(Source: p0ke-dex, via fyeahjpo)
“I write songs that turn inward now. Songs that rely on subtlety. Songs that are meant for headphones and car stereos. Songs that are experienced by one person at a time. Even when these songs are played in front of a crowd, everyone in the room will be listening to them alone.” —
Geoff Rickly
This man is absolutely one of my (few) musical heroes.
(via staircase-thoughts)
(Source: altpress.com, via fuckyeahgeoffrickly)
How The Zero Weeks Of Paid Maternity Leave In The U.S. Compare Globally
(via poppy90)
It’s not every day that I read about an animal that really, i mean really, blows my mind. But today I have found one that I’m dying to share with you all. This is Osmia avoseta, a solitary bee recently discovered in the Middle East that has some crazy construction skills: it builds its home out of flower petals which it forms into a cocoon-like dwelling for its larvae.
Two days goes into creating the nest, as the mother bee bites off flower petals and flies them back to the nest, one at a time, where she then begins molding them into a cozy home using nectar as glue. Once the structure is complete, she uses mud to line the inside of the flower-house before covering that, too, in flower petals. She’s quite careful not to miss a spot!
These little half-an-inch chambers only house one egg, so the mother typically creates around 10; usually right next to one another. The momma bee will collect nectar and pollen and store it in her digestive tract until she flies back to the nest and plops it at the bottom. The egg is then laid on top of the yummy mixture for baby to enjoy.
(via Jana Kinsman)
The Economist: An ocean of troubles -
Without dramatic action to reverse these processes, [Callum Roberts] predicts a catastrophe comparable to the mass extinctions of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when carbon-dioxide levels, temperature and ocean acidity all rocketed. He writes: “Not for 55m years has there been oceanic disruption of comparable severity to the calamity that lies just a hundred years ahead.” That would be hard to prove; it would be better not to try.
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npr:
Ooooo.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
Oh this is too cool. I’m not sure I would be able to eat it, it looks like a work of art!
i would eat this. i would make happy cooing noises while eating it.
GET IN MY MOUTH
[video]
GPOYTu
(via plz-gro)
She don’t wanna be some weird rabbit thing
Jigglysaturn
(Source: lilcera)
Team forfeits due to female opponent -
Ugh, supremely misogynistic and stupid. Just play against her!
WIRED
The art of military concealment is not just about making aircraft invisible to radar, but also about giving soldiers protection in the field. Since 1999, HyperStealth Biotechnology has produced patterns for more than two million uniforms for the armed forces of 40 countries.
(via holyfireman)
“The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.” — Vasudev (via ashelaysleeping)
(Source: seedeeply, via yobmasunshyne)
