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Posted by Karen

I don't like Brussels sprouts. For years people tried to convince me I just hadn't tried the right recipe. The only right Brussels sprouts recipe is to prep the sprouts, sprinkle with sea salt and flush them down the toilet. 4 stars. Or ... there's this one. On an unusually cool night in September of...

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How Moss Fights Crime

Nov. 12th, 2025 03:00 am
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Posted by Molly Glick

You’ve likely stepped on an unlikely crime solver: Mosses may be low-profile, but they can offer a huge help in closing classes. The mat-like plants and their relatives have previously been used to gauge the timing of people’s deaths and tie suspects to the scene of a crime, among other crucial forensic insights.

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Mosses and other members of the bryophytes plant group have served as helpful pieces of evidence in forensic investigations for a few reasons—they dwell in many different habitats, can be linked to specific locations, and easily stick to people’s clothing, vehicles, or other personal items. They’re also easily preserved, and only a wee bit of a bryophyte sample is needed to narrow down the main group the specimen is from.

Despite the valuable secrets they harbor, bryophytes have only been documented in aiding a few reported forensic cases around the world, according to a paper recently published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research.

BOTANICAL CLUES: A dried Sphagnum moss sample that was collected in 2013 during a homicide investigation in Michigan. Photo courtesy of Field Museum.
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“We reviewed 150 years of scientific literature to see how these plants have been used in investigations,” said study co-author Matt von Konrat, head of botanical collections at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. “Well, it turns out, the answer was, ‘Not that much.’”

Along with his collaborators, von Konrat encountered several cases where bryophytes were used to calculate the postmortem interval of remains—the time that has passed between one’s death and the discovery of their body—based on these plants’ growth rates. Investigators have also analyzed bryophyte fragments taken from suspects. When investigating a 2001 homicide in Finland, officials there “used recovered bryophyte fragments to link suspects to the scene of the crime where human remains were discovered,” according to the paper.

Read more: “The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies

During the investigation of the 2011 abduction and homicide of a 4-month-old baby in Michigan, dried mud on a suspect’s shoe contained Sphagnum moss and a collection of other plants that don’t typically grow near each other, leading officials to a specific area to search for the victim’s body. Several of the new paper’s authors were involved in that case. Though the body has not been found, “the analysis and identification of the botanical samples recovered from Phillips’ shoes greatly narrowed down investigators’ search radius.”

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Outside of these few examples, the authors note that plants are “underused” in forensic investigations. In fact, few law enforcement professionals are trained to identify and collect any type of botanical samples.

“Plants, and specifically bryophytes, represent an overlooked yet powerful source of forensic evidence that can help investigators link people, places, and events,” study co-author Jenna Merkel, who was pursuing her master’s degree in forensic science at George Washington University during this research, said in the statement. “Through this paper, we aim to raise awareness of forensic botany and encourage law enforcement to recognize the value of even the smallest plant fragments during investigations.”

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Lead image: Des_Callaghan / Wikimedia Commons

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Daily Happiness

Nov. 11th, 2025 06:49 pm
torachan: palmon smiling (palmon)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We finished up another puzzle.



This is the cat side of the two-sided Disney dogs and cats puzzle we got recently. I was anticipating the double-sidedness being a higher difficulty setting but since the "back" side of the puzzle has a matte finish and the "front" is glossy, it was actually very easy to tell which was which. What did add to the difficulty was the fact that the outer edges are just one color. What I ended up doing with some of them was actually checking the back side to see if there was any color on there other than the background green, and fitting those pieces in first, then finally working on the ones that were just single color on both sides and going by shape alone. The actual illustration itself was pretty easy to work on and went quickly (especially since both of us were working on it). I'm looking forward to doing the dog side at some point, but not going directly into that one next.

2. I used up the last of the croquettes we had in the freezer when I made the curry on Sunday, and Carla was wishing we had some more to have with the leftovers, but rather than buy another package (which would have resulted in leftover croquettes), we hit on the idea of using the last few frozen aloo tiki, and they worked very nicely! Now that's yet another thing gone from the freezer (and both they and the croquettes were suuuuuuuper icy, so they really needed to get used up).

3. Jasper!

threadbare tapestry unwinding slow

Nov. 11th, 2025 08:56 pm
musesfool: Sebastian Stan is trying to seduce you (drunk off all these stars)
[personal profile] musesfool
So I'm back on my HGTV bullshit again, and I just watched an episode where Egypt and Mike designed "the ultimate bachelor pad" for a dude who plans to entertain his friends and family for cards and football games, and who has two enormous dogs, and they put a WHITE COUCH in his living room. Who DOES that?

Otherwise, it was a nice reno - the three-seasons deck especially. But a white couch just seems like a terrible idea for 99% of people, let alone a guy with 2 huge dogs.

*
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Posted by Bob Grant

Now this is what I call a long-distance call. This image depicts a powerful laser beam shot from a mountaintop in California to a NASA spacecraft flying through the cosmos, about 143 million miles from Earth.

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The laser sent 1.4 kilowatts of power to the Deep Space Optical Communications transceiver, which was aboard the space agency’s Psyche spacecraft earlier this year. The experiment was designed to test the ability of the receiver to capture information-laden photons from such an impressive distance and then decode them, a handy thing if Mars missions are to become reality.

Read more: “If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him

And no, that purple crescent shape in the image isn’t a UFO. It’s just lens flare from an out-of-frame light.

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More recently, the test was repeated, with Psyche receiving a signal from 218 million miles away. Read more about the experiments, conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Lead image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

juniperphoenix: Locke and Sayid walking through tall grass (LOST: I went swimming in the Caribbean)
[personal profile] juniperphoenix posting in [community profile] fanart_recs
Fandom: LOST
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Individual portraits of Sayid, Desmond, Sun, Kate, Juliet, Eko, and Ana-Lucia
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital painting
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: maddiesium on Reddit

Why this piece is awesome: These are great likenesses and wonderfully expressive of the characters. Sun's is the real standout for me, with its dramatic use of color and light and that classic Sun expression.

Link: Lost portrait paintings

Daily Check-in

Nov. 11th, 2025 05:56 pm
starwatcher: Western windmill, clouds in background, trees around base. (Default)
[personal profile] starwatcher posting in [community profile] fandom_checkin
 
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, November 11, to midnight on Wednesday, November 12. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #33826 Daily Check-in
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 12

How are you doing?

I am OK.
9 (75.0%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
3 (25.0%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
5 (41.7%)

One other person.
4 (33.3%)

More than one other person.
3 (25.0%)




Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.
 

(no subject)

Nov. 11th, 2025 04:50 pm
ursamajor: strumming to find a melody for two (one chord into another)
[personal profile] ursamajor
And then suddenly, it became tech week for Verdi.

We borrowed Valerie Sainte-Agathe from SF Girls' Choir in preparation for this performance. Valerie breaks things down differently from Ash, but I like how she pushes us in certain ways that make us realize we know things better than we think we do; it's a confidence builder. Of course, that's a double-edged sword when it's the case where you actually don't know things as well as you know you need to, but I think overall most of us are benefiting from that presumption of a musical capability baseline, that we can read notes and lyrics at the same time and don't always have to start with one or the other. The occasional singing in mixed formation; the times when she tells us to just put the sheet music down and trust our memory.

We did a "retreat" a couple of weekends ago to basically cram in the equivalent of two additional rehearsals, and I think it helped to just run almost everything in order, to realize that yes, we actually have touched on all of the sections where we sing, and now it's just a matter of linking them together into one performance. (And, um, warming up sufficiently; some of my sopranos have definitely not been feeling warmed up enough for some of the high notes we've got in the Verdi; apparently the tenors have a similar plaint.)

Rehearsals Wednesday and Thursday; performance Friday night, along with a world premiere from Cava Menzies to open the show. I believe there are still tickets available for anyone local and interested. Guess I'd better dig out the concert blacks soon and make sure they're clean :) And figure out a lighter-weight folder for the Verdi, lord is the new edition heavy, but it still needs to be in a black music folder to blend in!

(Note to self: obviously it won't arrive in time for Verdi, but if you're thinking about trying to find a lighter-weight concert top before Break Bread, look at Blackstrad? Occasionally, the algorithm deposits actually relevant things in my feed. I'm currently intrigued by their Vesper top and their Elektra top, though I suspect given dress code the Vesper's a better option. There's even a petite section!)

And Break Bread will be upon us faster than a blink: rehearsal next week, break for Thanksgiving, two more regular rehearsals, and then dress rehearsal and performance all on Sunday, December 15. I'd better hurry up and order my music for our February concert, haven't done that yet, naughty section leader!
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Posted by Kristen French

Humans are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to steer through troubled waters and cheer us on when we shine. One popular school of psychology known as attachment theory suggests that these close relationships tend to follow established patterns that differ from one person to the next: Some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about abandonment, less willing to trust even those we hold most dear.

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Now a large, new, 30-year study has found that our earliest friendships may have the biggest impact on how well we “attach” to friends and romantic partners in adulthood. If true this finding would upend conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment styles later in life. The team of researchers found that, in fact, mothers come second, and fathers, at least in the cohort studied, had little influence. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, followed 705 people and their families over three decades, starting in the 1990s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early ’80s, and it entered into the popular discourse in the intervening decades. The theory evolved, with subsequent research suggesting that our attachment styles are shaped across our lifetimes by multiple relationships, not just those with our parents, as Bowlby had initially proposed.

But until now, few studies had experimentally tested, over a person’s lifetime, the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory. To do this, Keely Dugan, an assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and her colleagues, analyzed data from one landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families that started in 1991 and stretched over 15 years. They then followed up with 705 of the original study participants, who were now 26 to 31 years of age.

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Read more: “Love Is Biological Bribery

The data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors periodically videotaped mothers and fathers interacting with their young children and made notes about their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed parent-child conflicts and closeness through reports from the parents and measured parents’ warmth and hostility through reports from the children. They also examined how the children rated their friendship quality and collected teacher and parent reports about their social competence with peers.

In the follow up, Dugan and her team evaluated the attachment styles and relationship quality of the now-adult participants, with their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, maternal education, race and ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth.

Dugan and her colleagues found that a person’s relationship with their mother does shape their general attachment style and their specific individual relationships with friends, romantic partners, and fathers, accounting for 2 to 3 percent of differences in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and fuzzy during their younger years tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the interaction with the mother, the more influence it potentially seemed to have. But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.

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“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugani told Scientific American. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”

Even more reason to choose your schoolyard friends wisely.

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Lead image: Ihnatovich Maryia / Shutterstock

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Posted by Molly Glick

On Christmas morning in 1950, four students who were members of a Scottish nationalist political party carried out a legendary heist. They broke into Westminster Abbey in London and nabbed a 335-pound Medieval relic called the Stone of Scone. This scheme sparked a political border closing and a decades-long mystery, as bits of the stone have remained missing. One archeologist spent years trying to track them down, and has now revealed her findings.

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The students behind the hefty theft were avenging a theft that transpired six centuries earlier, which has long been viewed as a symbol of Scottish subjugation under England: This block of red sandstone had been used by Scottish rulers in coronation ceremonies sometime during the 13th century, until it was stolen by English troops under the direction of King Edward I in 1296. From then on, the stone became a fixture in British coronation ceremonies.

During the mid-20th-century heist, the thieves dropped the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, onto the floor of Westminster Abbey—and it cracked into two pieces. People involved with this plot crudely repaired the stone before it was returned to authorities in 1951.

But not all of the stone made it back. Some bits stayed in Scotland, others were scattered far afield, many of their whereabouts largely unknown until recently.

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Read more: “The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy

Sally Foster, an archeologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland has been on this case and reports her findings in a new Antiquaries Journal paper on the storied stone. A mastermind behind the stone’s clandestine repair was Robert, or Bertie, Gray. He was a sculptor and politician involved in the movement for self-governance of Scotland, which had unified with England in 1707, disbanding its own parliament in the process to send members to London as part of the new Parliament of Great Britain.

In the process of piecing the stone back together, Gray kept 34 fragments that he numbered, curated, and gave out over a period of 24 years.

In her recent research, Foster reported her adventures in hunting down these fragments and tracing their journeys as they secretly switched hands. While on this quest, she dug through archives, collaborated with curators and experts, and asked the public for information. Foster also conducted detailed ethnographic research, including interviews with families associated with fragments of the stone.

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Ultimately, Foster learned that “Gray traded on styling himself as the man who repaired the Stone, so we see him employing the fragments as a form of personal capital in his social and political networks,” she wrote.

Recipients of the stone include those involved in the robbery, people from as far as Canada and Australia, and politicians Gray respected. Some recipients even fashioned their fragments into jewelry, safeguarding them as family heirlooms. Pieces were also sent out for scientific testing to learn about the stone’s origins.

Ultimately, Foster located half of the 34 fragments, but the remaining pieces remain a mystery—she hopes that increasing public attention could lead her to tantalizing new clues.

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Lead image: Firebrace / Wikimedia Commons

Does Leon want to be a real boy?

Nov. 11th, 2025 03:55 pm
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
And by Leon, I mean Leon Muskbrat, the world's richest manchild.

(He's officially Leon 'cause the Prez called him that twice, so that makes it official.)

3am Saturday morning, Leon posted a Grok-generated video of a 'woman' that resembles his ex-wife and weirdly-named child's mother Grimes, who smiles and says "I will always love you" in a very bad lip sync.

I'm a little unclear whether he thinks this was a spiffy tech demo or showing off something that he did or just what this was.

The 87-y/o acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates had a very interesting observation:

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,” Oates wrote.

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world,'” Oates concluded.


WOW. Pity he can't take Tylenol for such a burn as it might cause him to become autistic.

He, of course, retorted and tried to disprove her observations and, in doing so, pretty much reinforced them.

But I was thinking about her statement of how it could be used as a metric about what a lot of political figures post about. Now, Leon, AKA the Ketamine Kid, AKA The Edgelord, AKA the frat boy who never grew up and hires gamers so that he himself can appear to be a skilled online gamer, this clearly applies. I can't imagine how boring a conversation with him would be: he'd probably have to steer it towards himself and his companies so as to have something to talk about!

(tagged under Tesla since I don't have, and don't want to add, a Musk tag)

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-ai-girlfriend-love-grok-desperate-2000683797

Remembrance 2025

Nov. 11th, 2025 04:56 pm
dewline: Remembrance Poppy Image (remembrance)
[personal profile] dewline
I was at my mother's care home today.

I hope that today was kind to you.
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
The Attorney-General of Texas, Ken Paxton, has decided to sue the corporations Kenvue, and Johnson and Johnson, the makers and former makers of the Tylenol family of pain relievers, citing “deceptively marketing Tylenol” knowing that it “leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.”

WHEEEEEEEEEE!

President Pudding Brain did that lovely press conference a few weeks ago where he repeatedly said, with minor variations "“Don’t take Tylenol. There’s no downside. Don’t take it. You’ll be uncomfortable. It won’t be as easy maybe, but don’t take it if you’re pregnant. Don’t take Tylenol and don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born”. There were some supercuts of this made that were quite amusing.

A couple of interesting sidenotes. The first is that Paxton will probably not be in office when this goes to trial as he's running for the U.S. Senate, so this is purely performative to appease the Orange God. He's also facing Federal Charges, which I believe are still pending, on some campaign finance irregularities - he was impeached on Texas charges but of course the Republican Texas legislature without surprise or irony found him innocent. It's definitely in his best interest to get out of Texas local politics before a change in political power takes place, which could happen.

The reality of autism and Tylenol, of course, is that autism was first classified as a disorder over a decade before Tylenol came to market. Still, this could cause J&J and Kenvue to bend the knee and cough up millions of dollars to the "Trump Presidential Library".

I hope they fight and drive Paxton et al into the ground.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/10/if-things-in-america-werent-stupid-enough-texas-is-suing-tylenol-maker/
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Posted by Devin Reese

The deep sea is a foreboding, almost impenetrable, place for us surface dwellers; darkness prevents photosynthesis, and animals at great depths must withstand extremely low temperatures, high pressures, and scarce nutrients. Yet, ecosystems just beneath the seafloor contain an estimated 15 percent of Earth’s living biomass—in the form of wildly resourceful microbes that make do in the abyss.

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Hardy communities of microbes inhabit the ocean’s crust, clustered around hydrothermal vents, which spew life-giving minerals in superheated streams of water. Now, a study in Communications Earth & Environment announces marine microbial life that even further pushes the limits of environmental tolerance.

University of Bremen researchers and colleagues searched for evidence of microbes in two sediment cores extracted from mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench. The cores, which were drilled from seafloor more than 9,800 feet down, contained mud from up to 5.4 feet below the seafloor, down into what’s called serpentinite, a sediment layer that is tinged a bright blue.

In that blue mud, the pH is a startlingly alkaline 12, the same as some household bleaches, oven cleaners, and hair relaxers. But the scientists, using lipid analysis, detected, in that punishing mud, fat molecules that could only have resulted from biological activity.

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Read more: “The Bacteria That Revolutionized the World

The conditions are more alkaline than is known for any other ecosystem on Earth. “What is fascinating about these findings is that life under these extreme conditions, such as high pH and low organic carbon concentrations is even possible,” said organic geochemist at the University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and co-author Florence Shubotz in a statement.

Add to those challenges the virtual lack of oxygen at such depths, and life has to find unique ways of making it. Known deep-sea microbes gain their energy through chemosynthesis, exploiting minerals in rocks and gaseous hydrocarbons from vents. The same appears to be true of these newly discovered organisms.

The lipid molecules detected in the study are from the cell membranes of either bacteria or archaea, an ancient domain of organisms that resemble bacteria. In the cell membranes of those microbes, fats provide a barrier against the alkaline conditions. Their condition indicates whether the microbes are living or long-dead. Intact lipid molecules indicate a living community, whereas degraded lipid molecules could be from fossil organisms. The results showed both types of lipids in the sediment cores—a community of contemporary microbes and evidence of ancient microbial populations.

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These extremophile organisms could also provide a window to how life first started on Earth. “We suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites,” Shubotz added. Furthermore, the core samples just scratched the surface of a habitat that could extend much farther below the seafloor, harboring even deeper insights into the earliest life here on Earth—and potentially beyond.

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Lead image: Ethan Daniels / Shutterstock

Mudlarking 61 - ah! oh! Bovril

Nov. 11th, 2025 08:38 pm
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
Putney Bridge

Putney

On Sunday morning, I went to Putney, as it was somewhere I hadn’t mudlarked before. I tried going down the Brewhouse Slipway, but it was too muddy. I then found the steps next to Putney Bridge, which were also muddy, but there was a handrail to hold onto for the top steps at least, so I made my way down slowly. The foreshore was covered in silt, as the tide must have started receding before the Uber boats started running again.

I made my way around the mud and the streams of water, and got to the river’s edge. I heard bagpipes being played. It was Remembrance Sunday, so I suspected they were coming from the church just above.

Other people on the foreshore included a person metal detecting, and a person who told me that it was muddy the way they came, and I told them that I’d found a Bovril jar.

At one point I was stood between the river and a large stream bit, as if I was on an island, and even though I knew the tide times and knew the water was still going out, I wasn’t sure I felt that safe, so turned around.

I didn’t take home:

1. A pink iPhone, smashed up, no screen, underneath Putney Bridge.

2. Hindu offerings, a collection of them washed up together.

iPhone

Offerings

I walked underneath the bridge and then came across some gates that had warning signs that said lights flash and that there could be sewer outfalls without warning. I walked quickly past, lights were not flashing.

Things I found:

1. A plastic frog head. I think it was a real animal to start with, so was glad to find it wasn’t!

2. A bracelet, perhaps?

3. Glass that says “blis” on it. Probably Chablis, but I like to imagine I found "bliss"

4. Glass that was part of an R White’s bottle.


Mudlarking finds - 61.1


Mudlarking finds - 61.2


More things:

1. A Bovril jar! Very excited by this one. It’s not one of the oldest types of Bovril jars as it doesn’t have a long neck, but it does have “oz” on it, so it’s certainly not recent.

2. Barrett & Elers bottle fragment

The “B&” were visible on this fragment, but the symbol on it is more of the giveaway - it’s of a vulcanite bottle stopper! The company was registered in 1897 and Henry Barrett invented this type of bottle stopper in 1872.

An advert from 1883: https://boroughphotos.org/lambeth/advert-barrett-elers-london/



3. Solo bottle fragment

On the bottom of the bottle it says “Property of Solo B”. The Solo Bottling Company were based at 10 Whitcher Place, NW1. Using 1940s - 1960s OS Maps, it says “Mineral Water Bottling Works” at this address. Whitcher Place does still exist but where this building was located is now UCL student halls.

From a listing of a 1954 receipt on eBay, I've found that Solo Bottling Company were linked to Solo Orchards, who made orange juice and other drinks.

There are various adverts from Solo Orchards, such as “ah! oh! SOLO” from 1948, and eBay also has a beer mat for sparkling orange listed.

Solo Orchards were taken over by Idris in 1960.

So the bottle I found could have contained sparkling orange from Solo Orchards, and is likely to be from the 1940s or 1950s.

1954 receipt:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/167796598399

1948 advert:
https://flic.kr/p/2fFCAWU

Sparkling orange beer mat:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306036568891

--

After that, I continued along the river, through Wandsworth Park, and past Church Draw Dock (another place to mudlark) and a heron, and onwards, over Battersea Bridge, and past the sphinx benches, and then over Vauxhall Bridge, and I stopped my walk there. I walked about 11 miles that day.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)
asakiyume: (shaft of light)
[personal profile] asakiyume
I watched the documentary El sendero de la anaconda (The path of the anaconda, 2019) over the weekend, mere days before it's set to leave Netflix, mainly to feast my eyes on the sweet, sweet drone shots of the Colombian Amazon, not primarily down where I was, but up further north, where lie the absolutely stunning waterfalls of Jirijirimo and the massifs of Chribiquete. (The subtitles were not crooked; it's that I was taking snapshots of my computer and then I cropped the photos, etc. etc.)

drone shot of massive waterfalls surrounded by lush green and mist

drone shot of stone massifs with lush green below them and on top of them

The documentary went here and there, but one thing it touched on is rubber plantations, and in the story of these is the black swan event. The story goes like this:

In spite of torturing (completely literally) the local population to try to cultivate rubber commercially in the Amazon in the early years of the twentieth century, efforts were unsuccessful because of a pest of rubber trees endemic to the region. But the seeds were spirited out and taken to Southeast Asia, where successful plantations were established--and that's where all the world's commercial rubber came from.

Come World War II, Japan conquered the area and took control of the rubber plantations. Bad news for the Allies! They were desperate for any alternative source of rubber, so they sent an ethnobotanist down there--Richard Evans Schultes, in fact, the guy who's fictionalized in Embrace of the Serpent (review here). They wanted Schultes to locate a specimen of rubber tree that was (a) productive and (b) resistant to the pest. And he did find one!

Meanwhile, however, the Allies had developed synthetic rubber, and that was how they supplied themselves for the rest of the war. And then after the war ... "the clonal gardens that had preserved the germ plasm that had been collected at tremendous cost of blood and treasure were cut to the ground [on the orders of the US Department of State]. The files were seized and classified. Was it some kind of crazy conspiracy? No; it was just bureaucratic idiocy. That, plus faith in the future of synthetic rubber," says Wade Davis, the film's narrator, a writer, anthropologist, and student of Schultes.

Aye but there's the ... rub. Because along came radial tires--they need natural rubber. And then, even more important, along came airplanes that fly at 30+ thousand feet. "Only natural rubber has the qualities that allow it to go from the subzero temperatures of high altitude to the shock and impact of hitting the tarmac at 250 kilometers per hour within ten minutes. And because of that we use more natural rubber than ever before."

And it all comes from Southeast Asia, from trees that are all clones of the trees grown from the original smuggled-out seeds. "A single act of biological terrorism or the accidental introduction of the spore into Southeast Asia would completely disrupt the industry."

So that's fun!

The film leaves Netflix on November 14. It's a little bit unfocused, and even though it wants to uplift an indigenous worldview, it's VERY heavy on White Guy Talking, but it does have a few local voices. Still: it's very, very beautiful.
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Posted by Jake Currie

The sheer magnitude of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp. Its 105,700 light-year width also makes it just about as difficult to capture with a camera. But recently, researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research achieved an important milestone in this gigantic effort.

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The team, led by doctoral student Silvia Mantovanini, collected images of the southern sky taken by the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Australia over 141 nights spanning seven years. Rather than relying on visible light, which can be blocked by clouds of gas and dust, they recorded images using low-frequency radio waves capable of illuminating all manner of cosmic phenomena.

Each image captured a section of the sky sliced into 20 different radio wavelengths with a corresponding color—red for longer wavelengths, blue for shorter. Then, with the help of roughly 1 million computing hours, they stacked the images and connected them together into one giant cosmic portrait. The results are stunning, and you can explore a zoomable version of their finished product here.

Read more: “Can Dark Energy Kill Galaxies?

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The image shows a radiant edge-on perspective of the Milky Way, rippling with stellar activity. It also offers a glimpse into our galaxy’s distant past. “You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles,” Mantovanini said in a statement. “The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.”

Capturing some 60,000 light-years, it’s the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever recorded, twice the size and twice the resolution of the next largest, which was compiled in 2019. It will remain the most detailed view of the Milky Way until the new largest low-frequency radio telescope array—the Square Kilometre Array Observatory—completes its survey in the next decade.

Until then, this cosmic masterpiece will offer researchers plenty of data to dig into as they explore the place in the cosmos we call home.

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Lead image: Silvia Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X Team