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August 3, 2011
· Stink bugs put entomologist in demand
· Growing pods produce food anywhere
· USDA invests $192M for rural broadband
· Insects released to combat invasive weed
· Water: ‘The most weird substance on Earth’
Stink bugs put entomologist in demand
(Los
Angeles Times)
Whether working at her Department of Agriculture lab, in orchards or at home, she's a leader of a kind of federal SWAT team fighting what a rural Maryland congressman calls the "bug from hell," the brown marmorated stink bug that is all the buzz in the mid-Atlantic region.
Thousands of the winged, six-legged invaders from Asia
inhabit Leskey's
"I don't think it's quite that pleasant," said Leskey, a specialist in bug behavior.
With her traveling slide show — call it Stink Bug 101 — she has drawn crowds at community meetings.
"Typically, people don't really care about what we
do," the career entomologist told a packed auditorium in
Among the questions she was asked: Squash or don't squash?
Answer: Don't! Unless you want to find out why they're called stink bugs.
"I've had 26,205 in my home since the first of the
year," said Doug Inkley, who admitted to
counting carcasses. A scientist who lives near
Leskey says the shield-shaped
insect is the most serious pest she's encountered, feeding on more than 300
plants. It has no natural enemy in the
The bug has been found in 33 states. But its maddening infestation is worst in the mid-Atlantic, where thousands of bugs invade homes, buzz around reading lamps at night, stroll across TV screens, land on dinner tables and become lodged by the hundreds in window sills.
The infestation is so widely discussed in the mid-Atlantic region that it has become a conversational ice-breaker.
"Somebody told me that if you're having a dinner party and perhaps guests don't know each other very well, just bring up stink bugs," Leskey said.
The Swedenburg Estate Vineyard in
So pervasive is the problem that a
A
"We've had [harvesters] who had to turn on the windshield wipers because there were so many bugs within the crop," Leskey said.
Though annoying to homeowners, the bugs pose a serious problem to agriculture, piercing fruits and vegetables and sucking out the juices, scarring the fruit skin and leaving corky, brown areas beneath. The bug caused $37 million in losses to mid-Atlantic apple growers alone last year.
Although the insect — first identified in the United States
in Allentown, Pa., a decade ago — has been found in the Pasadena area, it
doesn't yet pose an immediate threat to California's multibillion-dollar
agriculture industry. It is believed to have entered the country through a
cargo shipment from
In the quest to eradicate the infestation, an entomologist
in the Department of Agriculture's Beneficial Insect Introduction Research Unit
in
The wasp lays eggs inside stink bug eggs and the wasp larvae devour them. It's like the creature in the movie "Alien" that "feeds on the inside of its host, killing it in the process, and then bursting out to search for more prey," said Kim Hoelmer, one of Leskey's colleagues.
The 43-year-old Leskey, who launched her career in kindergarten with a show-and-tell of pupating monarch butterfly caterpillars, now has far more dramatic presentations at her disposal.
On a recent day at her lab in
Leskey and her staff are frequently called in like bug 911 responders to examine extreme infestations, like a sawmill site where they found millions of stink bugs "between every layer of stacked boards."
Between research and community meetings Leskey often takes to the airwaves. Asked during an appearance on NPR which she prefers, bed bugs or stink bugs, she doesn't hesitate:
"Oh, I'll take the stink bugs…. They're not going to suck my blood."
Growing pods produce food anywhere
(FastCompany.com) – Founded by a former software engineer, the company--which just received almost $1 million in funding--is working on ways to provide local food to cities. And by local, they mean truly local. Their special "growing pods" can produce food anywhere.
As fuel prices go up, the cost of shipping produce thousands of miles away rises accordingly. In the past few years, a number of companies have attempted to capitalize on the increasing hunger for locally produced food--we've seen rooftop farming startup BrightFarms and Brooklyn hydroponic farming startup Gotham Greens, just to a name a couple. PodPonics, an Atlanta-based company started by a former software programmer, thinks it can outgrow them all. The company is already well on its way. Last week, PodPonics announced that it raised $725,000 in a seed funding round led by private investors.
PodPonics started in 2010 when founder Matt Liotta--a serial entrepreneur who has launched Internet, software, and telecom startups--noticed that demand significantly outstripped supply in the local food business. "[My work] in Internet, telecom, and agriculture is all pretty similar in that the goal was to find a mature industry and come up with a disruptive technology," he says. "If you wanted to produce fresh produce at the point of consumption in a way that was economically viable, what would you have to invent to do it?"
Liotta decided to use recycled shipping containers as "grow pods," which are outfitted with organic hydroponic nutrient solutions; computer-controlled environmental systems to regulate temperature, humidity, pH levels, and CO2; and lights that emit specific spectrums at different points in the day. The system provides the exact amount of water, lights, and nutrients that a crop requires--so there is no wasted energy (though the pods are still hooked up to the power grid). In a 320 square foot area, PodPonics can produce an acre's worth of produce. The pods can be stacked on top of each other for more efficient use of space.
The startup already supplies 150 pounds of lettuce, arugula,
and other microgreens to restaurants (and a
smattering of independent groceries) throughout the
Podponics' success has caught the
eye of plenty of investors who see the potential for massive growth. "If
you look at the lettuce market, a lot of [countries] are having their lettuce
put on a plane and flown from
By next year, PodPonics expects to be able to supply universities. And after that, large chain grocery stores. In five years, Weinstein predicts that Podponics will have a presence in large supermarket chains "in most of the large population centers that are more than 1,500 miles away from [California's] Salinas Valley," where much of the produce in the U.S is grown.
The startup's lightning-fast growth is the result of timing, luck, and--according to Liotta--the fact that PodPonics' technology has allowed it to be more capitally efficient than other urban agriculture startups. The entrepreneur is confident that his startup will continue to scale up, in part because of a growing necessity for its services. "If you're looking to the future, most everybody agrees that fuel prices are going to go up and the population is going to rise. By the time we get to 2050, 60% of the world population will live in urban areas, and we will have 15% less arable land than we have today," says Liotta. "There's got to be a way to divorce arable land from food production if we're going to make it as a species."
USDA invests $192M for rural broadband
(Yahoo! News) – The Department of Agriculture today announced the agency will be investing $192 million into a loan program that will allow private telecommunications companies to expand their operations in rural areas.
The announcement was made by Rural Utilities Service Administrator Jonathan Adelstein on the behalf of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who noted the focus on the investment was to bring more broadband services to rural residents through the Department of Agriculture's Telecommunications Infrastructure Loan Program. The loans would ultimately bring thousands of miles of cable to telecommunications operations in eight states.
The $192 million in loans are part of a $690 million federal investment during the 2011 fiscal year. In addition, the federal government is putting $3.5 billion towards broadband funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009). Overall, the funding will help rural telecommunications upgrade equipment, afford better facilities, expand operations, and maintain and repair networks within their operations.
Vilsack released a statement on
the announcement and the importance of expanding broadband operations into
rural areas: "A significant portion of
So far, eight rural telecommunications companies in eight
states have been approved for loans by the Department of Agriculture's
Telecommunications Infrastructure Loan Program. The largest loans include
Farmers Mutual Telephone Company for 3 Rivers Telephone Cooperative, Inc. for
$70 million in
According to a news article from the Globe Gazette, Adelstein spoke at a local farm near Rudd,
Adelstein said, "This is
going to change life in rural
The USDA is encouraging residents to visit the agency's Rural Development website for more information about the loan program and other programs available.
Insects released to combat invasive weed
(Associated
Press)
Scientists released more than 5,000 water hyacinth plant
hoppers at several locations in San Joaquin and
Officials hope the insects will establish self-sustaining colonies and begin chomping down on water hyacinth. The invasive plant forms a dense carpet on the surface of waterways, impeding boat access and clogging water intake systems.
"Water hyacinth is probably the world's worst aquatic weed," said Philip Tipping, a research entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
The weed, which comes from South America, was introduced in
the
Tipping's research helped lead to
federal approval for the release of the tiny water hyacinth plant hopper. The insect
was deployed along the St. Johns River near
"In a quarantine setting, it destroys the plants," he said. "But you can't predict how well it'll do when it's released."
The insects may not adapt to the weather and die off, he said.
"Our goal is to see if we can't start punching a hole in these mats of water hyacinth, so people can take a canoe through them or a duck can get through them," he said.
The use of imported insects to fight invasive bugs and plants -- part of a practice known as biocontrol -- does have its critics, who say too many insects have been let loose without a full understanding their effectiveness and the long-term environmental consequences.
Supporters counter that biological controls are an alternative to widespread pesticide and herbicide use. They say scientists spend years vetting critters to make sure they do not feed on what they are not supposed to.
In the case of the water hyacinth plant hopper, about 90 species were tested, including plants that have no relationship to water hyacinth but are found in the same habitat and commercial plants such as tomatoes, Tipping said. Researchers found that the insect survived exclusively on water hyacinth, he said.
Water: ‘The most weird substance on Earth’
(MIT via Physorg.com) – We drink it, swim in it, and our bodies are largely made of it. But as ubiquitous as water is, there is much that science still doesn't understand about this life-sustaining substance.
For example, unlike almost all other compounds, which typically shrink as they get colder, water expands when it freezes — which is why ice floats on water. Yet even the reasons for this unusual fundamental property remain elusive.
Now an MIT doctoral student and a team of researchers have carried out new experiments supporting a controversial theory about water's behavior that could help explain some of its mysteries.
Their findings, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have important implications for fields ranging from biology to construction, the researchers say, because the behavior of water affects so many important processes.
Water is "probably the most weird substance on Earth," says Yang Zhang PhD '10, lead author of the PNAS paper, which was based on his doctoral thesis research. "It behaves very differently from other materials," he says, with scores of anomalous characteristics. The work was done in collaboration with Zhang's doctoral supervisor, Sow-Hsin Chen, professor in MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and six other co-authors.
All materials undergo phase transitions between the basic states of matter — solid, liquid and gas. At these transitions, a material's properties can change significantly and suddenly. A theory proposed about two decades ago explained some of water's odd behavior by suggesting that a similar transition may take place between two different liquid states, in which the arrangement of the water molecules changes so that the two states have very different densities.
The new research, which probed water's molecular structure under a wide range of pressures and temperatures, provided some evidence for the existence of this liquid-liquid transition, though the evidence falls short of proof.
Evidence for this posited transition has been very difficult to obtain because it occurs only at temperatures and pressures at which water normally could not exist in liquid form: For instance, the temperature at which the liquid-liquid transition may occur lies far below the normal freezing point, at about minus 60 degrees Celsius. So the researchers had to find a clever way to get around that limitation.
One key trick: the use of tiny tubes of silica, in which the molecules of water were tightly confined so that they were unable to crystallize into ice. This tight confinement made it possible to maintain water in liquid form far below its normal freezing point.
With the water molecules in this state, Zhang, now the Clifford G. Shull Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was able to probe their density using a neutron beam from a reactor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In the experiments, he gradually varied the pressure from normal sea-level atmospheric pressure (or 1 bar) up to about 3,000 times that amount, and varied the temperature over a range of 170 degrees Celsius. He found a difference in water's density by approaching the expected transition temperature from opposite directions, as predicted by the theory.
Pablo Debenedetti, a professor of engineering and applied science at Princeton University who was not involved in this research, says "these are beautiful experiments" that address "one of the most interesting open questions on the liquid state of matter, and in particular on water: the possible existence of a phase transition between two distinct phases of liquid water."
While the experiments support the theory, he says, interpretation is complicated because confined water might behave differently from water in bulk. "The theoretical tools needed to unambiguously relate observations in nanoscale confinement to the behavior of bulk water are not available at present," he says.
"Supercooled" water that remains liquid below the normal freezing point is relatively easy to produce; Zhang even filmed a short demonstration using an ordinary water bottle cooled in the refrigerator. Water can also be "superheated" in a microwave oven to well above the boiling point, flashing to a boil all at once only when it is disturbed in some way. (In both freezing and boiling, water usually needs a nucleation point, such as a bubble or a ripple, to trigger the change of phase.)
Because water is key to so many aspects of people's lives, these phenomena could have important consequences. For example, Chen delivered a keynote speech this July, at a conference on low-temperature agriculture, on the possible impact of these supercooled states on plant life. He believes the fact that living organisms apparently cannot be revived after being subjected to temperatures below about minus 45 C is explained by water's transition to a lower-density state that prevents proteins, the molecules on which living organisms are built, from functioning.
This density difference could also affect construction, because concrete contains tiny amounts of water that can cause buildings and roads in polar regions to suffer serious cracking when temperatures plunge below minus 45 C. If the theory is correct, this critical temperature could set a fundamental limitation for both organisms and concrete buildings.
"The building blocks of our bodies and the building blocks of our society," Zhang says, "both have a lower limit of temperature that is based on the properties of water." But by understanding those limits, he says, it might be possible to alter the water — for example, by dissolving certain chemicals in it — to change the transition points and lower that limit.
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