Domestication extends beyond dogs and cats to include various insects
Q. NASA is looking for a new planetary protection officer (PPO). Are you ready to defend Earth from alien attacks? You might want to read the job description first. A. As given in the job posting, “’Planetary protection is concerned with the avoidance of organicconstituent and biological contamination in human and robotic space exploration…’ In plain English, it’s about microbes,” says Leah Crane in “New Scientist” magazine. NASA strives to avoid microbial contamination from Earth, since it might lead to confusion between relocated bacteria and extraterrestrial life, or even worse, it might result in Earth microorganisms overrunning the locals, “destroying our chance of making one of the greatest discoveries in history.” Of course, protection must also be taken to prevent Earth from being contaminated by alien microbes.
But since no spacecraft is ever perfectly clean, the PPO must determine the number of microbes that are an acceptable risk, generally depending on where the mission is headed: An orbiter can have a large number of microbes since they’ll probably all die before it crash lands. But no rovers are allowed in “special regions,” generally areas with water, “because they are the areas where extraterrestrial microbes are most likely to live and thus the spots most dangerous to contaminate.”
In the future, tough decisions loom about whether to leave the most interesting areas in space alone, or to push ahead, probably contaminating them. For the new PPO, it will mean helping decide how much exploration to allow. Q. Can you make a grammatically correct eight-word English sentence using only the word “buffalo”? A. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Got it? Maybe this will help: Bison from Buffalo, whom other bison from Buffalo bully, themselves bully bison from Buffalo. Three distinct meanings of “buffalo” are used here: the proper noun “Buffalo” for the city of Buffalo, New York; the noun “buffalo” for “bison”; and the verb “buffalo” meaning “to bully.” The creation of sentences from just the word “buffalo” has been known since at least the 1960s. Dizzying to contemplate is the claim that a “buffalo” sentence of any length is grammatically correct, assuming appropriate capitalization.
Other words with multiple meanings, such as “police,” can also give rise to such bizarre multiplesame-word sentences. Q. When we think of domesticated animals, we generally think of mammals, such as dogs and cats. But can one domesticate insects? A. A species is domesticated when it has been selectively bred – usually for hundreds of generations – to live closely with humans. Honeybees and silkmoths are domesticated insects and have been for a very long time. Based on archeological evidence from ancient Egypt, the transition from collecting honey from wild bees to beekeeping happened at least 4,500 years ago.
And genetic evidence suggests that the domestication of silk moths began as early as 7,500 years ago in China. “People bred the [caterpillars] to produce more silk and to tolerate human handling and extreme crowding,” says Erika Engelhaupt in “Science News.” “For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese kept their silk-making methods top secret, and smuggling silkworms out of the country was punishable by death.”
Silkmoths have now been domesticated to the point that they cannot survive without humans: they are flightless, require help mating, and the feeding of their caterpillars must be supervised.