Mosquitos and Repellent Made from Breadfruit

Breadfruit

I have tried organic mosquito repellents before, and I thought they were a big waste of time.  DEET, diethyl toluamide, is the usual one. DEET is a weak neurotoxin, and it numbs the noses of mosquitos, so they can't find you.

Yesterday, I was hauling bricks out of the woods, and I had DEET on my face. When I got some on my lips, I could feel them getting numb. Sometimes infants are harmed by an over-protective mother slathering DEET all over baby.

Breadfruit is a prolific crop grown in southern Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and other tropical areas.  The flowers of the tree reputedly repel mosquitos and now researchers Maxwell and Jones at U of British Columbia have proven it.

They have separated out all the individual substances and found the three responsible ones---all fatty acids, capric acid, undeconoic acid and laurie acid that have ten to twelve carbons.  

Undecanoic acid is one of the ingredients in breadfruit blossoms.
The flowers are a good spot to find the fatty acids.  

No one thinks that C-10 to C-12 fatty acids are neurotoxins, so I wonder how it works.

My DW believes that coconut oil is a balm for all illnesses, and one that coconut oil is touted for is mosquito repellency. It is interesting coconut oil has a lot of C-6 to C-12 fatty acid, so rancid or over-processed coconut oil might work as a mosquito repellent.  Cooking up coconut oil to degrade it, especially with acid or base would make it work better. I did not find any commercial mosquito repellants like that.

There is a slightly geekier version of this on my other blog.

My Vegetable Garden for '12

This year's garden got a very early start because I could work the soil back in MARCH -- global warming came though with lots of great Spring weather.

Big changes this year are: 

++ Bye-bye Strawberries. After three terrible seasons, I have torn them all out. They kept sending runners so they grew into a mat of tiny strawberries -- each one too small to make fruit. I also tore out the blueberries which have been doing NOTHING.

++ Hello EIGHT tomatoes. Last year, I nearly had CROP FAILURE when the late blight stuck. I put in twice as many this year. I am also growing a few in different ways like, some in Wall-O-Waters and some without. Some staked and some running. And five different varieties. No heirlooms either -- only blight resistant hybrids.   

++ Catnip continues to takeover more real estate. Jenny likes it though. 

++ Asparagus - despite the asparagus jinx, I have big health asparagus ferns this year. [The asparagus jinx is that I always get transferred before I get a chance to eat the asparagus. In the last house I delayed planting it because I did not want to move. Later I got cocky thinking it was just a superstition, and I planted some, and then --- I got transferred. So the healthy crop this year is making a prediction. . .]

++ Marigolds - This year I have marigolds in the old strawberry patch. They are in a bed rather than a border. Sofia French Marigolds in front and  American Marigolds in back. 

++ Miracle Grow -- This year I am a commercial for Miracle Grow. After last year generic products, I am back to name brand fertilizer. I know it is all the same, but Miracle Grow is a good product at a good price. 

Varieties

Burpee's Big Boy. Vigorous and fairly self-supporting so far.

Early Girl Improved. This is the vigorous one;
The less vigorous one produced a fruit on 8-June:
Early!

Acorn squash grown from a sweet variety
we bought at the store. 

A Snack Attack Tomato. Looks good. I'll let you know how it tastes.

This is my Sweet 100. Very vigorous. I have had
two cherry tomatoes so far. Both were from flowers that set inside.

Other crops are basil, peas, eggplant, peppers (pimento), and leeks. The peas are strong, and falling all over each other. 

See my older garden post from 2009, and the 2010 tomato posting.

Thumb Drive

Here is a real thumb drive.

I tried to figure out where you could get one to link to the post, but all the links I could find did not work. An early poster was Ubergizmo, but they don't have it on their site any more.

I wonder if it was photoshopped, but it looks too plastic

My iPod Went Through the Washing Machine and IT STILL WORKS!

I came home from the gym, and took off my earbuds, but I left the iPod snapped to my waistband as I went to water the plants. Afterwards, I put the clothes in the wash, and as it was washing day, the next thing I knew, Jenny found my iPod in the dryer.

I was so sure it was wrecked that I ordered another one from Amazon the next day. I have had terrible problems with my iPod shuffle in the past because of water. See four previous posts. There was no change it would work after drying out.

However strangely and miraculously the iPod lives. It was working the next day, although I needed to recharge it.

The iPod works fine as an iPod. The docking port is a little noisy when I plug it into my car. Maybe that will get better.

Apple gets static for gluing the nano together which prevents users from changing the battery and so on. In this case, the glue is probably keeping the water out as well.

Kudos to Cupertino.

Fake Eggs for Easter

Fake egg being dipped in a wax/calcium chloride mix to make
a shell. 

Because its Easter, I want to post on eggs, specifically fake eggs. Fake eggs are being sold in China in place of real chicken eggs. Some people think this is a hoax, but even if it is a hoax, the hoaxers have developed a great craft technique to make realistic looking eggs from goop.

There are even recipes for how to do it.

Below is a youtube link to a Chinese news report including undercover footage on how to make the eggs. If  you want to see him making a pretty convincing egg, fast forward to about 3:30 minutes.

This link has a recipe: it has three different gelants, "sodium alga" (which might be sodium alginate), gelatin, and carboymethyl cellulose. The white is the same as the yoke except for food coloring in the yoke. The egg is "set" in place with calcium chloride, and that solidifies the gels, making a skin around it.

The egg looks and feels realistic, but I don't think anyone would be fooled by these eggs if they were eating them.  The egg shell looks pretty convincing too. I bet a con man could pass them at a farmers market.

The other kind of fake egg is a human egg that is made with stem cell techniques. More on that next time. 

Unemployment in Michigan Dropping

Unemployment in home state Michigan continued to fall, and let me tell you that is welcome. Now it is hard to get a table on the weekend at the local restaurants. It used to be 14.4% and now it is 8.4%. See my previous post as the recession bottomed out. Now Michigan has improved from worst to seventh from worst.

See the graph above. It is interesting that Northern Tier states have the lowest unemployment, and Sunbelt states are worst.

Fancy Feast Addiction

Cat's like Nestle's Fancy Feast cat food  that customers say their cats are addicted to it, and won't eat anything else. They call it "Kitty Crack," although I think that catnip is a better fit since it looks like a narcotic. 

I can confirm that. At our house we switched our cats back from other foods, when one cat got sick. They had been eating exotic cat food that we bought frozen. Now they are back on Fancy Feast and they won't touch anything else. 

I have to believe that Nestle chemists are working hard "cat-testing" to get formulas that cats want to eat. I suppose that is what gourmet cat food means -- if it means anything at all.

Most people think that Fancy Feast is healthy, although people can't agree on cat diets anymore than people diets. 

Nestle's bought Purina in 2001 and merged it with their existing Friskies line. They offer SEVENTEEN different cat food brands in the United States, and that is after the government made them divest Meow Mix because of anti-trust. Fancy Feast is one of their high end brands, but probably not the most expensive those seem to be Purina One, Pro Plan, and Purina Veterinary Diets. 

There are five kids of Fancy Feast, regular, appetizers, Elegant Melodies, Gourmet Cat Food (a dry food), and Gourmet Kitten Food (a canned food.) Most Fancy Feast is canned, and the ingredients are on-line along with nutritional analysis. Like most canned food they are mostly water (78-82%) and 9-12% protein. Gravy-containing foods have 3% more water and 2% less protein. 

St Patrick's Day Corktown 5K Race

You get bling when you run this race. You can
wear it as you walk the parade with your
green mardi gras beads. 

For the first time in two years, I actually did a running event today. It was the Corktown race, which precedes the Detroit St. Patrick's Day Parade, so the whole even was bathed in Irishness, or at least Greenness. Aside from the Irish theme, this race is notable for having free beer at the end, but alas only one glass each.

The race itself was fun. As usual I ran too fast at the beginning and choked near the end. Wonder how I did? You'll need to check the link yourself. 

I ran in my Z-Coil shoes, which strange as they are, did not attract any comments. I suppose the St. Patrick's Day spectators were weirder than that. The Z-Coil shoes did great.

Are We All Going to Freeze in the Dark? Probably Not?

It the world running out of oil? It does not look like it. Increasing gas prices make it feel that way, doesn't it?

People have always thought that they were running out of petroleum. In 1873 a Pennsylvania state geologist said there was enough petroleum for another FOUR years of oil lantern use. Ever sense, people have worried about running out.

In reality, we have just changed what we meant by "oil." 

Over the decades, oil drillers have pioneered one technology after another to get to the oil. Going deeper, going offshore, going to unstable 3rd world nations, going miles down under waters, and so on. Increasingly, oil companies are including natural gas in their oil reserve numbers. And gas reserves have been sky-rocketing due to shale gas, and the technology to recover it -- fracking.

Reinforcing the abundance of buried hydrocarbons is an new enormous natural gas estimate in China. Chinese geologists are claiming 25 trillion cubic meters of shale gas. This is 50% larger than the USA has, and the US has huge shale gas resources. See the map.

I don't know why oil prices keep going up, but I am going to pretend that I do. My four reasons are below.





Four Reasons Oil Prices Go Up

1. As the world industrializes it demands more and more cars, and cars run on gasoline. The problem is increasing demand; supply is less important.

2. A second effect is that oil companies need to access petroleum in more and more difficult locations. This is more expensive. Obviously companies have drilled the easiest oil first.

3. More new petroleum is located in developing countries that have nationalized their oil companies, like Venezuela and Libya. These countries take large tariffs, and make exports much more expensive.

4. Speculators are parking their money in oil, and this has created a little bubble in prices. Reinforcing the bubble are other speculators with futures contracts. Oil futures is like Vegas gambling, but as long as prices go up the speculators take a cut of the 'action.'



In summary, I have gone from an oil pessimist to a realist. While petroleum will run out someday, that day is at least a century away -- beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this. This means that global warming will likely continue because we lack any political system to control it. Conservation and climate control measures are worthy goals, because we aren't running out of oil anytime soon.

Heart Attacks, Beer and Bis-phenol A

BPA is found in canned beer. It is extracted
from the aluminum can's lining. 

Bis-phenol A, prominently used in beer cans and other food cans, continues to suffer bad health reports.   90% of the world's population has bis phenol A in their blood. Isn't that amazing?

It is increasing likely that this common, cheap, and durable chemical will soon be banned from food contact.

Circulation, the Heart Association Journal, published a report from a University of Exeter group showing that 756 people with coronary disease had relatively high BPA in their blood. High being 1.3 nanogram/milliliter in the blood. This result was significant at 97.3%. (It continues to amaze me how sensitive these tests are.)

When they controlled for all the standard cardiac risk factors, the trend was present at only 94.2%. Still convincing to me, but hard-core statistic geeks and their lawyers will disregard this result since it is less than 95%.

On the other hand, bis-phenol A compounds are pretty stable, and until now the most important medical effect was weak estrogen mimicking. (Meaning that it acted like estrogen in very high doses, causing early puberty in girls and low sperm counts.)

Bis phenol A is used in zillions of things, but most notably in the lining of food cans. Until recently it was used in clear re-usable plastic containers made from polycarbonate, but this has stopped in the US and Canada.  Here are three previous posts, click here and here and here on the estrogen effect.

More diabetes and liver enzyme changes were shown too, but the proof was not that strong.

The mode of action of the bis phenol A may be interaction with the BK ion channel, which transports potassium and calcium in smooth muscle cells; there is speculation about effects via the liver and via the aforementioned estrogen mimic effect.

Glass bottles are best.

So what does this mean? It probably means the packaging industry will be more motivated to convert to BPA-free alternatives to avoid crippling lawsuits.

Maybe you should start buying frozen vegetables instead of canned. Buying food in pouches instead of cans is a good idea too.

I am going to buy my beer in glass bottles.