Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2014 March 31

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 31

tillage radishes

tillage radishes are not well known. I only heard of them recently. their primary use seems to be for soil conservation improvement, but I just read a letter to the editor of a publication called FARM SHOW: #2/2014, page 41 wherein a farmer from Pennsylvania wrote in to say that a neighbor walking about on his farm, had found what he thought were wild radishes, dug them up, took them home, made them a part of his diet, and had his high sugar and blood pressure normalize. The farmer tried the same thing and now is off his medications and feels better than he has in years. The neighbor did not know that what he dug up were tillage radishes until the farmer explained it to him. I find web-sites about tillage radishes, but not a biologist's defined description and would like to know more. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.182.153.246 (talk) 01:44, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't know about the alleged health benefits—they look suspicious, and Wikipedia is the wrong place to ask for medical advice anyways—but as for the scientific name of "tillage radishes", this reliable looking source (PDF) states that "tillage radishes" is a nickname for the forage radish ("Raphanus sativus L. var. niger J. Kern") and the oilseed radish ("Raphanus sativus L. var. oleiformis Pers."). See the source for more details. (Note that the latter source claims that forage radishes are also called Daikon radishes, while Wikipedia says the Daikon is Raphanus sativus var. longipinnatus.) הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 02:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Dietary recommendations are not medical advice. StuRat (talk) 02:57, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Where the asker is mentioning a possible medical effect ("had his high sugar and blood pressure normalize" "is now off his medications"), it's definitely getting very close to it. I also wonder if homeopathy could be considered a dietary recommendation, since it's just a little extra sugar in your diet! MChesterMC (talk) 08:55, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm also skeptical that eating any one food will cure multiple problems like that. However, if somebody switched to eating radishes from bacon cheeseburgers, chili cheese fries, shakes, etc., then I would expect many of the benefits you listed (not so much from the radishes as from skipping the junk food). StuRat (talk) 02:57, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Of course what you are describing is called an anecdote, and the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not "data". There is absolutely no way of knowing all the other factor's in this farmer's life, let alone if the story is even accurately reported. i.e. What other medication he was on? what other food he was eating? what the normal progression is of the condition he was suffering from? What other environmental factors might have influenced the situation? This kind of story is precisely how quack medicines gets started and gain support and precisely why REAL medicine goes through blind random controlled trials. Vespine (talk) 02:46, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

That's a point that's really worth underlining. There are all sorts of reasons why these two people started to feel better. The placebo effect is one of them. Just giving someone a fake pill with absolutely no active ingredients and telling them that this will definitely fix whatever is wrong with them will very often help some small percentage of the population to improve their health all by itself.

Another problem is observer bias. But most of all, if 10,000 people were to start eating this food and 9,998 of them didn't get better, then that won't stop the two that did get better from saying that the food caused it...when it's plainly just a chance effect that they just happened to get better at around the same time they started eating it. People almost never write: "I switched from eating Cheetos to Flamin' Hot Cheetos and absolutely nothing happened to me."...but if they make that conscious switch and suddenly feel a lot better, then you can be sure that they'll be out there recommending the "Flamin' Hot Cheetos diet" to everyone who'll listen!

Another issue is that if someone thinks that eating this stuff will help their health, then they are undoubtedly aware that diet is a factor - and they may very well be taking other precautions to improve matters. That OTHER benefit could easily masquerade as an improvement due to the radishes.

To know for sure whether there is some amazing property of these radishes that cures people of what ails them, we'd need someone to go out there and do a proper long-term, double-blind study of a LARGE number of people with high blood pressure, etc and after some careful statistical analysis, come up with a definite answer. The difficulty with that is that these studies are expensive to carry out - and if you're starting the study just on the basis of a couple of people's anecdote - then the odds of it showing something useful is just WAY too small to be worth the effort.

One disturbing thing about this story is that one of the characters is a farmer who grows these things. He has a HUGE financial interest in having these radishes become the latest fad diet craze - so we simply cannot trust a single thing he tells us - either about his own health or that of some close friend or mysterious unnamed acquaintance. That alone is sufficient to make me dismiss this idea.

Bottom line is that this is 99.9% likely to be bullshit.

SteveBaker (talk) 13:31, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Instead of calling it not worth doing and bullshit, let scientists do the experiment(s). Anecdotes are data points even if they are not statistically reliable. --Modocc (talk) 17:31, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

You're making the same mistake though - an anecdote is not data. You simply don't know enough of the circumstances to know that it's even true. It's really very likely that the farmer in this situation is trying to make his 'waste' crop suddenly valuable - he could easily have dreamed up the whole thing. It's not even one data point. Humans currently consume around 7,000 different species of plant - and in some cases we eat leaves, fruit, flowers, roots or seeds - so in the plant world alone, there are probably 15,000 or so "foods" that we should carefully research - without even thinking about different preparation methods and the effects of combinations of foods. Then there are meats, minerals, synthetic ingredients and other stuff. That's an insanely high number of potential research projects. We really need to focus on the ones that we have the most reason to think are important. The kind of anecdote described above really doesn't help in any way in focussing on the important things to drive research with.

SteveBaker (talk) 19:36, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Again with the diatribes (which, BTW, don't belong on these desks). Thankfully you are not the arbiter of who is telling the truth, or what gets researched or not and anecdotes such as these are most certainly data points which can be evaluated on their own merits and circumstances by others. -Modocc (talk) 19:50, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I just have to say I agree with Steve. If you do ANY research into the long and rich history of quack medicine and the sheer number of scam artist snake oil frauds currently making money hand over fist, mostly by exploiting the sick, weak and vulnerable, literally getting away with murder, your tolerance for this king of crap grows extremely thin. Oh and in case you think, "it's just radishes, what's the harm?" Here's a website you should have a look at. Unfortunately a lot of people are like Modocc, they think it is fair and just to give anyone who comes up with the latest "miracle cure" the benefit of the doubt and assume it works based on their word alone, why would they lie after all? They're too busy actually "healing" people to run their own proper trials, and they sell their product for so cheap, they're practically giving it away, so financial gain couldn't be a motivating factor either. Practically every quack uses these lines. Vespine (talk) 23:00, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Of course there is plenty of rubbish people like to sell, so what? The OP did not ask whether or not the information was truthful. He did not ask us for our opinions, nor should we be expounding on them. Its not our remit. Plenty of regular markets for radishes too which the published letter is unlikely to impact. But no, Steve has to make stuff up instead, saying the anecdotes are not data and two sentences later saying they are one of many. This is the problem of selection bias, picking and choosing your data to suit an agenda which is to blanket dismiss anecdotes, which is pure bunk because not all anecdotes are equal, otherwise we wouldn't learn from them. I'll repeat:"...let scientists do the experiment(s)..." for it is sometimes the best way to proceed. --Modocc (talk) 23:17, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

There has been a great deal of scientific research on the health benefits of Cruciferous vegetables (Brassicaceae), which contain Glucosinolates especially when eaten raw. In 1992, Dr. Paul Talalay at Johns Hopkins generated a lot of public interest with his study on Sulforaphane. --Digrpat (talk) 07:32, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Medical use of radishes was described by Dioscorides, who said that they "improve digestion" among many other things. It's interesting to compare [1] (search radishes in book 2) side by side with modern claims on the internet like [2]; for example Dioscorides said that they "reduce the spleen" while the modern people say they "reduces the destruction of red blood cells that happens to people suffering from jaundice by increasing the supply of fresh oxygen to the blood." While I wouldn't put too much faith in such reports, I doubt any doctor would steer people with high blood pressure or diabetes (or just about anybody else) away from eating more healthy vegetables! As for the variety of radish, well, bear in mind that these are varieties of fairly recent historical origin, not different species, but I do agree that in general there is a tendency of foods that started off being recognized by the ancients for medicinal uses as much as their food value to become bigger, blander, and less medicinally potent with cultivation. (this seems particularly applicable in the U.S. even on a personal time scale - has anyone noticed that even as pomegranates finally become popular and available in the supermarket, they keep getting bigger and bigger, and don't stain your fingers yellow for days afterward?) Wnt (talk) 09:22, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Some thoughts:

1) This story sounds very much like the history of peanuts, which originally weren't considered to be fit for human consumption, just something to grow to replenish the soil and maybe feed livestock. Well, they turned out to be rather nutritious, and George Washington Carver worked to popularize them by coming up with uses for them.

2) I do think we should have government funded university studies of various nutritional supplements to determine which ones are useful and which are not. However, we should start with those with the most evidence in their favor, and two anecdotes is not that case. StuRat (talk) 00:49, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

On point 2) When it comes to spending other people's tax dollar, officials do get finicky and stingy. Its human nature... On point 1) Any efficacy at all would be more likely related to how the compounds of these varieties are metabolized than on their nutritional content. -Modocc (talk) 02:14, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people

Worldwide production of oats

If I understand correctly, Scotland produced essentially zero oats at the time reflected by the map. Has it been replaced since Samuel Johnson's day, or did the Scots of the period import their oats, or something else? Nyttend (talk) 16:09, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I suspect that data wasn't available for Scotland. A good map will show such nations as another color, like black, to reflect that, but they may have just left it white, meaning no oat production. StuRat (talk) 17:52, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

It probably wasn't meant to be scientifically correct. Ethnically insensitive jokes rarely are. --Jayron32 16:25, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Oats are easy to grow in a cool wet climate, so I would think that, in the past, Scots grew quite a lot of oats for their own consumption (and also for their horses). Much of Scotland would not be suitable for growing the crop as a commercial product, but, as a subsistence crop, when labour was cheap, many families probably relied on oats, not just in Scotland, but in other cooler, wetter parts of the world. Dbfirs 16:42, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

That's hardly the only reference to oats as the stereotypical staple of Scotland. Sydney Smith, one of the founders of The Edinburgh Review, (claimed to have) recommended that the journal's motto be Tenui musam meditamur avena, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal". The association of oats with Scotland seems to have been a commonplace, and I assume that there must have been good reason for its becoming so. Deor (talk) 17:41, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

This source states that by the end of the 16th century Scots had adopted a new diet, founded mainly on oatmeal and bere. Elsewhere in the book (page 245) it also says that oats were Scotland's main food crop, because they ripened earlier and were hardier than other grains. Mikenorton (talk) 18:24, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I've been watching a show called good eats recently, and saw an episode about oats. The 1st paragraph is relevant.Vespine (talk) 22:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

See oatcakes which were unknown to me until I visited some relatives in Glasgow. Oats are also a main ingredient of haggis - 8 oz of oats to 1 lb of offal according to this recipe. Then there's white pudding which contains oats. Finally, I have just found our article on brose. Alansplodge (talk) 16:10, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

I've just zoomed in on Scotland on your map, and actually there is a band of darker green across the Central Lowlands and some lighter green along the north east coast. The white area is The Highlands, which is almost all forestry and sheep pasture (with some estates dedicated to deer stalking). It pretty much matches this Map of Land Capability for Agriculture. Of course, it would have been a different story before the Highland Clearances when the area supported a larger population engaged in subsistence farming, but even so, you can't plough a mountain. The 2013 Cereal Harvest estimates published by the Scottish Government show annual production of 187 kilotonnes and a yield of 5.9 tonnes per hectare.[3] Barley production was nearly 2 megatonnes; very appropriate for a country famous for beer and whisky. Alansplodge (talk) 16:46, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

What is the color of the pleura (membrane)?

213.57.121.149 (talk) 21:08, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Here are many images, some post mortem, of parietal and visceral pleura. 84.209.89.214 (talk) 21:58, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I mean to a natural color, and how is it acceptable to call this color... 194.114.146.227 (talk) 08:21, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

an ordered list of cases when having myosis or mydriasis

Pupillary response

Where can I get an ordered list of cases when having myosis or mydriasis? I would like to learn in which cases it's expected to see one of them. 213.57.121.149 (talk) 21:15, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I'll start your list.

1. Normal eye Pupillary response in low light: Mydriasis
2. Normal eye Pupillary response in bright light: Miosis. 84.209.89.214 (talk) 21:51, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I mean to clinic cases. :) 194.114.146.227 (talk) 08:19, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Those articles list conditions that cause it. Medications such as opiates and amphetamines are listed. You will have to make the list yourself from your textbook. --DHeyward (talk) 19:23, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

If I knew any textbook of that I would not come here to ask this question. Do you know a textbook that has organized list of those? 213.57.121.149 (talk) 21:19, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Is this what we sound like to them?

See these parrot videos. It seems to me that these fluffies are trying to make 'human type' noises to fill in the gaps between the actual mimicked words. Any thoughts? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 23:02, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

The humans are making more noise than the birds, but what characters! :-) They do sound a lot like many of the squawking parrots I've been around though, with some mimicry mixed in. -Modocc (talk) 11:43, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

I think that a cockatoo quickly learns to make sounds that get the reactions it wants. They are social creatures by nature, and if raised in a human family, they will make more human-like sounds. I think those owners have a lot of trust that their birds won't take a finger or ear -- those sure look like threat displays to me. Talking_bird#Cockatoos has some refs, and here's an interesting-looking book chapter on "social influences on acquisition of human-based codes in parrots and non-human primates" [4]. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:13, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I've read bits and pieces of Dr. Pepperberg's work before. I know that she's not without her criticism, but fascinating stuff nonetheless. As for threat displays, I think that this particular species tends to sway slowly from side to side while puffed up with the crest raised and the wings held out to the side - so it's not quite the same thing. Parrot body language can be difficult to read though. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 08:51, 2 April 2014 (UTC)