Category Archives: Scottish Highlands

Fandabi Bannocks – 2 Months

Leave a Reply

For those that haven’t read the earlier post, I tried making Tom Langhorne’s guess at the ideal 16th century Highland survival ration, the idea being to test his reasonable claim that they would stay good to eat, unrefrigerated, for months or years.

And a little over two month in, we’re doing some microbiology stuff at work and I have a spare agar plate for growing a broad range of microorganisms, so I’ve taken a swab from both the outside and the inside of one of the bannocks, which have been sitting on a shelf at room temperature, wrapped in baking paper and tied with string.

The top half is from the outside of the bannock, the bottom half is from the inside, where I broke a chunk off about the side of a standard 2×4 Lego brick. This has had a week to grow at room temperature. When we take general environmental swabs (light switches, phones, doorhandles and so on) we normally get very obvious results in a few days, but I left this one going longer as there wasn’t much.

The big fuzzy splotch near the bottom is probably some kind of mould, likely the kind of thing you find on bread or cheese that’s starting to go off. The neat little round circles are probably streptococcus or staphylococcus, bacteria commonly found on human skin or in the mouth and throat. They may be there because I contaminated the plate while swabbing it, I didn’t do it in proper lab conditions….or they may have been on the bannock as a result of me handling them two months ago.

But long story short, this is a far lower level of microorganisms than I’d expect to see from a similar experiment with, say, a computer keyboard. And people touch those the whole time, then eat a sandwich with their hands, and don’t get food poisoning. So far, so good, as far as edibility goes?

Disclaimer: I’m not a microbiologist. This experiment isn’t set up to look for specific food-poisoning pathogens (in fact it’s designed to avoid growing them for safety reasons), but it should pick up any large growth of generic bacteria, along with the usual collection of spores, moulds and fungus…

Don’t try this at home unless you want to suffer any gastric consequences.

My First Tardigrade

Leave a Reply

Every time we do the “Life In The Littlest Loch” experiment with S2 I have a quick look at the water sample I’ve taken to see if I can find a tardigrade, because they’re the coolest little animals ever, and today I found one for the first time! It was in some of the moss on the concrete in front of the school

Tardigrades, also known as “Water Bears” or “Moss Piglets” are about half a millimetre long (they’d look like a speck of dust to the naked eye), and they’re about as close to invincible as any animal gets. They’ll survive very high and low temperatures (150C, oven temperatures, down to -273C, near absolute zero), high and low pressures (from 6x what you find in the deepest ocean, to the vacuum of outer space), and radiation doses hundreds of times higher than those that would kill a human.
They can intentionally dehydrate themselves, meaning that they “mummify” and can go for more than 30 years without food or water, but then wake up again when conditions seem better.

Because they’re so tough they’re found almost everywhere in the world, from hot springs to miles under the ice in Antarctica. In 2007 some dehydrated tardigrades were sent into space on the FOTON-M3 mission, exposed to outer space for TEN DAYS, returned to Earth, and when rehydrated just carried on munching away at stuff like nothing had happened!

Project Fish: Ullapool Freshwater Edition

Leave a Reply

Julia’s “Fishing For Footage” project has attracted some funding that took us over to Ullapool for a couple of days to meet up with the young folk at Ullapool Youth Space and chat to them about what we’ve been doing, let them have a look at the kit we’ve developed, check out the footage, and most importantly have a go with it themselves.

Now, when it comes to deep water and young people and funded projects you have to be careful, taking them anywhere near the sea requires a lot of expertise and risk management that we frankly don’t have. But we’d scoped out the local river, which is mostly too shallow to drown in unless you make a real effort.

Not only that, but the kids knew of a spot just upstream from where they normally swim (yeah, they can swim there for fun, but not for our project without paperwork!) where we could drop The Fish in from a bridge and just let it play with the current, the results were lovely. The river is quite peaty, meaning there’s a red tinge to the water, it really makes the green of the plant life pop on video.

The following is raw footage filmed by the young folk who took charge.

Fandabi Bannocks: How long will Scottish-style survival rations be good to eat?

Leave a Reply

This is all based around an excellent video by Fandabi Dosi, aka Tom Langhorne, who specialises in actually living the survival techniques and equipment of Scotland in the 16th Century or so. Multiple uses of the plaid (“the great kilt”), starting fires in a notoriously wet country, that sort of thing.

This particular video is about his take on a Highland survival food. He comes up with his own recipe, which as far as I’m aware doesn’t actually exist historically, but it could well have done, or at least a close variant.

So I tried it…and yeah, it pretty much works as advertised. It isn’t, as he points out, going to win any baking awards, but it’s calorifically dense (my sums say about 1,000 calories a biscuit, so three biscuits a day is a reasonable claim), and they’re definitely edible. More than that, they are one of these foods that feel calorie dense when you’re eating them, if I was massively hungry in the hills this would be a very welcome snack. Not as good as firing the stove up and cooking something substantial, but easily enough to fill me up a bit.

But about that shelf life claim – how long will these things stay edible without refrigeration? Given the ingredients I’m willing to bet on months, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was into the years. Not necessarily “best before”, I can imagine they’ll continue to dry out and may get a little more challenging to eat, maybe needing a soak in water first, as with hard tack / ship’s biscuit, but I’m looking more at the bacterial side: will they be safe to eat, rather than pleasant.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 20240608_151104-768x1024.jpg

So I cooked some up, have them stored in a cool (not refrigerated) dry place, wrapped in greaseproof paper tied with string (the modern equivalent of Tom’s beeswax impregnated cloth), and I’m going to take a bacterial swab every six months, both from the surface and from the inside of a broken open biscuit, and I’ll see what I can get to grow on an agar plate.

Note for the microbiologists: this isn’t entirely rigorous. I’ll be using standard nutrient agar in aerobic conditions, because that’s the limit of my training and the kit I have access to.

Note for the non-microbiologists: the stuff I’ll be using to grow any bacteria I find is not set up to favour stuff that is particularly harmful to humans, specifically anaerobic food poisoning stuff like botulism. This is entirely on purpose, I’m not trained to mess with stuff like that.

What I’ll be looking at is whether bacteria grow on them more generally. I’ll also be able to pick up moulds and fungi etc, which may or may not be harmful if eaten. See, for example, the blue mould found in many cheeses, and is entirely harmless. Or ergot, a fungus that grows in rye and has similar effects to LSD, but in a far more unpleasant way.

All Sky Camera Update

Leave a Reply

In 2020 I started a new job as a science technician in a school. A few months later the UK went into a coronavirus lockdown and I was told to do my job from home…which was an interesting challenge. We’d all seen it coming, so I’d already filled my home workshop with two carloads of broken equipment and antique science stuff in need of a polish, but it didn’t quite fill the time. So I started looking around for funding opportunities for…well, anything.

The Institute of Physics was offering grants for £800 for anything not-curriculum related and ideally relevant to the local area, and we’ve got a fairly dark sky, even from the roof of the school, and an all sky camera costs about £800…so I applied and they sent us some money. All Sky Optics, who supply this kind of thing, were hugely helpful both supplying the right bits and with lots of advice.

It’s been up there for three years now (it took a while to build as a project with students), without a break, in all weathers, taking hundreds of long exposure photographs each night, and then automatically stitching them together into videos each morning, all run by a Raspberry Pi and an astronomical camera.

The last service – we take it down once a year to check on it and add improvements, like the fan to reduce condensation and help the camera stay cool.

As the name implies, it films (nearly) the whole sky with an ultra-wide angle lens, like an extreme fish-eye. The centre of the image is directly overhead, and the circumference of the circular image is the horizon. We’ve caught noctilucent couds, meteors, satellites including the international space station, the milky way slowly rotating, and quite a lot of seagulls. And the aurora. From our location it’s a reasonably regular thing, and wow, did it kick off last week. We normally get a green arc and some pillars on the northern horizon, but this one was directly overhead, with a lot of red in it.

Project Fish: Clachtoll Jellyfish Bloom

Leave a Reply

We took The Fish (need to find a better name?) over to Clachtoll on the west coast of the northern Highlands of Scotland to see what was under the surface. Good timing, it turns out, as a jellyfish bloom was going on. When conditions are right jellyfish reproduce in huge numbers all over Scotland, sometimes even resulting in issues for nuclear power stations!

Project Fish is the “engineering arm” of Fishing For Footage by Julia McGhee. (I use the term “engineering” loosely, especially in this context!)