Buzzzz: interesting thing I just read
No, it's not about vuvuzelas.
Currently, the top toilet-tank book is Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. This morning I'd gotten as far as page 81, where I found this:
" . . . Jerry Bromenshenk had his own set of data showing IAPV [Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus] was not a significant player [in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)]. Bromenshenk had teamed up with Charles Wick, an engineer who had designed a machine for the U.S. Army that could detect new viruses. In the era of germ warfare, the Army thought it might be a good idea to have that kind of machine around. The machine depends on the fact that each virus has a distinct size [emphasis mine], and that viruses are some of the smallest things out there (about one hundred times smaller than a bacterium and ten thousand times smaller than a grain of pollen). If you make your bee slurpee [grind frozen honeybees up to make a sort of cold soup out of them] and strain out all the larger particles, you can spray what's left into a tube where lasers count the number of particles of each size. (At least, you can if you have one of Wick's machines, of which there are six in the world.) You don't have to know what you're looking for. Deformed wing virus (DWV) is 20.9 nanometers (mm) [sic: a nanometer is equal to 10-9 meters, or 10 ångströms] in size, so you know every 20.0 nm particle is DWV, but you might find a lot of particles of a different size and know you've got some new, unidentified virus."
Hmm . . . I wonder if the you know you want to* is associated with a virus. Judging from all the flack over the last World Cup, maybe it is. ;-)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*I do so love to add these little literary sandtraps . . .
Currently, the top toilet-tank book is Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. This morning I'd gotten as far as page 81, where I found this:
" . . . Jerry Bromenshenk had his own set of data showing IAPV [Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus] was not a significant player [in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)]. Bromenshenk had teamed up with Charles Wick, an engineer who had designed a machine for the U.S. Army that could detect new viruses. In the era of germ warfare, the Army thought it might be a good idea to have that kind of machine around. The machine depends on the fact that each virus has a distinct size [emphasis mine], and that viruses are some of the smallest things out there (about one hundred times smaller than a bacterium and ten thousand times smaller than a grain of pollen). If you make your bee slurpee [grind frozen honeybees up to make a sort of cold soup out of them] and strain out all the larger particles, you can spray what's left into a tube where lasers count the number of particles of each size. (At least, you can if you have one of Wick's machines, of which there are six in the world.) You don't have to know what you're looking for. Deformed wing virus (DWV) is 20.9 nanometers (mm) [sic: a nanometer is equal to 10-9 meters, or 10 ångströms] in size, so you know every 20.0 nm particle is DWV, but you might find a lot of particles of a different size and know you've got some new, unidentified virus."
Hmm . . . I wonder if the you know you want to* is associated with a virus. Judging from all the flack over the last World Cup, maybe it is. ;-)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*I do so love to add these little literary sandtraps . . .