Episode #465

Episode #465

News Items

• Mega-Earth
• Secondary Drowning
• Medical Information on Wikipedia
• Lady Hurricanes
• Black Hole Magnetism

Who's That Noisy

• Answer to last week: Fox

Interview with Bug Girl

• http://www.wired.com/category/charismaticminifauna/

Science or Fiction [ Show Answers ]

• Item #1 Science

  The commercial strawberry is octoploid, meaning it has four entire genomes (four complete sets of chromosomes) in each nucleus.

• Item #2 Science

  One of the first strawberry scientists was a teenager that examined strawberry plants and arranged them by genetic complexity into a “geneology”, 100 years before Mendel, that still holds up to today’s molecular resolution.

• Item #3 Fiction

  Today’s commercial strawberries descend from a cross between two species; a wild strawberry brought to France from Chile by a spy in 1714, and an ornamental plant called the meadowsweet, brought to France from N. America in the 1500’s.

Skeptical Quote of the Week.

‘Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them. And these can rarely be distinctly defined. The best course for the story-teller at times is to confine himself to a simple narrative of events.’ This is from ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky