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​Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

Nature's Animal Ambassador

​     If  I asked you what grain is the most harvested in the world, you’d probably answer either wheat or rice.  But the answer is actually corn, more accurately called ‘maize.’  This nutritious crop that originated in Mexico feeds not only people but also animals around the world.  We’re used to the wonderfully tender sweet corn harvested in late summer and early autumn, but most maize is actually field corn, more starchy than sweet and used as animal feed or to make cornmeal and flour.

     For a long time, biologists puzzled about the origins of this important crop.  There is no wild plant that looks anything like modern corn, which is actually a giant grass.  The closest relative is a scrawny branching plant with hard dark seeds called teosinte.  It seems a huge jump from teosinte to corn, yet geneticist George Beadle found in the 1930s that corn and teosinte have the same number of chromosomes and could be crossbred to produce hybrids.  With the limited tools available at that time, Beadle deduced that only about five genes were involved in creating the differences between teosinte and corn.

     Fast forward to modern times, when scientists can look directly at DNA and analyze every detail of its structure.  We now know that Beadle came very close to the truth—about five regions in the DNA seem to control the major differences between teosinte and corn.  For example, these two plants look so very different, yet just one single gene turns a branched plant into a single stalk, like a stalk of corn.  Another single gene controls one of the most dramatic and certainly most important traits for farmers—the nature of the seeds and their stalk.  In teosinte, each seed has a hard covering.  Just one gene eliminates the hard covering and produces a stalk bearing exposed seeds, like an ear of corn.  

     Scientists now use maize as a perfect example of two major ways evolution happens.  One way is through major sudden jumps, like the change from a branching plant to a single stalk.  The other is the more gradual kind of change that has led to the thousands of different kinds of maize grown by farmers today.  There are probably hundreds of varieties of sweet corn and thousands of varieties of field corn.  Think about that the next time you bite into a nice crunchy taco made from a corn tortilla.

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​Corn was a very important crop for homesteaders in the American West, used both to feed themselves as well as their animals.  Read about it in Homesteading: Settling America's Heartland, revised and expanded edition, Mountain Press, 2013.


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Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.
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Did you know that the Olympics were originated  in 776 BCE and continued every four years until being suppressed in 393 CE as a pagan ritual?  Find out from Jim Whiting how they got started again after more than a 17-century timeout.

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Stephen Swinburne
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Lifelong Naturalist

​          When I take a big bite into a hamburger, I am taking part in a food chain. When energy moves from one living organism (hamburger) to the next (me), scientists call this path or chain the Food Chain. Every living thing needs food. Food provides energy for plants and animals to live. 

            Food chains begin with plants using sunlight, water and nutrients to make energy in a process called photosynthesis. There are lots of different kinds of food chains— some simple, some complex. An example of a simple food chain is when a rabbit eats grass and then a fox eats the rabbit. I think food chains are so interesting, I’ve written some poems about them. 

 A Shark is the Sun

Shark eats tuna,
Tuna eats mackerel, 
Mackerel eats sardine,
Sardine eats zooplankton,
Zooplankton eats phytoplankton,
Phytoplankton eats sun. 
So...shark eats sun. 

            In every food chain there are producers, consumers and decomposers. Plants make their own food so they are producers. Animals are consumers because they consume plants or animals. Decomposers have the final say as they break down and decompose plants or animals and release nutrients back to the earth. Animals can be herbivores (plant eater), carnivores (meat eater) or omnivores (plant and meat eater). What are you?          

 
Why Can’t I Be On The Top?

I don’t like the bottom,
I want to be at the top.
I’m tired of being crushed and stomped
and chewed into slop. 
Why can’t I be the tiger
with claws as sharp as shears,
With a roar as loud as thunder
To threaten trembling ears?
Who designed this food chain?
Is there a chance I can opt out?
At least I’m not a plankton
Floating all about.

             I hope you are happy with your place in the food chain. If not, you might want to sing along with the Food Chain Blues. 

 Food Chain Blues

Mama said be careful,
It’s a risky world outside,
Dangers lurking everywhere,
Hardly a place to hide.
She said some of us get eaten,
And some of us survive.
Count yourself quite lucky,
If you make it out alive. 
We’re stuck in this cruel cycle,
Nature’s red teeth and claws.
You wanna do your best,
To stay clear of someone’s jaws. 
I got the food chain blues
I got the food chain blues
Someone’s gonna eat me.
I got the food chain blues!

​     You probably eat bananas at least once a week—they are the most popular of all fruits, even surpassing the apple.  But have you ever noticed that bananas have no seeds?  Probably not.  You just peel them and enjoy their soft, seedless flesh without even thinking about seeds.

     If you’d been strolling through a tropical forest in New Guinea thousands of years ago and reached up to pluck a wild banana snack, you wouldn’t have wanted to eat it.  The banana ancestors had big hard seeds surrounded by a small amount of sweet flesh, not worth peeling.  Sometimes, however, plants appeared with fruit that had no seeds.  Over time, people cherished these seedless fruits and grew the plants for their own use.

     The banana plant sends up a central stalk surrounded by very large leaves, then flowers at the tip.  The flowers produce a heavy load of bananas without being pollinated.  Then the stalk dies.  Meanwhile, the stalk sends out side shoots that become new plants.  That’s a form of cloning, meaning that all of a banana plant’s progeny are genetically identical, both to their parent and to one another.

     The ancestors of the modern banana could reproduce in the usual way, so  their seeds contained mixtures of DNA from the mother plant and DNA from another plant’s pollen.  This “sexual reproduction” allows for the genes of the plants to be combined in new ways.  If a disease came along, it might kill most of the plants, but some others could have natural resistance and survive.

     Because it lacks seeds, the banana has gotten into trouble.  Back in the 1950s, an especially sweet and tasty variety called the Gros Michel was the commercial banana.  But a devastating fungus came along and killed the plants and contaminated the soil.  Growers then chose another variety, Cavendish, which resisted the disease.  But now a wilt called Panama disease has shown up that kills the Cavendish plants.  And because bananas lack genetic diversity and because they don’t develop seeds that mix up their genes, the Cavendish has no way of defending itself.  Banana growers are doing what they can to stop the spread of the disease, however, and up to now they have been successful.  But don’t be surprised if in a few years the bananas you buy look and taste different.  Luckily, there are other varieties out there, like small “finger” bananas and larger red-skinned fruits, that you can already buy in places like Hawaii.

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent's new nonfiction picture book about horses has a fresh focus: how people over the ages have decorated horses in special ways. Organized into three categories—warfare and hunting, performance and competition, performance, and ceremony—the book introduces horses such as the chariot-pulling war horse of the Persians to the rose-decorated winner of the Kentucky Derby. For more information, click here.

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Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.
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Jan Adkins' Minute tomorrow is going to be about the real Dracula who may (or may not) have been as scary as the bloodsucking Count who has frightened decades of readers and movie goers.

Today is International Waffle Day!

       It originated in Sweden, probably due to confusion between the Swedish words Våffeldagen (Waffle Day) and Vårfrudagen (“Our Lady’s Day”), which also falls on March 25. Vårfrudagen marks the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary that she will become the mother of Jesus Christ. Despite this coincidence, International Waffle Day has no religious significance. In Sweden, the date is the traditional start of spring and Swedes (and many people throughout the world) celebrate by—you guessed it—eating waffles.

       Historians date the origin of waffles back to the ancient Greeks, who cooked flat cakes called obleios between two hot metal plates. In the 1200s, an unknown European craftsman invented plates with the honeycomb pattern that characterize waffles. Waffles reportedly came to the New World in 1620 with the Pilgrims. 

       Americans also celebrate National Waffle Day on August 24. On this date in 1869, Cornelius Swartwout received the first U.S. patent for a waffle iron. Designed for use on top of coal-burning stoves, it consisted of a cast-iron griddle and cover joined by a hinge. A handle and clasp prevented the cook from being burned. When the batter was poured in, it would cook for a few minutes and then the iron would be flipped over to cook the other side. The widespread use of electricity in the early 1900s resulted in the development of the electric waffle iron, making it easy to produce one of the most popular breakfast foods.  

       Waffles have another distinction. About 1971, University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman was experimenting with new soles for running shoes. He wanted something to provide traction and stability, yet lighter in weight than current models. Looking at his wife’s waffles gave him an idea. He poured rubber into her waffle iron and let it cook for a few minutes. He removed it, let it harden, then cut it to the proper shape. His experiments ruined the waffle iron, but they resulted in a new shoe called the Waffle Trainer. Bowerman joined businessman Phil Knight, one of his former runners, and founded the Nike Shoe Company to market the Waffle Trainer. The shoe created a sensation among runners of all levels of ability. Today Nike is almost synonymous with running shoes and other athletic footwear. 

     When it comes to preserving a fresh taste in food to be eaten at some later time, nothing beats freezing it.  That was the discovery made by Clarence Birdseye in 1924. He had been working in northern Canada and noticed that fish caught by the native Canadian Inuit s froze almost instantly in the frigid winter air.  It was just as delicious when cooked and eaten months later as it was on the day it was fresh.  Birdseye figured that if food was frozen quickly at very cold temperatures, large ice crystals couldn’t form to damage the food and make it mushy.  His flash-freezing process made him very rich.  

     The problem isn’t so much the freezing of food as what happens when it’s defrosted. See for yourself.  Stick a stalk of celery in your freezer. The next day defrost it.  Want to eat it?  Compare it to a fresh unfrozen stalk.  The perky structure of fresh celery is destroyed by ice.  Water has the very unusual property of expanding and taking up more space when it changes into ice than when in a liquid state.  That’s why ice cubes float and frozen unopened soda cans bulge.    Expanding ice crystals destroy the cell walls of plants.  Quickly freezing fresh food keeps the ice crystals smaller than slower freezing, but they are still large enough to destroy the cell walls of delicate vegetables like spinach or lettuce. But if you defrost frozen spinach from the supermarket it is beyond limp.  So a salad you can defrost and serve as if it were fresh has seemed like an impossible dream.  

​     Frederico Gomez, a Swedish scientist, is working to change this.  Like Birdseye he took a close look at nature, specifically at plants that stay alive in very cold climates.  He discovered that they contain a sugar called trehalose (tree-HAL-ose) that works like a natural antifreeze.  Could he find a way to get trehalose into spinach leaves?  If so, would the trehalose protect the structure of the spinach and keep it crisp after defrosting?  This picture shows the results.  The leaf on the left was treated with trehalose.  The one on the right was untreated.  He froze and defrosted both.  The treated leaf is as crisp as if it had never been frozen!  

​     Just because there is success in a lab doesn’t mean a defrosted salad will show up on your dinner plate any time soon.  But these results are enough to keep the research going. 

Move over Clarence Birdseye! 

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Cobb has been revising her classic book, Science Experiments You Can Eat.  While doing her research, she came across this work of Frederico Gomez.  She bought trehalose on line and soaked some slices of parsnip and zucchini in a trehalose solution, hoping that the sugar would be absorbed by the plant cells.  But when she froze them and defrosted them, it didn't work.  Dr. Gomez got the sugar inside the plant cells by removing some water from between the cells in a vacuum chamber, soaking the leaves in a trehalose solution (which  moved the sugar into the spaces outside the cells)  and then exposing the leaves with a mild electric shock to get the sugar through the cell walls.  Vicki didn't have the equipment to do all this but she tried anyway. The revised book will be released in spring/summer 2016.

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Vicki Cobb is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.
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​Everyone’s heard about Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic, but who's ever heard of Cal Rodgers?  Roxie Munro has and she's going to tell you his wild story tomorrow.