Bonsai Superstars

Breathtaking! I have always wanted to have the patience and the space (as funny as that sounds) to create bonsai works of art. They are fascinating to me. The eclectic environmental blog, WebEcoist highlights tree art with bonsai superstars, such as Masahiko Kimura, Ben Oki, Lindsey Bebb, Quinquan Zhao, world famous for his penjing (miniature landscapes that combine bonsai with soil, foliage, and rock), Robert Steven and John Naka, dec His most recognizable work, Goshin, resides at the US National Arboretum. It consists of 11 impossibly straight juniper trees.



Bonsai award winning artist Masahiko Kimura creates a new masterpiece in under ten minutes:

What Makes A Bug A Pest?

It seems it's all in the guts. Latest Japanese studies refine what is a pest and what is a bug. Depends on the micro-organism in their stomachs.

Writing in the latest issue of the Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the researchers said the finding sheds new light on the evolution of pests and may offer fresh approaches to controlling insects that harm livestock and crops.

The team worked on two very closely related species of stinkbugs in Japan - the Megacopta punctatissima, which is a pest of soybean and other crop legumes, and the Megacopta cribraria, that hardly causes any agricultural problems.

After the scientists switched the gut bacteria between the two species, the non-pest species thrived and reproduced prolifically on soybean plants in their laboratory.

The pest species, meanwhile, suffered sharply reduced egg-hatch rates and higher death rates of its nymphs, or larvae -- the very problems that the non-pest species used to face.

"We experimentally exchanged the gut bacteria between the species ... and we found the non-pest species performed very well after the transfer of the symbiont (symbiotic bacteria) and the pest species performed very poorly," Takema Fukatsu of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said in a telephone interview.

"This indicates that the symbiont determined the pest status of the host stinkbug."

Fukatsu and his colleagues are now analyzing the bacteria found in the two species of stinkbugs.

"We suspect that some mutation may have occurred in their (gut) bacteria and we hope to find the difference between them. In this way, we hope to understand the molecular mechanism underlying what makes a pest and what makes a non-pest," he said.

Looking ahead, Fukatsu hopes their research will have practical applications.

"This molecular mechanism can be used for pest control," he said.

Look At Those Melons!

Amazing how fruit doesn't last long in my fridge or on the counter but will last more than 2,000 years under the ground near Tokyo.

Archaeologists have excavated in Shiga Prefecture what they believe are the oldest remains of a melon ever found.

Based on a radiocarbon analysis, researchers estimate the half-rounded piece of fruit to be about 2,100 years old, Shuji Yamazaki, an official in the city of Moriyama, said.

The remains are believed to be the oldest of a melon that still has flesh on the rind, Yamazaki said. Previously, the oldest such find was believed to be remains found in China that date back to the fourth century A.D.

The melon might have been so well-preserved because it was in a vacuum-packed state in a wet layer below the ground, an environment hostile to microorganisms that might otherwise have broken down the remains, Yamazaki said.