Huge Hyper-arid Desert Discovered Near Centre of Amazon Rainforest

~ FauxNews Today ~ Leave a comment

Amazon Rainforest Desert-FNT.pngMANACAPURU, BRAZIL – Municipal officials were staggered today to learn that a huge hot and arid desert has been discovered within a fifty-minute helicopter ride from the city of Manacapuru. The desert, as yet officially unnamed, is larger than the Arabian Desert and second only in size only to the Sahara and the polar deserts. It covers almost one million square miles.

The area where it was found lies northwest of Manacapuru. It bisects the Rio Negro River and is located on a direct flight path in and out of Eduardo Gomes International Airport (MAO). It was discovered by a group of high school students from who were on a nature hike in the rainforest.

“We were shocked to find out about it, as it’s not on any of our maps” said Hugo Silva, a municipal official from Anamã. “But we see it as a good thing because when the word gets out, it should definitely bring more tourists to the area.”

Cartographers around the world are scrambling to determine how and why a desert with an area larger than Mexico could exist undiscovered for so long in the days of satellites and Google Maps.

Matheus Henrique Sousa, a scientist who works for the Bureau of Cartography and GIScience in Rio de Janeiro, and is an expert on the tropical rainforest effect, provided an explanation for the oversight. “It’s a strange one, I’ll admit,” he said. “But the answer is quite simple. It’s the sheer density of the arboreal canopy in that region. No one can possibly see through it from the air, not even Google Maps.”

Guilherme Oliveira, who heads up the Manacapuru department of tourism agreed with Hugo Silva, his municipal counterpart from Anamã. “Absolutely surprising. I mean, who knew, right? We’re been known as a rainforest kind of place for years. But if you get lemons, you make lemonade. And you can sell a lot of that in a desert.” Source: FNT Staff

Photo credit: Original images at Wikipedia and WorldAtlas

Guelph University Research Team Successfully Grows Potato Chip Cultivar

~ FauxNews Today ~ Leave a comment

Ontario Potato Field-FNT-SmallGUELPH, ONTARIO – Two first-year research students in horticultural science at the University of Guelph have successfully completed an experimental small-plot olericulture study in growing a potato chip cultivar. The students were able to produce two different varieties of potato chips, plain and ripple.

Alfred Carver, twenty-two, one of the researchers, who is from the Musquodoboit Valley in Nova Scotia, said that the results have yet to be ratified by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, but he is “one-hundred percent confident” that the project was a “major step in food science.” The other member of the research team is Jeremy Winslow, twenty, from Kinuso, Alberta.

“We’ve been able to grow both kinds of chips right from scratch and eliminate the potato processing plant completely,” Carver said. “Straight from the tuber to the table, so to speak. No slicing, blanching and deep frying necessary.”

Their supervising professor, Jason D. Ancaster, said that the results of the project were all the more remarkable in that the two varieties of potato chips that were successfully grown weren’t started from gene-bank plantlets or microtubers. “They just planted plain old garden-variety chip sections that came straight from the grocery store,” he said. “You know, the odd-sized crumbly pieces that you usually find in the bottom of the chip bag.”  He also cautioned potential large scale potato chip growers that the small-plot yields of the university study might not spool up to produce commercial yields. “Best wait a bit,” was his advice for impatient commercial growers. “By next season, we’ll have more of the bugs worked out. The guys are planning a ketchup-flavoured variety that should be worth the wait.”

Winslow, said that growing the chips from “the gound up” was a challenge, but “a way cool thing to do.” He admitted however that there were a few setbacks along the way.

“The low sodium variety that we tried didn’t work out so well,” he said. “They turned out to be soggy and stale as soon as we dug them out of the ground. We think it was a salinity thing with the soil.”  Source: FNT Staff

Photo credit: Original images by Purple Sheep Wikia and WebstrauntStore