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 Peter Menzel/ASA / ASA, Mex.meb.47.xsA mother sits with her daughters in the market in Taxco, a colonial silver mining town sixty miles southwest of Mexico City, Mexico. She is selling bags of the edible iodine-rich flying stinkbug, the jumil (Euchistus taxcoensis). The jumil is rich in iodine and consuming them prevents diseases resulting from iodine deficiency like goiters and thyroid problems. Image from the book project Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects by Peter Menzel and Faith DAluisio (Material World Books / Ten Speed Press). Before fast food, farms, or even wild game, insects fed prehistoric hunter-gatherers all over the world. Man Eating Bugs is a quest to learn about food preferences from native people in 13 countries who still eat insects.
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 Peter Menzel/ASA / ASA, This is the iodine cell, a device developed and perfected by Butler, Marcy, and instrument specialist Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz. When light from a star passes through the iodine, molecules in the hot vapor absorb parts of the light at very specific energies. Then, a specially etched slab of glass spreads the starlight into a glorious rainbow spectrumlike a prism held up to the sun, but with exquisitely fine detail. Because the iodine has subtracted bits of the light, a forest of dark black lines covers the spectrum like a long supermarket bar code. Its like holding the star up to a piece of graph paper, McCarthy says. The iodine lines never move. So if the star moves, we use the iodine lines as a ruler against which to measure that motion. Iodine cell. Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. San Jose, California. 120-inch telescope. Exoplanets & Planet Hunters
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 Barbara Cushman Rowell/Mountain Light / Mountain Light, Balti woman with a goiter (due to lack of iodine in diet), Askole Village, Baltistan, Pakistan
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