They're Back! Chesapeake Oysters Return To Menus After Rebound : The Salt hide captionA plate of Sweet Jesus oysters grown in Chesapeake Bay by Hollywood Oyster Co. in Hollywood, Md. Katy Adams/Courtesy Clyde's Restaurant Group A plate of Sweet Jesus oysters grown in Chesapeake Bay by Hollywood Oyster Co. in Hollywood, Md. The history of the Chesapeake Bay oyster hasn't always been a pure one. So you could forgive a chef for being skeptical about the big bivalve comeback being staged in D.C. and the surrounding area this winter as oyster season gets underway. But many mid-Atlantic chefs are actually cheering. "Almost every oyster you're buying cleans the bay," gushes Brian Stickel, corporate chef for Clyde's Restaurant Group. Old Ebbitt sells more than a million oysters a year. "At our restaurants, we sell up to eight oysters at a time, but I definitely see people asking more for local oysters," Stickel says. There's also the matter of taste. So why did Chesapeake oysters disappear from menus in the first place? Elizabeth Shogren/NPR More than enough, says Sughrue.
Why time seems to speed up as we get older Five or six times a day, every day, for 48 years, chronobiologist Robert Sothern has counted off 60 seconds in his head and then compared the results against a clock. As part of a lifelong experiment on circadian rhythms, Sothern, now 69, is trying to confirm or reject a widely held belief: Many people feel that time flies by more quickly as they age. So far, Sothern's results are inconclusive. It's true that lately, according to his measurements — and his gut — time seems to be speeding up as he nears his 70s. "I'm tending now to overestimate the minute more than I used to," he tells me. But then again, he had detected a similar pattern — more overestimates — in the 1990s, only to have his estimates fall in the 2000s. This matches what other researchers have found too. There's considerable evidence that time doesn't speed up as we age Kevin Dooley / Flickr There are a few different ways to study how we perceive time. The results? But stopwatches can only tell us so much.
Between Pigs And Anchovies: Where Humans Rank On The Food Chain : The Salt hide captionAn animal's ranking on the food chain depends on where its meals place on the ladder. That puts plants on the bottom (they make all their food), polar bears on top and people somewhere between pigs and anchovies. Lisa Brown for NPR An animal's ranking on the food chain depends on where its meals place on the ladder. When it comes to making food yummy and pleasurable, humans clearly outshine their fellow animals on Earth. But in terms of the global food chain, Homo sapiens are definitely not the head honchos. In the new study, ecologists specifically calculated human's trophic level — a number between 1 and about 5.5 that tells you how much energy it takes to make a species' food. Plants and algae, which use energy from the sun to produce all their food, sit at the bottom of the food chain, with a trophic level of 1. Next come the omnivores that eat a mixture of plants and herbivores. Instead, we sit somewhere between pigs and anchovies, scientists reported recently.
A Microbiologist Recreated 'Starry Night' With Bacteria In A Petri Dish How Food Hubs Are Helping New Farmers Break Into Local Food : The Salt hide captionMarty Travis (right) started the Stewards of the Land food hub in 2005. His son Will helps him transport food from local farms to area restaurants. Sean Powers/Harvest Public Media Marty Travis (right) started the Stewards of the Land food hub in 2005. His son Will helps him transport food from local farms to area restaurants. Lots of consumers are smitten with local food, but they're not the only ones. But they need help, and increasingly it's coming from food hubs, which can also serve as food processing and distribution centers. Donna O'Shaughnessy and her husband, Keith Parrish, are first-generation farmers in rural Chatsworth, Ill., about two hours south of Chicago. For many years, they ended each year in the red. They say they owe a lot to a year-round local food hub called Stewards of the Land, started in 2005 by Marty and Kris Travis, farmers in nearby Fairbury, Ill. The Travises became middlemen to fill a hole in the market.
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and critical thinking, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda. Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods: The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration.
An Innovative Plan To Reel In Sport Fishermen To Feed The Hungry : The Salt hide captionCarly Milkowski, resource coordinator at hunger relief agency Wayside Food Services, shows students Jessica Jamison and Autumn Felker how to make fish cakes using a Martha Stewart recipe. Courtesy of Samantha Laster Carly Milkowski, resource coordinator at hunger relief agency Wayside Food Services, shows students Jessica Jamison and Autumn Felker how to make fish cakes using a Martha Stewart recipe. Portland, Maine, native Hollis McLaughlin's recollection of his mother's fish cookery produces a wistful expression as he takes a bite of the fish cakes given to him as part of the regular Wednesday night meal he is served free of charge at the Parkside Neighborhood Center. McLaughlin's mother, Kay, worked for over 30 years on Portland's waterfront, picking lobster and crab and packing sardines. The 62-year-old McLaughlin diplomatically refused to say which fish cake he liked better. The Maine Hunters for the Hungry program is one of the few administered by the state government.
“Personal kanban”: a time-management system that explodes the myth of multitasking — Quartz Multitasking is probably the single most overrated skill in modern life. It drains your brain of oxygenated glucose that could be put toward paying more focused attention, makes it difficult for a person to switch between tasks, and is generally an illusion anyway. Only 3% of the population are “supertaskers,” according to a study from Ohio University. The rest of us just pretend to be. A number of systems have been developed to save us from our endless to-do lists, which can turn any job into a soulless assembly line of chores. One such system is “Personal Kanban,” which was named for the Japanese concept that inspired it, a just-in-time manufacturing process developed at Toyota in the late 1940s. In an industrial setting, Kanban (which means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, as a recent Medium post explains) relies on tickets that move with each product through a plant. Find a board with which you can use magnets, post-it notes, or thumbtacks.
Scientists: Use animal manure's stinking wealth of resources Increasing demands for meat, milk and eggs across the world have prompted an explosive growth in livestock production with massive environmental consequences at local, regional, and global levels. A new textbook, ‘Animal Manure Recycling: Treatment and Management’, draws from Danish expertise and spotlights technologies that presents state-of-the-art knowledge in relation to recycling animal manure, writes Copenhagen University in a press release. Many people know that a steak's path to the dinner table has undesirable climatic and environmental consequences, and large increases in livestock production have given rise to enormous quantities of animal manure. This presents challenges in relation to waste management and environmental protection. Denmark is assuming a leadership role in both farming and environmental technology and we therefore want to disseminate this unique know-how and at the same time contribute to the export of Danish technology. Lars Stoumann Jensen
Silly illustrations of logical fallacies [12 pictures] Programmer Ali Almossawi and illustrator Alejandro Giraldo teamed up to create An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, which features explanations of some basic and common mistakes made in arguments accompanied by fun pictures illustrating the point… You can read the whole book online. Here are some examples with just brief bits of his explanations… Slippery Slope A slippery slope attempts to discredit a proposition by arguing that its acceptance will undoubtedly lead to a sequence of events, one or more of which are undesirable. Not a Cause for a Cause Two events may occur one after the other or together because they are correlated, by accident or due to some other unknown event; one cannot conclude that they are causally connected without evidence. No True Scotsman A general claim may sometimes be made about a category of things. Guilty by Association Guilt by association is discrediting an argument for proposing an idea that is shared by some socially demonized individual or group. Previously…
Send in the Cows (or, How to Reverse Desertification, Build Soils, and Sequester Carbon) In light of last week’s post highlighting our death march towards Peak Soil, it seems appropriate to look at how we can go about building (i.e. adding organic matter to) the damn thing. Various permacultural methods exist that help build soil and heal the land, but the organic apple of this article’s eye is a technique known as “managed grazing.” In the words of Joel Salatin, “Nothing builds soil like intensively managed grazing on grasslands.” As noted, left to its own devices, it takes nature roughly 500 years to build just 2 centimeters (cm) of living soil. When done properly, grazing – or, more specifically, management-intensive grazing - can more than double that rate in 50 years time. Meanwhile, Salatin’s farm has been building one inch of topsoil annually (along with increasing their organic matter from 1.5 percent to 8 percent of soil content over the past 50 years). Now, for a comprehensive look at this burgeoning biomimetic practice. Management-Intensive Grazing (video version)
Making Food From Flies (It's Not That Icky) : The Salt hide captionBlack soldier flies mate and lay eggs inside these cages at EnviroFlight. Dan Charles/NPR Black soldier flies mate and lay eggs inside these cages at EnviroFlight. In the quirky little college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, home to many unconventional ideas over the years, there's now a small insect factory. It's an unassuming operation, a generic boxy building in a small industrial park. It took me a while even to find a sign with the company's name: EnviroFlight. They don't expect you to eat insects. It all starts in a small greenhouse. I see rows of tall, cylinder-shaped cages. Actually, they're flies: black soldier flies. These flies live all over the American South, but they rarely bother people, and they don't spread disease. The eggs turn into hatchlings that are so tiny they look like dust. "If I were to feed them, it would feel like the bucket was practically melting," she says. The larvae are insatiable eaters. I pass. Actually, he's not the first to think of this.
The Future Of Clean, Green Fish Farming Could Be Indoor Factories : The Salt hide captionLive tilapia raised by Blue Ridge Aquaculture are loaded into a truck bound for New York. Dan Charles/NPR Why hasn't fish farming taken off in the U.S.? It's certainly not for lack of demand for the fish. Slowly but surely, seafood that's grown in aquaculture is taking over the seafood section at your supermarket, and the vast majority is imported. The shrimp and tilapia typically come from warm-water ponds in southeast Asia and Latin America. Michael Rubino, director of aquaculture at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the U.S. could harvest much of that fish — especially the salmon — here at home. Rubino says it wouldn't even consume a very large area. The major reason why it hasn't happened is opposition from environmentalists and from people living on the coast, who enjoy their pristine ocean views. hide captionYoni Zohar inspects fish larvae in his laboratory in downtown Baltimore. And then there's the problem of feeding the fish.