Could you elaborate on that? Sounds interesting.
Well, when a man loves a pepper very much…
With a melon Carolina Reaper?
Ed Currie:
To be fair, most produce that humans eat isn’t found in nature. All of those different pepper varieties? Just three different species (basically, one for the super-hots, from habanero on up; one for paprika; and one for almost all of the other varieties). Most of the squashes, from zucchinis to pumpkins? One species. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, and several others? All one species.
In many cases, we don’t even know what the original wild type was, while in others, we do, but nobody ever actually eats it, because it’s so far inferior (for our purposes) to the carefully-bred ones.
That’s interesting and I have heard it before. Does that mean that every one of those vegetables can interbreed (be interbred)? You could make all kinds of crazy stuff, which of course is how we got to where we are.
The general rule is that things within the same species can interbreed. Things within the same genus can often interbreed. The product of interbreeding between two species within the same genus are oftern infertile.
In the case of the cabbages, I think so. Of course, for many other popular fruits and vegetables, the result is that they can’t even be bred at all: Due to hybridization or polyploidy or some other factor, they don’t produce seeds or are otherwise sterile. Those fruits and vegetables, we reproduce artifically, such as by grafting on cuttings to rootstock of related plants.
The family Solanaceae includes the genus Capsicum in which we find bell and chile peppers, as well as the genus Solanum in which we find nightshade and a host of other toxic flora alongside eggplants, tomatoes and potatoes.
At the behest of of the book of faces, I googled, “why were chainsaws invented”. The results were disturbing to say the least.
Chainsaws were originally invented in the late 18th century by Scottish doctors, John Aitken and James Jeffray, as a surgical tool for childbirth and other surgical procedures. Specifically, they were designed to aid in [symphysiotomy], a procedure to widen the pubic cartilage during childbirth, and to excise diseased bone.
Link. With pics and diagram.
Every fall the farmer’s markets and some of the local stores in my locale carry an assortment of edible but bizarre squashoids, either crossed deliberately or by accident.
And here I thought it would be just a chain with sharpened links worked reciprocally like those pocket survival cutting chains they sell. But no; in the absence of compact motors, hand-cranked chainsaws!? 
I had been under the impression that episiotomy was the common approach to simplifying childbirth, but now I read that antenatal perineal massage has become a popular alternative, as it involves no cutting or blood loss.
Before effective anesthesia, antisepsis and antibiotics things were often grim when a neonate’s head was simply too big for its mother’s pelvis. In fact I’ve sometimes wondered if the Flynn Effect was in part due to more large-brained children not dying or being brain-damaged thanks to the availability of Caesarian section.
Before the 1500s, most women who had a caesarian section died.
Before the 1500s, most women who didn’t have caesarian sections died, too. In fact, you could say the same about before 1900.
The important point is that shore-protection torpedoes were later surpassed by shore-protection artillery.
The think most people don’t remember is that High Explosive artillery was a newish thing in WWI. Before that, artillery was really limited by the fact that the propulsion charge detonated the warhead while the shell was inside the gun. “Dynamite Guns” were trialed using compressed air to get controlled propulsion.
The Brennan Torpedo saw limited (and top-secret) use as harbour protection, and was withdrawn when the British got good harbour protection artillery.
I don’t think that’s true. I mean, it’s true that all women around before 1900 are now dead, but most women didn’t die in childbirth or from complications thereof.
That’s not the point I was making. The point was that caesarian sections killed the pregnant woman at that time. Not later. She died from bleeding to death quickly. When a doctor (or whoever did the caesarian section) did it, the choice that they were making was to let both the baby and the mother die because the baby couldn’t get out of the mother or to cut her open, knowing that the mother would probably die by bleeding to death.
Although there are apocryphal accounts of women surviving the procedure, the oldest such account considered well-documented enough to be taken as fact was in the sixteenth century:
Indeed, most people think TNT is an incredibly hazardous substance, but it literally can be shot out of a cannon without detonating.