Wetenschap - 25 april 1996

Foreigner

To a foreigner, the Dutch landscape is something striking. There is this incredible flatness and a never ending horizon, a horizontal line from which the entire landscape hangs," says Peter Sansom. And there always is a lot of sky visible," adds Kaat Koekoek.

Sansom and Koekoek both work at the visual arts department of the Centre for Artistic Education (CKV) in Wageningen. During the coming months, CKV is offering some new courses with have an international flavour.

Both foreign artists, Sansom and Koekoek, explain that, although the courses are open to all, they are especially interested in the participation of people from other countries and cultures. The first course is entitled The Dutch landscape in a new perspective.

The two artists will bring their own non-Dutch view of the landscape to the course, and they plan to take the participants out to draw and paint the river landscape around Wageningen and Rhenen. The new perspective also refers to a technique which will be used in the course. Koekoek explains that a figure can be cut out from a sheet of cardboard and the frame that emerges can be used to look through at the landscape. She continues, This frame can be a square but it can also be triangular or irregular in shape, thus altering the participant's view."

The breeding programme for chickens is focused on improving their ability to transform as little as feed as possible into as much chickenbreast as possible. As a consequence, the young chicken's hearts can develop abnormalities. During their short life, two to ten percent of the young chickens die from heart disease. This is the conclusion of Cor Scheele from the Instistute of Animal Husbandry and Animal Welfare in Lelystad, who will defend his PhD thesis at WAU soon. The law of conservation of energy will always be valid. You cannot extract more energy from an animal than you supply," says Scheele.

The WAU recently published the 9th edition of Prosea, Plant Resources of South-East Asia. This edition is part of a fifteen-year programme describing seven thousand plant species in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, New Guinea and Brunei. The work on the vareity of species will be published in twenty books and should be finished in 2000. The books are intended for everybody who works with plants professionally," says the WAU coordinator Dr J. Siemonsma, Extension officers, policy makers industrial research managers, agronomist students... an enormous target group." Prosea's headquarters is in Indonesia.

The future market for Novel Protein Foods (NPF's) is enormous, according to Dr B. Linsen from the Dutch research programme Sustainable Technological Development. He aims to replace forty percent of the domestic meat consumption with NPF's by 2035. Meat production is bad for the enviroment and cannot feed the growing world population. An example of NPF is protex, wich looks like minced meat and can be produced by Spirulina bacteria, peas or alfalfa. Other meat subtitutes are produced by fermenting plant extracts with fungi in a reactor. However, before NPF's can enter the market, their composition, taste and smell has to be improved.

Two groups of WAU students will present their business plan at the Rabo Business Challenge this year. Students from different universities can present their fictitious plan in this national competition. Three WAU students made a plan for recycling TV sets. They already have interested inverstors. The other group wants to combine organic farming with work with mentally handicapped persons. An MSc student from Soil and Water is involved in this proposal.

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