Economist, June 21, 2014 (I)

choi

Letter to Editor: Having Fewer People Works.
www.economist.com/news/letters/2 ... -society-football-0
(“self-driving vehicles * * * will release millions of truckers, cabbies, bus drivers and car commuters for more useful work”)

My comment:
(a) Please only read the third letter (titled above).
(b) The “work” in the title is an intransitive verb, not a noun.

choi

Nitrogen-fixing ferns | Aquatic Alfalfa; Finding the genome of an extraordinary plant.
www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ant-aquatic-alfalfa

Note:
(a) “USING crowdfunding to raise money for science neglected by conventional grant-giving agencies is all the rage. Indeed, there is almost a return to a lost era of amateur natural philosophers and natural historians—with the twist that the amateurs merely stump up the cash, rather than doing the actual research.

“amateurs merely stump up the cash, rather than doing the actual research”
(i) stump something up (phrasal verb): “British informal Pay a sum of money”
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/stump
(ii) What the clause in Economist says is: Amateurs (note the plural form) pay the real scientists to do research and derive pleasure from the payments per se, instead of seeking return on investments.

(b) “Azolla’s significance comes from its partnership with several species of bacteria that can manage a trick no plant finds possible by itself: extracting nitrogen from the air and ‘fixing’ it into chemicals such as ammonia, so that it is available to make proteins. Asian rice farmers have known of Azolla’s fertilising properties for at least 1,500 years, and in many places the fern is encouraged to grow alongside rice in paddies—a sort of aquatic version of alfalfa.”
(i) Azolla is a genus name. It is 滿江紅 in both Taiwan and China.
(ii) The symbiotic bacterium is cyanobacterium Anabaena azollae.
(iii) Cyanobacteria "obtain their energy through photosynthesis [thus producing oxygen as a byproduct; all fixing nitrogen, too]. The name 'cyanobacteria' comes from the color of the bacteria (Greek kyanós 'blue')."  Photosynthetic pigment cyanophycin accounts for the blue color.
Wikipedia under the title of cyanobacteria.
(iv) nitrogen fixation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation
(section 1.2 Root nodule symbioses)

(c) “And the fern’s ability to fix nitrogen, together with the long, sunny days of polar summers, mean it would have grown like billy-o.”
(i) billy-o (n): "(in phrase like billy-o) British informal Very much, hard, or strongly <I had to run like billy-o>"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/billy-o
(ii) like billy-o
www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/like-billy-o.html
(origin unknown)

(d) “This [Azolla’s sequestration of carbon dioxide], by greatly reducing the greenhouse effect, cooled the Earth from temperatures in which palm trees grew at the poles to the sort that are experienced today.”
(i) Note the “grew” was past tense. It says that 49m years ago, the temperature on earth was so high that palm trees grew at the both poles of the earth.
(ii) The noun “sort” means “kind.”