61–70 of 152 posts
Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food.
Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
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Prior to human intervention, 'bananas' were small with tons of seeds.
And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. Every banana that has ever existed has been a clone of that one plant. Every so often, a new mutation occurs that gives us a new variety, but they all trace back to that one plant. It is the most extreme type of monoculture and is constantly th…
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It was clearly hot last month, but that isn't what anyone is arguing about in this thread. Hot months have happened throughout history. inigyou scoffed at the idea the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration. But they shouldn't have scoffed, because it's one of the primary drivers of data difficulties in climatology. Do you accept this fact?
Your argument for "the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration" is that an individual high temperature was recorded at an RAF base, ironically one of the places in the country you're least likely to find an immigrant. It was one of a number of places to record a temperature over 40 degrees, compared with the previous high point of 38.7 degrees (including all the airports and RAF bases and…
> and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out
It was a cloudless day.
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And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western g…
Interestingly, apparently the Gros Michel banana (which you can still get, if you try hard enough) tastes much more like artificial banana flavor, because that was the dominant variety when the flavor was developed.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us. There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge t…
BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.
Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us. There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge t…
They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.
I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
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Phoneutria are interesting animals. Needed to evolve defenses against the gluttony of monkeys. It must be a tasty spider. It happens that we are monkeys also, so the venom is carefully designed against us. There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge t…
The ones I know are completely brown. They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you. I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
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The Lingwood site is class 5 because it's in some guy's garden and surrounded by trees/hedges that block airflow. Class 5 sites have +/- 5 degrees of uncertainty and shouldn't be used for climatology under any circumstances. As to the runway point you're being sarcastic about - yes, that can happen. The UK set a record temperature in July 2022, which the BBC reports was set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire: https://www.b…
OK, got you. Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway or in heat islands (which we definitely haven't had for decades) or in someone's garden, whereas all the historical benchmarks exceeded were flawless. The UK recording a temperature of over 40 celsius was actually an anomaly because of the first time a jet ever landed at a British airport. Also the lack of rain wa…
I'm not saying he's right but we had here one of the highest temperatures recorded in France these days (not the highest, but we did reach a bit more than 42°C) and there's a runway just a kilometre away or so. QED.
It's used approximately twice a week by Cessnas, but probably on this day the plane had directed its exhaust on the weather station and also straight on our garden.
Not sure if the pilot was French, but there's a good chance it was an English immigrant.
Um. I wonder if there are any export opportunities for British Bananas ?
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Your argument for "the appearance of long term climate change can be caused by immigration" is that an individual high temperature was recorded at an RAF base, ironically one of the places in the country you're least likely to find an immigrant. It was one of a number of places to record a temperature over 40 degrees, compared with the previous high point of 38.7 degrees (including all the airports and RAF bases and…
You're clearly not arguing in good faith, so I'll just leave it with this: > and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out It was a cloudless day.
If you had an actual answer for what made the temperature higher on that day at that site (and 46 other sites) than it had ever been there or anywhere else (including all the other airports and heat islands) even before aircraft allegedly landed, and what Typhoon operations have to do with immigration anyway, you wouldn't be stuck repeating the unsupported claims of a political blog about the absence of cloud (the Met Office recorded cloud coverage of 1 oktas at 3pm at that site that day, but I guess Chris Morrison who wasn't there and doesn't exactly hide his partisanship is wayyy more reliable than the weather station's lidar)