Spore

spore

Earth Hacks Recap Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a public research university located in Richmond, Virginia and on Jan. 26–27, happened. VCU Earth Hacks was immediately on-board with being a sponsor, hosting a design thinking workshop during the event, and providing additional support and intros! Experimental Civics Kudos to the whole team for running an amazing event! Start of VCU Earth Hacks I caught up with , one of the co-founders, to ask her why she has supported this event: Sanjana Paul “I started Earth Hacks when I noticed that the rate at which environmental problems are increasing is exponential and the rate at which solutions to these problems are progressing is linear. Having attended hackathons in the past, I know that during these events, rapid innovation takes place and projects that would normally take months to implement have working prototypes ready in 24 hours. Attending hackathons, I saw that the types of problems presented for participants to solve are often very limited in scope and don’t seem to address pressing needs. This led my team and I to realize that nobody has really applied the hackathon model of innovation to environmental problems, and we did so, creating Earth Hacks.” Hackathon 2019 Themes The 3 broad themes this year were: Corporate Sustainability 2. Public Health, Biotechnology, and Medical Waste 3. Energy Efficiency Here is a to the DevPost for access to the 22 submitted projects! link Who Attended? 147 registered participants were at this year’s Earth Hacks. 12 different universities were represented, with the highest attendance numbers coming from VCU, George Mason University, and the University of Virginia. Of the 125 participants who chose to respond to the question asking for their gender, 45 were female and 80 were male. The breakdown of majors who attended Earth Hacks as shown in the image below: The breakdown of year in college of those who attended Earth Hacks as shown in the image below: Credit: Earth Hacks Mentor Shout-Out Mentors are a huge component of any hackathon and I was able to catch up with Associate Professor, Stephen S. Fong, Ph.D., from the Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering at VCU and asked him about the experience of mentoring over the weekend event: Stephen S. Fong, Ph.D. EarthHacks was intentionally developed to include a broad spectrum of backgrounds and expertise and as such, an initial challenge for both new and seasoned hackers is determining what the outcomes from EarthHacks projects should look like. In a nutshell, we want to emphasize a sound problem-solving approach where teams can identify and articulate a problem that is important to them and demonstrate an understanding of the area by describing key aspects and existing approaches that have been attempted. Each team should be able to describe the uniqueness of their approach and the stretch goal is to develop their idea with sufficient detail that their project is actionable (able to be implemented). Part of the core challenge is that we like to provide context for thinking big (non-conventional ideas), but since we all want real-world impact, aspects of feasibility are also important. Hackathon Projects Here are some winners to highlight from the event: ROSS Colleen Foley, Rebecca Youngerman, Mollie Gaines Team members: ROSS is a Repurposed Open-source Smartphone Sensor that helps reduce e-waste and promotes community growth. ROSS helps communities around the globe bring in open source data on the community they live in and pushes these cities and towns further towards the goal of becoming a smart city without the major costs. 2-sentence bio: Demo link: https://devpost.com/software/ross Spore Sticker (Our Exp_Civics Fave!) Taylor Duncan, Binal Patel, Trent Jackson Team members: Mycoremediation is a form of bioremediation, the process of using fungi to degrade or sequester contaminants in the environment. Allows cardboard to be used as a medium for mushrooms to grow in landfills, and thus accelerates the time necessary for cardboard boxes to decompose. 2-sentence bio: Demo link: https://devpost.com/software/spore-sticker Earth Hacks Logo Rohe Team members: Thomas Gordon, Charles Logan Parham, Kishore Bhat, Soham Apte To reduce the commonly unaffordable price tag attached to smart thermostats filled with bells and whistles, we were able to offer a smart thermostat that is projected to surpass efficiency performance tests, while maintaining a modest retail value. Rohe eliminates the need for a digital interface by utilizing an embedded WiFi chip that offers accurate indoor location fixes, thus boosting energy efficiency and cutting costs drastically for the user. 2-sentence bio: Demo link: https://devpost.com/software/the-green-machine-wc5fe6 Carbon Aliyah Desautels, Anthony Milositz, Jarrod Burrowes, Raymond Hang Team members: The application also uses incentives to increase interest in lower the carbon footprint that is caused by driving. This will help create awareness by connecting the data collected with accessible technology along with creating a network to attract different types of users 2-sentence bio: Demo link: https://devpost.com/software/carbon-2tiax0 Cleanstreak Emma McCamey, Nick Agliano, Sean McDermott, Connor Massaro Team members: Our project promotes sustainable living through an easy-to-use, easy-to-implement point collection system. We designed CleanStreak around green habits in the workplace, in the hope that these habits won’t just be a way to get free Lyft rides, but instead help to form healthy, long-lasting habits in and outside of work. 2-sentence bio: Demo link: https://devpost.com/software/earthhacks So there you have it! These were amazing projects built in a short amount of time! Congrats to all involved. Next Steps As always, if you need hackathon support, give us a shout at Experimental Civics, we’re here with juicy consulting tips and proven templates to help elevate your impact and performance. If you are a VCU student, make sure to make this event down for next year, perhaps you can even volunteer your time to make it go! Share the awesome and tag us: or **@**Exp_Civics **@**earthhacksvcu

VCU Imagineers Use Spore Stickers to Recycle Cardboard

Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 by Various, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . CEREAL FOODS IN THEIR RELATION TO HEALTH AND DISEASE. here CEREAL FOODS IN THEIR RELATION TO HEALTH AND DISEASE. By F.R. CAMPBELL, A.B., M.D. The cereals are subject to many diseases which retard their development, rendering them unfit for food, and even poisonous. The relation of unwholesome foods to the diseases of the animal body are now being thoroughly studied, recent advances in chemistry and microscopy contributing valuable aid to the prosecution of such investigations. Some enthusiastic advocates of the germ theory of disease believe that many, if not all, the so-called disease germs may be transplanted into the human system with the food ingested. But whatever may be the real truth in regard to this subject, it has been positively demonstrated that many diseases of the human body may be produced by unwholesome food. The specific symptoms produced in man by the various grain diseases are not accurately known, consequently our remarks upon this subject must be of a very general character. Pappenheim divides the diseases of the cereals into two classes, internal and external. The internal diseases are those depending upon conditions of soil, climate, cultivation, etc., and may be neglected in our discussion, as they produce no special disease of the body, only impairing the nutritive value of the grain. The external diseases are of much greater importance, as they probably produce some of the most fatal maladies to which the human race is subject. These external diseases of the cereals are due to parasites, which may be either of an animal or vegetable nature. Among the animal parasites may be mentioned the , which feeds upon the starch cells of the grain. Grain attacked by this parasite was at one time supposed to be injurious to health. weevil, vibrio tritici In 1844 the French Commission appointed to examine grain condemned a large quantity imported with this parasite, but afterward reconsidered their decision and permitted its sale, concluding that it was deficient in nutritive properties, but not otherwise unwholesome. Rust is the most common disease of the cereals, produced by vegetable parasites. Like the other diseases of this class, it is most prevalent in warm, damp seasons. Prof. Hensboro is of the opinion that rust is but an earlier stage of mildew or blight, the one form of parasite being capable of development into the other, and the fructification characteristic of the two supposed genera having been evolved on one and the same individual. Blight is a term loosely applied to a number of parasitic diseases. In it are included mildew, cories, and even rust and smut. The fungi producing these diseases attack the plant and seed at various stages of its growth. The whole kernel is affected, and not merely the external coat, as is sometimes maintained. When blighted grain is sown, the disease recurs the following year, often making it necessary to import new seed before the disease can be eradicated. Various remedies have been used to destroy the spores of these fungi, but all are uncertain and some are dangerous to health. Special machinery and methods have been employed in the mills to separate the mildew from the grain. Some of these succeed in removing the fungi and discoloration from the surface of the grain, but have no effects upon the parts within. Blighted grain is soft, and has an unpleasant taste and smell, and bread made of it is liable to be heavy and sodden. It is undeniable that the use of blighted grain as food is exceeding dangerous to health. It is a well known fact that vegetable parasites may attack animals; the silk worm disease produced by the , being an example. It is stated that the same vegetable parasites which produce plant diseases, when transmitted to the animal body produce special affections, the form and appearance of the germs being altered by their environments. The same germs developed under different conditions of temperature and surrounding medium, assume forms so various that they have been supposed to belong to different species and even different genera. If there is any truth, then, in the germ theory of disease, it is not so very improbable that a fungus which will produce blight in grain may cause cholera or tetanoid fever in an animal. Botrytis baniana Hallier, the famous physiological botanist, observed in 1867 that there was a peculiar disease of the rice plant associated with an epidemic of cholera. Rice plants fertilized with the discharges of cholera patients were affected with blight. A concentrated infusion of the blighted grain would produce changes in all animal substances, blood and albumen being converted into thin odorless products resembling in every respect the material found in the kidneys of cholera patients. The most formidable of the diseases attributed to the use of diseased grain is cerebro-spinal meningitis, commonly known as spotted or blanoid fever. The disease is rare in England, but is frequently epidemic in the United States, in Ireland, and on the Continent. In 1873, in the State of Massachusetts alone, 747 persons died of it, and other epidemics even more fatal have lately occurred in New York and Michigan. The disease is a nervous fever attended with convulsions, the pathological lesion being congestion and inflammation of the membrane of the spinal cord and brain. Dr. Richardson in writing on the nature and causes of spotted fever concludes that it is due to the use of diseased vegetable substances, especially grain, and from a careful analysis of the statistics of this disease reported by the Michigan State Board of Health considers it demonstrated that "under favoring condition for its action diseased grain received as a food is the primary cause of the phenomena which characterize the disease." These views are substantiated by the experiments of Dr. H. Day, who found that by feeding rabbits on unsound grain, spasmodic affections were produced, due to inflammation of the membranes of the spinal cord and brain. In warm climates, pellagra or Italian leprosy is said to be produced by eating diseased maize, which forms the principal article of food among the poorer classes of the rural districts. Pellagra is epidemic in northern Italy and the south of France. The disease is manifested by a redness and discoloration of the exposed parts of the body. It is most active during the hot weather, the inflammation subsiding in the winter, leaving a pigmentation of the skin. Each year the symptoms become more alarming, nervous disorders finally setting in, and a large number die insane. The disease is most prevalent in the country. In the towns, where maize is supplemented by other articles of food, it does not exist. Ergot is a very common disease of the cereals. The fungus producing it was discovered in 1853, but for centuries previous its injurious effects upon the human body were recognized, and it was observed that ergot of rye was the most poisonous. Taken in large doses, ergot will produce nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, and weakness of the heart. In small repeated doses it will produce contraction of all the unstriped muscles, as those of the blood vessels, the womb, and intestines. Ergotium is the name given to the disease produced by the continued use of grain affected by this fungus. Aitken describes it as "a train of morbid symptoms produced by the slow and cumulative action of a specific poison peculiar to wheat and rye, which produces convulsions, gangrene of the extremities, and death. In countries where rye bread is much used ergotium is sometimes epidemic. This was a frequent calamity before the introduction of suitable purifiers into the mills. There are two varieties of the disease, the convulsive and the gangrenous. The convulsive form begins with tingling of the extremities, drowsiness, and headache, followed by pain in the joints, violent muscular contractions, and death. The gangrenous variety begins with coldness and weakness of the extremities followed by gangrene and sloughing. This form is somewhat more fatal than the convulsive, the mortality of those affected being about 90 per cent. Mouldy grain and bread have also caused poisoning. Prof. Varnell states that "six horses died in three days from eating mouldy oats. There was a large amount of matted mycelium, and this when given to other horses for experiment, killed them within thirty-six hours." The writer has himself seen seven hogs die within a few days while being fed on mouldy corn. Flour which has become stale may produce similar injurious effects, although most of the germs are destroyed in the process of baking. It is quite probable, however, that a poisonous substance is generated by the mould fungus, which cannot be destroyed in this way.-- . Milling World About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Various (2005). Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8742/pg8742-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

CEREAL FOODS IN THEIR RELATION TO HEALTH AND DISEASE

207 Stories To Learn About Health

74 Stories To Learn About Robots

132 Stories To Learn About Robotics

Let's learn about via these 75 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Food Tech /Learn Repo 1. What is TikTok Kitchen and How Does it Work? I look into the new restaurant concept, TikTok's motivations, and how it will work. 2. How AI is Transforming the Grab&Go Food Market 3. What are the Applications of AR in the Food Industry? How augmented reality is being used in the food industry and how it can have a positive impact on your business if you start using it proactively. 4. What Are The Applications Of AR In Food Industry How augmented reality is being used in the food industry and how it can have a positive impact on your business if you start using it proactively. 5. Startup Interview: "Not as many people genuinely care about food security as they should" Grow fast and fix things: if you aren’t fixing things, you are not growing fast enough. Look where "move fast and break things" has gotten us. 6. Food Tech Stories: Amazing Dahmakan [Part 2] In Southeast Asia cloud kitchens are undermining the eating out model, working directly from singular cooking settings, and delivering directly to clients' doorsteps. This phenomenon is also known as delivery-only kitchens, ghost kitchens, and dark kitchens. 7. 5 Ways Technology is Reshaping The Restaurant Industry Learn how technology is reshaping the restaurant industry making businesses more efficient and smart. 8. 2022 Predictions: NFTs Move Beyond Laundering & CircleJerks While Fake Meat Gets Attacked by the Sea Annual tech predictions from venture capitalist, Bernard Moon. On NFTs, 3D-printing, meat substitutes, cryptocurrencies and commercial banking 9. Can Technology Help to Save Restaurants [Infographic] The future for many SMB restaurants is unknown right now. With social distancing and hospitality guidelines varying by state and county, it's been a difficult road. The industry itself was originally projected to reach $899 billion in projected sales in 2020, now, that is unknown. 10. Restaurant focussed DAO called FriesDAO is raising $9.69 Million to run a Fast Food Enterprise FriesDAO is connecting real-world assets to DeFi and on-chain blockchain governance and raising $9.69 Million to change the industry. 11. Restaurant Table Side Tech: How OneDine Solving Chargeback Issue for Restaurants In the good old days, when you wanted to grab a bite to eat, you walked into a restaurant, swiped your credit card and bon apetite. Or you made your order by phone, then paid when you pick it up. Smooth process from start to finish. 12. Delivering The Competitive Edge In Food Delivery Business By Creating Mobile App Food - The Constant 13. Can We Decentralize Zomato/Swiggy? A simple approach on how to decentralize food-delivery ecosystem. 14. Why We Should All Pay Attention To Recent Food Tech Innovations There is a lot of food tech innovations out there that have been popping up over the past few years. And food tech has become a fairly popular industry to be in 15. High Technology Changes To Agriculture Companies: 2020 Edition It's no secret that development in technology will continue to revolutionize every sector in the upcoming years. In 2020, there are so many advanced technologies that have been developed to make farmers' work easier and hassle-free. 16. Food Tech Stories: How Walmart is Growing Food Subscription Business Based on this story: Walmart Grocery is expanding its $98 per year 'Delivery Unlimited' subscription across the US 17. 7 Companies with Recipe APIs in 2022 An overview of 7 Companies with recipe APIs in 2022 18. The Effect of Covid-19 on Ride-hailing and Food Delivery Services Due to the crisis of the ongoing Corona virus Pandemic, Uber and other major companies announced new welfare policies that stated that any worker infected by the Covid-19 virus or workers in a location are completely quarantined by the government, would get paid leaves or compensation. Inspired by these events, other companies built using the taxi app and operating in other regions of the world discussed similar procedures to benefit those affected by corona virus. 19. Metaverse: The First Step into A Brave New World How is the next generation bound to embrace a new reality that will be consistently enriched and likely to be limitless? 20. First Come, First Served: 7 Businesses That Hired Robots Before 2020 We are already used to robots in an industrial environment. Repeatability, speed, precision,
flexibility, no contact with humans, and safety. That’s what robots are all about. No wonder that businesses all around the world are trying now to adopt robots in their services asap. 21. Human Brand Ambassadors Have Limitations: Enter FoodTech Robots In the nearest future, a majority of FoodTech businesses and consumer brands will start using cognitive virtual humans. 22. Where The Money’s Headed: China’s Tech Investment Trends of 2022 China’s entrepreneurial fervor and investor confidence is at an all-time high, with no signs of losing steam. So, where's the big money going in 2022? 23. Top 10 App Ideas for Restaurant and Food Business Startups in 2022 This post will provide you with the best app ideas for restaurant and food business startups to use as a springboard 24. Food Tech Stories: Will Amazon Go Grocery Improve Our Shopping? This story is based on Experiencing Seattle's Amazon Go Grocery 25. Future of On-Demand Food Ordering App in 2020 A survey was conducted in 2019 among the restaurants who had opted for app-based online delivery for the first time or listed with on-demand food app startups. Majority of restaurants said that people nowadays are showing little interest in coming to restaurants and prefer online delivery most of the time. Needless to say that this attitude resulted in increase in sales as reported by 60% of restaurants. 26. "Is This How Our Story is Due to End?" #COP26 Are we investing in the right things or failing to see the bigger picture in pursuit of short-term goals? 27. How Social Media Can Help You Eat Healthily Just about everyone who has tried to make radically healthier changes to their daily food consumption have realized that this is easier to accomplish with some kind of support system aside from your own will to succeed. It is a great help for people to cheer you on, support you, give you advice, or even criticize you on your way to better eating and overall health. 28. 17 Smart Tech Kitchen Products to Buy in 2020 With each passing day, technology keeps on getting smarter and intends to make human life easier. Even the basic things we use on a regular basis have turned advanced.  Nowadays Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa have become common things in homes and commercial places. The kitchen now adopts some advanced gadgets to simplify the cooking process. Whether you want to prepare meals for a huge mass of people or just brew a cup of coffee, the smart tech kitchen products discussed below will help you a lot. 29. New Restaurant Tech Creates Touch Free Take Out, Reopens Entire Mall Marketplace Restaurants have been hit hard by COVID-19. With massive closures and layoffs around the world, it's been a tough road for hospitality these past few weeks. It can be extremely overwhelming to look at the big picture, but luckily, there are restaurant tech innovators stepping up to the plate. 30. Meal Planning Introduction Meal planning is an essential ‘thing’ for healthy lifestyle. Please note that i didn’t create that content myself. I only put quotes or links from other sources that i googled. 31. Working at a FoodTech Startup: A Data Scientist's Insights Since 2018, I have been working for a plant-based alternative startup [더플랜잇, The Plant Eat] as a data scientist. Here is what I learned while working on the food data team. 32. What's Inside Junk Food? Remember how your mom told you to finish your food before getting dessert? It turns out your mom was right! 33. Super Sizing Technology to Improve the Food Industry How technology is transforming the way food and beverages are produced, delivered, and consumed globally. 34. Your Robocup, Sir 07:00 am, the bus leaves in 15 minutes and you’ve got a chance to run to the nearest coffee shop to get your morning dose of excellent caffeine. You come into a café, happily recognizing that there are only two competitors in the queue, and already start to feel the energy of a double Americano in your hand. 35. Food Tech Stories: Digital Transformation of Restaurant Industry Based on How Restaurants Can Adapt to the Digital Economy. 36. Food Tech Stories: Food On Wheels Can Solve Last Mile Problem Urbanization is a common process in many regions of the world, including a huge proportion of people in less developed countries. Rapid urbanization can cause many problems, including poverty and food insecurity, which can make it harder for citizens to eat a healthy diet. No matter how hard policymakers are trying to promote healthy and sustainable diets, it’s still an acute problem in modern cities. 37. #FoundersConnect: Mariam Jimoh, CEO & Founder of Oja (Ethnic Grocery Delivery Startup) Peace speaks with Mariam about her grocery startup for afrocarribean people living in the diaspora. 38. 5 Lessons Learned During Online Grocery Product Development Online grocery services are steadily gaining in popularity. Recent statistics show that 22 percent of American shoppers buy groceries online at least once a wee 39. Diving into the Legal Issues of NFTs in FoodTech The implementation of NFT leads not only to the improvement of operations and brand image but also causes some legal issues which are worth knowing about. 40. Food Tech Stories: Solving Food Waste Problem With The Help Of AI Food squander is probably the most serious issue that humankind faces today. Internationally, between 33-50% of all food is never eaten, and the worth is over $1 trillion. That being said, 800 million individuals battle to get a meal on a daily basis. That is 1 of every 9 individuals on the planet who are malnourished.  If we take less than a quarter of squandered food,  we could take care of every single of them. And here are a few other shocking facts that you may not know: 41. How to Create a Successful Food Delivery App 42. Food Tech Stories: How Italy Fighting with Food Waste Based on this story: Italy passes law to send unsold food to charities instead of dumpsters 43. Food Tech Stories: How Sugarmate Helps People With Diabetes Today, most people with diabetes opt to deal with their condition with the help of a continuous glucose monitor or CGMs. Since finger prick testing is not really convenient, CGMs are a great option. And they give a surge of information nonstop as well. However, most data is useless unless the right tools are used to analyze it. 44. Tech for Good: Vertical Farming 100 years ago, if you suggested that climate change would one day threaten our way of life, you'd be laughed off the stage. Today, climate change is increasing global hunger and bringing 100 million people into poverty by 2030. 45. Food Tech Stories: The Secret Of The Sustainable Food System The EAT-Lancet report is the primary full logical report of what comprises a sound eating regimen from a sustainable food system, and which activities can support and accelerate food framework change. 46. How Agtech and Blockchain Could Invigorate Africa’s Startup Ecosystem The utilization of agtech and blockchain as dual catalysts for growth in the African startup ecosystem will help invigorate African economies. 47. How To Create An App Better Than Uber Eats Food Delivery Apps - Adding A Dimension To Food-Consumption 48. How Blockchain can Disrupt the Restaurant Industry This article talks about blockchain and restaurant tech to disrupt and uplift the restaurant industry after COVID-19. 49. Business Model of Online Grocery Business: How It Can Make Money Online grocery shopping is one of the fastest-growing niches of eCommerce in 2020. According to a study by Nielsen, 70% of the consumers will shop groceries online by 2024. Subsequently, consumers in the US alone will be spending $100 billion annually on online food and beverages, which is equal to every household spending about $850 annually. 50. Emerging Food Technology Trends & Insights for 2022 The food industry is one industry that benefits from the use of technology, from data gathering, food quality, blockchain tech and supply chain tracking. 51. Few Important Things You Must Know About Building Food Delivery App The need to consume food is never going to stop. However, the way in which food was commercially consumed is bound to change from time to time. There was a time when food was prepared at home. Restaurants came to the rescue of people who were outside their homes. 52. Food Tech Stories: How These Guys Built A Multi-Billion Dollar Family Business Who doesn’t know Panda Express? It is a fast-food restaurant chain that offers American Chinese cuisine. With over 2,200 locations, it is a forward-runner in the Asian restaurant chain niche. The idea of Panda Express was born in the United States. First restaurants used to be located in shopping mall food courts, but the chain has been expanded since then. You can see Panda Express in universities, airports, military bases, amusement parks, and other places. 53. 10 Reasons Your Retention is So Low At Food Rocket, we consider retention our key metric, and this is especially true for doing business on the US market in general. 54. Pivoting Is an Opportunity: Even for a Growing Business Pivot is not just for the times when a business goes the wrong way but is necessary even if your business is doing well and showing sustainable growth. 55. Food Tech Stories: Will You Marry Me, Cooking Robot? Based on this story:  S'pore's First Robotics Restaurant Serves Robot-Cooked Wok Dishes 56. Food Tech Stories: Yummy Trends in 2020 Based on this story: Food and Restaurant Trends 2020 57. Food Tech Stories: How To Fail Food Delivery Startup Based on this story:  Trackin: Solo Founding a +$167,000/Month Food Startup 58. 7 Shopify Alternatives to Create an Online Food Delivery Platform Top Shopify alternatives restaurateurs must consider to develop their online food delivery platform. 59. 6 Smart Digital Health & Fitness Solutions With every holiday season comes a glut of, well, gluttony as we strive to make merry amid calorie-laden food and drink for weeks on end.  Then there’s the predictable diet and fitness-focused New Year resolutions that, however genuinely and well-intended at the onset, can be easy to make—but even easier to break. With this understanding, throngs of tech and online companies are finding innovative ways to keep people engaged and motivated throughout the holiday season and beyond as they endeavor to get fit and healthy...and stay that way. 60. The Future of Protein Have you ever tasted a veggie burger? Are you a vegan? You have a vegan friend, should you turn vegan? Did you ever thought about stop eating meat? Are you aware of animal slaughtering? 61. How Agtech Can Harness China’s Ever-Growing Technological Advantage One area that could benefit from and help foster more growth in China's economy is its agricultural technology (AgTech) scene. 62. Reconstructing Our Food Supply Chains with Blockchain Technology Blockchain technology can streamline and restructure the way that we interpret global supply lines, a change that may be vital for addressing climate change. 63. How Come Junk Food is Still An Epidemic? First part of this article: https://hackernoon.com/junk-food-whats-inside-it-107ar30zv 64. How I Built a Meal Kit Delivery App In a Day Using Stripe, Google Sheets, Glide and Carrd Note: This article is part of my toolkit newsletters↗️ where I share resources about building things. Join me :) 65. How To Develop A Fabulous Self-Service Ordering Kiosk For Your Fast Food Chain Long lines and long wait times frustrate guests and discourage them from returning to your restaurant. World-famous restaurants have come up with innovative ideas to eliminate these sources of frustration. Take McDonald’s as an example: In 2015, they started adopting self-service ordering kiosks that let customers select items, customize orders, and pay. Another good example is Stabucks. They built an app that lets customers order and pay in advance, then pick up their orders at their convenience. Those are just two examples, but there are many more. 66. Introducing a Simple Module for Parsing CSV Files This Slogging thread by  and Arthur Tkachenko occurred in slogging's official #programming channel, and has been edited for readability. 67. 7 Ways to UseRobots in The Food Industry Robots have come a long way. People have been predicting that robots will be a massive part of our lives for decades. That prediction is finally starting to become a reality. We are starting to see robots everywhere, with new innovations arriving on a weekly basis. 68. Food Tech Stories: Amazing Dahmakan [Part 1] Dahmakan is a food-tech startup in Southeast Asia that carries a composed way to deal with food delivery. The organization offers chef-made meals at a cost lesser than other eateries. 69. Chatting about GMO 🎃 This Slogging thread by Arthur Tkachenko and Mónica Freitas occurred in slogging's official #random channel, and has been edited for readability. 70. How to Build Food Delivery App Like Zomato Food ordering industry is the one which has a huge potential. According to the research by Morgan Stanley, online food delivery comprises only less than 5 percent of the total restaurant industry. 71. Meet the Technology of Future Packaging If we have binoculars, we can see the future of packaging. What will it look like in ten years? As far as we know, it's not hard to imagine. 72. How To Improve Nutritional Care of Patients By Using Hospital Nutrition Software Poor nutrition is a significant challenge nowadays. The pace of life is fast, and the time people spend on meal planning is critically tight. It leads to serious health problems including obesity, vascular heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cancer. 73. Machine Learning Food Datasets Collection An essential part of my company's Machine Learning team is working with different food datasets, and we spend a lot of time before for searching, combining or intersecting different datasets to get data that we need and can use in our work. Given that it might help someone else, I decided to list all helpful datasets in one place. 74. Organizing Data In Table: A Quick Guide The table is the HTML way to layout the data. We can use tables to structure data in columns and rows. 75. Introducing a Simple NPM Module for Food Measurements Hello! I've created a simple JavaScript module for food measurements. Thank you for checking out the 75 most read stories about Food Tech on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

75 Stories To Learn About Food Tech

Inside Earth: The Journey of Conru

The Story-book of Science by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE ORANGE-AGARIC CHAPTER LXV. THE ORANGE-AGARIC “MUSHROOM seeds, or spores, form on these gills, these points, and on the walls of the tubes of which these holes are the orifices. I recommend to Jules the following experiment. We will take some mushrooms whose caps are not yet thoroughly spread. We will place them this evening on a sheet of white paper. During the night the blossoming will be finished and the ripe seeds will fall from the gills of the agarics and the tubes of the boleti. To-morrow morning we shall find on the paper an impalpable dust, red, rose, brown, according to the kind of mushroom. Binocular Microscope “This dust is nothing but a mass of seeds, of spores, so fine that they cannot be seen separately without a microscope, so numerous they cannot be counted. There are millions and millions of them.” “A microscope,” interrupted Emile. “Is that the instrument with which you sometimes look at things so small that the naked eye can scarcely see them?” “Yes. A microscope enlarges the objects seen through it, and shows them to us in all their details of structure, although they would be hidden from the unaided eye by their smallness.” “Will you show us through the microscope the mushroom spores when I have collected them on a sheet of paper?” asked Jules. “I will show them to you. One spore is enough, under favorable conditions of heat and moisture, to germinate and develop into white filaments or mycelium from which will spring at the right time numerous mushrooms. How many mushrooms would be produced if all the spores that fall by myriads and myriads from the gills of a single agaric were to germinate? Here again we have the story of the cod, the louse, all the feeble creatures, in short, that reproduce their kind in such immense numbers.” “To have mushrooms, then, as many as we want, it is only necessary to sow the spores?” Jules again inquired. Spores “In that you are mistaken, my dear child. Up to this time mushroom culture has been impossible, because the care required by their excessively delicate seeds is not understood by us, or may even be beyond our power. Only one edible mushroom is cultivated, and even in growing this we use not the spores, but the mycelium. “They call it the hot-bed mushroom. It is an agaric, satiny white above and pale rose beneath. In the old stone quarries near Paris they make beds of horse manure and light earth. In these beds they put pieces of mycelium known to horticulturists under the name of mushroom-spawn. This spawn ramifies, pushes out numerous filaments, and from these finally spring the mushrooms.” “Good to eat!” “Excellent. Among the mushrooms we gathered are those that I am going to acquaint you with. “Look at this first of all. It is an agaric. The upper surface of the cap is a beautiful orange-red; the gills underneath are yellow. The stalk rises from the bottom of a sort of white bag with torn edges. This bag, called volva at first enveloped the whole mushroom. In growing and pushing above ground, the cap broke it. This kind, they say, is the best of all, the most appreciated. It is called the orange-agaric. “This other agaric, likewise orange-red, and also provided with a bag or volva at the base of the stalk, is called the false orange-agaric. Would you not, however, think it was the same kind?” “I don’t see much difference, for my part,” responded Claire. “Nor I either,” said Emile. “I see a difference,” Jules declared, “but it is very slight. The second agaric has white gills, while the first has yellow.” “Jules has sharp eyes. I will add that in the false orange-agaric the upper surface of the cap is sown with shreds of white skin, debris of the torn volva. The other one has not these shreds, or very few. “If one did not pay attention to these slight differences, one would commit a very fatal error. The first mushroom is a delicious viand; the second, or false orange-agaric, is a deadly poison.” “I am no longer surprised,” said Jules, “at your telling Simon that it is impossible for us, without long study, to distinguish the good from the bad kinds. Here are two mushrooms almost as much alike as two drops of water: one kills, the other is excellent.” “Not a year passes without its lamentable cases of poisoning, from a confusion of the two kinds. Remember carefully their characteristics, so as not to expose yourself some day to a terrible mistake.” “I will be very careful not to forget them,” Jules promised. “Both orange-agarics are orange-red and have a white volva or bag. The eatable orange-agaric has yellow gills; the poisonous one, white gills.” “Besides,” added Emile, “the poisonous orange-agaric has numerous shreds of white skin on the cap.” “Look at this other that I picked from the trunk of a tree. It is a large, dark-red boletus. It has no stalk. It fastens itself to old trunks by one of its sides. It is called the tinder-agaric boletus, because its flesh, cut in thin slices, dried in the sun, and made flexible by hammering, makes tinder.” “I did not dream that tinder came from a mushroom.” said Jules. “The truffle is the most important of eatable mushrooms. It grows under ground, like the mycelium that produces it. Its odor betrays its presence. A very keen-scented animal, the pig, is led into the wood. Enticed by the smell of the subterranean mushroom, the pig roots with its snout at the spots where the truffles are hidden. Then the pig is driven away, but to console him they throw him a chestnut; and finally the precious mushroom is dug up. In its shape the truffle bears no resemblance to ordinary mushrooms. It has a bulky round body, wrinkled, and black flesh marbled with white.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2018). The Story-book of Science. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56795/pg56795-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

THE ORANGE-AGARIC

The Story-book of Science by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . IN THE WOODS here CHAPTER LXIV. IN THE WOODS THE history of mushrooms reduced to a rule for cooking which will save us from grave dangers was enough for Simon, Mathieu, Jean, and the others, who lacked time to hear more; but Emile, Jules, and Claire were not satisfied: they wished to extend their knowledge on these strange vegetables. So their uncle took them one day to a beech wood near the village. The trees, several hundred years old and with their branches meeting at a great height, formed an arch of foliage through which, here and there, shone a ray of sunlight. Their smooth trunks, with white bark, gave the effect of enormous columns sustaining the weight of an immense building full of shade and silence. On the lofty summits crows cawed while smoothing their feathers. Occasionally a redheaded green woodpecker, surprised at its work, which consists of pecking the wormy wood with its beak to make the insects come out that it feeds on, gave a cry of alarm and flew off like a dart. In the midst of the moss with which the ground was carpeted were here and there numbers of mushrooms. Some were round, smooth, and white. Jules could not admire them enough; he likened them in his imagination to eggs laid in a mossy hollow by some wandering hen. Others were glossy red, others bright fawn-color, and still others brilliant yellow. Some, just coming out of the ground, were enveloped in a kind of bag that tears open as the mushroom grows; some, more advanced, spread out like an open umbrella. Finally, there were many that had already begun to decay. In their fetid rottenness swarmed innumerable grubs, which later would become insects. After picking a number of the principal kinds, the party sat down at the foot of a beech, on the soft moss-carpet, and Uncle Paul spoke thus: “A mushroom is the blossom of a plant that lives under ground and is called by learned men mycelium. This subterranean plant is composed of white, slender, fragile threads, resembling in their entirety a large cobweb. If you pull up a mushroom carefully you will see at the base of its stalk, in the earth that clings to it, numerous white threads of the mycelium. Let us imagine a rosebush planted so as to leave nothing but the roses above ground. The buried bush will represent the subterranean mycelium; the roses, open to the air, will represent the blossoms of the mycelium, that is to say the mushrooms.” “A rosebush,” objected Jules, “has stout branches covered with leaves; the mushroom-plant, according to what I see, has nothing of the sort. It is a kind of moldiness that branches out in the ground in white veins.” “Those white veins, so delicate that one can hardly touch them without breaking them, form the subterranean plant, without leaves or roots. They lengthen little by little in the ground to a pretty good distance from the point of departure. Then, at a favorable moment, they produce little swellings which grow under ground, become mushrooms, and burst open their bed of earth to expand in the air. This structure explains to us why mushrooms grow in groups. Each group, with the mycelium that produces it, constitutes one and the same plant.” “I have seen groups of mushrooms in a perfect circle,” Claire remarked. “If the ground is of uniform character and nowhere hinders the propagation of the subterranean vegetable in one direction rather than in another, the mycelium spreads equally on all sides, and so produces circular groups of mushrooms, which the country people sometimes call witches’ circles.” “Why witches’ circles?” asked Jules. “The ignorant and superstitious think they see an effect of witchcraft in this curious circular arrangement, whereas it is but the natural result of the uniformly equal development of the subterranean plant.” “Then there are no witches?” said Emile. “No, my dear. There are rogues who abuse the credulity of others; there are simpletons disposed to listen to them; but no one has preternatural powers.” “Since a mushroom is the blossom of a subterranean plant, of the mycelium, as you call it, must it not have stamens, pistils, ovaries?” Jules inquired. “A mushroom is in its way the blossom of a kind of vegetable, but its structure has nothing in common with that of ordinary flowers. It is a structure of a special sort, very complicated, very curious, which I shall pass by in silence so as not to overcharge your memory. “The chief function of a flower, you know, is to produce seeds. Well, the mushroom too produces seeds, but so small, so different from others, that they have a special name,—spores. Spores are the seed of the mushroom, just as acorns are the seed of the oak. That is worthy of some further explanation. Mushrooms “The mushrooms most familiar to us are composed of a sort of dome supported by a stalk. This dome is called the cap. The under side of the cap takes various shapes, of which the principal are these: Sometimes it is composed of gills which radiate from the center to the border; sometimes it is pierced by an infinity of little holes, which are the orifices of as many tubes joined together in a common mass; sometimes it is covered with fine points like those of a cat’s tongue. “Mushrooms that have the under side of the cap formed of radiating gills are called agarics; those pierced with little holes, boleti; those covered with little points, hydnei. Agarics and boleti are the most common.” Here Uncle Paul took, one by one, the mushrooms they had gathered and showed his nephews the gills of the agarics, the holes of the boleti, and the points of the hydnei. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2018). The Story-book of Science. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56795/pg56795-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

IN THE WOODS

THE SENSE OF SMELL

INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS

Field, Forest and Farm by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE ORIGIN OF COAL CHAPTER LX. THE ORIGIN OF COAL “Coal is a fuel of inestimable value. By the heat which it develops in burning it gives movement to divers machines. It makes the locomotive move over the iron rails and the steamship traverse the ocean. With its aid metals are worked, fabrics woven, pottery is baked, glassware manufactured, newspapers and books are printed, tools are shaped, and all sorts of instruments necessary to our daily activities are produced. The arts and crafts have no more powerful auxiliary. If we had to substitute the heat of wood for that of coal, our forests would prove insufficient. “What, then, is the origin of this combustible, which feeds an immense industry and is the source of incalculable riches? Ordinarily a piece of coal has no great interest for the eye. It is black, lustrous, formless, friable, without any definite character to afford us instruction. One can learn more from the fragments of refuse rejected by the miner as too poor in carbon, fragments in which the predominating element is a kind of dark stone that splits in sheets. In these a surprise is lurking that will tell us the secret of coal. “These laminate blocks, stone rather than coal, [ ]show us, on the slabs that have just been separated by the blow of the hammer, various wonderful designs in which we recognize without hesitation the imprint or mold of some form of vegetation. There is no mistake about it; a plant has left its remains there; we behold in very truth the leaf with its subdivisions and its veins. It is all there, even to the minutest detail. It is really the leaf minus the green color, for which is substituted the black of the coal. We should not obtain a more exact representation if we ourselves took the imprint of some sufficiently firm leaf on a soft plaque of clay. 337 Fern Imprints from the Coal Epoch “Pending the time when some lucky chance shall bring you into the neighborhood of a coal mine where you can obtain a laminate block that you can [ ]split into sheets and thus discover for yourselves the vegetable imprints there concealed, here is a picture that will show you what these curious markings look like. 338 “What do you think of it? Have we not here what seems to be actual leaves, and very elegant ones too? They are spread out with a care that would appear to indicate the work of a painstaking human hand. Yes, these are real leaves, but turned to carbon and firmly incrusted in their bed of black rock. “Similar imprints are found in great abundance in all coal mines. Certain coal-deposits, several meters thick, are composed entirely of them, the smallest chip that one splits off bearing on each face the markings of foliage. The whole is nothing but an accumulation of leaves and broken tree-trunks. An entire forest, heaped up in one pile, would not present an equal mass. Thus it is demonstrated that in coal are preserved the remains of ancient vegetation. “During great floods the rivers of former ages swept away in enormous masses the trees they had uprooted along the banks, together with the foliage washed into the current by the heavy rains; then all this refuse was deposited in the mud at the river’s mouth, or in some lake or bay. Thus were amassed here and there, under the water, during a long series of centuries, the remains of primitive forests. “Fine clay became packed about these masses, molding itself with delicate accuracy around even the [ ]smallest leaf; the weight of the superimposed mud crushed the softened tree-trunks; a gradual decay converted the whole into charcoal; and finally the ligneous mass became a layer of coal. Later the waters changed their bed, driven elsewhere by upheavals in the surface of the earth, and the previously inundated bottom-lands became solid ground in which to-day we find coal under massive strata of rock. 339 “Is it possible to distinguish the forms of plant-life whence has come our coal? Yes, it is possible, so well preserved are the details of that life in the products of our mines. Now an examination of the imprints left to us in the laminæ or leaves of our stone book shows us that the plant-life of those remote ages in which the coal was accumulated bore not the least resemblance to that of our present forests. And this difference was to be expected. The animal life has changed; why, then, should the plant-life have remained unaltered?” “Didn’t they have trees then like ours?” asked Jules. “No,” replied his uncle; “we do not find in our coal mines any signs of the existence of trees resembling those of our day. Nowhere in the world, in fact, are there now to be seen any such forms of plant-life as flourished so abundantly in those remote ages; or if any still exist that are at all analogous, they must be sought in the islands of the tropical seas. No vegetable growth of that coal epoch, whether tree or bush or simple cluster of leaves, [ ]bore flowers. The splendors of the corolla were not to appear until a later period. 340 “For the most part there were only tall stems or stalks, without branches, of equal size from top to bottom, and furrowed with channels or dotted with large points arranged in spiral lines. At the top a tuft of enormous leaves balanced itself, the under surface of each leaf bearing elongated or rounded swellings containing a fine brown dust, each grain of which was a seed for the propagation of the plant. “Plants that thus bear their seeds, or spores, in powdery masses on the under side of the leaves are called ferns. A number of species flourish in our part of the world. They are unpretentious plants, fond of shade and coolness. Old damp walls, rocks that drip water drop by drop, the darkest corners of our woods—these are the customary haunts of the fern. “A short underground stock and a sparse cluster of leaves, very elegantly shaped, it is true, constitute our native ferns. Those of the coal epoch were of a different pattern. Some of them displayed at the top of a stem as tall as our poplars a cluster of leaves five or six meters in length. They are called tree-ferns, and they contributed the greater part of the coal-forming material. “The accompanying illustration will give you an idea of what the vegetation of that period must have looked like. What strange trees! How different from our oaks and maples and hemlocks! The soil is a liquid mud in which lie and rot the tree-trunks [ ]prostrated by the weight of years; the air is sultry, moist, heavy, strongly impregnated with a moldy smell; and the density of the foliage barely admits a few sunbeams to flicker over the surface of the stagnant pools. 341 Imaginary View of a Forest of the Coal Epoch “Everywhere profound silence. No song of bird bursts forth from the foliage of those tall fern-trees, for the bird is not yet in existence. No foot of quadruped treads the ground, for the quadruped with its coat of fur will not come until much later. Some lizards lurking in the rock-fissures, some large dragon-flies at the water’s edge, some odious scorpions under the heaps of dead leaves—that is all the animal-life to be found in the forests that gave us our coal.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). Field, Forest and Farm. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67813/pg67813-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

THE ORIGIN OF COAL

THE FLIGHT OF “THE BARSOOM”

EVIDENCE OF THE DESCENT OF MAN FROM SOME LOWER FORM

A Short History of the World, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS The land during this Age of Fishes was apparently quite lifeless. Crags and uplands of barren rock lay under the sun and rain. There was no real soil—for as yet there were no earthworms which help to make a soil, and no plants to break up the rock particles into mould; there was no trace of moss or lichen. Life was still only in the sea. Over this world of barren rock played great changes of climate. The causes of these changes of climate were very complex and they have still to be properly estimated. The changing shape of the earth’s orbit, the gradual shifting of the poles of rotation, changes in the shapes of the continents, probably even fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, now conspired to plunge great areas of the earth’s surface into long periods of cold and ice and now again for millions of years spread a warm or equable climate over this planet. There seem to have been phases of great internal activity in the world’s history, when in the course of a few million years accumulated upthrusts would break out in lines of volcanic eruption and upheaval and rearrange the mountain and continental outlines of the globe, increasing the depth of the sea and the height of the mountains and exaggerating the extremes of climate. And these would be followed by vast ages of comparative quiescence, when frost, rain and river would wear down the mountain heights and carry great masses of silt to fill and raise the sea bottoms and spread the seas, ever shallower and wider, over more and more of the land. There have been “high and deep” ages in the world’s history and “low and level” ages. The reader must dismiss from his mind any idea that the surface of the earth has been growing steadily cooler since its crust grew solid. After that much cooling had been achieved, the internal temperature ceased to affect surface conditions. There are traces of periods of superabundant ice and snow, of “Glacial Ages,” that is, even in the Azoic period. It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes, in a period of extensive shallow seas and lagoons, that life spread itself out in any effectual way from the waters on to the land. No doubt the earlier types of the forms that now begin to appear in great abundance had already been developing in a rare and obscure manner for many scores of millions of years. But now came their opportunity. A CARBONIFEROUS SWAMP A Coal Seam in the Making Plants no doubt preceded animal forms in this invasion of the land, but the animals probably followed up the plant emigration very closely. The first problem that the plant had to solve was the problem of some sustaining stiff support to hold up its fronds to the sunlight when the buoyant water was withdrawn; the second was the problem of getting water from the swampy ground below to the tissues of the plant, now that it was no longer close at hand. The two problems were solved by the development of woody tissue which both sustained the plant and acted as water carrier to the leaves. The Record of the Rocks is suddenly crowded by a vast variety of woody swamp plants, many of them of great size, big tree mosses, tree ferns, gigantic horsetails and the like. And with these, age by age, there crawled out of the water a great variety of animal forms. There were centipedes and millipedes; there were the first primitive insects; there were creatures related to the ancient king crabs and sea scorpions which became the earliest spiders and land scorpions, and presently there were vertebrated animals. SKULL OF A LABYRINTHODONT, CAPITOSAURUS Nat. Hist. Mus. Some of the earlier insects were very large. There were dragon flies in this period with wings that spread out to twenty-nine inches. In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted themselves to breathing air. Hitherto all animals had breathed air dissolved in water, and that indeed is what all animals still have to do. But now in divers fashions the animal kingdom was acquiring the power of supplying its own moisture where it was needed. A man with a perfectly dry lung would suffocate to-day; his lung surfaces must be moist in order that air may pass through them into his blood. The adaptation to air breathing consists in all cases either in the development of a cover to the old-fashioned gills to stop evaporation, or in the development of tubes or other new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and moistened by a watery secretion. The old gills with which the ancestral fish of the vertebrated line had breathed were inadaptable to breathing upon land, and in the case of this division of the animal kingdom it is the swimming bladder of the fish which becomes a new, deep-seated breathing organ, the lung. The kind of animals known as amphibia, the frogs and newts of to-day, begin their lives in the water and breathe by gills; and subsequently the lung, developing in the same way as the swimming bladder of many fishes do, as a baglike outgrowth from the throat, takes over the business of breathing, the animal comes out on land, and the gills dwindle and the gill slits disappear. (All except an outgrowth of one gill slit, which becomes the passage of the ear and ear-drum.) The animal can now live only in the air, but it must return at least to the edge of the water to lay its eggs and reproduce its kind. SKELETON OF A LABYRINTHODONT: THE ERYOPS Nat. Hist. Mus. All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and plants belonged to the class amphibia. They were nearly all of them forms related to the newts of to-day, and some of them attained a considerable size. They were land animals, it is true, but they were land animals needing to live in and near moist and swampy places, and all the great trees of this period were equally amphibious in their habits. None of them had yet developed fruits and seeds of a kind that could fall on land and develop with the help only of such moisture as dew and rain could bring. They all had to shed their spores in water, it would seem, if they were to germinate. It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful science, comparative anatomy, to trace the complex and wonderful adaptations of living things to the necessities of existence in air. All living things, plants and animals alike, are primarily water things. For example all the higher vertebrated animals above the fishes, up to and including man, pass through a stage in their development in the egg or before birth in which they have gill slits which are obliterated before the young emerge. The bare, water-washed eye of the fish is protected in the higher forms from drying up by eyelids and glands which secrete moisture. The weaker sound vibrations of air necessitate an ear-drum. In nearly every organ of the body similar modifications and adaptations are to be detected, similar patchings-up to meet aerial conditions. This Carboniferous age, this age of the amphibia, was an age of life in the swamps and lagoons and on the low banks among these waters. Thus far life had now extended. The hills and high lands were still quite barren and lifeless. Life had learnt to breathe air indeed, but it still had its roots in its native water; it still had to return to the water to reproduce its kind. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). A Short History of the World. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11870/11870-h/11870-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE AGE OF THE COAL SWAMPS

The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE § 1 Life and water Wherever the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity. The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against which at first it had no protection. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides, any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep its moisture during hours of low tide of drought met with every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches in the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved of course in the water) and light. No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture in our lungs; and all our food must be liquefied before it can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which are always under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water, must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from drying up. Before the seaweeds could creep up out of the Early Palæozoic seas into {v1-24} the intertidal line of the beach, they had to develop a tougher outer skin to hold their moisture. Before the ancestor of the sea scorpion could survive being left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour. The trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled up into balls, far less as a protection against each other and any other enemies they may have possessed, than as a precaution against drying. And when presently, as we ascend the Palæozoic rocks, the fish appear, first of all the backboned or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a number of them are already adapted by the protection of their gills with gill covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming-bladder, to face the same risk of temporary stranding. Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves to intertidal conditions were also bringing themselves into a region of brighter light, and light is very necessary and precious to all plants. Any development of structure that would stiffen them and hold them up to the light, so that instead of crumpling and flopping when the waters receded, they would stand up outspread, was a great advantage. And so we find them developing fibre and support, and the beginning of woody fibre in them. The early plants reproduced by soft spores, or half-animal “gametes,” that were released in water, were distributed by water and could only germinate under water. The early plants were tied, and most lowly plants to-day are tied, by the conditions of their life cycle, to water. But here again there was a great advantage to be got by the development of some protection of the spores from drought that would enable reproduction to occur without submergence. So soon as a species could do that, it could live and reproduce and spread above the high-water mark, bathed in light and out of reach of the beating and distress of the waves. The main classificatory divisions of the larger plants mark stages in the release of plant life from the necessity of submergence by the development of woody support and of a method of reproduction that is more and more defiant of drying up. The lower plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The lower mosses must live in damp, and even the development of the spore of the ferns demands at certain stages extreme wetness. The highest plants have carried freedom from {v1-25} water so far that they can live and reproduce if only there is some moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their problem of living out of water altogether. The essentials of that problem were worked out through the vast æons of the Proterozoic Age and the early Palæozoic Age by nature’s method of experiment and trial. Then slowly, but in great abundance, a variety of new plants began to swarm away from the sea and over the lower lands, still keeping to swamp and lagoon and watercourse as they spread. § 2 The earliest animals And after the plants came the animal life. There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is no sort of land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of a water-inhabiting being which has been adapted through the modification and differentiation of species to life out of the water. This adaptation is attained in various ways. In the case of the land scorpion the gill-plates of the primitive sea scorpion are sunken into the body so as to make the lung-books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of crustaceans, such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected by the gill-cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches and air tubes, the tracheal tubes, which carry the air all over the body before it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated land animals, the gills of the ancestral fish were first supplemented and then replaced by a bag-like growth from the throat, the primitive lung swimming-bladder. To this day there survive certain mudfish which enable us to understand very clearly the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked their way out of the water. These creatures (e.g. the African lung fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a rainy full season and a dry season, during which the rivers become mere ditches of baked mud. During the rainy season these fish swim about and breathe by gills like any other fish. As the waters of the river evaporate, these fish bury themselves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the creature keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing air, which passes into its swimming-bladder. The Australian lung fish, {v1-26} when it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant pools, and the water has become deaerated and foul, rises to the surface and gulps air. A newt in a pond does exactly the same thing. These creatures still remain at the transition stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the higher vertebrated animals were released from their restriction to an under-water life. The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their life history all the stages in the process of this liberation. They are still dependent on water for their reproduction; their eggs must be laid in sunlit water, and there they must develop. The young tadpole has branching external gills that wave in the water; then a gill cover grows back over them and forms a gill chamber. Then, as the creature’s legs appear and its tail is absorbed, it begins to use its lungs, and its gills dwindle and vanish. The adult frog can live all the rest of its days in the air, but it can be drowned if it is kept steadfastly below water. When we come to the reptile, however, we find an egg which is protected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg produces young which breathe by lungs from the very moment of hatching. The reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant in its freedom from the necessity to pass any stage of its life cycle in water. The later Palæozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give us the materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading of life over the land. Geographically, all round the northern half of the world it was an age of lagoons and shallow seas very favourable to this invasion. The new plants, now that they had acquired the power to live this new aerial life, developed with an extraordinary richness and variety. Some Reptiles of the Late Palæozoic Age There were as yet no true flowering plants, no grasses nor trees that shed their leaves in winter; the first “flora” consisted {v1-27} of great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns, and kindred vegetation. Many of these plants took the form of huge-stemmed trees, of which great multitudes of trunks survive fossilized to this day. Some of these trees were over a hundred feet high, of orders and classes now vanished from the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in which no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green slime and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind them. The abundant remains {v1-28} of these first swamp forests constitute the main coal-measures of the world to-day. [10] [11] Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled and glided and flew the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four-winged creatures, often very big, some of them having wings measuring a foot in length. There were numerous dragon flies—one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a wing span of twenty-nine inches! There were also a great variety of flying cockroaches. Scorpions abounded, and a number of early spiders, which, however, had no spinnerets for web making. Land snails appeared. So too did the first-known step of our own ancestry upon land, the amphibia. As we ascend the higher levels of the Later Palæozoic record, we find the process of air adaptation has gone as far as the appearance of true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia. [12] The land life of the Upper Palæozoic Age was the life of a green swamp forest without flowers or birds or the noises of modern insects. There were no big land beasts at all; wallowing amphibia and primitive reptiles were the very highest creatures that life had so far produced. Whatever land lay away from the water or high above the water was still altogether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water of its beginning. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2014). The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45368/45368-h/45368-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE

The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES Now here it will be well to put plainly certain general facts about this new thing, life, that was creeping in the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early Palæozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space. Life differs from all things whatever that are without life in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful differences among living things to-day, but all living things past and present agree in possessing a certain power of growth, all living things take nourishment, all living things move about as they feed and grow, though the movement may be no more than the spread of roots through the soil, or of branches in the air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they give rise to other living things, either by growing and then dividing or by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing young. Reproduction is a characteristic of life. No living thing goes on living forever. There seems to be a limit of growth for every kind of living thing. Among very small and simple living things, such as that microscopic blob of living matter the Amæba, an individual may grow and then divide completely into two new individuals, which again may divide in their turn. Many other microscopic creatures live actively for a time, grow, and then become quiet and inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break up wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which are released and scattered and again grow into the likeness of their parent. Among more complex creatures the reproduction is not usually such simple division, though division does occur even in the case of many creatures {v1-17} big enough to be visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost all larger beings is that the individual grows up to a certain limit of size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines and stops. As it reaches its full size it matures, it begins to produce young, which are either born alive or hatched from eggs. But all of its body does not produce young. Only a special part does that. After the individual has lived and produced offspring for some time, it ages and dies. It does so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to its life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants as they are of animals. And they are not true of things that do not live. Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but they have no set limits of growth or size, they do not move of their own accord and there is no stir within them. Crystals once formed may last unchanged for millions of years. There is no reproduction for any non-living thing. This growth and dying and reproduction of living things leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which a living thing produces are either directly, or after some intermediate stages and changes (such as the changes of a caterpillar and butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they are never exactly like it or like each other. There is always a slight difference, which we speak of as individuality. A thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thousand next year; these latter will look to us almost exactly like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butterflies because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world now are descended from the men and women of A.D. 1800, but not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true of every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every species changes all its individualities in each generation. That is as true of all the minute creatures that swarmed and reproduced and died in the Archæozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it is of men to-day. Every species of living things is continually dying and being born again, as a multitude of fresh individuals. {v1-18} Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation of living things of any species. Some of the individuals will be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or less suited. In particular single cases any sort of luck or accident may occur, but on the whole the better equipped individuals will live and grow up and reproduce themselves and the weaker will as a rule go under. The latter will be less able to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a species, a picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and a preference for the strong and suitable. This process is called Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest. [8] It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow and breed and die, that every species, so long as the conditions under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more perfectly fitted to those conditions in every generation. But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of individual that used to succeed may now fail to succeed and a sort of individual that could not get on at all under the old conditions may now find its opportunity. These species will change, therefore, generation by generation; the old sort of individual that used to prosper and dominate will fail and die out and the new sort of individual will become the rule,—until the general character of the species changes. Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey-brown animal living in a bitterly cold land which is usually under snow. Such individuals as have the thickest, whitest fur will be least hurt by the cold, less seen by their enemies, and less conspicuous as they seek their prey. The fur of this species will thicken and its whiteness increase with every generation, until there is no advantage in carrying any more fur. Diagram of Life in the Later Palæozoic Age. Life is creeping out of the water. An insect like a dragon fly is shown. There were amphibia like gigantic newts and salamanders, and even primitive reptiles in these swamps. Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into the land, sweeps away the snows, makes white creatures glaringly visible during the greater part of the year and thick fur an encumbrance. Then every individual with a touch of brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will find itself at an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a handicap. There will be {v1-20} a weeding out of the white in favour of the brown in each generation. If this change of climate come about too quickly, it may of course exterminate the species altogether; but if it come about gradually, the species, although it may have a hard time, may yet be able to change itself and adapt itself generation by generation. This change and adaptation is called the Modification of Species. Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the lands inhabited by the species; maybe it occurs only on one side of some great arm of the sea or some great mountain range or such-like divide, and not on the other. A warm ocean current like the Gulf Stream may be deflected, and flow so as to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the other still cold. Then on the cold side this species will still be going on to its utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat. At the same time there will probably be other changes going on; a difference in the paws perhaps, because one half of the species will be frequently scratching through snow for its food, while the other will be scampering over brown earth. Probably also the difference of climate will mean differences in the sort of food available, and that may produce differences in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the changes in the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs and all the internal chemistry of the body. And so through all the structure of the creature. A time will come when the two separated varieties of this formerly single species will become so unlike each other as to be recognizably different species. Such a splitting up of a species in the course of generations into two or more species is called the Differentiation of Species. And it should be clear to the reader that given these elemental facts of life, given growth and death and reproduction with individual variation in a world that changes, life must change in this way, modification and differentiation must occur, old species must disappear, and new ones appear. We have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of animal, but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of all life, and equally true of the soft {v1-21} jellies and simple beginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas. The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun rose and set in only a quarter of the time it now takes, when the warm seas poured in great tides over the sandy and muddy shores of the rocky lands and the air was full of clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and species must have developed at a great pace. Life was probably as swift and short as the days and years; the generations, which natural selection picked over, followed one another in rapid succession. Natural selection is a slower process with man than with any other creature. It takes twenty years or more before an ordinary human being in western Europe grows up and reproduces. In the case of most animals the new generation is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and lowly beings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, growth and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours or even of a few brief minutes. Modification and differentiation of species must accordingly have been extremely rapid, and life had already developed a very great variety of widely contrasted forms before it began to leave traces in the rocks. The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore, with any group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and existing creatures are descended. It begins in the midst of the game, with nearly every main division of the animal kingdom already represented. Plants are already plants, and animals animals. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on for some time. The brachiopods are discovered already in their shells, accepting and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters and mussels do now; the great water scorpions crawl among the seaweeds, the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and scuttle away. In that ancient mud and among those early weeds there was probably as rich and abundant and active a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditch-water to-day. In the ocean waters, too, down to the utmost downward limit to {v1-22} which light could filter, then as now, there was an abundance of minute and translucent, and in many cases phosphorescent, beings. [9] But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed with life, the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as we can guess, a stony wilderness without a trace of life. {v1-23} About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2014). The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45368/45368-h/45368-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

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