Admit it. When you were young at heart, you loved dandelions. You loved their cheery yellowness. You loved blowing their seeds and making a wish. I loved them then and still do. Just recently, my grandson brought me my first grandmotherly bouquet of dandelions,his face shining with pride. I never have understood why they are a weed, except that lots went wrong during the Victorian era and green lawns with servants to pull the weeds became a status symbol here in the United States. Dandelions are edible and healthy.

Dandelions contain  inositols–chemicals with wide ranging health effects such as controlling high blood pressure, polycystic ovaries, psoriasis, and high cholesterol.Other chemicals in dandelions can help bile production and blood glucose regulation.Dandelions can prevent liver damage.  For a list, along with some experiments that didn’t yield results, go here. However, be careful where you get your dandelions. Avoid those near roads and factories  as they take up pollution. 

The root can be made into a trendy coffee-like beverage. The French make dandelions into soup. They are packed with potassium, calcium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C. The only worry might be that you could get heartburn from them.

Dandelion roots break up hard soil. There is no reason to spray them and your family with poison. Enjoy them. Put them in salad. Boil the leaves. Make soup.And when you see them, think happy thoughts. You might even make a wish.

Thanks to Josh Meier for the use of this photo. View his website here. There’s a secret about this photo. Can you spot it?

This shows how Mr. Tuttle, from a family of cabin builders, fit together a cabin that has stood firmly for over 170 years

Small windows, smooth walls, exposed rafters in the main room.

Have you ever wanted to see an authentic log cabin? There’s one in my hometown of Pella, Iowa.  It’s Pella’s oldest known structure and was built by Thomas and Nancy Tuttle in 1843. At the time, the land was bordered on the north by timber. The Tuttles split their own rails, dug a well, and made their home on the present site of Pella. They later sold their home and small farm to the Dutch settlers, who paid in gold. The town of Pella grew around the little cabin, which still stands today just to the east of Lincoln School and to the south of Sunken Gardens Park. It was an artist’s studio for many years but was sold to the Pella Historic Trust and was renovated.

Believe it or not, my husband’s family is related to the Pella Tuttles via Simon Tuttle who was born in Northamptonshire, England in 1565.  The Pella Tuttles are descended from John Tuttle who was born in Northamptonshire, England in 1596.My family is from John’s brother, William Tuttle, who was born in Northamptonshire, England in 1607. The brothers, along with a third brother, came to the US together  in 1635.  Some time after their arrival in Boston they settled in New Haven, CT before heading west to Iowa.

Tom and Nancy Tuttle–portrayed by Tuttle decedents–relax in front of the cabin during Pella’s Tulip Time 2017.

The cabin is located just around the corner from Sunken Gardens Park at 608 Lincoln St. in Pella.

A Shakespeare (1582-1616)  troupe will be in Pella this week. I must confess, I find Shakespeare’s comedies really funny. The wording is hard to understand sometimes though because commonly used colloquial phrases have changed quite a lot. In honor of this, I’ve put together a list of words and phrases used back in the 16-1700s. I got these not from Shakespeare but from a play called She Would and She Would Not by Colley Cibber 1671-1757. (This play caught my eye because it has a strong female lead character who was one of Dora Jordan’s greatest roles.) Can you figure out what they mean? What phrases of today will be confusing to future generations? Have I missed any of your favorites?

1.Pry’thee

2. Artful vs artless

3. I’ll Break no square

4. Quotha

5. Odzooks

6. Puppy

7. How now?

Ready for the answers?

Key:

1. Pry’thee also prithee means “pray thee”. It sounds nice. Almost like please. But it was more like WTF.
2. Artful vs artless We’ve all heard of Artful Dodger. Someone artful is shrewd, crafty, skilled. Artless sounds like the person would be a clod but it means without deceit, innocent, natural.
3. I’ll Break no square– my best guess is that this means I’ll not step out of line or formation.
4. quota “quoth he” but not particularly nice, kind of like “so he says” or “yeah right”
5. odzooks  similar to gadzooks (aka “yikes”)  meaning God’s hook or the nails that held Christ to the cross. Creepy, don’t you think?
6. puppy can mean a vain young man, a puppet, or a dog, the former in She Would and She Would Not 
7. How now? means “what” or more often, “what’s up?”. Famously used to show skill in elocution as in How now brown cow?”

My heart breaks for a lot of people in history. Without any sort of social safety net or obstetrics or valid peer review, life was pretty crummy for many of them. M.S. Tswett is one of those heartbreakers. Almost every week, I use one of his discoveries with applications very similar to his, for in 1903, he discovered chromatography while studying chemicals in plants. Thirty years later, it became an accepted technique. Too bad he was already dead!

Before chromatography, when a chemist wanted to separate a complex mixture, say, things in a plant leaf or stem, the chemist had to chemically isolate and crystallize the molecules of study. Most of the time, this was done through a series of chemical reactions. Tswett was a botanist and he did things differently. He separated plant pigments, various types of chlorophylls, carotenes,  and xanthophylls, by allowing the chemicals to be washed through a tube of solid material. The differences in chemical attraction between the solvent and the solid and the pigments caused them to separate in bands. The ones that had more in common with the solvent moved faster through the tube. The ones more attracted to the solid came out later. This is pretty much the basis of one of the most widely used chemical techniques ever–chromatography

Little Mikhail Semenovich Tswett had a sad start. He was born to Russian parents during their vacation in Italy. (His mother was originally from Italy so perhaps she went there to visit family.) It’s not known if he was an early surprise but soon after, his mother died. Mikhail was left in Switzerland, frequently visited by his father, who gained a new family He was ever to be a man without a country. He got a Ph.D.in Switzerland and moved to Russia afterwards to be near his father. Sadly, his non-Russian thesis wasn’t acceptable in that country, nor was Mikhail’s accent. He sounded more French than Russian! He ended up getting another Ph.D. and became a professor (for female students) in Poland  where he developed his famous technique. Was it an overnight sensation? No. His chromatography of brown algae pigments gave a different result than the crystallization results of the famous botanist Molisch in  Prague. This made the poor Tswett a bit of an outcast. Another botanist, who later won the Nobel Prize, Willszateter, couldn’t reproduce Tswett’s work (it was later discerned that he didn’t have the right chemicals.)  Chromatography was declared “odd” and pretty much ignored. Tswett must have struggled financially because it wasn’t until he was forty that he married a librarian and companion in his lab work. Tswett had to flee back to Russia during WWI and died there at age 47, unable to overcome the declaration of his work as odd.

Chromatography means color (chroma) writing (graphein) but Tswett also means color in Russian. Pretty cool, isn’t it? I wonder if he ever suspected that his name would be on so many lips over a hundred years after it was discovered.

This blog entry is dedicated to the release of a new book, Pawn of the Phoenix, a detective novel set in 1903, the year of chromatography’s birth.

In honor of a new sports romance written by my friend Jim Cagney, I thought I’d talk some about why things bounce. To understand this, let’s look at one of the first popular bouncy substance, a natural material, rubber.It’s a long chain of molecules, a polymer. There are many natural polymers, collagen for example, is a natural protein found in skin.Polymeric things tend to bounce when dropped because the stringy chains are arranged in a somewhat messy structure that’s actually very efficient. When something is dropped it picks up energy and when it hits a surface it absorbs some of the energy into its structure. This energy can be used to create heat, sound, or to become a counter force. As Isaac Newton said, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Rigid structures will more likely absorb the impact into their structures and become hot or even break bonds. Not polymers, they are apt to react with bounce because they are elastic. The energy of the drop will compress the molecules and then, the molecules will regain their shape and bounce back. Think about what happens when a ball is dropped on a surface that isn’t hard. Lots of the energy goes into squishing that surface down and the ball won’t bounce as high because it has given away energy.

Basketballs are made a little differently from a golf ball or a bouncy ball. They are a hollow bladder filled with air with a polymer coating. This polymer is often leather which is collagen, the skin protein. The air molecules inside the ball do a great job of moving in response to hitting a surface. But they don’t like to be near each other–air likes to fill space, much like paper on my desk. The ball will distort when it hits the floor but quickly get a push back from the air and bounce. The more force you put into the dribble, the higher the bounce.

Congratulations to Jim on his book, On the Rebound. Available here.