For example, it is capable of finding the shortest path through a maze, it can construct networks as efficient as those designed by humans, it can solve computationally difficult puzzles, it makes multi-objective foraging decisions, it balances its nutrient intake and it even behaves irrationally.
The aloe vera may have exhausted its nutrient supply if it has been in the same container for more than a few years.
Unrelated to the International Choices Programme, it failed owing to criticism that its nutrient criteria allowed high sugar and high fat products to carry a healthy choice logo (Wartella et al., 2010).
We also found orthologs of genes predicted to be hexose transporters, maltose transporters and permeases (amino acid permeases, sulfur permeases, allantoate permeases, glycerol permeases and iron permeases) which further expands its nutrient assimilation machinery, thereby helping it to acclimatize to diverse host niches.
This is at once a very old and a very new way of thinking about food: it suggests that all calories are not created equal and that the structure of a food and how it is prepared may matter as much as its nutrient composition.
"The most critical thing for the embryo is that it engages in a growth trajectory that is appropriate for its nutrient availability," Fleming said.
"Leaf mass per area is a measure of the density or thickness of leaves, and it is strongly linked to how quickly a plant turns over its nutrient resources," Royer said.
After all, whatever its nutrient benefits, the stuff is colored and sweetened, and the package makes no jokes about the 125 calories per bottle.
And still without any recognition of the opportunity costs of that water, the timing of its return, its nutrient load, etc. Water is far more complex than carbon and deserves more effort than simply transferring carbon metrics into our most complicated natural resource.
The most serious threat to the reef is not agricultural run-off (which warms the water and increases its nutrient level, so that the coral gets choked by algae and dies), but a nasty starfish called the crown of thorns, originally imported in the ballast tanks of foreign vessels, which devours coral polyps.
All these data will be fed into computer models which, the researchers hope, will allow them to develop an automated way of predicting where and when new features will form, and to monitor them when they appear.Dr Bowden and his colleagues also hope to understand the impact of thermokarst activity on the structure of the soil, and its nutrient content.
