THE GHOSTS RIDERS OF ORDEBEC (FRED VARGAS) AND ORINE AS FERTILISER

 Lucio nodded, seeming to appreciate the macabre balance sheet, and uncapped the beer bottles, levering them against a branch.

‘When you piss against it, you’re damaging its roots,’ Adamsberg protested, ‘and now you’re tearing off its bark.’

‘Not at all,’ Lucio retorted indignantly. ‘Urine’s full of nitrates, best thing there is for compost. Why d’you think I piss against the tree? Nitrates, that’s why, did you know that?’

‘I don’t know much, Lucio.’

 

In this case, folk wisdom is near the truth, because human orine contains urea, a substance that is produced industrially as a fertilizer. In 1828 Whöler was able to synthesize it artificially in a laboratory for the first time, messing up the vitalist theory. This theory defended that certain compounds were only able to be produced by living organisms

This Lucio is also right about nitrates, because the urea is a nitrogen compound whose symbol is CH₄N₂O

THE FUTURE FUTURE (ADAM THIRLWELL) AND MYCORRHIZAL SYMBIOSIS

 What then happened was that new interpreters emerged, to communicate between the soil and the trees. Little mushrooms appeared at the base of each tree trunk. First there were chanterelles everywhere, yellow among the black earth. Underground, the threads from these fungi grew into the hairs of the roots, so that they couldn’t be separated. Everything was a blur and tangle. The threads gathered little messages from the soil and the rock. These mushrooms were new in the forest. No one had seen them before. The trees fed the fungi their sugary drinks and in exchange the fungi diverted away from the trees anything they thought might be harmful to them, the toxins or metals, and when they had gathered enough of these elements they transformed into ever crazier varieties of mushroom: porcini, cepes, boletes. Everything was a form of thinking and comparison. If water fell in one area, too far for the trees to reach, it could be transported back to the trees through the filaments of the fungi. It was an education, a little process of apparent self-assembly – the way a group of people might take over a disused gas station and somehow transform it into a cinema for the benefit of the whole community.

What could be the utility of thid humble collection of texts? I would love that they appear as an introduction to the chapters of a Science book, as the same way as some novels begin with a quote.

Such a good description of the micorrizic symbiosis! It seems like the text belongs to The Living Forest, by Wenceslea Fernández Flores. An hyperbolic critic said that the author was the new Martin Amis, but I disagree with he, because thatś much to say

 

THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON (LAUREN GROFF) AND THE RABBIT TEST

 What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.

 

In the recent past, this test was very popular, even it was used the expression ´the bunny died´ to name euphemistically a pregnancy. As the text says, the test consists in injecting urine from the possible pregnant woman in a rabbit, in a doe rabbit specifically. If the woman is pregnant, the presence of the hCG hormone will cause changes in the rabbit organism. But the rabbit doesn´t die because of this injection, like the text may show, but it has to be sacrified and dissected by a doctor in order to check wether there is a pregnancy or not. It may seem a very rudimentary method and something like an archaic ritual, but its reliability was quite high, around 98%.

MEN IN MY SITUATION (PER PETTERSON) AND ECO-ANXIETY

 Of the roads. Of the cars, of Mazda and Ford, of Opel, of any brand at all, of manuals and automatics, of petrol-powered cars and cars that were diesel powered, of quiet-running cars and cars that spewed coal-black smoke out over the tarmac in a miserable tail from their exhaust pipes. I hadn’t worked out how much carbon dioxide I emitted on these trips. It was probably a criminal amount, and honestly, it bothered me, I thought about it often, I lay awake at night counting litres of fuel, counting cubic metres in my sleep, but what could I do, should I take pills, how damaging was the pharmaceutical industry, certainly very damaging, though I didn’t know with what substance or how; toxic runoff into the ground, crap in the air, or just narcotically destructive in general.

In this blog we like to keep us up-to-date about scientific neologisms. Letś consider eco-anxiety, which symptoms are well described in this text. Pavese said that a suicide was a shy killer, so in the same way we could say that people who suffer ecoanxiety are like expandable hypochondriacs. As you can see, itñs a very first world problem. Everything contaminates, everything wastes energy, even a simple Google search does it. Indeed, I have just searched it on Google and “one only one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2”

 

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (CHARLES DICKENS) AND THE INFLUENCE OF WIND IN SONIC PROPAGATION

 As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many church-clocks in the City - some leading, some accompanying, some following - struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

 

How useful for the daily life is to have a slight knowledge of the basics of Science! Without reaching the levels of McGyver, here are a few tips about wind so that you can take the most of them: you shouldn´t urinate against wind ( all the boys learn it by scientific method). And the wind has also influence in the sound. Everyone who lives around a futbol stadium knows that with wind-assisted, the sound gets better. You listen to it stronger and better, or less flawed, in Dickens´words. This is because of a type of diffraction that alters less the sonic waves

WHEN WE CEASED TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD (BENJAMÍN LABATUT) AND THE EFFECTS OF CYANIDE

 The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P: Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life.

Itś very short the bibliograhy about the effects of cyanide. Likewise, there are very few records about the effects og guillotine during French Revolution. It really atracts my atention the fact that this Indian goldsmith, hopeless as he was to commit suicide, found time to think about Science and posteriry. He had his reason, the poor guy. Pavese, anothesuicide, used to say tha a suicide was a shy killer. May the bitterness of cyanide be recorded, in case someone was cuirious about it

 

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (JENNIFER EGAN) AND ENTANGLED PARTICLES

 And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us.1

11. I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained

 

I like this nice confession by the author because it shows how the writers sometimes use Science to brag adorning their metaphors. In fact, with a complicated and abstract topic like quantum mechanics, it should be just the opposite, I mean, instead of being a source of metaphors, it would be neccessary to use clever similes to understand their own concepts, because many of them are neither intituive nor familiar. I see Quantum Physics more like a recipient of similes than a donor.

And what a beatiful word is sophistry, isn´t it?