No visit from the stork . . .
QUESTION Storks are found all over Europe, so why don’t we see them in Britain?
STORKS are large, long-legged, longnecked wading birds with long, stout bills. the white stork ( Ciconia ciconia) was once commonplace in Britain.
Because their nests were large, prominent and close to human habitation, their good parenting skills were easy to observe and they became a symbol of rebirth.
Even though there are still sightings of the odd migrant bird here, they have declined due to habitat loss, over-hunting and persecution.
White storks were particularly associated with Sussex, with place names such as Storwood and Storgelond.
Storrington, near Worthing, was originally called Estorchestone by the Saxons, which means the village of the storks. A pair of white storks is the local emblem.
Storks were a popular dish in medieval banquets. In the 16th century, there are records of each bird fetching up to 48 old pence at London markets. they may simply have been eaten to extinction in Britain.
this was certainly the case with another long-legged bird, the crane. Anecdotes tell of king John killing up to nine a day. In 1465, the Archbishop of York served 204 cranes at a banquet.
other species such as the night heron (or brewe) and little egrets once sold by London game dealers had vanished from Britain by the 17th century.
the European decline in storks began in the 19th century due to industrialisation and changes in agricultural methods. today’s strongholds are rural Portugal, Spain, Ukraine and Poland.
there is some hope for the stork in Britain. knepp Castle estate’s 3,500 acres in West Sussex is a key rewilding centre. A dozen pairs of white storks were released on the estate last year.
one pair built a nest of sticks in an oak tree and laid three eggs, becoming the first breeding pair of white storks in Britain for centuries.
Penny Rees-Cowan, Graffham, W. Sussex. QUESTION It was once said the nose can detect 50,000 scents, but new estimates say it is a trillion. Which is correct and how do they know? THE number of scents a nose can detect were based on an article by E. C. Crocker and L. F. henderson in the American Perfumer And Essential oil review in 1927. they claimed all smells are blends of just four primary odours: fragrant, acid, burnt and caprylic (goat-like).
Like all the colours that result from mixing the three primary hues of red, yellow and blue, the idea was that every odour from that of the skunk to the rose is a blend of these primary smells.
the Crocker-henderson system was designed for the perfume industry. Smells could be named by expressing them in four digits, from 0000 to 8888.
For example, the scent of camphor is 5735 (five units of fragrant, seven of acid, three of burnt and five of caprylic) while rose oil was 7423.
the number was rounded up to 10,000 which for decades became a rule of thumb for the number of detectable smells.
In 1970, J. E. Moore classified seven odours: ethereal, camphorous, musky, floral, minty, pungent and putrid. In 1991, Zwaardemaker’s odour Classification increased the spectrum to 50,000.
A team from the rockefeller University, New York, took a more rigorous approach in 2014. their results were reported in the journal Science under the title humans Can Discriminate More than one trillion olfactory Stimuli.
their experiment determined the ability of people to distinguish between cocktails of 128 odorous molecules. they were mixed randomly to create unfamiliar smells and 26 people were asked to identify a scent from three samples — two were the same and one was different.
the researchers used the results to extrapolate how many scents the average person could discriminate if presented with all the possible mixtures made from the 128 molecules. they estimated this would be at least one trillion.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Is cassette technology still used in any walk of life?
MAGNETIC tape was developed in germany in 1928 and the audio cassette was invented by Philips in 1964. By 2010, it had mostly disappeared, having been replaced by CDs and digital streaming.
however, demand for this retro technology has shown an upturn. Since 2015, sales of cassette albums in the Uk increased by more than 100 per cent year on year, with 75,000 sold in 2019.
Billie Eilish sold more than 4,000 exclusive black cassette versions of her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We go? Artists such as Jack White, taylor Swift, Jay Z and Lana Del rey have released new music on the format.
Aside from the retro appeal, there are good reasons to listen to cassettes. our ears function in analogue and much of our favourite music was originally recorded in analogue. Cassette tapes and vinyl reproduce the harmonics and frequencies your ears are built to listen to.
Louise Forster, London N12. MAGNETIC tape still has a use in the business world. Since the Fifties, it has evolved into one of the most widespread and reliable media for storing data.
It has survived competition from hard disk drives and optical media such as Blu-ray discs or DVDs.
tapes have a much longer shelf-life and are less prone than hard drives to the risk of corruption, so they are an important archive storage medium. Magnetic tapes can be read securely for more than 30 years, while the average hard drive scarcely lasts five years.
IBM still offers mainframe-optimised, tape-based, data storage solutions.
Alan McNairney, Bradford, W. Yorks.
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