growing

Showing 22 posts tagged growing

To know how food is grown — and how to grow it — to know who grows it, how it’s processed and shipped, and how far it might be coming from to get to our plates… we like finding videos that chronicle how these systems happen.

The Perennial Plate is a great resource for not only learning about food’s origins, but how people eat and endeavor in cultures around the world. Chef Daniel Klein and camerawoman Mirra Fine are currently traveling the globe to tell these stories.

From Splendid Table, Mirra and Daniel talk about their experience filming Coconut: Nose to Tail, and how efficient the use of a tree can be: 

MF: For the people of Sri Lanka, the coconut is really a source of life. Not only because it is an ingredient that is found in most Sri Lankan foods, but also because the coconut tree itself, from the trunk to the leaves to the actual nut, is used in non-food elements of their life… 

DK: They are selling really every part of the coconut. They are selling the toddy to a toddy producer, they are selling their husks to a rope producer, they are selling the oil to an oil producer, and then they use the coconuts for their own cooking and also to build huts and things like that.

Watch another Perennial Plate video: Lifen Yang’s small farm to table restaurant in Kunming, China, and then spend time on some farms around the globe.

From medicalschool, watch this time lapse clip of how bacteria reproduce by dividing into two every 20 minutes. 

Bacteria are microscopic single-cell organisms that are found in the air, inside and on our bodies, in the dirt, and everywhere in nature. There are both harmful and beneficial kinds. Some cause diseases, while others help our bodies function. For example, there are more than 400 types of bacteria live in the human digestive system. There are also kinds that are used to make medicines, and others that make foods like cheese and yogurt. (Might anyone know what kind of bacteria this is?)

More mentions of bacteria are in these videos.

And now it’s time for 3+ minutes of jazz and tiny hailstones. From Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal, “The Universal laws behind growth patterns, or what Tetris can teach us about coffee stains.”

As I watched this miniature world self-assemble on my windshield like an alien landscape, I wondered about the physics behind these patterns. I learned later that these patterns of ice are related to a rich and very active current area of research in math and physics known as universality. The key mathematical principles that belie these intricate patterns lead us to some unexpected places…

Observe this quiet, growing collection of ice particles on its own, or read on for a much deeper discussion of universality that includes diagrams, videos, and animated gifs.

Related quiet particle observation: Dust particles dance to a Radiohead cover. 

In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California - Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.

We love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.

PS. Need a DNA primer? Watch this vid.

From KQEDscience