies can be co-workers, family members, friends, fellow resolvers. They don't even have to share the same resolution, Ira. It just has to be someone on your side. And for a couple weeks, people can persevere through even the more difficult environments lacking social support. But once you get into January, the willpower begins to slip and that's when we start counting on other people...

FLATOW: Yeah.

NORCROSS: ...to remind us, to encourage us and to keep us back on track.

FLATOW: Karen(ph) in Atlantic City. Hi, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

KAREN: How are you doing?

FLATOW: Fine. Happy New Year to you.

KAREN: Thank you. I'm actually in Laramie, Wyoming. And I kind of had an unusual plan this year. My husband is - excuse me - 50 and I'm 55. He's about six foot two, 260. I'm about five foot two, 160. So, we go through this every year. And this year, instead of buying him Christmas gifts, I set up appointments with a nutritionist, a personal trainer, and a phone-support system, some friends of ours.

FLATOW: Wow.

KAREN: So we can kind of get a grip on it, you know, at our age. We're those people that exercise a lot, do all kinds of things, we just eat too much.

FLATOW: So you're going way past just making a resolution. You're already into the activation stage of this.

KAREN: Correct. Actually, I gave him a very loving letter yesterday about how I hope this will work for us because I want to live a long time. Women in my family tend to live to 90.

FLATOW: That's nice. I hope he has returned all this goodness to you.

(LAUGHTER)

KAREN: He has. He's actually an excellent shopper.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: That comes in handy this time of the year.

KAREN: It does, and he likes expensive stores, so you know, whatever. I'll take it.

FLATOW: All right, thanks for calling.

KAREN: Very welcome.

FLATOW: Dr. Norcross, these people have gone already past the resolution stage.

NORCROSS: Well, they're ringing in the New Year exactly the right way. They tried it on their own and perhaps experienced, like most people, partial success. But now, they're taking it up a step or two and saying, let's get some professionals involved. And when you make the commitment of time and money, such as appointments with a nutritionist and a personal trainer, people get more serious. In fact, I just learned today that my own brother has hired a personal trainer for my mother. That helps us all stay on track.

FLATOW: That's great. Let's go to Nina(ph) in Doylestown, P.A. Hi, Nina.

NINA: Yes, hi, Ira. I want to thank you for keeping me sane while I was raising three children, by the way.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: You're welcome.

NINA: I find there's big difference between motivation and inspiration. And that is - seems to be what my downfall is when I make a goal for myself. Could you discuss that?

FLATOW: Motivation?

NORCROSS: Versus inspiration.

NINA: And inspiration.

FLATOW: And inspiration.

NORCROSS: That's great question. And that makes all the difference. Inspiration is short-lived. It's typically emulating other people and it'll push us for a week or two. But inspiration begins to extinguish quite quickly. And as Henry Ford once said, after that, it's 90 percent hard work. Inspiration may get us started, but it never keeps us going and that's where motivation works.

And motivation doesn't come in a bottle. Motivation is, scientifically speaking, a series of small behaviors. And here's some ways to enhance the motivation: Track your progress by recording or charting the behavior in question. Reward your successes, reinforce yourself for each step with a healthy treat or a compliment, perhaps even create a reward contract with a loved one. And you also need to arrange your environment to help, rather than hinder you, limit exposure to any high-risk situations, create reminders. So we don't need to think of motivation as something we have. Motivations are specific behaviors we build into our day.

FLATOW: What if you don't start your resolution on January 1st? Should you still make a resolution, even if you're not prepared to start on January 1st?

NORCROSS: We say take resolutions seriously or don't take them at all. You can start a resolution on February 1st, March 1st, your birthday, the beginning of summer. People who push themselves prematurely into a resolution without having a specific action plan are quite likely to fail. So, pick a day when you're ready. Set the quit date or the start date for the resolution, make sure you're ready and then take it. The change of the calendar, Ira, may not be the right time for everybody.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So you do one thing at a time, and, you know, don't say, I'm going to diet and quit smoking at the same time because you'll never get them both done.

NORCROSS: Well, there's some interesting research on that. And that is, it depends how much time and commitment you have. If the two resolutions are related, then it may make sense to do it together. For example, losing weight and increasing exercise, most people see those things as going together. But if there are two very different resolutions, you may just be overwhelmed with the amount of time and energy that they call for. So, we ask people never more than two. If they're related, two is great. Otherwise, just do one at a time.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Jodie(ph) in Baton Rouge. Hi, Jodie.

JODIE: Hi.

FLATOW: Hi there.

JODIE: Our family was a bit derailed with some unexpected twins. And so I had been talking to my 13-year-old and my 9-year-old about all of us making family resolutions this year, some things that we would like to do different now that the babies are almost two. Do you have any suggestions on how to make it work for some family-type goals and resolutions?

NORCROSS: Well, we sure do. And as a parent, I think we can all appreciate how we're derailed with the pressures and responsibilities of childhood. The family resolutions is a fascinating idea and one that can work quite well, presuming you could find a resolution the entire family is behind and not just one or two. Far too often, we see parents who would love a resolution, but the kids really aren't into it. But if you can find one the whole group agrees with, then you have the built-in social support.

At that point, we would say, please publicly declare your resolution as a family. Such a public commitment is generally more successful than private decisions. Have the whole family create a reward contract. When we do this, we'll all reward each other this way, so not only for individual behavior but for the entire family behavior. It's a lot easier taking that big, old refrigerator out to the curb on trash day than to have one person struggling with it. Families can do it all together much more effectively than one alone.

FLATOW: Great idea. How's that?

JODIE: That was great. Great suggestion.

FLATOW: Thanks for calling.

JODIE: Thank you so much.

FLATOW: Happy New Year, Jodie. Thanks for calling. We are talking with John Norcross about New Year's resolutions. Anything else - anything surprising also that you found in your research, Dr. Norcross?

NORCROSS: Yeah. And that's about the slips, Ira. In one of our - excuse me - one of our most recent studies, we found that people really slipped quite a lot. That is, most successful resolvers slipped in January. But they discovered that a slip, a momentary lapse in a resolution, need not be a fall. They picked themselves up and they recommitted themselves to the resolution after a slip. For example, 71 percent of our successful resolvers said their first slip had actually strengthened their efforts.

But they know a slip didn't need to become a fall or, as we say it in the scientific research, a lapse didn't need to become a relapse. And the successful resolvers slipped just as much in early January as the unsuccessful resolvers. So this is really encouraging news to everybody. Early slips may be a sign that you just need to refine your action plan, get back up and do something.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Let's see if we can get one more call from Karen(ph) in Atlantic City. Hi, Karen.

KAREN: Yes, hi. I made a New Year's resolution in 1978 to start running and I'm still going.

FLATOW: Good for you.

KAREN: So, I'm wondering at what point a resolution turns into obsession, especially when your knees are falling apart.

(LAUGHTER)

NORCROSS: Well, first off, congratulations, Karen. That's an impressive resolution. And indeed, that's how the successful resolutions proceed. They're no longer something that you have to be all that mindful of. You've just totally integrated it into your life's scheme, as it were. It's no longer a problematic behavior. It just becomes who you are, a new healthy daily habit. You're right though, even the best behaviors can be taken too far. And whether that's your knees or time, sometimes we all need to learn a resolution to let go just a little bit of even the more positive elements in our life.

FLATOW: Is it - why is it so hard for you to stop, Karen?

KAREN: I do - fresh air. It's become now, I think, actually - I'm on the Boardwalk, which is beautiful. I've gotten slower, a lot slower, not that I ever was that fast. The air, really, I'm just so used to it. Maybe I could just walk fast.

NORCROSS: Well, it's the bounty of benefits that exercises generate for all of us: the time alone, the exercise, the scenery. Congratulations on doing it. But if your knees are hurting, everyone should remember that healthful walking is almost as beneficial as the running.

FLATOW: Karen, I have a suggestion for you.

KAREN: Yes?

FLATOW: Make this year's new resolution to slow down, to walk instead of run, and see if you can keep that resolution.

KAREN: Well, thank you. That's one of those resolutions, I think, that gets made for you, you know.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Well, good luck and thanks for calling and...

KAREN: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: ...see you on the Boardwalk.

KAREN: Happy New Year.

FLATOW: You, too. Any last words here, Dr. Norcross?

NORCROSS: Well, it would be - let's think of resolutions as marathons, not a hundred-yard dash. We need to prepare for the long haul, the changed lifestyle, just as Karen discussed. And we should keep in mind that even if you're not successful this year, our research shows that virtually everyone who doesn't succeed this year will try again next year. This is a life-long quest for improved behavior.

FLATOW: Thank you very much for those tips, Dr. Norcross, and a happy New Year to you.

NORCROSS: Thank you.

FLATOW: John Norcross is a clinical psychologist and distinguished professor of psychology at University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

As Biodiversity Declines, Tropical Diseases Thrive

Mosquitoes like this one can carry the virus that causes dengue fever.

James Gathany/CDC Public Health Image Library

Global health advocates often argue that the tropical diseases that plague many countries, such as malaria and dengue, can be conquered simply with more money for health care – namely medicines and vaccines.

But a new paper is a reminder that ecology also has a pretty big say in whether pathogens thrive or die off. Using a statistical model, researchers predicted that countries that lose biodiversity will have a heavier burden of vector-borne and parasitic diseases. Their results appear this week in PLoS Biology.

"The general logic is that the more organisms you have out there, the more things there are that can interrupt the life cycle of disease, and the less concentration you'll have of any vector," Matthew Bonds, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the paper, tells Shots.

But plants, mammals and birds are disappearing fast – one-third of the world's species are now threatened with extinction, according to the United Nations. And when the creatures that prey on mice, mosquitoes or other vectors of disease go, parasites and other disease-causing agents discover it's a lot easier to survive.

Scientists have already shown that's one reason for the explosion of Lyme disease in the Northeast United States. A 2002 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you have a rich community of tick hosts, like squirrels, mice and other small mammals, the disease is diluted among them. But if the habitat is degraded, and ticks carrying Lyme have only white-footed mice as hosts, the disease risk to humans can rise dramatically.

West Nile encephalitis, a mosquito-borne disease, has also ripped through communities with the help of surging bird populations, according to a study in Nature.

Because of studies like these, Bonds wanted to see how strong the causal relationship was between biodiversity and 12 common vector-borne and parasitic diseases on a global scale. So he chose statistical methods from a new field that blends economics and ecology called "macroecology" to figure out how biodiversity loss affected disease burden, controlling for several different variables.

Ultimately, he found that if a country with a relatively high biodiversity (such as Indonesia) were to lose 15 percent of it, the burden of disease would be expected to increase by about 30 percent. His models also showed how diseases have a significant impact on economic development and explain differences in income between tropical and temperate countries.

"I think what this shows is that the burden of disease is really important, and it's not just driven by health care," he says. "These diseases spend so much of their life-cycles outside of humans, so they're part of the physical environment."

Nevertheless, human disease is still generally viewed as a medical or public health problem — not an ecological problem. Policymakers only just beginning to talk about conservation as they plan for public health.

View the original article here

Get The Most Bang From Your Bubbly

In time for New Year's Eve, Science Friday examines the chemical reactions that transpire in fluted glassware. Ira Flatow and Richard Zare, a chemist at Stanford University, pore over the science of bubbles — from how to keep that open champagne fizzy (forget the cork) to why beer tastes better from a glass rather than a bottle.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Don't clear the table just yet. We've got another helping of food science for you.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORK POPPING AND WINE POURING)

FLATOW: We've got some scientific advice on how to get the most bang out of your bubbly. Hmm. Tastes good. Up next, we're poring over the science of bubbles. Here are some facts to whet your appetite. Lipstick and champagne, they clash chemically. Frosted beer mugs, a no-no for flavor. And if you want to keep that open champagne fizzy, corking is not the answer. What is the answer? Well, here to explain is bubble master Dr. Richard Zare. He is professor of chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY. Happy New Year.

DR. RICHARD ZARE: Well, thank you, Ira. Same to you.

FLATOW: Thank you very much. Let's go through some of these bubbleology(ph) tips for us. Do you have any tips for getting the most flavor and fizz out of champagne?

ZARE: Well, it turns out that as it warms up, you get more volatiles that come off when it evaporates. And that's, of course, very enjoyable because most of our taste comes from smell, not actually from inside our mouth.

FLATOW: So let it warm up a little bit before you drink that icy stuff.

ZARE: That's right. This also actually applies to beer, Ira. Let me mention some things. Many people drink beer just from the bottle. And while I understand how quickly that is to take in the beer that way, because as I mentioned to you, smell is involved, you just don't get much smell when you put a bottle to your mouth. Much better is to drink beer from a glass. Now, what type of glass? Well, many bars serve frosted glasses. They think that's quite fancy and wonderful. But actually, I think that's a bad idea, as does my friend Norman(ph) Metzger(ph) in Washington, D.C., who pointed this out to me. It turns out that if you cool liquids that contain gases, they really - the liquids dissolve the gases better and they - it is the gas coming off the liquid, which is part of the aroma, which makes, again, beer be so enjoyable to many of us. Now I understand that on a very hot day, nothing like a really cold beer. But in terms of taste, sipping from a glass that's cool is really quite wonderful.

FLATOW: Hmm. Now I understand, as I said before, I understand that as for lipstick, lipstick will kill the bubbles?

ZARE: Well, the bubbles are held together by this sort of membrane of various things that surround the carbon dioxide that's making the bubble. And when you add something like too much detergent, somebody doesn't really wash out the glass well or some people even rub their nose and then put their finger down.

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: And this kills bubbles. And the oils - any type of oil, including the ChapStick, Vaseline, et cetera, will actually cause the bubbles to burst. It really destroys the surface tension - makes it uneven and the bubbles burst this way. So it's very interesting to see and it's very obvious on New Year's Eve, generally, women have less bubbles in their glass of champagne than men do for the obvious reason that women generally wear lipstick. On the other hand, this thing I just told you doesn't always work, because just like you can have second-hand smoke, Ira, you can have second-hand lipstick.

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: So try it out.

FLATOW: I'll tell you. What a pick-up line for New Year's Eve. I am doing a scientific survey of the lipstick around here. Let me ask you a few questions about your lipstick and your champagne. There's an opening.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: All right. Let's talk about having that open - you've now opened our bottle of champagne. You want to save a little bit for the morning after. What's the best way to save it? I know you have done experiments about the best way to keep the bubbles in a bottle of champagne fizzy til the next morning.

ZARE: Well, actually, Hal McGee and I - he's the Curious Cook who wrote a column for the New York Times with that subtitle, I think - looked into this. And the truth is the best way gas dissolved in your liquid is to keep the liquid cold. Anybody who's played around with water knows as you start to heat it up, it really drives the gases off. And hot water is much flatter and - so is any hot - any liquid. And it releases gas that way. So you really - to keep your champagne effervescent, you want to keep it cold. So returning it to the refrigerator or keeping it in an ice bucket is just the right thing to do.

FLATOW: You don't have to put the cork back in it or anything like it?

ZARE: You actually do not. There's enough carbon dioxide in the champagne to go on for many days. We've seen that. There's something else that's interesting that happens. If you leave the champagne uncorked, just like with wine, you get a change in its taste due to some oxidation from the air. And that actually can be quite pleasant too.

FLATOW: I bet you have spent many hours verifying that.

ZARE: Oh, it requires it. All in the name of science, Ira.

FLATOW: Of course.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: But what about that trick of sticking a spoon down the neck of the champagne? Is that all just an old wives' tale?

ZARE: Well, from what I could tell, the only effect the spoon has, like a silver spoon is, if it helps cool the bottle down when you put it back in the refrigerator. Otherwise, I don't think it works.

FLATOW: Now, let's talk about the bubbles in your glass of champagne or your glass of wine because there's a whole bunch of physics going on there, isn't there? Let me start with...

ZARE: Well, a lot of chemistry too.

FLATOW: Of course. You're a chemist. You would be saying that.

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: Let's consider how the bubbles get there in the first place or what goes on in champagne. I think it all starts with this Frenchman by the name of Dom Perignon who lived about 1639 to 1715 and developed this thing called the methode champenoise, where you take some type of wine and you bottle it again with sugar and yeast that causes second fermentation. And this yeast converts the sugar into carbon dioxide and ethanol - the alcohol we enjoy drinking. And he also, of course, have other things that are leftover from this. You get a couple of grams per liter of different other materials, like glycerol and tartaric acid and lactic acid, and it turns out that champagne is actually acidic. It has a PH of about three.

FLATOW: Wow.

ZARE: But if you look at the amount of carbon dioxide that's in the champagne, it's immense. You know, at sea level, the pressure of the air is one atmosphere. The amount of carbon dioxide in the bottle of champagne when you opened it, is something like seven atmospheres. It's loaded. It's super saturated. It wants to come out. And here's the problem: How do you get bubbles that come out? One of the same questions about how do you get clouds to rain. You need some form of nucleation, something to happen. And I need to tell you that most of champagne is actually just water, and water loves water.

Water loves water so much that it crushes little bubbles and you don't see bubbles ever form in the middle of a glass of champagne the same way you don't see bubbles form when you boil a pot of water and you look at it. The bubbles do not form in the center of the liquid. Instead, they form on the walls, on the side. Why? Because they need to hide and grow to a critical size. And they tend to actually form on various forms of, well, shall I call it dirt, fibers, dust, scratches in the glass, places to hide and build up to be a big enough bubble so we can escape and not be crushed by the water.

FLATOW: Hmm. Let me just interrupt for a second to remind everybody. I'm talking with Dr. Richard Zare on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

So that's why you see them forming in lines. They've been lining up in crack on the glass or they're coming off the sides and, I guess, you can revise or revive a stale glass of beer by nucleating it.

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: Well, one of the simplest ways, but I don't recommend it of seeing this effect is to dump in a tablespoon of either sugar or salt into a carbonated beverage. You'll see a great deal of foam being formed.

FLATOW: Wow.

ZARE: Sand will work too. I don't recommend any of those three.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Well, does that explain why - in soft drinks, like, root beer, which has a lot of fizz inside of it? When you make a root beer float and you pour it on the ice cream, it just explodes with foam because the ice cream has all those little nooks and crannies in it?

ZARE: Yes. And ice cubes too. Let me talk about ice cubes for a moment.

FLATOW: Please.

ZARE: Have you ever noticed that when you pour any carbonated beverage on ice cubes for the first time, lots of foam. You drink it, then you say, I want a refill. The next time people pour on the ice - the same ice cubes, right?

FLATOW: Right.

ZARE: Much less foam. It's not that the bottle has gone flat. It's that the - all the sharp spots on the ice, the asperities on the ice have melted away. And without these little nooks and crannies, again, the carbon dioxide doesn't know how to escape. It wants to escape. It wants to go to one atmosphere. It just doesn't know how.

FLATOW: That would explain why I have heard about bartenders sprinkling some salt in your beer to make it foam up again.

ZARE: It does.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHER)

FLATOW: Yeah.

ZARE: But try it. It works in champagne and beer. But I don't think that for purpose of taste is the thing to do.

FLATOW: Not at all. Now, let's talk about one of the - I once saw a video that you created about bubbles in a glass of beer that they don't always go up. The bubble seemed to be going down, and you tried this with what? And you...

ZARE: It was actually with Guinness beer.

FLATOW: Guinness? Famous for all those bubbles in there.

ZARE: That's right.

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: And it's - at first, quite a puzzle and you wonder if people reported that the bubbles on the sides of Guinness - glass of Guinness beer were going down. How could bubbles be going down? Is it that they just had too much beer to drink? What's happening here?

FLATOW: Yeah.

ZARE: What's actually happening is that everywhere it's bubbling. But the bubbles in the center glass actually have less drag, less friction on them and they rise more rapidly, more easily than the ones on the side. And the result is they set up a circulation of the liquid. And bubbles are very slowly moving in beer. In fact, if you'll notice, champagne has more rapid moving bubbles than beer bubbles. And we could discuss why that is in a moment. But anyways, the result is that because of the liquid circulation, the bubbled go down initially...

FLATOW: Wow.

ZARE: ...in a glass of Guinness or some of the other very highly carbonated beers.

FLATOW: Well, one last quick question for you, Dr. Zare: Why are some bubbles bigger than others - depending on beverage? Is that what it is?

(LAUGHTER)

ZARE: Oh, I wish I understood all if this. Part of it has to do with the size of the cracker crevice that you have and it's been a mystery to me as to what controls, totally, the size of the bubble. I don't know the answer to that.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Well, we hope you enjoy finding that.

ZARE: More to learn.

FLATOW: Boy, (unintelligible).

ZARE: I shall study this.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Please, do that and maybe next year, we'll come back and talk to you again. Dick, have a Happy New. Thanks for joining us.

ZARE: And, oh, I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn't throw me at all. So tell me why should it be true, Ira, that I get a kick from you. Thanks so much.

FLATOW: Thank you very, very much. Dr. Richard Zare, who is, I guess, he has day job, but he likes to do most is being a bubbleologist(ph). He's professor of chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

This Milk Production Was Brought To You By A Robot

Hide caption Milking Parlor, 2012: Two people are needed to milk twice a day, 300 cows. Hide caption Milking Robot I, 2012: One milking robot milks three times per day, 60 cows. The cows are in a stable, in which they can move around freely. They can use the robot whenever they need to. No human needs to be present. Hide caption Lettuce, 2011: Lettuce is grown in a stacking system to provide a maximum use of space. Plants grow inside of plastic trays without soil. A conveyor belt is moving the plants to ensure they get all round sunlight. The whole growing process is computer controlled. Hide caption Tomatoes I, 2012: In order to have total control over the nutrients and the irrigation, tomatoes are planted in sterile material such as rock wool and not in soil. By doing so, the tomatoes are, according to the growers, less likely infected by diseases, a smaller amount of pesticide is needed and the yield can be increased. Hide caption Tomatoes II, 2011: In order to consume locally grown tomatoes in ... the U.K. or Germany, the tomatoes need to be produced in heated greenhouses. ... To produce in more sustainable ways and to keep the cost of energy low, the greenhouse above is heated by the waste heat from a nearby nuclear power station. Hide caption Apple Tree, 2011: Modern apple growers use apple varieties that are grafted onto Dwarfing Rootstocks. Developed at a research station in the U.K., these ... trees need less water and less space than traditional apple trees, which makes high density planting possible. The fruits are more accessible and easier to pick, because the trees are smaller. Hide caption Eggplants, 2012: A computer manages precisely the irrigation, the nutrients given to the plants and also the climate inside the greenhouse. Automatically windows open, sunscreens move, and waste, water and nutrients are collected, purified, and recycled. Hide caption Cress, 2011: Cress, tomatoes, cucumbers, or lettuce are grown in closed systems just with LED lights. There is no sunlight and no direct exchange of air with the outside. Day and night, summer and winter stop existing. Humans are able to determine the shape, taste and color of plants and fruits. They can be grown anywhere from the desert to inside of restaurants and supermarkets. Hide caption Strawberries II, 2012: Strawberry crops are grown on tabletop-raised beds. The tabletop system makes it easier to pick the fruits and eases the weed and pest control. A leaf and sap analysis determines the nutrient's compound, which is fed with the irrigation water. To accelerate the growth of the plants, growers above add CO2 from a close-by Shell refinery. Hide caption Mushrooms, 2012: To allow an all-year-round production of mushrooms and to increase the yield, mushrooms are grown in a microclimate inside growing rooms. A stacking system maximizes the production per square meter. Hide caption Chicken, 2011: Since the mid-1990s the consumption of chicken has increased by 75 percent worldwide. Chicken are often reared in barns. One chicken barn has the capacity to rear 50,000 chickens.

We all have an inkling of how our food is grown these days, but increasingly we don't really know what it looks like. You'd probably recognize a tomato plant or a cornfield — but these photos offer a perspective that a lot of us haven't seen.

Photographer Freya Najade is exploring the age-old question of how humans harness nature — a question as old as agriculture itself. But what she uniquely captures here is the latest chapter in the evolution of food production, in which technology — in the form of robots and computers — is the central character.

"It was a bit bizarre, observing cows milked by robots without any humans present," Najade writes from London, where she's based. Bizarre, she says, but not all bad:

"I have seen new technologies that allow, in certain aspects, a more environmentally friendly production. For instance, in a greenhouse in which waste, water and nutrients are collected, purified and recycled, the production becomes more environmentally friendly because less water and nutrients are needed."

The fact is there are just so many of us to feed. And it's going to take some real ingenuity to feed the billions more joining us — even if that means growing lettuce under LED lights in a building in a desert. Though industrial-scale mushroom production is nothing new, in Najade's photos it looks a lot more like a science experiment than the romanticized agriculture of bucolic farms. But they're both, effectively, always a kind of experiment.

Who's making the decisions about how how we'll be growing the next generation of fruits and vegetables? I hope there's another photographer out there who wants to find out. For now, though, we have Najade, who's forcing us to ask, "Remember when humans actually milked cows?"

Maybe one day we'll be asking: "Remember cows?"

View the original article here

'Consider the Fork' Chronicles Evolution of Eating

Did you know that the human overbite may have evolved after people began using forks and knives? In Consider the Fork, author Bee Wilson traces how kitchen tools—from knives to pots to gas stoves—have changed over time, and how they have influenced what, and how, we eat.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Simple things like a pot or a wooden spoon or maybe even some of the more modern conveniences like a refrigerator or a gas stove. And to answer those questions and more, my next guest looked through the historical and anthropological records and found that how we cook, what we eat, has been largely influenced by social, economic and even political factors throughout the ages. Bee Wilson is a food writer and historian based in Cambridge, England. She's author of the new book "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat." Welcome to the program.

BEE WILSON: Thank you. Hi.

FLATOW: Do we know how and when humans first started to cook?

WILSON: We know it was a really long time ago. I mean it depends which anthropologists you listen to, but I mean it's several million years ago that fire starts. And according to Richard Wrangham in his fantastic book "Catching Fire," cooking was the defining act that actually made us human, because by applying heat to food it meant that we were able to eat of a wider range, and it meant that our brains were able to grow large enough that we made that leap from primate to human.

But for me, the great beginning of cookery is the invention of the pot, much more recently in historic times, 10,000 years ago. And I think pots and pans are one of the many inventions in our kitchen that we don't even recognize as being inventions, because they've been around for so long. But if you imagine...

FLATOW: Like the fork.

WILSON: Like the fork. I mean the fork is, in historic times, extremely recent, and now, arguably, it's the most universal utensil. It's used at every kind of meal ,from a fancy three-course dinner with silver-plated or stainless-steel cutlery, to a fast food meal where you might be using a plastic fork. And yet, it encountered huge resistance when it was first introduced. And for a long time in Europe, it was only the Italians who used forks. The reason being pasta, as we all know, forks are the perfect implement for twizling(ph) long strands of noodles or spaghetti.

But in the rest of Europe, particularly Britain, they thought that forks were just these weird, effeminate, unnecessary objects, which we could do fine without. And this whole question of cutlery, it seems rather irrelevant compared to what we eat, and yet, if anthropologist called C. Loring Brace is correct, the adoption of the knife and fork at table, which happened roughly 250 years ago in society at large in Europe and then in the States - if he is right, then the adoption of the knife and fork actually had these profound implications on the structure of the human jaw.

And it was only around that time that human teeth moved from having an edge-to-edge bite, such as you would see in apes, to having the overbite that we have today, where the top layer of teeth fit over the bottom layer, like the lid on a box. This is far too recent a change for there to be any evolutionary or Darwinian explanation. And what Brace decided after studying many, many human jaws was that the only change that happened in that - at that time, wasn't what people ate, but it was how we ate.

And it was through the process of cutting food into small morsels from childhood onwards that we actually change the way that our jaws work. And the real clincher was that he found this change 900 years earlier in China, the reason being chopsticks.

FLATOW: We're talking about food this hour on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Bee Wilson, food writer, historian and author of "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat." Are our cooking and eating habits continually evolving, Bee?

WILSON: On the one hand, they're constantly changing. On the other hand, there are things which have been in our kitchens - not that kitchens have existed in their modern form - for thousands of years. Things like the mortar and pestle, which is very similar in form today to how it would have been in ancient Rome or ancient Mesopotamia even. Or things like the colander, which again, beautiful colanders exist in Pompeii and Herculaneum - and frying pans, beautiful ancient Greek and Roman frying pans.

So some things have remained constant - wooden spoons, nothing really does the job of a wooden spoon better than a wooden spoon, which is why perhaps it hasn't been replaced. And there's also always a role for the affection we feel, I think, for certain implements and...

FLATOW: Yeah, yeah.

WILSON: ...yeah, we're tied to the way that our mothers and grandmothers cook through a certain degree. And then there are other things, like really good vegetable peelers that do the job of peeling vegetables as efficiently as possible without hurting your hand, which have only been in our lives for about 20 years, give or take. So I think there's a sort of constant interplay between continuity and change, and the tools which were adopted - it's never just to do with how well they work technologically or scientifically on their own terms. It's always how they fit into a wider culture of cooking and economy, and how we feel about these.

FLATOW: You know, the - I think one surprising object we all have now is the microwave oven because we don't - I don't think we really think of it as a cooking thing, but as a reheating thing, don't we?

WILSON: That's right. I mean I think the microwave oven, it's an astonishing invention. I mean there are various mythical stories told about its invention. It was invented by someone called Percy Spencer in 1945, who's actually working on military radar systems. He had no idea he was going to invent one of the most successful cooking tools of all time. And there are these various stories told of how he was standing in front of an open wave garden, a chocolate bar melted in his pocket, or in another version, an egg exploded in his face, or there's this third one where he left his sandwich next to the magnetron and then he came back and find it was cooked.

Actually, none of this is probably true. It was actually developed through a series of slow observation by the whole of Spencer's team. But, um, I think the microwave oven it's a phenomenal invention, but it had the misfortune to be invented and marketed at just that point in history when TV dinners and processed food and all of those supermarket meals (unintelligible) had been taking off. So it was seen as a device, merely for heating food up. And it's - lots of home - very good home cooks that I know feel really hostile towards the microwave oven in a way that I think they don't towards many other cooking tools.

FLATOW: Yeah, yeah.

WILSON: And actually, its true culinary potential is only now really been recognized by the modernist cooks, people that make the (unintelligible) fantastic tools of melting chocolate, caramelizing sugar, steaming vegetables.

FLATOW: Yeah. All right. We're going to get - very interesting, talking with Bee Wilson, author of "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat." Jack Bishop, chef and editorial director, also a contributing writer for The Science of Good Cooking. We'll take your calls when we get back. 1-800-989-8255. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about the chemistry, the science of cooking with Bee Wilson, author of the book "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat;" and Jack Bishop, who's also with us. He is a cast member of "America's Test Kitchen" and "Cook's Country." Our number, 1-800-989-8255. I want to ask you a question, Bee. I'm going to quote from your book that says we've been talking about chemistry here in the first part of the program with Jack, and you say good cooking is a precise chemical undertaking.

The difference between a truly great dinner and a different one might be 30 seconds and one quarter of teaspoon of salt. And you go on to talk about how recipes - I think it was Fannie Farmer who you mentioned in your book - was the first one to actually write down these things.

WILSON: Yes. And I think that there's a sudden change in the nature of what a recipe is. For most of history, recipes were aid memoirs. They were sort of memory devices for people who already know how to cook. It wasn't instructing you in how to cook if you didn't know how to. Whereas Fannie Farmer had grown up not knowing how to cook herself, she learned relatively late in life, and she never took it for granted. And so her recipes, for the first time, are actually attempting to cook, teach her readers from scratch, how you can make something if you've never done it before and how it can be reproducible in the same way that a scientific experiment might be.

And unfortunately, the measuring system that she chose, the American cup measure system, is in my opinion one of the most erratic and prone to fluctuating results, particularly when it comes to cake making because there's a problem of density. So I don't believe that she succeeded in her aim of being a fully scientific cook. But then probably no one does because there's always this interplay in cooking, between the extent to which it is a precise chemical undertaking and then the role of instinct...

FLATOW: Yeah, yeah.

WILSON: ...and cooks, as our scientists, we're always juggling variables, aren't we? It's never quite the same kitchen that we walk into twice.

FLATOW: So how did writing this book changed how you thought about your own cooking?

WILSON: It made me realized many of the things I did already - there was this kind of huge history of invention behind these tools which I just kind of use without thinking about it. And in any case, this confirmed me in some of the ways that I like cooking. It made me really think about the fact that I do like certain pots or certain pans more than others, and sometimes it - rationale like I really like my cast-iron skillet whether it's for making pancakes, or cornbread or anything like that.

And then I came across the work of this engineer called Chuck Lemy(ph) who had attempted to come up with what the ideal surface would be for a pan, rating it according to nine different criteria. And he found that actually lots of the things that we want for our pan are completely incompatible. We want a pan to be very thin, so that it's very responsive to heat, but we also wanted it to be very thick so that it has good heat uniformity. And he found that it was virtually impossible to have come up with the perfect pan. But the one that came closest made out of single material was cast iron, and I read this and felt very vindicated in my effects, probably...

FLATOW: Yeah.

WILSON: ...I would like it even if it wasn't such a perfect pan. So I think a large part of - it concerned me is my habits and as for others - I mean in finishing writing the book, I acquired a pressure cooker, which I think I wouldn't have done if I hadn't been researching the subject because it made me realized when I was considering the kind of modernist kitchen and the kitchen of the future, the extent to which we've often just been dealing with the variables of heat and time and quantity, and then there are all these other things that we can do, such as pressure...

FLATOW: Right, right, right.

WILSON: ...which are only just now being opened up. And I think there's always huge possibilities for cooking things in a different way, which I find very exciting.

FLATOW: Well, we've run out of time. I want to thank you both for being with us today. Bee Wilson, author of the book "Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook." Jack Bishop, chef and editorial director of "America's Test Kitchen," also he's on "Cook's Country" and also one of the contributors to The Science of Good Cooking. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

JACK BISHOP: Thank you, Ira.

WILSON: Thank you.

FLATOW: Happy New Year to you. Happy holiday season.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here