Beyond a delicious beverage, teabags a good monitoring tool
Q. With trouble brewing over carbon emissions in the Arctic, how might the humble teabag help determine the severity of the problem? A. The Arctic tundra contains vast quantities of carbon that are being emitted into the air at an accelerating rate as the land heats up, says Lesley Evans Ogden in “New Scientist” magazine. Two Dutch researchers studying soil decomposition had the tedious job of joining the seams of hundreds of tiny bags, “filling them with dead plant material, then weighing and burying them in the ground.” Later they’d dig up the bags and reweigh them to track the progress of decay. A eureka moment came during a tea break when they realized that using teabags would not only eliminate all the time-consuming work but also provide a standard study tool “if ecologists everywhere buried the same type and brand of teabag instead of homemade litterbags.” And because decomposition follows a two-stage process — fast at first, then more slowly for the more resistant materials—-they further saw that by burying two different types of tea, they could capture data on both phases simultaneously.
Now the Tundra Tea Bag Experiment — an international collaboration involving some 50 researchers — has buried teabags at 350 sites worldwide to try to find out how decomposition rates differ across the tundra. “Analysis is ongoing, but early hints are concerning,” says Ogden. It is hoped that the findings will improve the predictability of climate change at high latitudes. Q. About seven per cent of Americans over the age of 40 are affected by phantosmia. What is that? A. Also called phantom odor perception or olfactory hallucination, it occurs when someone smells burning rubber or other unpleasant odors even though nothing is there, reports the University of California, Berkeley “Wellness Letter.” The condition is not well understood, but it may occur with some common medical conditions or with certain neurological or psychiatric disorders. According to a recent study by the National Institute of Health, women were more likely to perceive such odors, as were those of either sex who had persistent dry mouth, a history of head injury or poorer overall health (“Journal of the American Medical Association,” 2018).
“Phantosmia can lower quality of life and affect appetite and food preferences,” but in many cases,
ACROSS
1. De, mono, athe
4. Small villages in S. Africa
8. As a result
12. Hobbits do this to no man
15. Feminine pronoun
16. This cookie can get stuffed
17. Shubbery conflagration
19. Aromatic daisy cousin
21. Happens before noon
22. Buenos ___
23. Brenda of the comics
24. Taught how to do it again
27. "The ___" (Uris novel)
28. "___ to a small lump of green putty I found in my armpit one midsummer morning." (HHGTTG)
29. Eggy drink
30. Willem's da one
32. Melting world topper
35. Clod chopper
37. Relating to a hilus or hilum
39. Mysterious cosmic stuff
42. Ring world it goes away on its own.
Q. Elephants are often cited as ecosystem engineers, knocking over trees, pruning branches and dispersing seeds. How has a recent discovery linked the footsteps of these giants to one of the smallest creatures in the landscape? A. When herpetologist Steven Platt trudged through a seasonally flooded wetland in Myanmar, he noticed “Frisbee-sized pools brimming with clusters of frog eggs and wriggling tadpoles,” says Rachel Nuwer in “Scientific American” magazine. These pools, Platt realized, were elephant tracks offering a lifeline in this parched environment for the next generation of frogs. Re
43. Eastern non-daylight savings time
44. Old timey seem
45. Get a move on, horse!
46. Mediterranean appetizer
48. Fool's month
49. First amongst numbers
51. Elon says "Nuke it!"
55. Hey ___, not cool
57. Yummy pastry log
60. Charge
61. Quiet! (Quietly)
64. Stellar duo
66. Gorilla drum
67. Delivery person?
68. Stick fast to
69. Good gangstars take this and don't talk
70. Tokyo, once
72. Troublesome mental division
75. Long-jawed fish
76. The weather's up and down
79. Logical operator
82. Still a planet to me
84. Who wrote this clue?
85. Trattoria offering
87. End of the line illness
89. Mr. ___, ____, bright and shiny ____
90. Most spooktacular of the months
DOWN
1. turning to the same spot a year later, he found similar tracks, again containing tadpoles and eggs, and surmised they served “as small breeding sites linking together larger wetland patches during the dry season.” The only other study on this phenomenon in Uganda seems to confirm his conclusion.
But with elephants being threatened due to habitat loss and poaching, Platt wonders if some of this complex interconnectedness may be lost: “As the elephant goes, probably a lot of relationships we don’t even know anything about at this point go, too.”
91. Here comes the ___, and I say it's alright
92. Rough sleeping to a Scot
93. Nose juice
94. New, as in liberal, conservative Ferris Bueller does not believe in these
2. Close, closed
3. FM radio frequencies
4. Portal sticker
5. Hockey Bobby
6. Past chic
7. Pro, dis, indis
8. Skier dragger
9. Reflecting our better nature
10. One nation under God
11. Chinese port
12. H1N1, also swine
13. Miner's matrix
14. Pasta cowboys star in spaghetti
18. "A pox on you!"
20. Assault, as in bones
25. Gentle laugh
26. Jupiter's sulfurous moon
31. Boat mover
32. Footnote word
33. Just in, legal, carton
34. Strong praises
36. Gold-coloured alloy
38. A thing
40. Little spoon
41. Bane of wooden ships
42. Woman (Aussie slang)
47. Like ostriches, but you eat them
50. Rhymes with grab ironically
52. Post-lunch
53. Type of wheel drive
54. Hot and dry, like a desert
56. Dinosaur killer
58. Shoemaker-Levy 9 for one
59. Puffed up old star
61. Words to act by
62. -ps, -nge, -nce
63. Quavering leading lady
65. Elevator, mine, John
67. Goes with poppas
71. Half an extinct bird
73. Animacules bringing illness
74. Osiris to the Egyptians
77. Money dispenser
78. Slippery fish
80. Upon a time
81. Drummer Puente
83. Spend it in Romania
86. Sticky stuff
88. Means no