‘Is the crown really necessary, Mr. Paris?’
‘Yes ma’am! You’re the Queen!’
Please note Special Agent Scully in the background with what appears to be an action-figure sized poster of Janeway posing hard, destined for the wall of the basement office next to newspaper clippings of a UFO appearing over Los Angeles in 1996.
Tags:
#Star Trek #Voyager
The bullhorn acacia is kind of sad as acacias go. You know how most acacias produce alkaloids that taste nasty and keep things from eating them? Well, bullhorn acacias don’t. It’s like, get on the bus, bullhorn acacias.
Of course, bullhorn acacias are not hearing your noise, because they’re thinking outside the metabolically-expensive-poison box.
And what they’re thinking is that maybe if you like eating them, you’re really gonna like this face full of motherfucking ants they’ve got for you.
Yes, you read that right. Instead of playing fair and making their own toxins to keep everything and their brothers off of their leaves, this plant outsourced that shit to ants. Presumably this is because ants are easily bribed with food, generally looking for a fight, and, most importantly, can run really fast. Acacias in general, while also easily bribed and kind of ornery, are not known for their speed and mobility.
You’re probably looking at that picture and going “Man, I am just not seeing a real place for those ants to live. This plant is a terrible employer if it’s not even going to provide housing. Also, those thorns are kind of nasty-looking, but they’re awful big. I bet I could just avoid them and not step on the ant mound and be fine.” And this is not an unreasonable thing to think! Which is probably why the acacia already thought of it, and decided to keep its ant legions in its thorns.
Yup. This plant has evolved a way to shoot stinging insects out of its thorns, just in case stabbing you didn’t get the point across. This is because this plant is hardcore.
Now you may be sitting there going “I don’t know, ants are pretty metal, and that ant looks pretty metal even by ant standards. Maybe they just really liked the idea of living in hollowed-out thorns and did this all on their own.” And I can see why you’d say that, because it totally sounds like something ants would do, but you’d be tragically wrong. You know how some ants will properly farm or half-assedly shepherd aphids because they suck out plant juices and process and concentrate the sugars in their waste, which the ants then treat like gatorade?
The acacia tries to cut out the middle man there. They produce little bundles of protein and fat called Beltian bodies and then stick them on their leaflet tips, which is basically just mocking herbivores at this point, and then on the leaf stalks they’ve got these fancypants glands that produce nectar, to further rub it in. I mean, seriously. This plant is just hanging out going “Oh, yeah, my leafy greens taste like cake, assholes. You want this? Hope you like ants, too, because that’s what else is there.”
So the ants are getting a super fucking sweet deal here, and it’s like, man, this plant is going way out of its way to keep these sons of bitches around. Is it sure it wouldn’t be easier to just pony up with the alkaloids and taste gross? Because it seems like it wouldn’t be nearly so cool, but it would be way simpler than growing these ant apartments and ant cafeterias and whatnot, and this plant probably isn’t vain enough to evolve based on sheer coolness.
Well, ants aren’t stupid, but they are pretty fucking territorial. Remember how acacias are generally just not capable of getting up and wandering around? The ants do that for them. Any vines and shit trying to climb on the acacia get ant-murdered the same way herbivores trying to eat it get all face-stung, and the ants will go the extra distance of killing anything that tries to grow around the base of the tree. They send out fucking ant doom-patrols looking for weeds. And then they kill the shit out of them.
So, fucking bullhorn acacias, right? They really hit on a cool scheme. Surely they are the only plants that could pull this off. Nope! There’s a bunch of plants that have figured out how to make deals with ants, to the point where there’s a name for them: myrmecophytes. (“Myrmecophyte” is Greek for “Yo, dawg, there may have been a slight miscommunication after you said you liked plants.”). Some of them don’t even do anything for ants except make a nice living space, because that way when the ants die and start their little ant graveyards in random unused spaces, the plant can use their little tenant corpses as fertilizer. (Note: Do not trust plants. Ever.)
This is beautiful, in every way.
It gets better/worse. Acacia nectar permanently alters your* digestive system. Once you eat it, you can never eat any other food again.
*If you’re an ant, anyway.
Tags:
#the power of science #we must not look at acacia trees #we must not buy their fruits #(or) #(acacia: not even once)
I have loved you for a thousand years;
I will love you for a thousand more.for my John, who has been one of the best friends I ever could have asked for.
keeping the tags I reblogged it from—
No, brain, come on, there are so many interesting-looking things to read in fanfiction alone that we haven’t even read once yet, stop telling me to re-read “Not Yet Dead”.
Tags:
#Sherlock #fanfic #come on brain #remember how after finishing it #(and abandoning all our other plans for the evening once we got to the climax in *order* to finish it) #you got so worked up over how awesome it was you actually aggravated the lingering traces of our stomach bug #nearly making us too ill to go out trick-or-treating the following evening #(but then again I’m not sick at the moment)
I did it!
It was easier to make the words come out once I tried it in the second-most-secluded place in my house rather than going to the third-most-secluded. (The most secluded place is the Death Trap Room, a part of the attic whose door can only be opened from the outside. No way in hell am I setting more than one foot in there without use of the buddy system, and since the point was to make sure my family couldn’t hear me (so I wouldn’t have that awkwardness)…)
Tumblr Accent Meme!
Your name and username.
Where you’re from.
Pronounce the following words: Aunt, Roof, Route, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Pajamas, Caught, Naturally, Aluminum, GIF, Tumblr, Crackerjack, Doorknob, Envelope, GPOY.
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is a bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?
Choose a book and read a passage from it.
Do you think you have an accent?
Be a wizard or a vampire?
Do you know anyone on Tumblr in real life?
End audio post by saying any THREE words you want.
Tags:
#eponymous rose #oh look an original post #can you tell I read this from a script I wrote up last night? #(I can) #(I’m significantly more coherent than usual) #but it was still an accomplishment that I got up enough nerve at all #and once I’d made sure the mic on my MP3 player could pick me up I did it in one take #(I could’ve sworn I was better at L’s than this) #(‘misweading statistics’) #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #accents #fun wif forn fronting
Global use of ‘Fahrenheit’ or ‘Celsius’ [600×337]
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS!
thelandofmaps.tumblr.com
This is wrong.
You can’t use complementary colours. They need to be blendable so you can show Canada as a blend. (Maybe other places too, but I haven’t been to any of them so I don’t know.) My thermostat reads in Fahrenheit by default. My oven doesn’t even have a Celsius option. (If you watch Canadian cooking shows and read Canadian cookbooks and food package instructions, you’ll see that Celsius being an afterthought or ignored entirely is the norm when discussing cooking. Occasionally you see Celsius get front-and-centre and Fahrenheit get the parenthetical, but not usually.)
You can get away with not knowing French, but you need to be Celsius/Fahrenheit bilingual.
Tags:
#our home and cherished land #interestingly this doesn’t appear to be true with metric/American in general #I’ve noticed that the Daily Planet people don’t expect their audience to understand figures given in miles #when they show Americans using miles they give the kilometre translation in voiceover or on the screen #I’m pretty sure they only do that with Fahrenheit when it falls outside the range used in weather and cookery
worldsocietyofpandas:
there’s nebula in that coffee?
o.O
Tags:
#Star Trek #Voyager #joke #pretty things
. And, earlier this year, Brad Pitt acknowledged his face blindness.
Brad Pitt! If I ever met him, I’d love to swap some prosopagnosia war stories with him.
The trouble, of course, is that even if I saw him on the street, I wouldn’t recognize him.
My thoughts exactly, Mr. Herrmann. My thoughts exactly.
Tags:
#prosopagnosia #thirded #every time I see a picture of Brad Pitt I think it’s Chris Hemsworth #and that’s with the context of ‘this is some celebrity or other’
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.
So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.
Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.
So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)
Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.
This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be?
Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?
By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.
are you telling us astronomers have discovered something which is literally fucktuple the size of anything else previously estimated to exist
Anything that fucking rewrites all of what we know about the universe needs to get its ass on my blog. It’s giant, glowy, black hole filled ass.
Wondering how many times I can use the word “fucktuple” today without arousing suspicion. :)
much pretty so big fucktuple wow
Tags:
#the power of science #pretty things #that artist’s conception looks like the Prophets’ wormhole
So, I hear it’s cold out?
Apparently, the Great Lakes are under there somewhere, but it’s hard to see anything through the icy white in this NASA satellite image from the afternoon of Jan. 6.
(via NASA)
Tags:
#our home and cherished land #weather #yeah that looks about right #brr
If you host an Asexual meetup, or are looking for one in your area, this new site might be of interest to you. I know that for North America it already has a pretty long list of groups.
So, I was going to put up a list of some ace websites I’d like to see people make. Now a site like this doesn’t have to be on it!
And it looks to be more complete than the other such sites I’ve seen. (Nobody else ever told me there’s been K/W meetups for nearly two years.)
Bit annoying that you have to sign up for AVEN just to see the post, but okay.
Tags:
#asexuality #I was a bit startled when they knew what my icon was #until I realised they’d asked Gravatar if there was an icon associated with my email address #okay then #(turns out when they ask you for favourite dessert in lieu of a CAPTCHA) #(they mean it) #(I figured that was just their way of telling me the password was ‘cake’) #(but you’re allowed to say other things) #(and they go and put it on your profile)
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 