Monthly Archives: August 2010

A hand juicer as a survival tool

Many people are familiar with the practice of juicing fruits and vegetables, to make nutritious and tasty drinks. Everyone is probably aware that increasing your intake of fruit and vegetable matter (and this includes fresh juice) is very healthy, and can improve the quality of your life. But how can a juicer machine save your life?

I recently read an interesting discussion claiming that grass – not wheat grass, but plain old lawn grass – is an overlooked source of food in times of famine, war, and other times of need. Now before the scientifically minded amongst you jump up and down and say “no no grass can’t be eaten – you need a rumen, or the enzyme cellulase to break it down”, this is how it works:

Although grass fibre ( mainly cellulose, and it’s true you DO specifically need the enzyme cellulase to break it down to a simpler form) is of very little use to humans, it is still possible to crush the juice out of the grass and drink this. What does it taste like? It tastes like wheat grass apparently, and although it is not the best flavour in the world, it still contains a mixture of simple sugars that are sustaining enough to potentially get you through an emergency.

So, you need some way to crush lawn grass. Of course an electric juicer is a great way to juice, but an electric machine isn’t going do much good to as if electricity grid is down! In this case, the best option is a hand juicer. A hand juicer is any juicer which is powered manually, and the most common types are those which you clamp to a surface like a kitchen bench, and then turn a crank handle while feeding in ingredients. Hand juicers are generally used to juice wheat grass, so they aren’t really going to struggle when juicing lawn grass.

This information probably sounds quite wacky, and you should probably be careful when applying it! However, whichever way you look at it a compact hand juicer does sound like a useful survival tool. There are many things that you could find that you could juice if you had to, which would not be very palatable to eat. Think of edible native plants such as thistles, which are edible but very stringy and difficult to chew. A hand juicer can be purchased for as little as $50, and could be an excellent investment one day.

Cold climate survival: How and why thermal underwear can save your life

When people think of outdoor survival situations under adverse conditions they tend to think of survival knives, maybe guns, and other iconic tools of the action-hero survivalist. But the fact is that one of the greatest dangers you will face in the wild will not be from wild animals or head hunters…cold will kill you faster than anything else.

Experienced outdoors men and women like to talk about the rule of 3’s: A person can go for 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and 3 hours without warmth.

There is a lot of truth in this old rule, and you need to prepare carefully if you are setting out on any expedition. It might just be a camping trip, it might be a white water rafting trip, or you may be going searching for fossil bones. In any case, it’s better to be prepared than to face a situation without the necessary survival equipment.

Thermal underwear is a fantastic invention which seriously can save your life. Many professional athletes and adventurers wear thermal underwear not just to stay comfortable, but also to avoid injury. If you’ve never worn thermal underwear before you may suspect that it is itchy or uncomfortable, but modern thermals are smooth and in fact barely noticeable once you have them on. There are three main types of thermal underwear that you can obtain:

The cheapest kind of thermal underwear is usually of the acrylic fiber type, which is a synthetic fiber. Acrylic fibers are relatively inexpensive, and also quite hard wearing. The downside can be that synthetic fibers absorb body odor, and can be difficult to refresh.

Also fairly affordable, is cotton thermal underwear. You need to be careful with cotton underwear though, as cotton has a distinct disadvantage in the field. When it gets wet, it completely loses its ability to insulate you, and is in fact worse than useless. Cotton thermal underwear is only appropriate for fairly light duty applications, and should not be worn into serious survival situations.

By far the best type of thermal underwear is pure wool. It might surprise some people to learn this, but wool has been used by civilizations all around the world for countless thousands of years for a good reason – it has amazing natural insulating properties, and it is also naturally antibacterial. Even when wet, wool maintains the ability to insulate your body, and as such is the best choice when you are embarking on a quest into the unknown.

Ways to Reduce Pollution

There are simple ways to help reduce pollution in the environment. Below are just a few ways we can all contribute to maintaining a healthy safe environment for adults and children. One way to help stop pollution is to always keep your car up to date with its emission tests. Avoiding smoke emissions will help prevent pollution. Try not to litter. Littering is careless and can easy be avoided. By throwing hazardous waste into water and land, it creates toxic chemicals that affect everything from the food we eat to the water we drink.

Burning tires has proven to be a significant factor in polluting the air we live in. Human carcinogens and chemicals get released into the air by burning tires. It only helps the environment to try and purchase used tires. Sometimes people invest in military tires due to the overwhelming surplus and quality. Instead of purchasing retail or wholesale tires, invest in used tires instead. Help stop the amount of tires being made by taking advantage of used tires instead of buying brand new ones.

Conserving energy goes a long way. By purchasing Energy Star products and generally reducing the amount of energy taken in per day, you will help relieve some of pollution. Turning lights off and appliances off when they aren’t being used will help as well. Plus, you will save on your energy bill. Get your home tested for radon, a hazardous, odorless but toxic gas. As far as automobiles are concerned, try to carpool or use public transportation when ever possible. By keeping your tires inflated you will save gas. When going grocery shopping bring a canvas bag to reduce the amount of paper and plastic wasted. Lastly- recycle, recycle, recycle! Sorting out the cans, cardboard and plastic from other garbage makes such a difference in the environment and can be re-used!

Science in dinosaur movies: Jurassic Park, then and now

The 1993 movie Jurassic Park, based on the book by Michael Crichton and directed by Steven Spielberg, is seen by most enthusiasts as the best dinosaur movie that Hollywood has produced. It set a high-water mark in the genre for many reasons: it took dinosaurs seriously as a topic, and did not portray the animals simply as ridiculous extras; and the movie was amazing for its visual effects. For any movie from Jurassic Park onward, your dinosaurs had better look real, scary, and believable.

Jurassic Park was also important in that it showed dinosaurs more or less accurately, consulting with real paleontologists in its making, and working to utilize the latest and greatest views on dinosaurs. This is not to say that they did not put in a Hollywood spin, or as I have called it in the past, “Spielbergize” some of the dinosaurs, but as a paleontologist I could really see that the ideas were not completely out of the blue. In fact, Spielberg foreshadowed some of the findings about dinosaurs that were to come.

I want to review some of the key features of Jurassic Park as they were thought of in Hollywood in 1993 and compare that with the state of the art today.

Dinosaur DNA

The entire premise of Jurassic Park is that DNA from extinct species was collected and cloned in order to bring the animals back to life. Are we any closer to being able to do this? Well, not really.

The complete DNA code of any single species is very long and complex, and it is very unlikely that any DNA molecule will survive intact for millions of years. We cannot even clone species that are modern or recently extinct with much success, and we have access to their DNA. The technical difficulties of getting DNA intact, knowing how to put that DNA together on chromosomes, knowing how to trigger the genes on the chromosomes to turn on and off during development, means that even if we could somehow get a complete dinosaur DNA sequence, we could not make a living animal.

However, there have been some amazing advances in molecular paleontology, where protein fragments and amino acids have been shown to be able to survive within fossil bone for an extraordinarily long time, much to the surprise of scientists who assumed that fossilization would destroy the tissues at the molecular level. Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future. Who knows what discoveries await us, but for now, the current best answer is that we will never be able to clone a dinosaur. (See Mammoth protein designed to be cool for more on molecular paleontology).

Excavation Scene

Early in the movie we are treated to a scene of a paleontology excavation as modern paleontologists dig into the past to understand dinosaurs. As with any profession, portrayal in a movie is not often close to reality. Cop movies do not realistically show what it is like to be a cop. Lawyer and doctor movies stretch the true on those professions, and the excavation scene was the one where me and my professional colleagues got a good laugh.

We see the field crew effortlessly dusting sand away from crisp fossil bone. We see the team firing off seismic charges to send waves into the rock to visualize complete dinosaur skeletons underground, just waiting to be effortlessly dug out. Oh boy. This is so far from the truth.

We cannot simply use a type of remote sensing technology to visualize unexposed fossils, however there are a few technologies that people have tried to use. Sometimes the minerals that fill fossil bone have a higher concentration of radioactive elements, and so mapping the concentration of radioactivity over a site has helped to locate concentrations of fossils in those cases. There is a technology called ground-penetrating radar which under certain circumstances could be applied to fossils, but its use is limited. The main problem with both of these techniques is that to find fossils underground, you have to be able to tell them apart from the surrounding rock, and too often the fossils are very similar to the rock that encases them.

Fossils are still found the old fashioned way—by looking for bones weathering out on the surface, and digging around them in hopes that something more is there.

And of course, it is not as simple as dusting them off. Fossils are often enclosed in a hard matrix of rock, which can take many hours of tedious labor to remove. Frequently in the field the fossils are exposed enough to understand how they are laid out, and then removed in giant blocks to be worked on back in the museum lab for the next several years.

Velociraptor

The undeniable stars of the movie were the “raptors.” As shown, they were cunning and relentless killers, bent upon creating havoc for their human character counterparts. In the movie, the velociraptors were shown to be about as tall as an adult human and perhaps 12 feet long nose to tail. That was an exaggeration to say the least.

Real velociraptors have been excavated in Central Asia, and are not known from North America as fossils. However, there are Velociraptor relatives known from this continent. But in life, real velociraptors were only about half the size shown in the movie, maybe the size of a mid-sized dog.

However, Spielberg did not know it, but his velociraptors did not have to be exaggerated in size if he had just said that they were a dinosaur species that was discovered in 1991, and named in 1993—Utahraptor (Kirkland et al. 1993). The same year that Jurassic Park was released also saw the emergence of Utahraptor, a dinosaur that much better fits the dinosaur shown on film. It was discovered in North America, as was suggested for Velociraptor in the movie, and was the size of the animals shown in the film. So, in a way, Spielberg was showing a real dinosaur, just not the one he thought.

Tyrannosaurs Running

It might be a close call as to which was more popular in the movie, Velociraptor or the seminal favorite dinosaur Tyrannosaurus. Who did not thrill to see the giant animal trash Jeeps, eat lawyers, and run amuck? In a harrowing scene, tourists of Jurassic Park are chased at top speed by the Tyrannosaurus and only just manage to escape in their vehicle.

Could Tyrannosaurus almost outrun a Jeep? Well, likely not.

Large animals today do not run well. The heavier an animal is, the more force there is on the animal’s joints and bones, and running compounds the effects of those forces. Modern elephants cannot run, but rather trot. They can move quickly, but they are too large to achieve a full-scale run.

How to kill Tyrannosaurus, from Farlow, Smith, and Robinson, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol 15(4).

Likewise, tyrannosaurs were very large and heavy animals, and there are physical constraints based upon the strength of their bones and joints. And unlike an elephant, Tyrannosaurus supported all their weight upon two legs, teeter-tottered over their hips. Running would have placed tremendous stresses on the hip joint.

Also, unlike an elephant, the large head of a tyrannosaur was extended out over the ground, as much as 15 feet above the surface, and they did not have forelimbs of any size to speak of. This means that if they did get up to a significant running speed and were to stumble, their heads would fall with great force to the ground without any way to break the fall. In short, if they did run and fall they would bash their brains out on the ground. Running, in this case, would be fatal.

Venomous dinosaurs

In Jurassic Park, the dinosaur Dilophosaurus was portrayed as being able to spit blinding venom into its victim’s eyes. The suggestion that a dinosaur was venomous was groundbreaking. Earlier this year there was a report of the discovery of a venom delivery system in a raptor dinosaur, Sinornithosaurus (Gong et al. 2010), seeming to once again make Spielberg a paleontological prognosticator.

However, it does not seem likely that the interpretation of Sinornithosaurus as being venomous will stand up to further scrutiny. Secondary investigations of the fossils suggest that characters which were viewed as supporting a venom delivery system are actually not what they were first thought (Gianechini and Agnolin 2010), so it looks like we still have to wait to find a venomous dinosaur, much less one that can spit!

Jurassic Park stands as one of the greatest dinosaur movies. From a paleontology stand point, while the movie is fiction several interesting propositions were shown, and this is, after all, what drives our curiosity to explore.

Dinosaur movies at Amazon

References:

Gianechini, F. A., and F. L. Agnolin. 2010. A reassessment of the purported venom delivery system of the bird-like raptor Sinornithosaurus. Paläontologische Zeitschrift.

Gong, E., L. D. Martin, D. A. Burnham, and A. R. Falk. 2010. The birdlike raptor Sinornithosaurus was venomous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(2):766-768.

Kirkland, J. I., R. Gaston, and D. Burge. 1993. A large dromaeosaur (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of eastern Utah. Hunteria 2(10):1-16.

What Makes A Good Hunting Knife?

The best hunting knife is the one that you have on you at the time you need to use it. If you are an outdoorsman or a hunter then you should know that there are many kinds of hunting knives that have been made for a variety of chores. In fact there is no one knife that is the best knife for “everything.” The main focus is to determine what you need your knife to do for you in order to decide what is the best knife to fit your needs.

So what is your hunting knife going to be used for? Will it be mostly for skinning? Is your hunting knife going to be used for wood craft and survival. Do you want your knife to be stainless or carbon steel? These are all major considerations.

Once you have laid out what it is that you want then you can choose a knife that will meet the standards that you have set for it.

Here are some things to consider when looking for a hunting knife:

Folder or fixed blade? The fixed blade version is the most popular with hunters and outdoorsman. Fixed blades are stronger than folders and are easier to clean, sharpen and maintain.

The shape of the blade is important. The best hunting knife for you is in direct relation to the blade shape. The standard blade shapes are drop point, clip point, and skinner. There are also modifications of these blade shapes in between. Skinners are for skinning. Drop point and clip points are for skinning and general woodcraft chores.

What type of steel do you want? There is no such thing as “the best steel.” All steels have their own inherent advantages/disadvantages. Stainless stays sharper longer than carbon, but is harder to re-sharpen in the field. Carbon is easier to sharpen but won’t stay sharp as long as stainless.

Other things to consider will be hand ergonomics, material construction and sheath types. If you use a checklist like this then you will be able to choose the best hunting knife for your needs.

If you already own one or two knives that you now realize aren’t perfect there is no need for anxiety you can just buy more!

See also a related post, what you should look for in a hunting knife.

Boneblogger: Science and the outdoors

Exploring the natural world