Who "Owns" Radioactive Waste?

from the November 24th Asahi Shimbun:

During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer "owned" the radioactive substances.

“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.

You can read the rest of the article here.

TEPCO's position is as ridiculous as Chichikov's in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls.

Friday Night

from Saké: A Drinker's Guide

Silently, Passing By

Persimmon

Hachiya. Furry feeling on the tongue before ripe. Astringent. Must wait till ready to burst to eat.

Yucca, Yucca Moths, and Bogus Yucca Moths

Yucca is not native to Japan, but it does well here in our area. This one has been planted in a cozy, reflecting spot against a wall.

It does well with this one caveat — there's no one around to pollinate it, so any plant you see is at an evolutionary dead end. The Yucca in the United States, Mexico, and Caribbean rely on female moths of the genus Tegeticula to deposit pollen into the stigma of each flower. Without these moths, and absent anyone to hand pollinate them, the flowers won't produce seeds.

In their native habitat they are also host — and I love this term — to "bogus yucca moths," smaller moths that reside in the relative safety of the flowers, but don't do any of the heavy lifting/pollinating work.

My guess is that some day in the misty future, these "bogus" moths will — like the much-maligned and removed appendix in the human body — be shown to serve some useful purpose and will have to be renamed.

The Right Enzymes

Echosquirrel and I have this running dispute on how long it takes to digest a meal. I've always tended to think that at most it takes a day, whereas she argues that the whole process from intake to elimination of wastes takes a few days. While doing a little basic research to find out that she is right — it takes 72 hours on average (the large intestine is not 9 meters long for nothing) — I also discovered that many Japanese people carry an enzyme in their gut not found in Westerners' for digesting seaweed.

According to a May, 2010 article by Karen Schwarzberg and Mike Gurney in the Microbe Blog Small Things Considered,

the Japanese can digest their nori (Porphyra) courtesy of the particular strains of B. plebeius that they carry, strains that are not found in North Americans. Furthermore, genomic evidence suggests that the initial acquisition of the β-porphyranase genes by B. plebeius was by horizontal transfer from a marine Bacteroidetes. The likely site for the transfer might well have been within the human GI tract since such Bacteroidetes are present on the uncooked seaweeds that have been avidly eaten by the Japanese since at least the eighth century. The transfer would have provided the host with a selective advantage: the ability to metabolize and derive energy from a frequently-eaten carbohydrate source that others in the population could not digest. Interestingly, the paper (Hehemann, Nature) reports an incident of transfer from mother to infant, implying that we can pass those modified bacteria to close family members and perhaps others.

I don't have any particular problems digesting nori or the various other seaweeds I ingest on an almost daily basis.

Here's hoping I have the right enzymes.

November Flowers

I've been seeing these here and there about town the past few days, but I haven't been able to identify them yet. Not immortalized enough to be in the haiku flower book; not tasty enough to make the edible plant guide; not pedestrian enough to grace the field flower guide.

**** after writing these lines I decided to do a quick Google blekko search in Japanese — don't know why I didn't start with that — and quickly found out who they are: koutei dahlia (皇帝ダリア) or Dahlia imperialis, native to Central America.