Adam's Apples

This fun video (4 minutes) was created in 2014 for a biology class at Stanford. It speaks for itself. Bonus points if you can name the fruit (not an apple, really, and what's with that?) that inspired the soundtrack.

BOTTOMS UP  ¶  I've called them "chins" and have also heard "feet." The question, however, is about the true name of the bumps on the calyx end of the apple.  ¶  The answer is crown.

The genetic heritage of just a handful of apples dominates commercial production, according to an analysis in the science journal Horticultural Research this month. The top 8 cultivars (really, top 3) dominate the orchard genome The authors ( Migicovsky et al. ) suggest that the lopsided use of these "elite cultivars" by apple breeders "leaves the apple industry vulnerable to evolving pests and pathogens and a changing climate." The study applies recent advances in gene-sequencing technology to the USDA apple germplasm collection . These new methods make feasible an analysis of this scope.

I write about apples, not current events. But we are all affected and afflicted by this terrible moment in human history. To all of us, take care.  And wassail.

This week I have augmented my hoard of apples with two pecks of winter fruit. With some gaps, I expect my supply to take me through to April. The acquisitions are a half peck each of Cripps Pink ("Pink Lady" to you) and Blushing Golden , and a whole peck of GoldRush .

Gnarly Pippins is both website and nom-de-pomme of site author Matt Kaminsky. Kaminsky (aka Pippins) was profiled this past fall in the Boston Globe . He brings an enthusiasm for wild apples in the spirit of  Henry David Thoreau . Kaminsky's layered, meditative prose style also reminds me of apple-blogger Chris's Life of Apples (on hiatus, perhaps permanently).

There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Gala trees in the world today.  ¶  They are clones, genetically identical to the first Gala bred in New Zealand and grown from seed nearly 100 years ago. Indeed, they are that tree, in that each is a link in an unbroken chain of living tissue from the mother tree, grafted and regrafted onto countless sets of roots .