Michigan’s gangsta gardener gets off [VIDEO] Lightning Makes Mushrooms Multiply. For generations, Japanese farmers have welcomed storms over their fields based on the belief that lightning strikes provoke plentiful harvests of mushrooms, which are staples of Japanese cuisine. (Related: "New Lightning Type Found Over Volcano? " ) Currently, mushroom demand is so high that dealers are increasingly turning to foreign suppliers.
Japan imports about 50,000 tons of mushrooms a year, mainly from China and South Korea. As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply. (See pictures of Brazilian mushrooms that glow in the dark .) The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods. A direct hit with that much energy would fry the mushrooms. Ancient Hawaiian Farms. The original settlers of Polynesia migrated through South-East Asia and Indonesia across Melanesia, before settling the Polynesian islands beginning in 1000 BC.
Hawaii was one of the last island groups to be settled. Archaeological evidence indicates the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii from the Marquesas between 500 and 700 AD. Hawaii has often been thought of as an earthly paradise. Still people must live and eat. A pattern of earthen berms, spread across a northern peninsula of the big island of Hawaii, is providing archeologists with clues to exactly how residents farmed in paradise long before Europeans arrived at the islands. "Archeologically, this kind of research is really hard to do in most places since there is rarely a signature for the agricultural activity, or a strong connection between the remains of a house and a plot of farmland," explained, Julie Field, an assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.
Exploding Watermelons in Jiangsu Province Latest Sign of China's Food Safety Problem. John Solomon/CC BY 2.0. Watermelons for sale in Shanghai. Farmers in China's eastern Jiangsu province awoke one morning earlier this month to a scene of agricultural carnage -- hundreds of exploded watermelons. More continued to burst throughout the next couple of days, ruining more than 100 acres of the crop. In the search for a culprit, many are placing the blame on the misuse of growth chemicals in a country already deeply troubled by food-safety scandals. State broadcaster China Central Television reported shortly after the incident that forchlorfenuron -- a growth accelerator farmers say can boost the size and price of the fruit by more than 20 percent and allow it to be harvested two weeks earlier than usual -- had been sprayed on the watermelons too late in the season and in overly wet weather, causing them to explode like "landmines.
" Pan Jing of Greenpeace said farmers depended on fertilizers because many doubled as migrant workers and had less time for their crops. Spice Pages: Gumbo file' (Sassafras albidum, Filè, Filé) How Sugar Affects the Body in Motion. Gary John Norman/Getty Images Sugar is getting a bad reputation. A cover article in The New York Times Magazine several weeks ago persuasively reported that our national overindulgence in fructose and other sugars is driving the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and other illnesses.
But that much-discussed article, by the writer Gary Taubes, focused on how sugars like fructose affect the body in general. It had little opportunity to examine the related issue of how sugar affects the body in motion. Do sweeteners like fructose — the sweetest of the simple sugars, found abundantly in fruits and honey — have the same effect on active people as on the slothful? A cluster of new studies suggests that people who regularly work out don’t need to worry unduly about consuming fructose or other sugars. Plantain herbal uses Plantago major. Plantago majorPhoto by Karen Bergeron Copyright 2008 Other Names: Common Plantain, Broadleaf Plantain, Great Plantain, Greater Plantain, Ripple Grass, Plantago Asiatica, Waybread, Waybroad, Snakeweed, Cuckoo’s Bread, Englishman’s Foot, White Man’s Foot, Che Qian Zi (China), Breitwegerich (German), Tanchagem-maior (Portuguese), Llant?
Com? (Spanish), Llant? Major (Spanish) Plantain Habitat Plantain is a perennial herb, thought to be of Eurasian origin and now naturalized throughout the world. Plantain Cultivation: Plantain is very easy to cultivate, it succeeds in any soil and prefers a sunny position, some forms have been selected for their ornamental value. Plantain Medicinal Properties and Herbal Use Plantain is edible and medicinal, the young leaves are edible raw in salad or cooked as a pot herb, they are very rich in vitamin B1 and riboflavin. Plantain Herbal Folklore and History Native Americans carried powdered roots of Plantain as protection against snakebites or to ward off snakes. Medicinal Qualities of Dandelion. There are so many uses claimed for the plant that it takes place among the herbal cure-alls.
Its most frequent use, however, is an herb to heal the liver. In Europe, many scientific experiments have been undertaken which prove the traditional belief that the herb truly does cure hepatic ailments (Lucas: Herbal: 33). The herb acts in two ways for these conditions: it promotes the formation of bile and removes excess water from the body in edematous conditions resulting from liver congestion (Lust: 171). It is thought to be especially useful in cases of enlargement of the liver and for jaundice, even in little children. Dr. Swinburne Clymer wrote: "Dandelion has a beneficial influence upon the biliary organs, removing torpor and engorgement of the liver as well as of the spleen...only the green herb, whether for tincture or infusion should be used....
" (Lucas: Common: 12). Dandelion is not only official but is used in many patent medicines. . * B vitamins help reduce stress. Green News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. Organic farming just as productive as conventional, and better at building soil, Rodale finds. Organic agriculture is a fine luxury for the rich, but it could never feed the world as global population moves to 9 billion. That’s what a lot of powerful people — including the editors of The Economist — insist. But the truth could well be the opposite: It might be chemical-intensive agriculture that’s the frivolous luxury, and organic that offers us the right technologies in a resource-constrained, ever-warmer near future.
That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest data of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls “America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture.” Now, Rodale promotes organic ag, so industrial-minded critics will be tempted to dismiss its data. But that would be wrong — its test plots have an excellent reputation in the ag research community, and the Institute often collaborates with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.
And anyway, let me turn that question around.