It’s a bad translation using a more modern meaning of “erdapfel” instead of a medieval one. Could easily be a very local colloquialism instead of a widespread name.
To my eye it looks like a melon or gourd plant. It’s definitely not a tuber (the next drawing shows an underground bulb).
Topinambour would have been available in the middle ages. Confusion with potato by the modern reader is understandable, as a topinambour does look similar to a potato, and some German dialects (e.g. Swiss dialects) name potatoes "Erdapfel".
> Topinambour would have been available in the middle ages.
No, Helianthus tuberosus [1] aka "topinambur" is Jerusalem artichoke which would not have been available at the time. It's a New World crop just like the potato.
We're talking about a book written in 1462, before the Columbian exchange. The plant wasn't introduced to Europe until the early 17th century.
The reason I think it's a heirloom melon variety is threefold: a) "earth apple" fits because melons grow on the ground, b) there are green melons with yellow and pink stripes/patches, with the same elongated fruit shape, c) vines and leaf shape.
Hello, OP here. We didn’t yet have access to a proper critical commentary and did our best with the image captions, although our best was a rather poor job in this case — much trickier than anticipated. I went to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek today for research and new captions will go live tomorrow. (Although even the experts are confused as to what the “Jerusalem artichoke” image is supposed to be — they suggest watermelon or cucumber.)
Wiktionary says of Erdapfel (which OP admittedly with '?' wasn't sure how to translate):
> From Middle High German ertapfel, erdapfel, ertöpfel, erdöpfel, ertaphel (“mandrake, cucumber, pumpkin, melon”), from Old High German erdapful, erdaphul (“pumpkin, squash, melon”)
Not really, their margins typically wind up comparably with other manufacturing. They just have way way higher costs. Modern drugs are expensive, for a ton of reasons.
> 10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day.
It would be about $2.75 per day, an insignificant amount, but it's much worse than that because you earn it all at once at the end of the ten-year period. So you're making (almost) $2.75 a day toward the end of the period, and a lot less than that toward the beginning.
Really though, it's more a sort of diligence bonus on top of the regular earnings he makes from his teeth manufacturing business. Looked at that way, it's pretty impressive quickly obtain an otherwise lost 10-15K per decade as opposed to just losing money on carpet removal once a decade. And all of it for, what? a few hours of work?
Yeah, it's partly a tradeoff for convenience. The carpet helps capture dust which makes everything more breathable in the lab as well. I'm sure bigger labs have more sophisticated facilities, but he's just one guy in his attic.
Carpet is probably the best thing for it, since the dust will work its way down in and stay there instead of sticking to your shoes and winding up all over the city.
Sanders killed anyone. He was involved in a shootout at a gas station, and a gas station employee got shot by his shootout opponent and killed, which effectively won Sanders the turf war.
60% is freaking nothing in protein space. Like, that's not something to brag about. I could go through and hand edit GFP to 60% identity and get basically GFP still functional at the end.
In grad school, I worked on proteins that were 12%-15% sequence identical but had sub 4 Å RMSDs once the structures were solved.
EDIT: Actually, bragging about it could be a nigerian prince thing, where they do it to scare away investors that might actually hold them to some standard.
I'm curious if you've looked into N-Glycolylneuraminic acid and whether that could be the issue? Does chicken cause an issue for you?
I'm sorry to hear about your Lupus diagnosis, and glad it's in remission. My doctor wanted to diagnose me with Lupus due to the facial rash and arthritis/joint pain, but I came back negative in all the bloodwork, which I think means about 98% sure don't have it. I found that I can treat the joint pain effectively with SSRIs (Fluoxetine, 20 mg is enough to wipe it out after a few weeks). My mother has MCAS and my sister and aunt have UC, so I feel like I'm tripping through a minefield trying to navigate whatever autoimmune issue this is....and I have a PhD in biochemistry.
I haven't looked into N-Glycolylneuraminic acid specifically. For me, all types of meats, including eggs, chicken, and lamb, increased my inflammation levels. From what I understand, correctly diagnosing immune diseases can be quite challenging. My doctor once said it’s more of an art than a science. Because my mother had lupus it was easy in my case. While I’m not against medications, they often come with side effects. For example, immunosuppressants are necessary for high inflammation but can increase the risk of cancer. Even SSRIs have side effects.
When I had pain, I tried both medications and dietary changes, using an engineering mindset to isolate variables. Although I listened to my doctor, I also took matters into my own hands and did my research. My doctor initially doubted that changing my diet would help but did recommend the Mediterranean diet. He still doesn’t believe that food helped since there’s no clinical research backing it, and it’s not something commonly taught in medical schools.
The best part about experimenting with food is that it's easy and inexpensive to test on oneself. In my case, I was fortunate that my joint pains allowed me to observe the effects of my dietary changes within a week or less. Initially, I expected results in a day or two, but I soon realized that I needed to experiment for at least a few weeks to see the full effects. These days, I consume small quantities of eggs every few weeks and haven't noticed any significant increase in inflammation.
One of my friends has APLS (antiphospholipid antibody syndrome), which can also occur as a secondary symptom of Lupus. All of her blood tests always come back negative due to the way APLS affects coagulation -- unless the bloodwork is cultured for at least two days. So if you have reason to suspect the test results may be incorrect, ask them to re-do the bloodwork as a long-term culture rather than the normal fast screening.
My father makes fake teeth, so for my wedding, and also my sister's wedding, he cast the rings out of old gold scraps he had lying around. It's maybe the one possession I have that I'm extremely sentimental about.
This is why you have more than one project. And also backup projects for those projects. Every mature lab should have a simple turn the crank project for each student that's got the biochemistry worked out, and is just a matter of collecting observations and doing lengthy data analysis. Those are the lifesavers when the ambitious ones fall through.
I must have been involved in ~20 projects in my PhD. Only 3-4 will ever be published.
This exactly. I filled hundreds of pages of behavioral data during my PhD. Although I don’t know the exact numbers, I’d wager that my publications came from only 20-25 pages of data.
If you anticipate low success rates, you can find success either through luck or through diligent experimentation with an expectation of null results. Null results which, by the way, can often improve your odds of downstream success.
Every lab usually has a few “I’ll bet it’ll work but I don’t have time to find out” projects.
But that’s actually a big part of doing independent research - using your time the most efficiently, so students need to get to the point where they have a dozen or so paths and they plan out the next year or two thinking about the best way to tackle them and “fail fast”.
Anyways, original text is here:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_07492/?st=gallery