So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial – it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn’t help matters. Both “lemon” and “lime” were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.
.. To the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was because their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them. The real culprit was in the bad meat, and the casks of lime juice mandated by law on every seagoing ship were another example of outdated medical superstition that would now give way to a more sophisticated understanding of illness.
.. The advice he got was unchanged—scurvy was an acidic condition of the blood caused by ptomaines in tainted meat.
.. Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of ‘vitamin’.
Little Pluto and Its Big Data
For instance, even though New Horizons got no closer than 7,800 miles from Pluto, and it zoomed past at over 30,000 mph, it collected so much data that NASA estimates that it’ll take fifteen months for it all to downlink back to Earth. Forget prompt analysis – we won’t even have all the data in our hands until October 2016.
.. Incredibly, peak transmission speed is a sluggish 1-2 kilobits per second. To put that into perspective, New Horizons’ highest resolution camera, LORRI (LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager) has a detection square that measures 1024 x 1024 pixels. Each pixel is translated into a 12-bit number – meaning each picture is a 12 million bit package, travelling over billions of miles of space. And that’s just one camera.
The Real Landscapes of the Great Flood Myths
Analyzing sediment cores from the bed of the Black Sea, they discovered that before 5600 B.C., the sea was a large freshwater lake. Then, when glacial ice melting off the poles raised sea levels worldwide, the Mediterranean overtopped a narrow strip of land and decanted into the lake. The inflow “roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days,” the researchers write in their book Noah’s Flood, cascading over the land at 200 times the flow of Niagara Falls.
.. Saint Augustine, a fourth-century bishop in a Roman province of Africa, warned against readings of the Bible that conflicted with reason and the study of nature. In his view, the earth didn’t lie. When he found seashells encased in mountain rock, he took them as confirmation of a global flood. How else could the bodies of marine creatures get locked up in mountaintops?
Decoding the Remarkable Algorithms of Ants
Ants in particular excel at collective search, automatically tailoring their search strategy to efficiently cover large areas of ground. Gordon has found parallels between the algorithms ant colonies use for foraging and the man-made ones that underlie the Internet. Given how long ants have been solving these kinds of problems, Gordon hopes that she will uncover new algorithms that will ultimately make large-scale computing networks cheaper and more efficient.
What has most impressed you about ants?
I’m impressed by the contrast between the coordinated responses of colonies and the ineffective and incomplete actions of individual ants. In other words, colonies accomplish a lot, but no ant is very competent on its own.
.. For harvester ants, we’ve learned that an ant decides whether to go out of the nest and forage using the rate at which it meets ants coming in with food. It’s a form of positive feedback; the faster ants are coming in with food, the more ants go out. Each ant decides only when its rate of interaction is high enough to go out. Overall this system allows the colony to regulate foraging activity so that the ants don’t go out unless there’s enough food to make it worthwhile.
.. In some ways they have sacrificed what we think of as efficiency for resiliency.
.. Rather than sending one really complex robot to explore Mars or to search a burning building, it makes sense to send a group of cheap robots that will still work as a group even if one malfunctions.