Blueberry trees?  Oregon State University researcher Wei Qiang Yang has a couple of reasons to think so.  First, he says, in machine harvest of blueberry bushes, 15 to 20 percent of the berries are lost.  Second, blueberries now grow on their own roots.  Yang, who is both a researcher and an extension agent in Oregon’s major blueberry production region around the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora where he works, has tested grafted blueberry trees that grow on single stems since 2005.  “There are 180 grafted blueberry trees (30 each of six cultivars) and 180 blueberry bushes, so I can compare them side by side in the field scientifically,” he said.  “The plant spacing for the blueberry tree is three feet apart between plants and ten feet between the planting rows with grass middles.  They are all planted on flat ground, no raised beds.”  Yang is collaborating with researchers at land-grant universities in California and Florida as part of a multistate effort.  All are testing several blueberry varieties grafted onto rootstocks.  Yang himself has a rootstock testing plot with more than 800 rootstock seedlings.  http://www.goodfruit.com/blueberry-trees/

Blueberry trees in Ohio?  As a part of Gary Gao’s new specialty crop block grant, he travelled to the University of Florida in Gainesville to meet with professors Rebecca Darnell and Jeff Williamson. Together, they had a multi-year and multi-state USDA-SCRI grant to work on grafted blueberry trees.  Dr. Darnell was the PI of the project.  She showed Gary their grafted blueberry trees that were designed to improve harvest efficiency.  Southern highbush blueberry cultivars were grafted on the sparkleberry.  https://southcenters.osu.edu/newsletter/connections-newsletter-spring-edition-2017/blueberry-trees-focus-gary-gaos-university

The term "cold war" first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called "You and the Atomic Bomb."  Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians.  After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity.  Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world.  Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international.  By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.”  In 1946, in his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan explained this policy:  The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]”; as a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” President Harry Truman agreed.  “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation . . . by outside pressures.”  The containment strategy provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States.  American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II.  Thus began a deadly “arms race.”  In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own.  In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.”  Stalin followed suit.  The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be.  It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan.  Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.  Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition.  On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveler”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit.  In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway.  That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space.  Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.  The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad.  In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south.  Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option.  Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.  In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere.  The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World”.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north.  Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf.  However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.  The Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan.  Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere.  As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world.  This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.  In November 1989, the Berlin Wall--the most visible symbol of the Cold War--was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart.  The Cold War was over.  http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history  See also Origins of the Cold War at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-8/apush-postwar-era/v/origins-of-the-cold-war

Reader feedback:  What do you call a group of clams?  A chowder!   Thank you, Muse reader!

Scientists have answered one of nature’s most pungent questions:  what gives the world’s smelliest fruit its distinctive aroma.  Scientists in Singapore said on October 9, 2017 they have mapped the genome of the durian, known throughout Southeast Asia as the “king of fruits” for its unique smell, flavor and formidable spiny appearance.  They identified a group of genes responsible for odor compounds called volatile sulfur compounds, and found that these genes become highly activated as the fruit ripens, driving its unusual smell.  “The durian smell has been described as a mix of an onion-like sulfury aroma with notes of sweet fruitiness and savory soup-seasoning.  A key component of the durian smell are volatile sulfur compounds, or VSCs, which have been characterized as decaying, onion-like, rotten eggs, sulfury and fried shallots,” said geneticist Bin Tean Teh, deputy director of the National Cancer Center Singapore, co-leader of the study published in the journal Nature Genetics.  Unlike other plant species that typically have one or two copies of these genes, this species boasted four copies, demonstrating that VSC production is, as Teh put it, "turbocharged" in durian fruits.  Will Dunham    https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2017-10-09/whats-that-smell-secrets-of-famously-pungent-durian-fruit-revealed  You’ll often hear that durian smells like hell but tastes like heaven.  Its pungent odor is acknowledged in Southeast Asia—the fruit is banned on most public transport, and you probably won’t be allowed in a hotel, a taxi or an airplane with a durian in your bag.  https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-16/insane-fruit-probably-world-s-most-celebrated-and-persecuted

Here Are The 2017 MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Winners by Colin Dwyer  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/11/556891441/here-are-the-2017-macarthur-genius-grant-winners

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1782  October 11, 2017  The last two symphonies of the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev both premiered on October 11.  Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony premiered in Leningrad in 1947, and Prokofiev's Seventh, his last Symphony, in Moscow, in 1952.  Composers Datebook  Word of the Day  surrey  noun  A light horse-drawn carriage with forward-facing seats accommodating two or four people, popular in the United States; a motorized carriage of similar design.  The musical film Oklahoma! featuring songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, including “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”, premiered on October 11, 1955.