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Air Pollution Can Disrupt Pollinating Insects By Concealing the Scent of Flowers
vinces99 writes Car and truck exhaust fumes that foul the air for humans also cause problems for pollinators. In new research on how pollinators find flowers when background odors are strong, University of Washington and University of Arizona researchers found that both natural plant odors and human sources of pollution can conceal the scent of sought-after flowers. When the calories from one feeding of a flower gets you only 15 minutes of flight, as is the case with the tobacco hornworn moth studied, being misled costs a pollinator energy and time. "Local vegetation can mask the scent of flowers because the background scents activate the same moth olfactory channels as floral scents," according to Jeffrey Riffell, UW assistant professor of biology. "Plus the chemicals in these scents are similar to those emitted from exhaust engines and we found that pollutant concentrations equivalent to urban environments can decrease the ability of pollinators to find flowers."
We just need to create tiny insect robots to replace the defective real insects.
amid the wafting stench of bought airtime.
One scent can overpower another scent. That's why deodorant and toilet sprays work. It just so happens in this case that the smells are similar?
It's been standard knowledge for home gardeners that growing just one thing (e.g. tomatoes or carrots) in a certain space makes it easy for the bugs that feed on it to find it, but if you mix things up then the pests are confused and less successful. To protect against plant-specific pests, put a variety of things together in your garden: flowers, herbs, vegetables. The good pollinators like honeybees will love it; the carrot fly and tomato hornworm moth will have a much harder time finding the carrots and tomatoes to land on and lay their eggs.
"Flowers are for women and fags."
And the food web. Don't forget that.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
are good for something other than driving.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
That's a pity for the insects, but we live on this planet too, you know. We can't undo all of our pollution.
-- Cheers!
The tomato hornworm moth is a pest anyway. Good riddance.
Neonicotinoids can cause problems for pollinators by concealing their metabolism.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...
Well, duh doy, son.
Neonicotinoids are banned in europe, but the industry is lobbying for a lift of the ban.
Ironic you are calling people fags when you have a dick in your ass.
Ironic? He may very well be a fag himself - and still believe in such stereotypes. He didn't actually say anything negative about fags . . .
Really I don't get why everyone keeps referring to each other as a bundle of sticks, its very confusing.
Flowers are for women and fags.
Women and Cigarettes? What the hell are you talking about?
Well, it's a good thing we don't grow a whole lot of food crops in the streets of New York City. For a minute there I was worried.
Just calculate the marginal cost of a kilogram of combusted fuel due to pollination problems and, add it to the fuel tax, and spend it on research to drive down the cost of more fuel-efficient cars and hydrogen vehicles.
Everyone in se UK. Oh wait...
I'm pretty sure tobacco hornworms are a pest, not a farm-aid. At least if my memory serves me correctly they are BIG critters and demolish tomato plants. Luckily a tiny wasp (bracconid) likes to lay its eggs in the skin of the tobacco hornworm and the hatchlings devour that critter. Whenever I'd find them in my garden I'd toss them into the woods.
I guess in their moth stage they are pollinators. I did not know this.
Parfum can disrupt men by concealing the scent of a woman. Then, when you've had your whole life not being used to it, one drops panties and you're like, OH GOD I CAN'T GO DOWN ON THAT!
The next day, your bedroom is loaded with Glade Plug-Ins.
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I give you 5 out of 10 for your trolling efforts.
Just calculate the marginal cost of a kilogram of combusted fuel due to pollination problems and, add it to the fuel tax, and spend it on research to drive down the cost of more fuel-efficient cars and hydrogen vehicles.
I think if you research the actual numbers, you will find that government regulation has done anything but reduce the cost of vehicles.
Anyone else think this is related to the declining bee population?
Don't try to grow stuff in urban environments. Growing food on a farm and trucking it in (or better yet hauling it on an electric train) is a far more efficient and greener use of land than single-family homes with back yards.
"If you love nature, stay away from it." --Henry David Thoreau
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Potpourri is evil.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's because of this! Without regulations, you only see apparent cost. Then someone sees the negatives for that particular activity and (a) estimates cost for recovering from that negative (b) tacks on additional cost to discourage such activity.
That's because of this! Without regulations, you only see apparent cost. Then someone sees the negatives for that particular activity and (a) estimates cost for recovering from that negative (b) tacks on additional cost to discourage such activity.
I'll grant that you have a point, but I'm not convinced the positives have actually made up for the negatives.
Costs that aren't reflected in the price of causing air pollution (caused e.g. by car-driving), but devolve on other parties, are known as "external costs".
External costs can however be included in the price of the product (in this case driving an internal combustion vehicle) by means of a tax, and that is often the only way for external costs.
The market that determines the demand for fuel combustion can do its work only if the "true" cost of driving is felt by the ones who actually buy that particular product, instead of other parties further down the line.
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The best solution to any problems the world faces is not rules, regulations, but technology. You have to make the price of running nuclear (or even renewable) origin liquid ammonia fuel cell powered vehicles that emit no organic carbon scents low enough to compete. By the way, I never got a chance to respond to another slashdot posting, citing sodium metal, and sodamide as an economic way to crack ammonia back to its elements, citing ruthenium, the most efficient catalyst, is too costly. Well, hello, as far as I know the Haber-Bosch process uses reduced iron oxide catalyst, and one of the prime rules of catalysis, is that a catalyst does not change the equilibrium constants, it only lowers the activation energy, the temperature required for a process to happen, and whatever catalyst is best at driving a reaction forward, is usually also the best in driving it backward, so why you need to mess with sodium metal or ruthenium when you can just use simple Haber-Bosch catalyst? If a hydrogen-nitrogen mixture is what you're after, but that mixture may not be a well combusting one, as the extra nitrogen might dilute the combusting air mix to below the explosive limit. I'm too lazy to look it up now, let's just say ammonia is not combustible, and even if cracked ammonia is combustible, the situation is similar to adding 10% ethanol to gasoline giving you less miles than if you just bought 90% straight 100% gasoline, and ran with that, being a Carnot-cycle high temperature achieved efficiency issue. In fact running pure oxygen from a cylinder plus straight gas gets you much better mileage than running air plus gasoline, and similarly, running pure oxygen and pure hydrogen into a car engine is much more efficient, than running air and hydrogen, let alone running air and cracked ammonia hydrogen+nitrogen. The energy in ammonia is there, you just have to know how to get to it, and combusting it is not the answer, but fuel cells can get the 60% efficiency per gram of hydrogen supplied, almost irrespective if diluted or not with hydrogen, while an internal combustion engine has to heat the inert nitrogen too. (Stirling cycle engine-like copper-gauze recouperators can be used to recover nitrogen waste heat from a fuel cell, but recouperators don't really have a place inside an internal combustion piston, the deadweight of extra nitrogen there directly driving down the high temperature achieved during explosion number of the Carnot cycle efficiency formula, devastating the efficiency numbers.) Of course the best solution is a hybrid, one that has a lithium ion battery that'll take you 5-10 minutes on a commute, and if you run out of that, then the ammonia fuel cell kicks in, but you can probably not make a fully electric car economical and have a long driving range of hours and hours too. Unfortunately for a fuel cell iron catalyst probably does not work well, as it has to be something that allows the hydrogen through the metal, and ionization of it at the interface, such as a platinum or palladium coating on a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... proton conductor such as a Nafion membrane. However, microholes in an iron membrane similar to those developed for micron filtration via electron beams, or a nanothin film of iron oxide reduced to iron, or mixture of nickel-iron, such coatings might work well enough instead of platinum. Carbon black and charcoal are typical replacement in catalysis where platinum is unavailable, so simply carburizing the nafion membrane surface with a flame or some similar plastic that chars better than nafion might work, also adding iron or nickel or cobalt or whatnot compounds to the surface can get you a platinumless low temperature fuel cell. You're also talking a nano-thin film of platinum, and the amount is so small, that, say 80 bux may cover a dozen square meters, and that's not too high a cost when you consider new car costs are never under 10 grand anymore. For a moped or 2-cycle engine gasoline bicycle you could probably not afford a liquid am