Crater Lake's Wizard Island named for its shape resembling a sorcerer's hat

Wizard Island and Llao Rock (top right) named by William Steel, who initiated the national park idea of Crater Lake

Wherever standing on the rim surrounding Crater Lake, visitors marvel at the deep blue water and the green-gray island of the lake's west side: Wizard Island. This volcanic island appears cone-shaped whether you see it from the Sinnott_Lookout at Rim Village, a West Rim Drive spot or any other rim lookout. To get on to Wizard Island, you need to descend Cleetwood Cove Trail and get on a tour boat with an interpretive ranger. While approaching the cinder cone you may wonder how the island got its name.  

Crater Lake's early promoter William Gladstone Steel, who first visited Crater Lake in 1885, thought the cone looks like a sorcerer's hat [1]. He named the island Wizard Island and stuck to his witchcraft & sorcery approach by calling the crater on top of the island the Witches Cauldron [2,3]. 

Keywords: geography, geographic names, Wizard Island, Crater Lake National Park, Oregon.

References and more to explore
[1] William L. Sullivan: Trails of Crater Lake. Navillus Press, Eugene, Oregon, 2014. Note: see Hike 11.
[2] Crater Lake Institute: William Steel [www.craterlakeinstitute.com/cultural-history/smith-brothers-chronology/b-william-steel.htm].
[3]  Crater Lake Historic Resource Study: Names and Places of Crater Lake [www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/crla/hrs/hrsah.htm].

Thismia, a flowering-plant genus named after the English microscopist Thomas Smith

Smithia → a, h, i, i, m, s, t → Thismia

As the above line shows, the word Thismia is an anagram. It is a play on the last name of the English microscopist Thomas Smith (died ca. 1825) [1]. In the intriguing “Afterthoughts” section of his article “Where is Thismia americana?,” Robert H. Mohlenbrock gives further details [2]:

The genus Thismia was named by a botanist named William Griffith in 1844. He wanted to name it after a colleague named Smith, but did not think Smithia sounded scientific enough, so he scrambled the letters in Smith, added “ia” at the end, and came up with Thismia.

Something to remember for your next session of Botany Scrabble!

In many publications you will find Thismia species classified as members of the Burmanniaceae family. But since species of Thismia are so unique, most botanist now separate them, according to Mohlenbrock, into the Thismiaceae family. Thismia species are myco-heterotrophic plants, which lack chlorophyll and parasitize fungi for their food supply.

The mysterious North American species, Thismia americana, was last seen in 1916 [2]. But new species are still discovered during botanical surveys in tropical regions, such as Thismia betung-kerihunensis from West Kalimantan, Borneo [3] and Thismia puberula from Southern Vietnam [4].

By the way, the name Smithia was considered scientific enough by others to give this name to a genus of flowering plants in the legume family (Leguminosae or Fabaceae) [5].

Keywords: word play, botany, taxonmy, mycotrophic plants;  Burmanniaceae > Thismiaceae > Dioscoreales > Monocots > Angiosperms.

References and more to explore
[1] Flora of North America: Thismia [efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=1&taxon_id=132837].
[2] Robert H. Mohlenbrock: Where is Thismia americane? Natural History September 2016, 124 (8), pp. 42-44.
[3] Hirokazu Tsukaya and Hiroshi Okada: A New Species of Thismia (Thismiaceae) from Wast Kalimantan, Borneo. Systematic Botany 2012, 37 (1), pp. 53-57.
DOI: 10.1600/036364412X616639.
[4] Maxim Nuraliev, Anton Beer, Andrew Kuznetsov and Svetlana Kuznetsova: Thismia puberula (Thismiaceae), a new species from Southern Vietnam. Phytotaxa November 2015, 234 (2). DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.234.2.3.
[5] Wikipedia: Smithia [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithia].

Phylloxera vastatrix, meaning “devastator of vines”

Literally, Phylloxera vastatrix means dry-leaf devastator. The binomial term is composed of three words of the following origins: the Greek noun phyllon for leaf; the Greek/Hebrew adjective xeros for dry; and the Latin noun vastatrix for waster, ravager or devastator [1-3].

Phylloxera vastatrix refers to an observation made in the late 19th century in vineyards in France and other parts of vine-growing Europe. Healthy green leaves of vine plants suddenly turned red in midsummer, followed by the plant's drying and dying. In the 1860s la nouvelle maladie de la vigne was studied in affected vineyards in southern France. The French botanist Jules Émile Planchon and two other agricultural examiners unearthed dead vines, but couldn't find anything. Next, they inspected the roots of still healthy looking vines growing in neighborhood to the dead ones. They found those roots infected by pale-yellow bugs resembling winged termites. Maximillian Potter describes the then shocking news—of what the Planchon team found when they scanned the roots with magnifying glasses—as follows [4]:

As the team filed in their report, beneath the [magnifying] glass they found “not one, not ten, but hundreds, thousands” of tiny yellowish louses on the wood sucking the sap. Over the course of three days, every affected vineyard they visitied, in St.-Rémy, at Graveson, at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, among others, they found these insects, pucerons, which Planchon named Phylloxera vastatrix, meaning  “devastator of vines.”

This grapevine pest is today commonly called phylloxera or grape phylloxera. Its current scientific name is Daktulosphaira vitifoliae. Since its emergence as Phylloxera vastatrix it has been of considerable scientific interest and importance to viticultural enterprises [5].

Keywords: viticulture, entomolgy, insects, phylloxera plague, grapevine.

References and moreto explore
[1] phyllon [nameberry.com/babyname/Phyllon].
[2] xeros [www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Lexicon.show/ID/G3584/xeros.htm]
[3] vastatrix [latinlexicon.org/definition.php?p1=2062165 ].
[4] Maximillian Potter: Shadows in the Vineyard. Twelve, New York, first trade edition, July 2015; page 107.
[5] Astrid Forneck and Lars Huber: (A)sexual reproduction - a review of life cycles of grape phylloxera, Daktulosphaira vitifolia. Entomologica Experimentalis et Applicata, 2009, 131 , pp. 1-10. DOI: 10.1111/j.1570-7458.2008.00811.x.

VINE and WINE, a word pair with differences in pronunciation and meaning

The nouns vine and wine look similar and sound similar—they rhyme. Yet, the two words differ in pronunciation and meaning.  The beginning consonant in vine sounds like the one in the word violet. And the noun wine begins like the word white.

The semantic difference: Vine is the plant that produces grapes (vine berries). Wine is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting grape juice. The following sentence illustrates the relation and distinction between the two nouns:

The more a vine struggles, the better the vine and the wine.

Wine chemistry follows vine chemistry follows soil chemistry! The highlighted sentence above has been extracted from a much longer one in Maximillian Potter's “Shadows in the Vineyard,” comparing viticulture in Burgundy (France) and California. Here the complete sentence [1]:

Burgundians believe that some density of planting is good for the vines because it forces them to compete for nutrients; the more a vine struggles, so goes the cliché in Burgundy, the better the vine and the wine. 

Vine, wine and Germans
Germans have the masculine noun Wein for both the plant and the drink—vine and wine. You may have met Germans (like me from northern Germany, where climate & soil is not in favor of viticulture) struggling to say these two English words correctly. But there is help available on the Web [2].
Depending on context, the word vine may variously be translated into German as Weinstock or Rebstock (both masculine) or Weinrebe (feminine) when one wants to refer to the cultivated plant—a vineyard's grape vine, which is the common grape vine (Vitis vinifera).

Keywords: writing, spelling, pronunciation, German-English, grapevine.

References and more
[1] Maximillian Potter: Shadows in the Vineyard. Twelve, New York, first trade edition, July 2015; page 158.
[2] Recommended for German speakers: How to say VINE and WINE - American English Pronunciation Lesson [www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAgrYGbhtXg].

Brexit, short for “British exit” and costly for Great Britain and Europe

The portmanteau Brexit stands for “British exit.” This term mirrors the abbreviation Grexit, referring to the (potential) withdrawal of Greece from the Eurozone. While the Grexit, debated in context of the Greece debt crisis—and not wished for by most Greeks—has (for now) been avoided, the Brexit depends on the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum scheduled for June 23, 2016. The referendum will take place in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar.

If the majority of Britons are going to vote in favor of a Brexit, Great Britain will—more or less—be deprived of an active role in shaping the world around its isles. Escaping European bureaucracy and stepping aside EU regulations will not help in turning unwelcome constraints into advancing strategies.

For example, leaders in the U.K.'s biotech industry argue that a Brexit would create a significant research funding gap for biotech companies, since the U.K. contributes about 12% to the EU budget dedicated for science research, but receives 15% of that budget. And [1]: “A Brexit would also require a new U.K. drug authorization system and the uprooting of the London-based European Medicines Agency to an EU country.”

A large number of scientist, including Stephen Hawking, are concerned about the United Kingdom leaving the European Union [2]. The clock is ticking. Europe and the world is watching!

Keywords: plebiscite, British Euroscepticism, European Union.

Reference
[1] Alex Scott: Industry urges against Brexit. Chemical & Engineering News March 7, 2016, 94 (10), page 8.
[2] What would Brexit mean for Science? http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0310/What-would-Brexit-mean-for-science-video.

“Tree of Life” associations

The term Tree of Life is associated with words such as biodiversity, phylogeny and taxonomy. In the 1970s, Carl Woese and his coworkers began with studies that lead to the reorganization of whatever lives under the biologically grouped kingdoms [1]. Instead of using classifiers based on morphological and physiological data, they employed genetic data to establish relationships between different organisms. In 1977, Woese and Fox proposed eubacteria, archaebacteria and urkaryotes (now bacteria, archaea and eukarya) as the main branches of the tree; defining a three-domain system with various subdomains.

The Tree of Life continues to be rewritten—and refined. There are web sites dedicated to track and incorporate published (sub)trees and to provide information for their twigs and leaves [2,3]. A recent study initiated the automatic assembly and digitalization of published trees into a “complete” Tree of Life [2,4]. This Open Tree of Life can be updated via uploading. The underlying data can be downloaded for homework, analysis and phylogenetic research. The authors of the evolutionary tree study express the following hope [4]:  

This comprehensive tree will fuel fundamental research on the nature of biological diversity, ultimately providing up-to-date phylogenies for downstream applications in comparative biology, ecology, conservation biology, climate, change, agriculture, and genomics.

A supertree to save the world!

References and more to explore
[1] NovaNext: The Man Who Rewrote the Tree of Life [www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/carl-woese].
[2] Open Tree of Life: tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/argus/opentree3.0@1.
[3] TOLWeb: Tree of Life web project [tolweb.org/tree].
[4] Hincliff, C. E. et al.: Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life. PNAS 2015, 112 (41), DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1423041112.

A twisted, racetrack-shaped torus to generate and confine a plasma: the stellarator

A stellarator is a nuclear-fusion device invented in the early 1950s by American astrophysicist and plasma physicist Lyman Spitzer (1914-1997) [1,2]. The name of this complex device signifies a star machine, referring to the goal of harnessing the energy like a stellar object such as the sun. Therefore, this device is also called by the composed term stellarator-heliotron and the concept behind its design is named the stellarator-heliotron concept [3]—heliotron literally meaning sun automat.

In the plasma physics community a stellarator is also known as the black horse of reactors, since it is very difficult to build. It took 1.1 million construction hours (spent over 19 years, including times of construction setbacks) to built the world's largest experimental stellarator, the W7-X, which currently is ready to be fired up [4].

W7-X is short for Wendelstein 7-X, referring to the Wendelstein mountain in the Bavarian Alps south of Garching, where its predecessor Wendelstein 7-AS was built and tested [5]. The successor W7-X was assembled by researchers and engineers at the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP) in Greifswald, northeast Germany. Now being completed, W7-X—with large modular superconducting coils enabling steady-state plasma operations—is the world's largest fusion device of the stellarator type [5]:

Its objective is to investigate the suitability of this type for a power plant. It will also test an optimised magnetic field for confining the plasma, which will be produced by a system of 50 non-planar and superconducting magnetic coils, this being the technical core piece of the device.

W7-X is expected to generate its first plasma at the end of this year.

References and more to explore
[1]  National Aeronautic and Space Administration: Lyman Spitzer, Jr. [asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/overview/spitzer_bio.html].
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica: Lyman Spitzer, Jr. [http://www.britannica.com/biography/Lyman-Spitzer-Jr].
[3] Energy technology Network: Stellarator-Heliotron Concept [www.iea.org/techinitiatives/fusionpower/stellarator-heliotron].
[4] Yahoo!: Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy [finance.yahoo.com/news/germany-start-monster-machine-could-152111129.html].
[5] IPP: Wendelstein 7-AS (1988-2002) [www.ipp.mpg.de/2665443/w7as].
[6] IPP: Wendelstein 7-X [http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16900/w7x].