Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science Read Online Free Page B

making the sap too hard for the aphid to extract, so it moved to another plant. When the colonists pulled up the dead plants to examine the roots, there were no aphids – so they never realised that the aphids were the cause.
The aphids behaved quite differently on North American vines. In these native plants, they attacked the leaves, making little ‘galls’ on the plants – structuresthat were their homes, as well as nurseries to the millions of tiny baby aphids. In eight months, a single female could produce some 25 billion descendants.
Around 1860, the aphids travelled on the roots of some North American vines to Europe. They survived the trip because the new steamships were a lot faster than sailing ships. The disease first surfaced in 1863. It took three years to act. In the first year the leaves died; in the second year the grapes died and dropped off; and in the third year the vine itself died. In the otherwise very good vintage year of 1865, vines began dying in the communes of Gard and Vaucluse, for no apparent reason. In 1868, the botanist Professor Jules-Emile Planchon dug up and examined the roots of a variety of vines – i.e. healthy, dying and dead ones. He noticed the tiny yellow aphids on the healthy and dying plants, but not on the dead ones. He called this particular aphid Phylloxera (Greek for ‘dry leaves’) vastrix (Latin for ‘devastator’).
In 1870, France and Prussia went to war. France took six years to recover from this war, but it took a generation to restore the damage done to the vineyards by the aphids. In fact, aphids cost France five billion francs – twice the amount that France had to pay as reparations for its defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war.
The cure was related to the cause. The aphids did not attack North American grapevine roots. But the French did not like the taste of North American grapes. So vast quantities of North American grapevine roots were imported into Europe, and the local vines were grafted onto these resistant roots. The grapes from the grafted local vines were thought to have virtually the same flavour as before, and to be unaffected by growing on top of an American vine root. Even so, the Burgundy vineyards wanted to protect their reputation, and banned any North American varieties until 1887.
    However, the writing was on the wall for absinthe. Thanks to absinthism becoming a major and increasing social problem, absinthe was banned in Switzerland in 1908. In the USA, it was regarded with such horror that it was banned in 1912—two years before heroin and cocaine were banned. And it was even banned in its natural home of France in 1915.
    At the time, absinthism was blamed on a specific chemical called thujone. This thujone was found in the wormwood herb used to make absinthe.
    But now, in the 21st century, absinthe is legally available in most of the Western world, provided that the thujone level in the bottle is less than 35 ppm (parts per million).
    Thujone—Part 1
    So, can thujone cause fits? Yep, it is true that thujone in concentrated amounts can cause convulsions, as well as other medical problems.
    In one case, a 31-year-old man bought some little bottles of ‘essential oil of wormwood’ via the internet. The supplier sold it as an aromatherapy oil—something to be smelled, not drunk. But the buyer drank a 10 ml bottle of the oil. Shortly afterwards, his father found him having convulsions, and he became disoriented, lethargic, belligerent, agitated and incoherent. The concentrated wormwood oil had also begun to destroy his muscles—the breakdown products of which had entered his bloodstream and clogged up his kidneys, causing temporary kidney failure. He also had congestive heart failure. Thanks to rapid medical treatment, he recovered and was discharged from hospital after nine days.
    One of the toxins in wormwood oil has been identified as alpha-thujone. Normally the human brain runs in a delicate balance, poised between too much and