I got one at Oak Ridge. It was silver, and many years later had a bronze cast to it.
Wouldn’t that just be El Seed?
Any books on the 60s semi-fad?
Titles?
Not sure of your intent - but this comment needs more STARS.
On a side note, the found a bacterium that resists radiation, called Conan the Bacterium
“D. radiodurans is capable of withstanding an acute dose of 5,000 Gy (500,000 rad) of ionizing radiation with almost no loss of viability, and an acute dose of 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.[10][11][12] A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred double-strand breaks (DSBs) into the organism’s DNA (~0.005 DSB/Gy/Mbp (haploid genome)). For comparison, a chest X-ray or Apollo mission involves about 1 mGy, 5 Gy can kill a human, 200-800 Gy will kill E. coli, and over 4,000 Gy will kill the radiation-resistant tardigrade.”
Water bears are close at 4,000 Gy. They may be our only hope against Conan the Bacterium. Can Conan exist in the vacuum of space?
Just a general comment: irradiating *seeds *is about inducing useful mutations to carry into future generations. Irradiating harvested food is about preserving that particular piece of fish, meat, milk, etc., until consumed.
One is free to approve or disapprove of either of these things for whatever reasons make sense to one. But its useful to understand they are very different things and operate in very different ways for very different goals. If you munge them together then whatever your decision may be, it’s logically meaningless.
I believe most of us are aware of that, but thank you anyway. :dubious:
Irradiating foods would certainly trigger some chemical changes, much like cooking does. And so it’s plausible that it might change the flavor a little. But I see no a priori reason to assume that the changes would always be for the worse-- After all, plenty of foods taste better after cooking.
Certainly NOT!
El Seed was a villain. And he had no “seed powers”. Besides apparently being an animated plant, his main power was having a couple of cool “B-girls” as sidekicks
I have a bunch of african violets in my house which are ‘space violets’. They are mutated to bloom more constantly and have more blooms. Another mutation available is a green edging to the flower petals.
The african violet breeding company that sells them (or maybe ‘sold’ - I haven’t bought new ones in years because AVs live forever) is Optimara, and the varieties are called “Everfloris”. You can look them up, Optimara had a web page about how they were produced.
Which just points out the irrationality of that particular position.
We have thousands of years of experience of people eating naturally mutated plants and selectively bred plants. We have some 50 years of experience eating plants whose genetics were artificially and randomly scrambled by intense radiation.
None of that has caused any ill effects whatsoever.
Yet a scientist deliberately inserts a specific gene with a specific purpose into a specific point in plant’s genome, and the sky is falling, and “Frankenfoods” are suddenly a serious threat.
Yet exposing the plants to huge doses of radiation and seeing what happens next is a LESS risky strategy…
Book titles?
CalMeacham: Seed man!! Awesome! I actually collect seeds, pods and husks. I think they’re fascinating and kind of miraculous.
Other, less-glamorous seed powers:
going dormant for centuries, while remaining viable
surviving a vertebrate’s digestive track unscathed
sprouting in virtually no soil at all between the cracks of the sidewalk
I can visualize all of these being used in his repertoire of super abilities. Especially sprouting in a sidewalk crack, and thus surprising evildoers.
“OK, we robbed that bank, now let’s run awa…Hey! Where’d YOU come from?”
The play, and eventual film, entitled “The Effects of Gamma Rays on ‘Man in the Moon’ Marigolds,” comes to mind.
IIRC, the Legion of Super Heroes had a second-string member named Chlorophyll Boy, who could make plants grow at an accelerated rate.
And whatever happened to gibberellic acid anyway? It was all the rage decades ago to remarkably alter growth, flowering times, colors(I believe) of various plants.
Chlorophyll Kid, actually
He dates from the early 1960s, when people were still under the 1950s spell of Chlorophyll, which was touted as good for all sorts of things, including freshening breath (so they sold Chlorophyll gum)
There are still people who believe chlorophyll is kinda a cure-all. You can pull up lots of sites on Google, and you can still get Chlorophyll gum, though it’s not as common as it once was. See here:
As for personal experiences, we had this lead sphere on a pedestal sort of thing that was about 18 inches in diameter at my high school back in the late sixties that allowed you to irradiate small items for whatever reason you liked. You could put items on a small tray that would slide out and then you would slide the tray back inside and spin this wheel on top and it would move the tray around to face the radiation source and then you spun it back.
As I remember, we used it to irradiate radish seeds for various lengths of time and then planted them and compared both the number of sprouts we got from each batch and the number of “deformities.”
No idea what the actual radiation source was. We used to joke that whatever it was, it would make a very small bomb.
Are you guys sure that the Posies of Doom seeds were not produce by a plant that had been irradiated?
This sounds to me like the Russian biologist who thought that if you cut of a frog’s legs, the tadpoles would not develop legs.