Month: June 2012
What does the number on a fruit sticker mean?
Those stickers on fruit and vegetables show the produce PLU – Price Look Up Code, used in grocery stores and supermarkets to make check-out and inventory control easier and more accurate. In most cases, the code is a four-digit number, beginning with a “3” or a “4“, which identifies the type of bulk produce, including […]
Trout, queen of the river
The word trout refers to several species of fish belonging to the Salmonidae family. Most live exclusively in freshwater, but some species spend their adult lives in the sea and swim upstream to spawn like salmon.
The tomato genome has been cracked
A consortium of 300 plant geneticists from 14 countries has spent the last nine years decoding the tomato genome in the hope of breeding better ones. Their results were finally published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. The most amazing thing is that the tomato turns out to possess about 32,000 genes, some 7,000 more […]