The weekly crop report said warm, dry weather was needed — there had been heavy rains May 15, and only 25 per cent of the crop had been seeded. There was extensive flooding along the Red River in 1966, and the Red River Board had opened an office to receive claims.

Officers of several credit unions were scheduled to meet to discuss the current “tight money” situation in Canada. A full-page ad from Manitoba Pool offered 10-year savings certificates at six per cent interest.

We reported that radioactive fallout from China’s third atomic bomb test was more than 33 times higher than the previous one. There were agricultural effects from more than 400 tests that were conducted by the U.S., Soviet Union and China in the 1950s and 1960s. The Strontium 90 nuclear isotope became concentrated in food, and there were particular concerns about the safety of milk.

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The globally popular sport gets its name from the slightly curved or “curl” path the stones take when released by the player towards the target area nearly 30 metres away.

As soon as the player releases the stone, it is only affected by the friction against the ice. The friction can be slightly reduced, and therefore the sliding distance somewhat increased by intensively sweeping the ice just in front of the sliding stone.

The stone, which weighs nearly 20 kg rotates slowly based on the spin the player applies upon release and typically revolves two to three times during the 25 seconds it takes to travel the length of the sheet.

Despite years of speculations among the curlers and several scientific articles, so far no one has been able to present a good explanation to why the curling stones actually curl. Interestingly, other rotating objects sliding over a surface curl in the opposite direction (make a simple test by sliding, for example, a glass turned upside down over a slippery floor).

However, a team of Uppsala University researchers in Sweden found that the curved path is due to the microscopic roughness of the stone producing microscopic scratches in the ice sheet.

As the stone slides over the ice the roughness on its leading half produces small scratches or grooves in the ice. The rotation of the stone will give the scratches a slight deviation from the sliding direction. When the rough protrusions on the trailing half shortly pass the same area, they cross the scratches from the front in a small angle and have a tendency to follow them.

The importance of having a proper roughness of the sliding surface on the stone to give it the expected trajectory, is since long known among curlers, the Uppsala release says.

However, this has not previously been coupled to the steering mechanism. While working on their model the Uppsala researchers experimented with pre-scratching of the ice in various ways, and could then observe that also non-rotating stones could be guided.

Stones with very smooth, polished sliding surface were, however, not affected by the scratches.

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The combination truck/tractor could carry 3,000 pounds in truck mode, and pull a three-bottom plow in the field. When fitted with a belt pulley on its front, it could power a 22-inch cylinder threshing machine, a circular saw, or water pump.

But with a price tag of $2,500 — a fortune a century ago — not many farmers could afford the multi-tasking machine. But they attracted a lot of interest and one of them was awarded a gold medal in its class in the motor contest at the 1909 Brandon Summer Fair.

The accompanying picture shows the Avery being put through its paces via the de Prony Brake, a belt-driven dynamometer which measured horsepower and variations in belt pulley speed. The solid rubber tires on the machine were perforated and studded with replaceable hardwood plugs.

While the Manitoba Agricultural Museum doesn’t have an Avery 12-horsepower tractor, it is home to a number of rare machines. For more information, visit ag-museum.mb.ca.

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Researchers from Newcastle University in Britain have shown the kilogram itself has put on weight.

The original kilogram — known as the International Prototype Kilogram or the IPK — is the standard against which all other measurements of mass are set. Stored in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, 40 official replicas of the IPK were made in 1884 and distributed around the world in order to standardize mass.

Using a state-of-the-art Theta-probe XPS machine — the only one of its kind in the world — the team has found the original kg is likely to be tens of micrograms heavier than it was when the first standard was set in 1875. It seems that over time, contaminants have built up on the surface of the platinum-based originals.

“It doesn’t really matter what it weighs as long as we are all working to the same exact standard. The problem is there are slight differences. Around the world, the IPK and its 40 replicas are all growing at different rates, diverging from the original,” said lead researcher Peter Cumpson.

“But mass is such a fundamental unit that even this very small change is significant and the impact of a slight variation on a global scale is absolutely huge. There are cases of international trade in high-value materials — or waste — where every last microgram must be accounted for.

The researchers used cutting-edge X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) to analyze surfaces similar to the standard kilogram to assess the buildup of hydrocarbons — and how to remove them.

Publishing their findings this month in the journal of Metrologia, they reveal how giving the kg a suntan could be the answer. “By exposing the surface to a mixture of UV and ozone we can remove the carbonaceous contamination and potentially bring prototype kilograms back to their ideal weight.”

Sounds like a good excuse for a winter holiday.

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“It can tolerate some pretty cool temperatures with little or no damage,” said Kansas State University agronomist Jim Shroyer.

Six counties in the western part of key producer Kansas saw temperatures dip below freezing from midnight to early morning, according to data gathered by Kansas state climatologists.

Generally for freezing temperatures to do sustained damage, conditions have to be well-below freezing for several hours.

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It’s likely solar flares will wreak havoc with at least some systems this coming year as the sun flips its magnetic field, says Pam Wilson, a precision agriculture instructor with Assiniboine Community College.

“Basically the sun’s magnetic field flips every 11 years, and when it does, it sends out these charged particles,” Wilson said after her presentation at Ag Days. “These charged particles are basically big bundles of energy and they get thrown every direction.

“When they get thrown towards the earth they create radio signals and these radio signals interfere with the radio signals the satellites are sending out to our GPS receivers,” she said. “They actually mimic the radio signals so they’ll block the signals coming in from the GPS.”

Wilson said solar flares have also been known to interfere with television signals and cellphones.

Wilson said it has been 11 years since the last flip, so the technology in the field has likely improved. But she said it remains to be seen how much of an effect the sunspot activity will have in 2012.

“I’m curious how bad it’s going to be this time because last year people were having some issues, but not as many issues as they had a decade ago. I’m hoping it’s going to be better,” she said.

The solar flares can cause farmers to lose their GPS signal several times a day. “It could be for a minute, it could be for three hours,” she said. “In a high solar flare year, like this year will be, it could happen three times, it could happen five times a day. During a normal year it might happen once every 30 or 40 days.”

Users might also experience a higher DOP, which stands for dilution of precision, or a reduction in the performance accuracy of their system.

If farmers start to experience random outages, their first step would be to contact their supplier to see if a higher-quality antennae will correct the problem. If possible, borrow one to see if it helps before making an outright purchase, she said.

Wilson also told her Ag Days seminar that when things go wrong with GPS, 90 per cent of the time it’s related to either how the system was installed or calibrated. She said 70 per cent of the time it is due to improper calibration.

She advised farmers to take the time and go through the proper steps when calibrating their systems. If the dealer’s instructions aren’t detailed enough, there is plenty of information on proper calibration on the Internet.

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“Women. They are a complete mystery,” quipped the author of A Brief History of Time.

The wheelchair-bound Hawking, who only recently retired from a post once held by Isaac Newton, was too ill to attend his 70th birthday celebrations on Jan. 8, but in a recorded speech urged people to be curious about the universe.

He was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 1963 and told he had barely two years to live. He has since been hailed as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.

He said his excitement and enthusiasm for his subject drove him on, and urged others to seek out the same inspiration.

“Remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious,” Hawking said.

Hawking, whose health has deteriorated to where he now uses twitches in the muscles in his cheek to choose letters or words on his voice computer to communicate, is still undaunted.

“However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at,” he said. “It matters that you don’t just give up.”

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The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said April 1 that it requires documentation proving the safety of food and feed products before it will allow them into Canada.

The federal agency has also begun testing radiation levels of Japanese products, it said.

Last week, Canada said it required documents verifying the safety of milk, fruit and vegetables from four Japanese prefectures. Other countries also have imposed restrictions, and Russia’s food safety body said it may ban seafood from areas near the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The Japanese areas affected by Canada’s import controls are Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Miyagi, Yamagata, Niigata, Nagano, Yamanashi, Saitama, Tokyo and Chiba.

Above-safety radiation levels have been discovered in some types of vegetables from the Fukushima area in northeast Japan, where a six-reactor nuclear plant was battered by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government has said. Japan has stopped shipments of vegetables and milk from near the plant.

In the U.S., a trace amount of radioactive iodine, well below levels of public health concerns, has been detected in milk from the state of Washington as the U.S. monitors radiation levels amid the nuclear crisis in Japan, U.S. regulators said.

“These types of findings are to be expected in the coming days and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children,” the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency said in a joint statement.

Testing found 0.8 pCi/l of iodine-131, a radioactive form of iodine, in the milk sample.

Although there are naturally occurring levels of radiation in milk, such an isotope is not normally found in milk, but the agencies stressed it was 5,000 times lower than the FDA’s standard, known as the “defined intervention level.”

“These findings are a minuscule amount compared to what people experience every day,” FDA scientist Patricia Hansen said in a statement.

The EPA said it has increased radiation monitoring in U.S. milk, precipitation and drinking water in response to radiation leaks at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the earthquake March 11.

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Engineers managed to rig power cables to all six reactors at the Fukushima complex, 240 km (150 miles) north ofTokyo, and started a water pump at one of them to reverse the overheating that has triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.

Some workers were later evacuated from one of the most badly damaged reactors when smoke briefly rose from the site. There was no immediate explanation for the smoke, but authorities had said earlier that pressure was building up at the No. 3 reactor.

Smoke was also seen at the No. 2 reactor.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami left more than 21,000 people dead or missing and will cost an already beleaguered economy some $250 billion, making it the world’s costliest ever natural disaster.

The head of the UN atomic agency said the nuclear situation remained very serious but it would be resolved.

“I have no doubt that this crisis will be effectively overcome,” Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told an emergency board meeting.

But news of progress at the nuclear plant was overshadowed by mounting concern that radioactive particles already released into the atmosphere have contaminated food and water supplies.

“Quite clearly it’s a serious situation,” Peter Cordingley, Manilabased spokesman for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional office for the Western Pacific, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“It’s a lot more serious than anybody thought in the early days when we thought that this kind of problem can be limited to 20 to 30 kilometres … It’s safe to suppose that some contaminated produce got out of the contamination zone.”

However, he said there was no evidence of contaminated food from Fukushima reaching other countries.

Fukushima is the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, but signs are that it is far less severe than the Ukrainian disaster.

Japan’s Health Ministry has urged some residents near the plant to stop drinking tap water after high levels of radioactive iodine were detected.

Cases of contaminated vegetables and milk have already stoked anxiety despite assurances from officials that the levels are not dangerous. The government has prohibited the sale of spinach from all four prefectures near the plant and also banned selling of raw milk from Fukushima prefecture.

There were no major reports of contaminated food in Tokyo, a city of about 13 million people. City officials however said higher-than- standard levels of iodine were found in an edible form of chrysanthemum.

“From reports I have heard so far, it seems that the levels of radioactive iodine and caesium in milk and some foodstuffs are significantly higher than government limits,” said Jim Smith, a specialist in earth and environmental sciences at Britain’s Portsmouth University.

“This doesn’t mean that consumption of these products is necessarily an immediate threat, as limits are set so that foodstuffs can be safely consumed over a fairly long period of time. Nevertheless, for foodstuffs which are found to be above limits, bans on sale and consumption will have to be put in place in the affected areas.”

Japan is a net importer of food, but has substantial exports – mainly fruit, vegetables, dairy products and seafood – with its biggest markets in Hong Kong, China and the United States.

In Taipei, one of the top Japanese restaurants in the city is offering diners the use of a radiation gauge in case they were nervous about the food.

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