Take a Bug to Lunch: Helping the Planet by Eating Insects

Telling someone to eat a bug used to be a bad thing, but not anymore. Now the United Nations thinks we should all be eating bugs. In the recently released U.N. report, Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security, the authors point out that by the year 2050, we can expect the world’s current population of 7 billion to grow to 9 billion. That will require our current food production to nearly double. Making that harder are the facts that most of our fisheries are over fished or near collapse, and climate change will make growing traditional crops and livestock increasingly difficult.

Insects may be a nutritious and economical solution to our problems. They’re almost pure protein. According to the Insects Are Food web site, 100 grams of beef contain 23.5 grams of protein, 288.2 calories and 21.2 grams of fat. An equivalent portion of crickets contains less protein by weight, 12.9 grams, but only 121 calories and a mere 5.5 grams of fat. Unlike beef, pork and chicken, though, the fat in insects is unsaturated and therefore better for us. They’re also a good source of iron, riboflavin, niacin, and many other important vitamins and minerals.

Raising insects for food is also better for the environment. The livestock industry is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gasses. Raising cows, pigs and chickens for our tables produces more CO₂ and methane than all the world’s cars, busses and trucks combined. Insects produce only a small fraction of that. They also require much less water and food, not to mention land, to raise than conventional livestock. Producing a pound of beef uses approximately 20 times as much food and 1000 times as much water as an equivalent amount of insect protein.

O.K., but bugs? Really? Yes, really. With the notable exceptions of the U.S. and Europe, insects are eaten by people all over the world. Termites and winged ants are considered a seasonal treat in much of Africa. Food vendors in Thailand and Vietnam sell all manner of insectoid snacks on sticks, and Agave worms are in more than just bottles of Tequila. There are even insect recipe books, and innovative chefs all over the country are integrating insect ingredients into haute cuisine.

If the idea of eating something with an exoskeleton still bothers you, just think of all the weird things we already eat. If you like shrimp, take a look at one with its head still on. You’d be hard pressed to differentiate it from something you’d find lurking under a rock in your backyard. Calamari is a nice euphemism, but we all know it’s squid, and Cajun cooking wouldn’t be Cajun without crayfish. Louisiana natives even call them mudbugs. Those of us who live near the Chesapeake Bay, like I do, know the joy of raw oysters, but let’s be honest. No matter how much lemon and hot sauce you put on it; the dish still looks like nothing so much as snot on the half shell.

Don’t worry about insects being dirty or spreading disease either. They’re actually quite clean, and carry fewer human diseases than cattle, pigs or chickens. The other thing to remember is if eating insects was going to cause massive outbreaks of disease, it already would have. The FDA already allows processed foods to be sold if the amount of insect matter in them is under a certain level. Granted, most of that insect matter is too small to be seen, but if you consider all the processed foods we eat, the average American eats between one and two pounds of insects per year. Get over it.

I’m not saying that eating insects is for everyone. It took me years just to get my kids to try sushi, but as our population grows and our climate changes, we’re going to have to look beyond our cultural biases if we’re going to find sustainable solutions. Eating insects is good for us and good for the environment, and I can tell you from personal experience that they’re a lot tastier than you think, so swallow your apprehensions and give them a try.

Review: My Beautiful Brontosaurus

There is something magical about dinosaurs. They are unique in their ability to capture our imaginations and transport us, albeit briefly, to a time when we puny hominids were not even a twinkle in Mother Nature’s eye. How many of us weren’t captivated by them as children, and how many of us, as adults have marveled at some precocious paleophile, not yet old enough to cross the street or write in cursive, who can rattle off names like Parasaurlophous, Deinonychus and Pachycephalosaurus with gleeful abandon. Acclaimed science writer Brian Switek lacks none of that glee, and is more than willing and able to share it with the rest of us.

He takes us back and begins his story, as all great stories must begin, to the time he first laid eyes upon his true love. It was in New York. His parents had brought the young Brian to the American Museum of Natural History, and he recounts the intimate encounter he had amongst the museum’s skeletal behemoths.

Way back then, in the forbidding gloom of the hall, my imagination gave the bones a thin cast of vitality, the skeletons felt less like perished monuments to paleontology and more like bony scaffolding waiting to be connected by sinew and wrapped in scaly hides. My young mind didn’t see dead dinosaurs, but the osteological architecture of creatures that might walk again.

Brian Switek

That’s how he began his journey to discover all he could about dinosaurs, from the suburban New Jersey of his youth where he started his first dig, much to his parents’ dismay, to his dusty explorations and excavations in his new home, Utah. As he explains the reason for the move, “With apologies to Horace Greeley, my rationale for coming to Utah was ‘Go West, young man, and grow up with the dinosaurs.’”

Aside from the sheer joy Switek shares when recounting these dinosaur tales, he also gives the reader an unparalleled look at evolution, not just the evolution of the dinosaurs and how they came to be the mightiest creatures to ever walk the Earth, but the evolution of paleontology itself and how our views of dinosaurs have changed. Take for example the beloved Brontosaurus of the title. It was first discovered in 1879 by legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, who thought he’d found an entirely new species, similar to, but distinct from an earlier long-necked dinosaur named Apatosaurus that he’d discovered two years earlier. He dubbed his new find Brontosaurus. Unfortunately, he was wrong. The Apatosaurus and the Brontosaurus were one and the same, and since the Apatosaurus name came first, Brontosaurus technically never existed. The error was caught a few years later, but it was too late. In the popular imagination the name Brontosaurus stuck.

What’s worse, as Switek explains, this was just one of a number of major blunders and misinterpretations about dinosaurs. In the early days, scientists thought of dinosaurs as slow moving brutes with large appetites and small brains, an image reinforced for the public by portrayals of dinosaurs in movies. Countless cold-blooded T-rexes stomped across screens, dragging their tails and devouring everything in their path, while their long-necked prey lumbered half submerged through primordial swamps.

Fortunately, this started to change during the last decades of the twentieth century, during what many have called the Dinosaur Renaissance. Switek tells how, bit by bit, the scaly, lumbering sluggards were transformed into the warm-blooded, agile, gregarious creatures, adorned with brightly colored feathers, that we’re more familiar with today. That type of metamorphosis is rarely swift and never smooth, and Switek does a good job or describing every bump and scuffle. Along the way, he introduces us to a who’s who of some of the world’s finest paleontologists, and does a yeoman’s job of teaching us why they care so deeply for these long gone beasts. He treats dinosaurs, not as a synonym for extinction, but as a symbol of our continuing quest to learn about the world around us, both past and present.

Although the book is populated with scientific names and the occasional bit of esoteric terminology, Switek manages to integrate it all into an endearing narrative that should hold the interest of the laymen as well as the experience dino enthusiast. With humor and passion he transports us back, and for a time turns us all back into one of those kids that fell in love with dinosaurs.

Coppin State University & dewMore Baltimore presents…

Coppin State University & dewMore Baltimore presents….

Words Matter: The Link Between Language and the Brain

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” – George Orwell

Last week, the Associated Press (AP) announced that it would stop using the terms “illegal immigrant” and “illegal” in its Stylebook to describe people who come to this country without going through the legal immigration process. Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained the decision.

“The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally,”

This change has implications, not just for the AP, but for news outlets all over the country. The AP Stylebook is considered the go-to source for most journalists on questions of terminology. Regardless of what position you take on immigration reform, the obvious question for most readers of this blog is, “What does this have to do with science?”

It turns out, quite a lot. Words are not simply neutral descriptors of our environment or verbal tools used to communicate wants and needs. The link between our thoughts and the words we choose to express those thoughts is fundamental, and it doesn’t just go one way. We’ve known for quite some time that the brain influences the way we express ourselves, but new research is uncovering that the way we express ourselves influences our brains as well. The language we use may influence how we make connections in our brain, how we form memories and even how we perceive the world around us.

Edward Sapir & Benjamin Lee Whorf

The idea that languages can affect the brain and therefore thought isn’t new.  It was first proposed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf over 60 years ago. Whorf was studying the Hopi language, when he noticed that it didn’t seem to contain any units of time. He proposed that this omission caused native Hopi speakers to actually perceive time in a non-linear way, very different from English speakers. As Sapir put it, “Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose.” Their idea came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

At the time, their hypothesis provoked a great deal of discussion by others in the field, but by the 1960s it had gone out of vogue. It was criticized by a number of prominent linguists, including Noam Chomsky, on the grounds of the poor methodology used by Sapir and Whorf, and on the question of causality. Was the language affecting the brain or was the brain affecting the language? It was a classic chicken-egg problem.

Back then, there was no way to find an answer, but using modern tools like positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers are trying to unravel which came first. This has given rise to entirely new fields of research, such as neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience.

Around the year 2000, a group of Italian researchers used PET scans to compare the brains of native Italian and native English speakers. Italian is a phonetic language. English most definitely is not. The same sound in English may have multiple spellings and the same letter combinations can be pronounced in a dizzying variety of ways. The researchers showed each group a series of actual words and nonsense words. When trying to identify the nonsense words, the Italian speakers showed greater activity in the area of the brain that deals with word sounds. The English speakers showed greater activity in the area that deals with word retrieval. They seemed to be trying to recognize words as a whole.

Their work was followed up in 2006 by researchers who used fMRI to compare brain activity in native Chinese speakers versus native English speakers. Each group was asked to solve simple arithmetic problems. Although both groups solved the problems with equal proficiency, the way that they did so differed. The English speakers used a region of the brain that processes language, suggesting that they dealt with them as word problems. The Chinese speakers used a region that processes visual information. Essentially they were dealing with them as pictures.

If this is all correct, and the language we use does influence how we perceive and process the world around us, then the use of terms like “illegal immigrant” and “illegal” to refer to our fellow human beings raises some very disturbing questions. Does it dehumanize how we view them? Regardless of which immigration reforms are passed, do these terms hardwire us to forever perceive them as other? Does biased language lead inevitably to biased reasoning? Clearly, this all bares additional research, but until then we should be careful of the language we use. Words matter.

Vertical Farming: The Green Hat Trick

Jolanta Hardej, CEO of FarmedHere

Jolanta Hardej is a farmer. That might not seem unusual, let alone newsworthy, but Hardej’s farm isn’t in what most people think of as farm country. It’ isn’t in the verdant fields of Iowa or Kansas. It isn’t in California’s Central Valley or the Garden State, New Jersey. No, her farm is in Chicago. Oh, and did I mention that Hardej’s farm is inside and vertical?

She is CEO of FarmedHere, part of the rapidly growing (pun intended) urban farm movement. Her company has transformed what used to be an abandoned warehouse in Chicago’s Bedford Park neighborhood into a 90,000 square foot agricultural oasis. It’s the largest vertical farm in the country, and has recently been awarded Organic Certification from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Bedford Park facility, one of three operated by FarmedHere, promises to produce a million pounds of chemical and pesticide-free leafy greens, including basil, arugula and mint.

 

FarmedHere Bedford Park facility.

The driving forces for the urban farm movement are consumer demand for pesticide and herbicide free food and the need to reduce the carbon footprint of traditional agricultural. In addition to the carbon intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, current agricultural practices have enormous transportation costs to bring crops to distant markets. As Hardej points out on the FarmedHere web site, “On average a head of lettuce travels 1,200 miles to reach your plate, our greens travel just across Chicago.”

 
So far so good, but that all begs the question, why is the farm vertical? Instead of growing plants in traditional fields or beds, in order to save space, FarmedHere grows them in multiple vertical racks using a technique called aquaponics. It combines the soil-less growing practices of hydroponics with fish farming, known as aquaculture. Not only do you get fresh herbs and vegetables, but fish too. Combining the two also eliminates a number of disadvantages and gives you the best parts of both.

 

Vertical growing racks.

Hydroponics involves growing plants without soil. It allows the grower to maximize growing conditions for the plants and therefore increase output, but it requires fertilizers, often chemical fertilizers, to be added to the growing medium. Aquaponics is the growing of fish, and it has great potential to satisfy the worlds growing appetite for seafood. Unfortunately, when done improperly, it can cause severe environmental problems, such as the destruction of mangrove swamps or other sensitive areas, and overfishing of species used to feed the aquacultured fish.

 
In an aquaponic setup, both these problems are solved. The fish do just what you’d expect. They poop, but these waste products supply the fertilizer for the plants. Meanwhile, as the waste containing water from the fish is circulated through the plants’ growing beds, it is filtered, and can be returned, cleaned and ready to the fish, in a closed loop. Not only does this reduce the use of fertilizers, but surprisingly, growing fish reduces the use of water. According to the National Geographic Society, it takes approximately 1,800 gallons of water to produce each pound of beef we eat. At the University of Maryland Aquaculture Research Center in Baltimore, using closed loop systems, they have managed to produce a pound of fish with only 4 gallons of water.

 

Tilapia grown in tanks.

The only major down side to these sorts of indoor vertical farms is the power needed to provide the plants with light. Currently FarmedHere and other indoor facilities use florescent lights to give the plants the light they need to grow. That requires a substantial amount of electricity. Potentially, LED lights could be used to provide the required light with much less electricity, but the folks at FarmedHere are working on another solution. You know all that fish poop I mentioned earlier. Not only does it provide the plants with fertilizer, but it can be fed into bioreactors to produce fuel. The bacteria in the bioreactors break down the excess waste and turn it into methane. The methane can then be burned in generators that produce electricity for the lighting. So far, this type of system is still in the development stage, but it looks promising.

 
If all this is successful, facilities like the one in Chicago can be used as models for other areas across the country. They will be able to produce organic produce and fish, while, at the same time, reducing the carbon generated by traditional farming practices, and do all of it, while generating much of the electricity they need. That’s a win-win-win, like a green hat trick.

The Future is Here and It’s in 3-D

The Future is Here and It's in 3-D.

The Future is Here and It’s in 3-D

The other day, Dan Rodricks and I had a chance to talk about 3-D printing on his radio show. I was explaining some of the revolutionary things being done with this new technology, and I lost track of the number of times Dan said, “Wow.” A 3-D printer is essentially an inkjet printer, but instead of simply printing out fonts and images on a piece of paper, it prints three dimensional objects by laying down particles of a building material, usually plastic, and then laying down a layer of adhesive on top. It then prints another layer of building material, and another layer of adhesive and so on. Each layer is about the width of a human hair, and by building up layer after layer, it enables the user to create virtually any object.

3-D printing has the advantage of being faster than traditional manufacturing techniques and producing less waste. The other major advantage is that it’s more flexible. You don’t have to create new dies and processes to make a prototype or small run of a product. You simply design the desired object on a computer, using a computer aided design (CAD) program, and send the file to the printer. There are even shareware versions of the software and websites where you can share your designs with others. You don’t even need a printer. Several companies will take your design and print it for you for a fee.

Just like when computers were first developed, the original 3-D printers were large industrial machines with price tags in the tens of thousands of dollars. Recently, though, companies like MakerBot and Formlabs have started making 3-D printers for the home market. These new models are small enough to fit on a desktop, about the size of a laser printer, with prices comparable to laser printers too, ranging from a high of $1,500 to a low of under $500.

Home computers and the internet changed our world by decentralizing and democratizing information. There were no more gatekeepers to control information, and the results were often wonderful, sometimes dangerous and usually completely unpredictable. 3-D printers do the same thing for manufacturing. Gone are the gatekeepers. If you’re a budding young entrepreneur with a great idea, you no longer have to go through the trouble and expense of having a manufacturer (usually overseas) make your prototype. You can do it yourself. If you’re an artist, you can design and modify your creations on the computer, and have them the same day.

The biggest market for home 3-D printers may be hobbyists, members of the maker movement. You can print almost anything, including mechanical parts, miniatures and models, jewelry, dishes. You name it. If you haven’t been blessed with a standard hand, it’s difficult to find tools that you can use comfortably. Imagine being able to print out a tool that fits your hand like a glove. For that matter, imagine printing a glove that fits your hand like a glove is supposed to fit. There are companies using 3-D printers for making all sorts of clothing, from shoes to bathing suits customized for your exact body size and shape. No more dressing rooms; just modify the file on line and print it out in whatever color or pattern you like.

If this sounds like something out of the Jetsons or Star Trek, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The printers can use almost any substance that can be melted. There are chefs using 3-D printers to make intricate chocolate creations. Instrument makers turning out 3-D printed violins, 3-D printed smart phone cases, furniture, robots, and much more. Companies will make you all manner of customized toys and action figures, including one that will print you a personalized PEZ dispenser with your face on it. If that’s not personalized enough for you, a New York company will scan certain parts of you anatomy and print out customized adult toys. It’s a strange and brave new world.

The medical applications are even more futuristic. Surgeons have used 3-D printers to print replacement jaws and custom fitted prosthetic limbs. They’re even printing with living cells. Scientists have learned how to spray cells onto a flexible matrix to make functional blood vessels and ears. The Defense Advance Research Administration (DARPA) funded research into 3-D printers that could spray living skin cells directly onto burn victims. A number of researchers have predicted that within ten years, they may be able to print working organs like kidneys and livers.

Like any cutting edge technology, 3-D printers have both uses and abuses. If you have a product with a copyrighted design, it can now be pirated like a music CD. If the ownership of an item is tightly controlled or banned, now people have the option of simply printing one without the government’s knowledge. One company designed parts for a semiautomatic rifle for the 3-D printer and posted an open source version of the design on line. For the time being there isn’t much danger, since the prototype snapped in half after only six shots, but as printer materials continue to improve, all bets are off. Scientists are currently experimenting with using 3-D printers to come up with new chemical compounds. Can 3-D printed designer drugs be far behind?

3-D printing may currently be in its childhood, but as any parent can tell you, childhood is an often wonderful, sometimes horrifying, and always unpredictable. We survived when it happened with computers, and we’ll survive it with 3-D printers too, but life will never be the same. We’ll find uses we can’t even dream of now, that we won’t be able to imagine doing without 20 years from now. Whether we like it or not, the future is here, and it’s in 3-D.

Update

Do you remember when I said that 3-D printed gun wasn’t a problem because it broke after 6 shots? Apparently they already fixed that little bug.