Smithsonian.com

It’s been a year since I started writing for the Gist, and over our lifetime we’ve amassed more than 200 posts. But the time has come to ride into the sunset - to kick off into that happy blogosphere in the sky, where the rivers babble with happy comments and the posts fly off the keyboards like tiny birds.

We’re retiring the Gist, and this is our goodbye post.

Over the last year, you’ve gallantly followed along as I posted about treebound evolution, extremely prompt pesticide resistance, first-hand penguin sightings in Antarctica, the crazy sanity of gas prices, the unimaginably huge turtle trade in China, giant prairie-stomping pterosaurs, a galactic collision that looks like Tinkerbell, very dead Norwegian (OK, Danish) parrots, NASA fashions, most possible angles on Tyrannosaurus rex and giant pandas, the oddly familiar numbing heat of Chinese soup - and, as they say, much, much more.

And I wasn’t alone. Virginia Hughes (who still blogs here) kept us updated on solar power, the Grand Canyon, and the suggestion that our time in history should be named after all the trouble we’ve caused. Sarah Zielinski tracked down a murder mystery involving gorillas and warned us about Burmese pythons invading the U.S. Laura Helmuth added news about dams and expensive gems.

But this is America, where everyone’s a sucker for a happy ending, even the Smithsonian. So the Gist isn’t totally vanishing: in its place you’ll find a sampler platter of new blogs: Dinosaur Tracking - hot and cold running dinosaurs; a new science blog called Surprising Science and written by Sarah; and my new project, with Laura Helmuth and Amanda Bensen: Food and Think, where we’ll be writing about the culture and science of food.

Food and Think had its beginnings this summer: a curious explanation for chile heat, and globalization’s role in reviving an ancient Oaxacan drink. We realized that food and cooking are marvelous, complex fields of study that also make our mouths water. Cuisine is the accumulated results of millions of amateur chemists in millions of kitchen laboratories. It’s chemistry distilled by history, and it’s completely fascinating. We hope to serve you some of the choicest tidbits - and to whet your imagination as well as your appetite. I can barely wait.

So thanks to everyone for reading, for commenting, for adding us to your RSS feed. I hope you’ll follow me over to Food and Think, or keep your eye on our other blogs if they suit your interest. I’ve had a great year snacking at the science news buffet; now here comes the main course.

(Image: Sunrise over South Texas, by Hugh Powell. That’s right - a sunrise. In every ending there’s a new dawn, after all. See you at Food and Think)

Ah, the last of the summer tomatoes. Plump, sun-warm, and soft. Sometimes I like to just eat them over the sink and let the rich purple juice run down my chin.

What’s that? You were expecting rich red juice? But purple could be so much healthier, according to this week’s Nature Biotechnology online. Scientists from England’s John Innes Centre succeeded in transferring two genes from snapdragons into tomatoes, boosting the fruits’ ability to produce pigments called anthocyanins. The resulting deeply purple fruit promoted longer lives when fed to laboratory mice.

This is one of those technological feats that makes you think “wow,” “ew,” and “the end of the world is nigh” all at once. I mean, I know this is done routinely nowadays, but just the thought that we know that somewhere inside a snapdragon is a gene that can persuade a tomato to change color is kind of amazing. Let alone that we can essentially cut and paste it into another plant without so much as a hiccup.

And it’s all because you haven’t been eating your vegetables. Fruits and veggies are high in a class of pigments called flavonoids that would be so good for you - if only you would eat them. But since only about 23 percent of Americans do eat enough veggies, Innes Centre scientists set out to invent a tomato with sky-high flavonoid levels. The idea being that instead of changing your eating habits, you can get healthy by squeezing ketchup over fries, eating pizza, and drinking bloody marys. Kind of neat thinking, really.

Enter the snapdragon: not popular on menus, but great at producing flavonoids. In particular, purple varieties called anthocyanins - the same stuff that makes blueberries blue and companies like Jamba Juice so eager to tell you about their smoothies. The list of health benefits the researchers provide includes

protection against certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and age-related degenerative diseases. There is evidence that anthocyanins also have anti-inflammatory activity, promote visual acuity, and hinder obesity and diabetes.

Sounds good, but I’m still not convinced purple tomatoes are the best way to get my anthocyanins. I’m not a raving opponent of transgenic crops (though I disagree with patenting them). I just think I’d rather have blueberries on my cereal than eat purple spaghetti. Heck, I’d probably rather have blueberry spaghetti.

(Image: John Innes Centre)

Fad dieters take note: The Innes Centre website takes care to point out in bold type that seeds are not available for sale.