I really want to see badass!Charles in a wheel chair, so I made this based on a segment of animation Guilty Crown (ep5), just Charles throwing a none descriptive suits.
Only had 1 hour to spare so this is again very crappy and not detail at all…
He looks evil.
A 7 year-old asks Neil deGrasse Tyson what would happen if two black holes collide.
It’s wonderful. You da man, Clayton.
Oh, and the answer will make your head spin in the all the best ways.
(by KaluzaPryme)
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)
The Biology of the Translucent Jewel Caterpillar
You’ve seen the odd-looking larval wonder on your dashboard. Why does it look like that? Really interesting post at SciAm detailing the jewel caterpillar’s unique defensive adaptations (specifically the evolutionary advantages of “looking like a poisonous gumdrop”)
That’s the only problem I have with new legendaries. I like them, but they’ve made themselves common and lost their value. There’s nothing special about them when there’s a dozen more to choose from. Literally.
