Q. Dear Twig: How many colors of tomatoes are there? A. The easy answer is, more than one. Tomatoes come in colors besides red. One seed catalog lists red, pink, green, brown, black, orange and purple as the main ones. A second catalog lists red, pink, yellow-orange and purple-black as the main ones plus seven more — blue, peach, white, orange-red, olive-green, yellow-green and lemon-yellow — in a cool group of “others.” And that’s not counting tomatoes that have two colors on them, such as red with yellow stripes, yellow with red stripes and pink with gold stripes, which would make a nice Baja shirt, except for the wet squishy glop in the pocket. In other news, a red one with White Stripes would rock. That said, commercial processing tomatoes, grown in big fields and made into ketchup and so on, stick to a standard color: red, like my face when I sit on a tomato, which, yes, it would seem I just did. Next: What’s behind the colors? My own behind is on top of them. Twig Got tomatoes? Get tips on using them at http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5532.html From your scientific friends at The Ohio State University--specifically, the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (www.oardc.ohio-state.edu) and OSU Extension (extension.osu.edu.)

This bug doesn't bite ... but it can stink up your house!

There's a new bug in town, and it's causing quite a stink. The brown marmorated stink bug, named for its brown spots, showed up in the United States about 10 years ago and is sneaking into people's houses.

Outdoors, it could damage apples, peaches and cotton and soybean plants. But for now, the biggest problem is indoors - what the stink bug does when the weather turns cool in the fall.

It crawls through cracks in homes and other buildings, looking for a warm place to stay. Many insects can't survive the winter cold. But these bugs work their way under siding, around window and door frames, under roof shingles and into crawl spaces. Once inside, they go into a state of hibernation and wait for winter to pass.

The stink bugs don't harm people. But they will release an unpleasant odor, which scientists think is a kind of defensive weapon to prevent birds and lizards from eating them. Sometimes the warmth in the house wakes them up, and they fly clumsily around a room. If left undisturbed, the stink bugs will "wake up" in the spring and will leave the houses and buildings, but they may return in the fall.

No one is sure how the stink bug got here. It is originally from Asia and may have sneaked into the United States in a shipping crate.

To fight this pest, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are trying to find ways to keep it from spreading, including developing a trap that will keep the bug out of houses and farm fields. They are conducting experiments designed to find chemicals the bugs release to attract each other, known as pheromones. The scientists hope to reproduce man-made versions of the pheromones so they can lure the bugs into traps.

There are several kinds of stink bugs. Another kind, the brown-winged green bug, has been attacking crops for years in Japan. Scientists there have designed a trap that uses one of that bug's pheromones as a lure. Using that same chemical mixture, ARS scientists were able to trap and count the numbers of brown marmorated stink bugs at research sites in Maryland. The counts show the stink bug numbers are increasing. It makes finding a pheromone that can be reproduced and put into a new stink bug trap all the more important.

If you find a stink bug, do NOT squash it or vacuum it up or it will release its unpleasant odor. The best way to get a brown stink bug out of your house is to allow it to walk onto something like a newspaper and carry it outside. You also could gently collect it on a piece of tissue and flush it down the toilet.

The oldest known mathematician

Today mathematicians do wondrous things, allowing engineers to let us communicate, fly into space, protect our security, and get us from point A to B. As with art and culture, mathematicians forge new paths by building on the work of those preceding them, or as Newton might have said, by standing on the shoulders of giants.

When looking at the giants of mathematics, we go back in time spanning virtually all cultures, from Wiles (b.1953) to Lagrange (1736-1813) to Fermat (1601-1655) to Fibonacci (1170-1250) to al-Khwarizmi (790-850) to Liu Hui (220-280) to Euclid (325 BC-265 BC) to Baudhayana (800 BC-740 BC) to Ahmes (~1680 BC-~1620 BC).

Each of these mathematicians was remarkable in his own right (I happened to have selected only men for the sample; please see the September 2006 Tidbit for a biography of Ada Byron). Ahmes in particular was known for his work scribing a collection of problems in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, weights and measures, business, and recreational diversions.

That's impressive for work done 3,700 years ago. But mathematicians apparently lived 70,000 years ago in a place called Blombos Cave off the coast of South Africa. According to Science Magazine, they carved stones there with a complex geometric array of carved lines, suggesting capacity - and development - of abstract thought and symbolic language.

As our children (and often enough their parents and educators!) struggle with learning basic math facts, the distributive law, 3-D geometry, algebra, trigonometry, probability and statistics, calculus et al, it's refreshing to know that we are all simply continuing a human quest for knowledge that goes back at least 70,000 years.