"Carrot Men in the Rocks" This panel is several miles south of Rangely, Colorado, in a sandstone overhang on a small wash. It was referred to as the "carrot men" site.
General View	Both photos are "copyright Brian C. Lee"	Detail

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Cloning Experiments

In an interesting 1958 experiment, F.E. Steward, a biologist working in the Lab of Cell Physiology, Growth, and Development at Cornell University succeeded in growing a complete carrot plant from a fully differentiated carrot root cell.

Steward literally shook apart cells from a carrot root and placed these individual cells in a rotation tube containing cell nutrients. The cells surprisingly began to divide and grew to form tissues. Some cell masses broke from the tissues and grew their own roots. When these massed were planted in soil, they developed into complete carrot plants. Steward's results surprised biologists because at the time it was thought individual differentiated cells would not divide and grow to form complete organisms. After the failure of Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King and other scientists to clone animals from differentiated cells, Steward's results led some scientists to hold on to the belief that cloning from differentiated cells was not biologically impossible.

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Can you get high on Carrot Seed?
Daucus has been reported to contain acetone, asarone, choline, ethanol, formic acid, HCN, isobutyric acid, limonene, malic acid, maltose, oxalic acid, palmitic acid, pyrrolidine, and quinic acid. Reviewing research on myristicin, which occurs in nutmeg, mace, black pepper, carrot seed, celery seed, and parsley, Buchanan (J. Food Safety 1: 275, 1979) noted that the psychoactive and hallucinogenic properties of mace, nutmeg, and purified myristicin have been studied.

It has been hypothesized that myristicin and elemicin can be readily modified in the body to amphetamines. Handling carrot foliage, especially wet foliage, can cause irritation and vesication. Sensitized photosensitive persons may get an exact reproduction of the leaf on the skin by placing the leaf on the skin for awhile, followed by exposure to sunshine.

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Carrot Musicians

Several groups of people make and play musical instruments made from carrots. To learn more about carrot musicians visit the page dedicated to these true artists  - here.

 

Flutenveg - You had better believe it, you can even see and hear them playing on their web site at Flutenveg com - carrot musicians.

Linsey Pollack also from Australia who also plays carrots!  must be something in the water, or too much sun.  Have a peek here.

The Wyld Men - Dr. Cranius Lunch, Seth Sethstherton and Grebe, are more commonly known as the Wyld Men, specialising in Veggie Music - yes music played on real vegetables!  Think of it as ‘precycling’.   Before you use something, you use it for something else first -- in this case, parts of your next meal.  Read on, follow the link and engage your imagination! here

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. It consists of 11 musicians, a sound engineer and a video artist. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in Europe and Asia. From time to time workshops are given - on how to manufacture an instrument or on musical topics.

 

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Carrots in Space

Yes you read it right - here is STS-43 Pilot Michael A. Baker, on the Atlantis Orbiter vehicle in 1991, seated at the forward flight deck pilots station controls, eating a freefloating peanut butter and
jelly sandwich while holding a carrot in his right hand.

Click on photo to see larger image.

And when they return from Outer Space, what do they ask for?   ..... Carrots:

Associated Press Writer Mike Schneider explained on Wed Apr 5, 2006:-

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. - After more than six months in orbit, returning U.S. astronaut Bill McArthur longs for two simple pleasures: a hot cup of fresh coffee and a carrot!!!.
"Life up here is an extraordinary experience ... but we miss the richness, the texture, the three-dimensional nature of living on our home planet," McArthur said Wednesday in an interview from the international space station with The Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle.

"I'm a big coffee drinker and I always like a nice hot cup of coffee in the morning," he said. "The coffee on board tastes good but it's all in bags."

McArthur will fly back Saturday on a Soyuz spacecraft, landing in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Also aboard will be Russian flight engineer Valery Tokarev and Marcos Pontes, Brazil's first man in space.

McArthur and Tokarev have been at the space station more than six months. They are being replaced by Russian commander Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. flight engineer Jeff Williams, who arrived at the station with Pontes last Friday.

McArthur said he also is looking forward to biting into a crunchy salad and feeling "that sensation of pressing into a nice fresh lettuce or a nice raw carrot."

This week, the crew tested a new method of preparing for spacewalks and produced sufficient data, even though the test was cut short, McArthur said.

Before beginning spacewalks, crew members usually have to breathe pure oxygen for several hours to purge their body of nitrogen and prevent a condition known as the bends. The new method could reduce that preparation time.

McArthur and Williams had planned to spend eight hours sleeping in an airlock. But the test was stopped after five hours when two alarms went off while the astronauts slept.

The alarms were triggered by a software glitch that gave an erroneous message about oxygen pressure.

"We were never in any danger," McArthur said. "There was never any problem with the atmosphere."

 

Campaign Carrot Monument

Carrot Campaign monument, located in Port Hardy, British Columbia Port Hardy is a small community in British Columbia, Canada located on the north-eastern coast of Vancouver Island. Port Hardy has a population of over 4,500. It is the gateway to Cape Scott Provincial Park on the northern most tip of Vancouver Island. British Columbia provincial highway 19, which stretches from one end of Vancouver Island to the other, ends in Port Hardy, right near Rotary Park. This explains the town's motto, found on a sign entering town, that reads, "where the highway ends and the adventure begins." If you can't read the sign, it says: The Carrot Campaign - "This carrot, marking the northern end of the island highway, is a symbol of government road building promises, dangled in front of north island settlers since 1897. The successful late 1970's 'Carrot Campaign' was aimed at making the government keep promises of a completed island highway."

Icy Sparks from your Carrots !!

If you often cook mixed vegetables from frozen in a microwave, on a microwaveable plate you may notice that carrots produce sparks during cooking and, on closer examination, they display small burns. Why is this? several factors make frozen carrots susceptible to the effect described (although other vegetables also do this).

Firstly, dense vegetables such as carrots have a higher amount of minerals in them - iron, magnesium and selenium - than other food items and sometimes create an arcing effect in a microwave.  This tends to happen more in glass dishes. Sparks result as the microwaves reflect or bounce off the metal. the "arcing" does not harm the food, but it does prevent it from heating thoroughly because reflected microwaves will not cook.  Also, extensive arcing can damage your oven's magnetron tube. If arcing occurs,turn off the microwave oven and finish cooking the food on the range top.
Arcing may occur in other vegetables, and most often appears in green peppers and green beans.

Secondly, while microwaves are extremely good at heating liquid water, ice is almost totally transparent to them, so it is actually quite difficult to get ice to melt in a domestic microwave oven. The "defrost" option on a microwave oven relies on intermittent heating of a small amount of liquid water present on the food, and heat conduction from these areas into frozen material. By putting frozen material into the microwave oven with continuous energy input, no time is given for thermal conductivity effects, and therefore a colossal heating effect occurs on a very localised surface area. These areas, typically at the extreme point of the carrot, will dry out rapidly and then char, essentially forming small carbon points.

Thirdly, carrots are relatively large objects (compared to, say frozen peas) and because microwaves are essentially varying high voltage fields, a large alternating electrical potential exists between the highly conductive charred sections.

Finally, carrots are generally given quite angular cuts, giving sharp points which will yield the highest field gradients. The combination of a large alternating field across a good electrical conductor with sharp points causes electrical breakdown of the air and the sparks which accompany this. Depending upon the precise conditions, it is equally possible for charring to be a secondary effect, rather than a cause. In this case, the discharge may originate from uncharred points, with charring only occurring as a huge current passes through a relatively small point.

Was Henry Ford Carrot Crazy?

In the 1920's , the American automobile maker Henry Ford tried to impress upon his business associates the value of a vegetable-based diet. He held a banquet in a Detroit hotel that highlighted carrots in all their splendour, complete with a master of ceremonies dressed in a carrot suit who proclaimed, “I am King Carrota! I am full of vitamins, full of iron, full of iodine, full of bottled sunshine. I have no enemy but a bad cook. I am a friend of flappers and the bald-headed, the spindly baby and three-chinned monsters, but who shall mix me with canned peas shall be consigned to outer darkness.”

After a twelve-course meal consisting entirely of carrots—carrot soup, carrot loaf, carrot au gratin, carrot torte—washed down with carrot juice, a doctor remarked that he had seen children who ate too many carrots turn yellow, which certainly dampened the festivities, at least at his table.

The Flaming Carrot

Bob Burden the writer/artist and ingenious mind behind the Flaming Carrot came up with a superhero not quite like any others ever seen before in the comic book industry. The Flaming Carrot was a mysterious and demented Flaming Carrot/person that went on rampages battling monsters, gangs, communist hoards, old girlfriends, journalists, and sometimes his own morality (yes, it is as crazy as it sounds). The entire print run of 30 epic stories lasted from 1984 to 1993.

Carrots make antifreeze!!

A team of plant biologists at the University of York  (England) have isolated the first plant antifreeze protein. The naturally occurring 'antifreeze' in carrots might lead to improved frozen foods, more efficient freezing of tissue for medical use and better frost tolerance for crops.

The discovery of the antifreeze protein by a team from the Plant Stress Response Group led by Professor Dianna Bowles, is reported in the international journal, "Science"

"Antifreeze proteins act in a different way to the antifreeze you put in your car radiator," said Maggie Smallwood the senior scientist involved in the project. "These proteins specifically bind to ice crystals and stop them growing." The stress response team showed that extracts from carrots which had been growing under cold conditions could prevent ice crystal growth. They went on to purify the protein which kept the ice crystals small and identify the gene which encoded the protein. They transferred the gene into a model plant which does not normally express antifreeze activity and showed that extracts from these plants stopped ice crystals growing.

> Dawn Worrall, a postdoctoral scientist working on the project, pointed out that much of the damage which plants and other organisms experience when they freeze is due to the growth of ice crystals over time. "Large ice crystals disrupt tissue structure more than small ones and regulation of ice crystal growth may be important to survival of a carrot root in the field over winter," she said.

Professor Dianna Bowles expects the carrot antifreeze protein to have a number of potential applications. "Simple natural extracts from carrots may be useful in enhancing the quality of frozen food products and prolong their life in the domestic freezer," she says. "The pure carrot protein might also prove to be useful in cryoprotection (freezing) of medical tissues. In addition, transfer of the gene into temperate crop species may increase their frost tolerance and widen their season or region of cultivation. Similarly there may be applications for horticultural species that suffer from early frosts."

The antifreeze protein discovered in this study is produced by a carrot plant: it is an example of a commercially important product that can be grown in a 'plant factory'. Plants can be used to produce large quantities of industrial or speciality chemicals in a highly energy-efficient manner. Researchers in the Plant Laboratory at the University of York are exploring the potential of this environmentally friendly technology to manufacture products for a wide range of industries.

Carrots unlock the mystery of the universe

Guess what you can do with a plate of lovely vegetables? And it's got nothing to do with sex or slimming.Put down that fork. Show your coleslaw a little more respect. For Sliced carrots could help to unlock some of the strangest secrets of the Universe.

The tangled history of the Universe could be unravelled by the light from a glowing carrot. Now there's food for thought. Carrots can be used to make lasers. Check out the full detail on the laser page. 
 

Carrot Tattoos:

Here are two more cases of pure carrot madness.

	The Carrot Lady, Michele Hewitt of California. A firm friend of the Museum has a page dedicated to her body art and carrot collection. Carrots where you've never seen them before! Click here to see more.
	Rebekah Sue Harris with the Carrot Top tattoo. Scotty (Carrot Top) autographed her arm and she just had the autograph tattooed into her skin the following night!

Take the Carrot Mind Test

Well known faith healer Charles R. Collins from the US says you don't need, faith healers to get well - you can do it yourself using the incredible power of the human mind.

He wrote a book, The ABC's of Life and opened a practice as a faith healer in Miami in the mid-70s. The basis of his philosophy is shown in a simple experiment, he says.

"Take eight to 10 good-sized carrots and cut off the top, leaving about half an inch of carrot attached to the top. Be sure to cut any green sprouts coming from the tops. Then place four or five carrot tops in two dishes of water. Mark one dish with a 'plus' sign and the other with a 'minus' sign. Place both dishes on a sunny window sill.

Love (+)

Several times a day pick up one dish, tell the carrots how beautiful they are and encourage them to grow.

Hate (-)

Do the opposite with the others: curse them, hate them and think negative thoughts toward them.

Collins says "Ninety-nine percent of the time, the 'plus' carrots will sprout and flourish while the minus' ones will wither and die."

This simple carrot experiment offers proof, says Collins, of living power of the human Mind. If you can kill growth out your body in such an obvious way," he said, "just think of the damage you're doing inside your body by thinking negative thoughts. I truly believe that this is the basis all sickness!" While Collins is no longer active faith healer, he has an impressive case book of successful cures.

"The carrot experiment shows you what you can do," he insisted. "You can control the power in and around your mind. And once you learn to do that, you'll be free of disease forever! "

But in spite of his brilliant successes, Collins gave up faith healing and retreated to the isolation of a mountain top in Utah! At least he had the good sense to use carrots in his experiments.

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