Living my best life, in Chiapas.
You’ll never guess what’s growing all over this guy’s face.
The bottle gourd comes in two subspecies linked to their geography: one from Africa, where the plant first evolved, and one from Asia. Researchers have long wondered whether the New World bottle gourds are more closely related to the African or Asian subspecies. If they could build a bottle gourd family tree, they thought, they might be able to figure out how the plant reached the Americas in the first place. Did it float over on ocean currents from Africa, the prevailing assumption until about 10 years ago, or did humans carry the plant with them when they walked across the Bering land bridge from Asia?
Only one bee failed to fly above 8000 meters, and two even remained airborne above 9000 meters—more than 100 meters higher than the peak of Mount Everest.
My exploration of what’s above your head continues over at Science.
![“The Mexican government and the Mexican people have done what needed to be done [to protect the butterflies], at great cost. But all those things aren’t going to ensure the survival of the migration.”…Vidal and others say it’s the U.S. government’s turn to take action. Mexico must “energetically demand” that the United States reform its agricultural policy with an eye toward preserving milkweed, Vidal says. In the meantime, watching fewer and fewer monarchs arrive in Mexico each winter “is like water escaping from our hands without a way to stop it,” says Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who studied the monarchs as a graduate student.
Monarch Numbers in Mexico Fall to Record Low - Science](http://25.media.tumblr.com/12cfbf3eb19d29629102e1807f6ba22b/tumblr_n06e9l2YXZ1rih2x1o1_500.jpg)
“The Mexican government and the Mexican people have done what needed to be done [to protect the butterflies], at great cost. But all those things aren’t going to ensure the survival of the migration.”…Vidal and others say it’s the U.S. government’s turn to take action. Mexico must “energetically demand” that the United States reform its agricultural policy with an eye toward preserving milkweed, Vidal says. In the meantime, watching fewer and fewer monarchs arrive in Mexico each winter “is like water escaping from our hands without a way to stop it,” says Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who studied the monarchs as a graduate student.
“We built a laser system that was designed to do a good job of diagnosing skin cancer and then realized that we could use exactly that same laser system to look at Renaissance artwork.”
The men of Earth came to Mars.
They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all. But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns: THERE’S WORK FOR YOU IN THE SKY: SEE MARS! and the men shuffled forward, only a few at first, a double-score, for most men felt the great illness in them even before the rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Loneliness, because when you saw your home town dwindle to the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men. And when the state of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, or Montana vanished into cloud seas, and, doubly, when the United States shrank to a misted island and the entire planet Earth became a muddy baseball tossed away, then you were alone, wandering in the meadows of space, on your way to a place you couldn’t imagine.
So it was not unusual that the first men were few. The number grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers. But the first Lonely Ones had to stand by themselves…
"The Settlers" from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
I’d go. Would you?
WTF? Find out at Science.
