Wheat, Environment IQ & retrotransposons

NZ Wheat a Record

NZ imports 46% of its wheat , less than I had thought.
total Import+produced = 171kg/person 470g/day (I suppose some is 'feed'

A Nth Otago (Canterbury?) farmer got a world record 15+ T/ha yield with 200kg N/ha
and a decent 11T/ha with no N applied - so NZ can grow wheat (maybe this was 'feed'?)

I reckon NZ should try to grow more wheat, just in case the PRC snap up the diminishing crop from Aus, and maybe they lose their taste for Anchor.

Consumption 753,000 T = 171kg/person   (not MT?)

2003 record grower in North Otago, New Zealand (NZ), applied to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records for yields produced by two English feed wheat cultivars that were16.2 t/ha and 14.3 t/ha at 14% grain moisture content from two fields (Chalmers 2003). Such l

,,Canterbury (sic) region of NZ in the 2002-03 season. Savannah, an autumn feed wheat cultivar, was direct-drilled on 6 May 2002 in a stony silt loam soil. Mid-flowering occurred on 1 December 2002. The crop was irrigated six times with approximately 40 mm of water applied each time. Rainfall from sowing to maturity was 505 mm. Two treatments had 207 and 230 kg N/ha applied in three applications, while a third treatment received no N fertiliser. There were three replicates. Soil mineral N was 50 kg N/ha in the top 25 cm shortly after crop emergence. Deeper N measurements could not be taken because the stony soil made sampling impossible.

...exceeded 15 t/ha when N was applied, and around 11 t/ha when no N was applied (Table 1).

Table 1. Yield and mean grain weight (mg) at 14% grain moisture content, and ears/m2 harvested from a crop of Savannah wheat in Canterbury, NZ, in 2003.

Treatment (kg N/ha)      Yield (t/ha)
0                                   11.1
230                               15.5

...unfertilised treatment produced only 11 t/ha (still a very good yield),,

cropscience



2009 Agricultural Production Survey
408,400 tonnes of wheat were harvested, up 19 percent on the previous year.
The area harvested increased 27 percent to 53,900 hectares of wheat.
Barley and maize grain harvests in 2009..
449,800 MT of barley +10 percent. The area +15 percent to 77,800 hectares.
257,000 tonnes of maize +25 percent. The area +26 percent to 23,100 hectares.



stats
fao
     2300kcal = 10MJ

about
scientificamerican


Urine 500litres = 5.6kg N = 230kg cereal so 1kg N = 41kG grain (blog search 2006?)
from above 200kg N ADDS 4Tons of N so 1 kgN = 4000/200 = 20kg Grain

15g/day N in 2 litres?  = 7.5kg
theecologist
rollitup

So because of (unfounded) disgust we replaced bioN with industrialN , or a byproduct of the explosives industry?

Its clear that New Zealand is massively underpopulated, we have, what 750 refugee quota. Gotta be the most selfish and greedy people on the planet.





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IQ
There's a lot of bytes spilled over Heredity vs Environment in Intelligence.
Very little, almost no thought given to the 3rd force: Chaos:

Genes cant possibly describe E11 * E4 synapses. Its done chaotically. tiny initial divergences racking up major cerebral differences,
tiny experiential differences carving major developmental paths

Now we have retrotransposons active in the brain, such that its a mosaic.... Different parts have different genetics.
Racism pales into insignificance,

numerous L1, Alu and SVA germline mutations, as well as 7,743 putative somatic L1 insertions, in the hippocampus and caudate nucleus of three individuals. Surprisingly, we also found 13,692 somatic Alu insertions and 1,350 SVA insertions. Our results demonstrate that retrotransposons mobilize to protein-coding genes differentially expressed and active in the brain. Thus, somatic genome mosaicism

ncbi


2011 Oct 30;479(7374):534-7. doi: 10.1038/nature10531.
Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain.


It gets worse: the chaotic variation which may swamp environmental factors, is itself influenced by the environment...

ncbi

L1 retrotransposons are capable of mobilization in neuronal progenitor cells from rodents and humans and evidence of massive L1 insertions was observed in adult brain tissues but not in other somatic tissues. In addition, L1 mobility in the adult hippocampus can be influenced by the environment

and for "for the youngest active human retrotransposon, SINE-VNTR-Alu (SVA)."
ncbi

its a chaotic jungle in there...

and its also going on in the germ line... its inherited chaos!...

 several subfamilies of Alu elements are expressed in undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and that most expressed Alu elements are active elements.

ncbi

Anyway, I had a high IQ but low socialisation, so I could have benefited from an EQ test, and special classes in how to get along with people.
...
S J Gould as Marxist, proposing we dont test IQ because its evil, or uncorrelated or something. (?)
cpsimoes

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huge cave in Vietnam. If not a claustriphobe, looks grand

nationalgeographic

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Fuukushima, standards for radiation set higher...

..at the Chernobyl [...] clear targets were set .. more than five millisieverts in a year were evacuated, no question [...]

Were Japan to impose similar strictures, .. would have to evacuate some 1800 km² and impose restrictions on food produced in another 11 100 km²
..Dr. Kozo Tatara for the Japan Public Health Association at the American Public Health Association’s 139th annual meeting

standard


..

According to the simulation, the reactor core started melting about 50 minutes after the emergency core cooling system of the No. 1 reactor stopped functioning and the .. an hour and 20 minutes later, the control rod and pipes used to gauge neutrons started melting and falling onto the bottom of the pressure vessel. After about three hours and 20 minutes, most of the melted fuel had piled up on the bottom of the pressure vessel. At the four hour and 20 minute mark, the temperature of the bottom of the pressure vessel had risen to 1,642 degrees Celsius, close to the melting point for the stainless steel lining, probably damaging the pressure ves

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And devastatingly, the government failed to make use of radiation data to predict the movements of the radioactive plumes released from the plant to warn local towns and direct evacuations, the report [by a government-appointed investigative panel] said. The failure helped expose entire communities to harmful radiation, the report said.

nytimes

Seems that Uranium water boilers are terrific, just as long as 1) everyone does the right thing, always 2) nothing goes wrong

but
1) At Chernobyl the operators sort of tinkered, turning off the safety

2) if the cooling fails for 40 minutes the zircon gets bent
if the cooling fails for 2 hours the whole thing slushies in a heap, which might not melt through to the groundwater
... Hydrogen explosions pop off, then you cant get near the thing for 40 years.
Gosh, those pools of old rods are actually dangerous, they can cook off and blow - who knew?

The plumes of radiation wander about. Not such a problem if it doesnt rain (It didnt rain over Tokyo) but it did rain over Wales and Lake Como (sorry about that George Clooney)

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heres the new "safe" reactor design

that pissant pool of water (4) is 'gravity fed' so theres nothing to worry about... seriously ... were safe for 10 half-lives of Pu (350,000 years...)

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eia
china coal use explosion

Very Fast Trains ... quoting very low carbon footprint in Europe, because the electricity is from French Nukes. Good, I just hope not one reactor crew loses concentration for 40 minutes over the next however many years the rods are hot (thousands?)

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Russia is NOT returning to Stalinism
lrb

That the much publicised vertical power structure is a ‘fiction’, as it was called by Aleksei Navalny, one of the instigators of the massive anti-regime demonstrations that took place on 10 December, is evident from the corruption which, according to Harding, ‘has increased sixfold under Putin’s rule’. Escaping the draft, registering a company, buying an apartment, getting into school, passing an exam, being acquitted of criminal charges, trumped up or valid, receiving medical treatment may all require the bribery of public officials. The kickback plague is endemic, inflating by as much as 50 per cent the cost to the state of everything from weapons to highway construction. That the principal players in ‘the greatest corruption story in human history’, as the economist Anders Aslund puts it, include the fabled siloviki – the ‘heavies’: the army, the intelligence agencies etc – is the strongest sign of the absence of a hierarchy. In a hierarchy, local officials would answer to their Moscow superiors: but they don’t.

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I have no idea what this 'new food bill' is about, sounds bizarre
I will fight to the death for the right to eat chutney, as soon as I can find the chutney liberation front...

new-food-bill-in-new-zealand
- It turns a human right (to grow food and share it) into a government-authorised privilege that can be summarily revoked.

- It makes it illegal to distribute “food” without authorisation, and it defines “food” in such a way that it includes nutrients, seeds, natural medicines, essential minerals and drinks (including water).

- By controlling seeds, the bill takes the power to grow food away from the public and puts it in the hands of seed companies. That power may be abused.

- Growing food for distribution must be authorised, even for “cottage industries”, and such authorisation can be denied.

- Under the Food Bill, Police acting as Food Safety Officers can raid premises without a warrant, using all equipment they deem necessary – including guns (Clause 265 – 1).

- Members of the private sector can also be Food Safety Officers, as at Clause 243. So Monsanto employees can raid premises – including marae – backed up by armed police.

- The Bill gives Food Safety Officers immunity from criminal and civil prosecution.

- The Government has created this bill to keep in line with its World Trade Organisation obligations under an international scheme called Codex Alimentarius (“Food Book”). So it has to pass this bill in one form or another.

- The bill would undermine the efforts of many people to become more self-sufficient within their local communities.

- Seed banks and seed-sharing networks could be shut down if they could not obtain authorisation. Loss of seed variety would make it more difficult to grow one’s own food.

- Home-grown food and some or all seed could not be bartered on a scale or frequency necessary to feed people in communities where commercially available food has become unaffordable or unavailable (for example due to economic collapse).
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this (non food) sounds exciting, to my biochemical ears...

Pycnogenol® represents a natural blend of genetically programmed (say what?) constant proportions of bioflavonoids including catechin, epicatechin, taxifolin, monomers, dimers of catechin and epicatechin, oligomeric procyanidnins and phenolic fruit acids such as ferulic acid and caffeic acid.
Glycerin, Hamamelis Virginiana (Witch Hazel) Extract, Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Organic Camellia Sinensis (Green Tea) Leaf Extract*, Organic Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract*, Stearic Acid, Glyceryl Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Organic Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil*, Xanthan Gum, Allantoin, Panthenol, Ascorbyl Palmitate (C-Ester), Pinus Pinaster (Pycnogenol®) Bark Extract, Sodium Hyaluronate (Hyaluronic Acid), Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E), Retinyl Palmitate (Vitamin A), Potassium Sorbate, Phenoxyethanol, Ethylhexylglycerin.

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