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Slash and Burn in Brazil

Does rain forest grow back? Archaeology might have the answer

Posted on January 16th, 2012 by Alun Salt

Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the conquistadors, there’s variety over short distances because change in height makes vertical economies possible where different foods grow at different heights and they’re just the [...]

Entrance to the seed vault

Schrödinger’s History (TIME 100)

Posted on December 2nd, 2011 by Alun Salt

How can you say something is historically important or not unless you observe it? What happens if you set up conditions where you intentionally cannot observe a site’s historical importance? I said in the opening post that some sites might have been chosen as a deliberate trolling for comment, and I think the Svalbard Global [...]

The Galapagos Islands, iconic in the history of Evolutionary Theory, but is this the place it was discovered?

The scale of science and history (TIME 100)

Posted on November 28th, 2011 by Alun Salt

TIME has recently published 100 greatest places in the world. The book is a collection of sites that, the editors argue, have had the biggest impact on world history. It’s excellent blog material because hardly anyone has read it (including me), any list will be personal and omit something someone feels is important and, following [...]

A gift for the anti-Botanist

Posted on November 14th, 2011 by Alun Salt

With a world full of fascinating life-forms, it’s always easy to find a gift for a botanist. There’s so many plants to choose from, but what can you get for a friend without green fingers? What can you get for someone who doesn’t merely lack gardening skills, but is a hazard to plant-life. While browsing [...]

Cucumbers and melons in medieval manuscripts

The fashionably late arrival of cucumbers in Europe #bad11

Posted on October 16th, 2011 by Alun Salt

You might put together a salad from what you’ve grown in your back garden, but it’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan meal. Tomatoes came from Mesoamerica and if you have potato salad, then you have the Incas of South American to thank. Recent research by Jules Janick and Harry Paris, Medieval Herbal Iconography and Lexicography of Cucumis [...]

Autumn Clean

Posted on September 28th, 2011 by Alun Salt

I’ve been tidying up my online presence, RSS feeds and so on for the new academic year. I’ll be moving my life sciences posts to a professional account on Google Plus, http://gplus.to/drsalt In some ways this is the wrong way round as my PhD is not in Botany, but it helps dealing with students. Another [...]

Plant versus Bee Power

Posted on September 19th, 2011 by Alun Salt

Coming up in October we have a paper, ‘Flower power: its association with bee power and floral functional morphology in papilionate legumes‘ by Silvina A. Córdoba and Andrea A. Cocucci, in the journal. The paper examines if there’s any correlation between the strength of flowers and the strength of bees. Are they in an evolutionary [...]