Bark (botany) rope, used for example in the rigging of Viking age longships. Among the commercial products made from bark are cork, cinnamon, quinine (from the bark of Cinchona) and aspirin (from the bark of willow trees). The bark of some trees notably oak ("Quercus robur") is a source of tannic acid, which is used in tanning. Bark chips generated as a by-product of lumber production are often used in bark mulch in western North America. Bark is important to the horticultural industry since in shredded form it is used for plants that do not thrive in ordinary soil, such as epiphytes.
History of aspirin testing failures. Vane and Piper tested the biochemical cascade associated with anaphylactic shock (in extracts from guinea pig lungs, applied to tissue from rabbit aortas). They found that aspirin inhibited the release of an unidentified chemical generated by guinea pig lungs, a chemical that caused rabbit tissue to contract. By 1971, Vane identified the chemical (which they called "rabbit-aorta contracting substance," or RCS) as a prostaglandin. In a 23 June 1971 paper in the journal "Nature", Vane and Piper suggested that aspirin and similar drugs (the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs) worked by blocking the production of prostaglandins. Later research