The caterpillar

This is the story of my small ecosystem on my 3rd floor patio.

The first plant that my friend got me as a gift was a one gallon yellow hibiscus.  The specific variety with a bright red dot in the center of the large yellow flower.  

This small hibiscus plant grew up really fast on my patio, facing the sunny south
side of the building.  Soon I had to move it to a larger and larger planter.  It is now taller than me!

I often see a visitor flying in to suck the yellow flower, an amazing humming
bird.  It is absolutely stunning to see this tiny little bird fluttering in the air!

I had other plants on the very same patio: a red geranium that I had to cut back, a rose Bush that did not last, a white jasmine. 

My new friend Gail moved to the area a few years ago.  She told me she moved
in with her daughter who has a large corner house.  They have a large
garden with many trees and a vegetable garden.  I am so envious of people
with gardens!  In front of the house they have a bunch of milkweed plants.  You know these long green leaves that monarch butterfly worms like to feed on.  Generous Gail gave me a small pot with a milkweed plant one day.  I happily brought it home and transferred it to a planter, added extra soil and watered it.

The milkweed grew and grew and looked beautiful, until one day I noticed the fresh
green leaves were almost gone.  On one of the eaten branches I saw a large
beautiful striped caterpillar!  

Perfect stripes of curling yellow black and white. It was fat and quite amazing.
I got so excited I immediately took its photo and sent to all my friends and my
sons.  I kept on going out to the patio and checking on it.  A few hours later I saw it crawling out of the planter and this was also such a new sight, a fat beautiful striped caterpillar crawling around with its antennae’s moving up in the air. What was it looking for?  Later on I saw it up on the patio wall.  In the end it disappeared.  I never saw the chrysalis or the butterfly.

Did the humming bird have a feast?

Moonlight Sonata

My stream of consciousness rambling.

You know how the people at Google say they know what you want before you know it yourself.  As I just read the biography of Elon Musk, Google keeps suggesting to me any articles about Tesla and SpaceX.  A few days ago Elon Musk posted on Instagram photos of earth from his satellite.  In the caption he just wrote "Moonlight sonata."  You can hear the soft piano music as you are watching photos of our planet from space.

A new friend I met told me he practices transcendental meditation two hours a day. After years of practicing Iyengar yoga I only got to do some visualization and guided meditation.  My curiosity led me to the trusted YouTube.  I typed TM in the search.  The first video that showed up was introduction to TM.  The music was the soft piano melody of moonlight sonata.  The instructions were to do absolutely nothing. No effort in trying to focus on anything just be quiet in the moment hear the soft music.

I never learned to play music and I cannot carry a tune.  I was wondering about all the students of piano who worked on playing Moonlight Sonata for hours and hours.  My friend who loves music claims that it is like oxygen for her.  For her there is no life without music.  It gives her a high like some people get from alcohol or drugs.

Personally I get a high just thinking about my knowledge of protein chemistry.  I am thinking of the building blocks of proteins as the alphabet of life.

The alphabet is what helps us write and communicate our knowledge to the future generations. 

In Hebrew there are 22 letters and they are classified by the part of the mouth that produces them: Guttural letters, letters made by the lips, teeth or tongue.

Similarly proteins, the language of life, are made of 22 amino acids.  The amino acids are classified by their chemical properties: Acidic, basic, neutral or hydrophobic.  (They attach to fat or lipids and not the water medium.)

Some of the longest words in English are made of 15 to 22 letters.  On the other hand proteins have a much more complex task and some are as long as 5,000 amino acids.

What about music?  As far as I know there are 8 musical notes.

 And the combinations of melodies and songs and symphonies are

 staggering!  Just listen to the Moonlight Sonata!

The Future of Food

The world population is about to grow from 7b to 9b.  We keep hearing and wondering about this question:  Can the earth sustain such a large population? 

There are many people who are certain that we need more wars to kill some people.   These people cannot comprehend that it is possible to feed everyone.  There are also those who demand less cruelty to animals.  The most convincing advocate that I enjoy reading and listening to is the Israeli historian who wrote two international best sellers: Yuval Harari.  I followed many of his lectures and that is when I first heard of 3D printing of hamburgers.  Searching for the latest data in 2017 I found a 2013 Guardian article Titled:

Google's Sergey Brin bankrolled world's first synthetic beef hamburger.

The article states: 

The man who has bankrolled the production of the world's first lab-grown hamburger has been revealed as Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The internet entrepreneur has backed the project to the tune of €250,000 (£215,000), allowing scientists to grow enough meat in the lab to create a burger – as a proof of concept – that will be cooked and eaten in London on Monday.

Brin's money was used by a team led by physiologist Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University to grow 20,000 muscle fibres from cow stem cells over the course of three months. These fibres were extracted from individual culture wells and then painstakingly pressed together to form the hamburger.  The objective is to create meat that is biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow.

The world's first lab-grown beef burger was cooked in London in 2013. The in-vitro burger was cultured from cattle stem cells.

In experimental biology the jargon is: IN VIVO- experiments in the whole living animal.  IN VITRO- experiments in the test tube using tissue or cells from the animal.

The impact of meat consumption from raising cows is immense:  It produces 18% of greenhouse gases.  70% of antibiotics used in the US are used on cows.

"Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein," Dr Post told the Guardian before. "So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way. With cultured meat we can make it more efficient because we have all the variables under control. We don't need to kill the cow and it doesn't produce any methane."

Then I found another article from 2015 by a New Zealand blogger repeating the same facts and talking about 3D printed food:

In 15 years' time, there's a chance some of the beef you consume will have been grown in a test tube. The cow never would have had a beating heart, nor a brain, nor would it have seen a paddock or a feedlot. It would just be a bunch of cells and tissue.

Not in 100 years, not 50 years, but 15 years. Perhaps even less. Known as "cultured meat" it's just one of the ways scientists are trying to solve a very global problem. Namely: how do you feed a population that doesn't stop expanding when there's a finite amount of farmable land in the world?

Meat, particularly grain-fed beef, is also a massive contributor to global warming. Thanks to factors like methane emission, deforestation to create more grazing land and the amount of energy it takes to harvest corn and other grains for feed, the livestock industry produces more greenhouse emissions than every mode of transport on earth combined. 

The bottom line is if we keep eating meat in the manner we do and don't invest in more sustainable farming solutions, the world as we know it is likely to end. This isn't hyperbole. And scientists the world over are working on some far-out solutions that are close to becoming real.

Cultured meat

If we all started eating more vegetables grown with solar power instead of fossil-fuel draining livestock, things would start to turn around for the environment in a big way. Unfortunately, experts say world meat consumption shows no sign of slowing and demand for it is expected to increase 73 per cent by 2050, even though 70 per cent of farmland is already used for livestock.

Test tube meat could be a solution to the globe's insatiable appetite for protein. In 2013, Professor Mark Post, of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, presented a burger made of cultured beef to an audience in London. Made using stem cells harvested from a cow's shoulder, the burger took three months to grow and, by all reports, tasted much like a normal burger, if a little less juicy.

According to the Maastricht University's website, cells taken from just one cow could produce 175 million burgers.

"I expect cultured meat to be available in 10-15 years," says Canberra-based science writer and author Julian Cribb. "It is likely to catch on as it will be cheaper, use far fewer resources such as water, land, nutrients and pesticides, and can in theory be tailored to the precise dietary requirements of the individual. Synthetic clothing is already universal and food is likely to follow."  

Cribb says cultured meat will end the reign of industrial meat by replacing it. "It will ensure the production of real meat from animals goes upmarket and farmers receive a much better price for it, as happened with wool since synthetic fibres arrived, enabling them to care for their land better," he says.

As for consumers possibly not wanting to eat a cow that never went moo?

"If it's cheap, healthy and tasty, people will eat it even if they don't know how it was grown," Cribb says. "Do you really know what's in your snack food today?"

Other subtitles in this article:

3D Printing

Soylent

Personally and genetically modified food

More current articles:

Ten Food Trends that will Shape 2017 - Forbes

There is a 2017 publication from FAO:

The future of food and agriculture in the US: Trends and Challenges