22. July, 2003 - no bananas?

• Yes, we’ll have no bananas. Within about a year, the tasty yellow fruit will be extinct. Ten-thousand years of selective breeding have left the current bananas sterile. Since they’re all cloned, there’s not much genetic diversity and disease and pests are wiping ’em out. That’ll just leave the non-tasty varieties of bananas around. [boing boing]
• Hear about the plant that’s Stronger than LSD and legal? Well, if you take enough, you can’t remember what you did while taking it, so I’m thinking that’s probably a reason to avoid it. But the DEA’s still trying to get it made illegal.
• Rules eased on deer permits because there’s too darned many of ’em running around the state. Rather than entering a lottery for antlerless permits, hunters in most of the state can just buy ’em right in the store.
• Continental Divide Despite Some Promising Signs. Europe doesn’t really get baseball, and both the German and Greek teams have plenty of US-born and trained players, but there’s a chance it’ll catch on there. All I know is that Cory Harris is playing for the Greek team right now, and it feels like the Saints are missing his bat.
• Study Suggests NASA Should Consider Navy’s Safety Techniques for nuclear vessels. When the USN finds a problem, a fix has to be found and made before they can move on. NASA, on the other hand, identified the problem with foam falling from the shuttle’s external tank years ago, but still hadn’t done anything about it. But fixing the problem with NASA is tougher than it looks because at the head of NASA is a political appointee, who generally changes every time we get a new president. At the head of the Navy’s reactor program is an admiral who keeps the post for either years, regardless of political changes.

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Tue, 22 Jul 2003 07:38:04.