Notices by Euphoria Lophophora III 🌵 (invaderxan@sunbeam.city), page 2

The thing is, astronomy research has no inherent profit in it. The work astronomers do can (and often does) eventually have a strong impact on human technology and society but, at the time the scientists are still doing it? Not really.

Astronomy research is not done for profit and frequently involves collaborations which straight up ignore national borders and political matters, focusing on acquiring knowledge and sharing it freely.

Honestly, capitalists hate it.

＊Gasp!＊
Sequoia seedling!

Lake Retba in Senegal is a salt lake which is naturally bright pink like strawberry milkshake.

The colour comes from microbes which use a type of photosynthesis which evolved separately to the kind that plants use. The chemical machinery those microbes use is rhodopsin – the same stuff which is found in your retinas, allowing you to see.

#NoFoolin

32000 years ago, during the last ice age, an Arctic ground squirrel was gathering food, which it took back to its burrow. That squirrel never ate all of the fruit and seeds it stashed, and so they stayed there, buried under the Arctic permafrost. Forgotten.

Until the squirrel's ancient home was discovered by a group of Russian scientists. The research team managed to grow 36 plants from those ancient seeds. Here's one of them – an ancient type of campion (Silene stenophylla).

#NoFoolin

A Tree of 40 Fruit is, quite literally, a tree which flowers with 40 types of blossom and produces 40 types of fruit. Specifically, heritage varieties of fruit from the Prunus family, which includes cherries, plums, peaches, and almonds.

There are at least 16 of these trees in the world, grown by New York artist Sam Van Aken.

#NoFoolin

Oranges need cold night time temperatures to actually turn orange. When oranges are grown in tropical countries where the weather is always warm, their skin never turns orange, instead staying a leafy green colour even when fully ripe.

#NoFoolin

This is the Fortingall Yew in Scotland, and at between 2000 and 3000 years old, it's one of the oldest living things in Europe.

Yew trees are dioecious, meaning that individual trees are mostly either male or female. But some yew trees are both. Others, transition from one to the other over time. The Fortingall Yew was once a male tree, but it's recently started growing female flowers and producing berries.

So it turns out, trees can be both nonbinary and trans too.

Some easy-to-care-for plant suggestions for beginners:

• Chlorophytum (spider plant)
• Dracaena (any species)
• Pothos vine (Epipremnum aureum)
• Heartleaf philodendron
• Rubber plant
• Pilea (Chinese money plant)
• Peperomia (any species)
• Bromeliad (most varieties, but Guzmania is probably the easiest)
• Peace lily
• Snake plant

(Made boostable at @Kiki's request! ☀️)

💚

Kor: Curzon, my beloved old friend!

Dax: I'm Jadzia now.

Kor: Jadzia, my beloved old friend!

(Being an ally, Klingon style)

So probably the weirdest Cambrian creature was this little beast. It's called Opabinia.

About the size of a mouse, and probably a relative of anomalocaris. Opabinia is mostly unlike any other creature we've ever found on Earth. Five eyes and an odd little trunk with a grabby thing on the end. In an incredibly bizarre form of convergent evolution, it probably used this appendage to eat in much the same way an elephant uses its trunk!

Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta) trees, native to Southeast Asia, look like something from a fairytale. Their beautiful trunks are a result of how their bark grows.

As the trees grow, they shed flakes of bark, revealing bright green, young bark underneath. Slowly, this fresh bark ages and fades though a variety of colours – blue, purple, pink, orange, and finally a dark maroon colour. This final dark coloured bark falls away, repeating the cycle.

Image source: https://pixels.com/featured/rainbow-eucalyptus-mitch-cat.html

50% of all photosynthesis occurring on Earth right now is being done by cyanobacteria.

So I made a thing.

The green on this graph shows where chlorophyll b absorbs (the type mostly used by plants). You can see it catches light in two places. Near 450nm (the blue end of the spectrum) and around 650nm (in the red).

The two lines show the wavelengths emitted by LED lights. Blue is cool white and red is warm white. Both have a spike in emission around chlorophyll's blue absorption and broad emission over the red absorption.

In other words, this is why houseplants like LED lighting!

It makes me uncomfortable how people have adopted corporate language when talking about themselves on the internet. You are not a corporation or a persona. You are a whole person.

You don't have a "brand" – you have passions and interests. You don't "create content" – you share thoughts, words, ideas, knowledge, and a whole galaxy of other things.

There are plenty of people out there who want to categorise you and put you in a box. Don't help them to do this.

You're so much more than that. 💚

Begonias are forest floor plants and some are highly specialised for low light conditions. In the darkest places, they have metallic blue leaves.

The colour comes from iridoplasts – a special type of chloroplast for capturing as much light as possible. They work by having many tiny surfaces which absorb light. An accidental side effect is that any light that reflects back gives the leaves an iridescent blue sheen.

A similar reflection effect causes the blue colour in Morpho butterfly wings.

The Opportunity rover’s final message from Mars was “My battery is low and it is getting dark.”
😭😭😭
NO I’M NOT CRYING OVER A SPACE ROBOT SHUT UP

Today's fun fact: Forests are inherently socialist. Seriously.

In a forest, most plants are linked together by an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi. Via the fungi, the plants share resources around so that they can all benefit. Wha's more, the plants contribute more or less depending on how much they have. Plants with more resources contribute more to their community, helping to nurture the small, young, and weak ones.

This is one of my favourite random pieces of knowledge!

💚☀️🌳

Petrichor, that fresh aroma you can smell after the rain, is caused by a little molecule called geosmin. The name literally means "earth smell." It's produced by soil bacteria and gives an earthy flavour to beets.

Humans are extremely sensitive to this scent – much, much more sensitive than sharks are to blood. Some think we evolved that way to find fresh drinking water after droughts.

Plant Microbial Fuel Cells let you enjoy both plants and solar energy at the same time!

Plants use light to produce sugars, and some of those sugars get deposited into the soil via the plants' roots. There, the plant sugars nourish soil bacteria, and with some clever use of electrodes, you can steal a little of the metabolic energy from those bacteria.

Essentially, you're using a living plant as a solar cell. It doesn't give you very much electricity but it's cool. 🌱☀️