Pests With a Special Advantage
Since we can't say anything about presidential candidates, even the obviously insane ones, we have been doing more science topics. This time we talked about horizontal gene transfer, which can cause big changes in various life forms. We specifically talked about work that shows some extraordinary genetic changes in a pest known as a whitefly. On the program we went fairly far afield of the narrow topic of the whitefly's genome, and we hope that people who listened enjoyed the program. I'll try to finish up this Web page in the near future.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday August 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Whiteflies do a lot of damage to all sorts of plants around the world, including food crops and other economically important plants. They suck the sap out of a plant which greatly weakens or even kills it, and they leave behind a sticky excrement that attracts other pests and which will typically host molds. Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have been studying the whitefly pest and they have discovered some extraordinary things about whiteflies.
One important thing that the scientists discovered was that whiteflies have as very sophisticated way of handling the nitrogen waste that inevitably results from cells creating proteins. Some insects have bacteria in them that deal with the waste nitrogen. The whitefly has taken the genes that the bacteria use to metabolize the nitrogen and they've incorporated in into their genomes! |So these insects have bacterial DNA as a part of their DNA. It is theorized that viruses transferred those genes from a bacteria to a whitefly millions of years ago and the whiteflies have been the beneficiaries of that action, called horizontal gene transfer
ever since. Those bacterial genes, two of them, allow the whitefly to either get rid of or use the nitrogen waste on their own, without having to rely on symbiotic bacteria. This is quite an advantage to the whitefly.
Another discovery the Scientists made as that the whitefly has also coopted some plant genes into it genome. They specifically have incorporated genes that allow the plants, and now the whiteflies, to not get damaged by the toxins that the plants use as insecticides. Two well known insecticide that plants make toe defend against insect depredation are caffeine and nicotine. But there are a lot of other insecticides that various plants make to keep insects from devouring them.
Whiteflies are known to bring viruses from one plant to another and it's possible that one or more of those viruses contributed the antidote to plant toxins to the whitefly genome in the very distant past.
The scientists who did the study of the whiteflies and discovered their interesting genetic makeup are speculating that knowledge of those two genes the insects got from bacteria, and which make the whitefly genome unique, could prove to be vulnerability if scientists can base some sort of insecticide on those two genes. Such an insecticide wouldn't harm other insects, and maybe it wouldn't hard mammals either.
We're seeing genetics used to try and deal with diseases and now we may see genetics used to reduce the damage caused by a major insect pest. I just hope that they do a lot of testing to make sure that only the whiteflies are effected by this genetic bomb.
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We let everyone know that we are not allowed, under section 399 of the Communications Act, to even mention anyone who's running for public office while the election and campaigning is going on. This means we can't say anything about Donnie "Bonespur" Trump on the air, at least we can't say anything about him until our November 9, program, if we're still on the air by then.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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