what's that comment? "you wouldn't use a rapier in the same situation you'd use a folding chair"
“Baikal Zen”: Rocks that have fallen on the ice of Lake Baikal are heated by sunlight and emit infrared rays that melt the ice below. Once the sun is gone, the ice becomes solid again, creating a small support for the rock above.
scrolling down I was like “oh what a cool idea! someone skipped stones on a lake and took high speed photographs to get these pictures where it looks like the water is holding up the stone which is kinda was does happen a-oh, no. nope. it’s just Fucking Lake Baikal up to its god defying nonsense again”
nothing - and i mean nothing - can top the way neil gaiman talks about crowley and aziraphale’s relationship on his episode of david tennant’s podcast. every time i hear it, a part of me dies in the absolute best way possible.
“because you’d actually spent 28 minutes watching the up and downs of these two on earth for 6000 years becoming the only important thing in each other’s lives. and here is this moment where they are actually - they have two utterly different philosophies of existing. and aziraphale cannot go off with crowley and crowley cannot go off without him, but he has to. and you wind up with that ‘have a nice doomsday’ line. the excitement i had at writing that stuff, and the joy i had in knowing that we’re gonna watch that relationship open like a flower to us, ending in a 1960s - with the hand over the holy water, and there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house. and i knew that because it did that for me. watching what [david] and michael brought to it, and it became the most glorious, tentative, friendship over thousands of years, that then becomes sort of peculiar and flirty and weird and prickly and funny and glorious.“
Heading home from the fields
A typical butterfly farmer's attire typically doesn't have a top. It's not like insects have anything to hide on their chest and it removes the hassle of fitting the clothes around their wings.
Poofy underskirts don't have a practical reason, country girls just want to be pretty too.
By Patrick Barkham
The Guardian
May 27, 2023
York groundsel was a cheerful yellow flower that slipped into global extinction in 1991, thanks to overzealous application of weedkiller in the city of its name.
But now the urban plant has been bought back to life in the first ever de-extinction in Britain, and is flowering again in York.
The species of groundsel was only ever found around the city and only evolved into its own species in the past century after non-native Oxford ragwort hybridised with native groundsel.
York groundsel, Senecio eboracensis, was discovered growing in the car park of York railway station in 1979 and was the first new species to have evolved in Britain for 50 years, thriving on railway sidings and derelict land.
But the new plant’s success was short-lived, as urban land was tidied up and chemicals applied to remove flowers dismissed as “weeds”.
It was last seen in the wild in 1991. Fortunately, researchers kept three small plants in pots on a windowsill in the University of York. These short-lived annual plants soon died, but they produced a precarious pinch of seed, which was lodged at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank.
Andrew Shaw of the Rare British Plants Nursery had a vision to bring the species back to life, but when tests were carried out on some privately held seeds very few germinated successfully.
So Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog, quickly authorised a de-extinction attempt via its species recovery programme, which has funded the revival of the most threatened native species for 30 years.
“The Millennium Seed Bank said the seed was getting near the end of its lifespan and so we thought we would only have one more chance of resurrecting it,” said Alex Prendergast, a vascular plant senior specialist for Natural England.
Natural England paid for a polytunnel at the Rare British Plants Nursery in Wales, where 100 of the tiny seeds were planted. To the botanists’ surprise, 98 of the seeds germinated successfully. The polytunnel rapidly filled with a thousand York groundsel plants.
In February six grams of seed – potentially thousands of plants – were sown into special plots around York on council and Network Rail land.
This week, the first plants in the wild for 32 years began to flower, bringing colour to the streets and railway sidings of York.
This de-extinction is likely to be a one-off in this country because York groundsel is the only globally extinct British plant that still persists in seed form and so could be revived.
But Prendergast said the de-extinction showed the value of the Millennium Seed Bank – to which plenty of York groundsel seed has now been returned – and there were a number of good reasons for bringing the species back to life.
“It’s a smiley, happy-looking yellow daisy and it’s a species that we’ve got international responsibility for,” he said.
“It only lives in York, and it only ever lived in York. It’s a good tool to talk to people about the importance of urban biodiversity and I hope it will capture people’s imagination.
“It’s also got an important value as a pollinator and nectar plant in the area because it flowers almost every month of the year.”
luke arnold woke up this morning with one thought and one thought only and that was the silverflint agenda happy fucking pride month
There had been small rumors floating around.
David Bowie photographed by Helmut Newton for US Vogue November 1983
@ivanaskye submitted: this Decomposed Leaf let me get very close for pictures, due to being a Decomposed Leaf that is Gross and therefore has no need to fly away, being notably Not Yummy
(front range colorado)
Wow! What a gross dead leaf that I don't want to eat! Definitely not a beautiful mourning cloak butterfly that would probably be delicious. Did you know? Mourning cloak butterflies can make loud clicking noises to startle predators! Not that that has anything to do with this leaf
SNOOP DOGG goes off-script in a conversation with Larry Jackson, formerly of Apple Music and current Co-Founder and CEO of Gamma, moderated by Shirley Halperin, Executive Editor of Variety Magazine at The Milken Institute. (May 3, 2023)
