Apollo 11, broccoli, and the pressing need for more trees

Tomorrow (Saturday, 20 July 2019) will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.  Many of us old geezers remember that day.  (Truthfully, my own memories are pretty vague.  It was California in the sixties, after all.)

Here’s a retrospective on some of the coverage of that event:

“Accolades, skepticism and science marked Science News’coverage of Apollo: Moon landings coverage focused on science, while voicing wary public frustrations”

And here are an additional pair of interesting articles:

“How NASA has kept Apollo moon rocks safe from contamination for 50 years: Lunar samples have solved plenty of mysteries, with more answers to come”

“Apollo astronauts left trash, mementos and experiments on the moon: 50 years later, the experiments still teach us things and the trash needs to be preserved”

Oddly, though, in an age that values “inclusivity” so highly and that is so concerned not to marginalize the Other, I cannot recall having ever heard the story of Apollo 11’s brief sojourn on the lunar surface told from the perspective of the Moon’s indigenous peoples, the Selenians.  Here, however, is a brief article that attempts to rectify that oversight, to at least some slight degree:

“Fifty Years Since the Lunar Invasion”

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Six more science-related links that I found interesting and that you might, as well:

“Nutrition Science Is Broken. This New Egg Study Shows Why.  At turns lauded and vilified, the humble egg is an example of everything wrong with nutrition studies.”

“Backed in Black: How to get people to buy more produce: Researchers from BYU and the Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology may have figured out a secret to get people to buy more fresh produce: dress veggies up in black.”

“Can Learning a Foreign Language Prevent Dementia? The evidence is far less clear than popular media might lead you to believe.”

“AI is Coming Closer to Deciphering Lost Languages”

“BYU team breaks down major players in cell to score future cancer therapy wins: Learning more about a specific protein complex and how it works is a stepping stone for others who might look for cancer therapies or ways to help treat diabetes and other diseases.”

This item is significant, and I find it especially interesting because many ordinary people would be able to help out with the course that it suggests:

“Planting trees could buy more time to fight climate change than thought: Earth has 0.9 billion hectares that are suitable for new forests”