#soybean yield

[iyemarathichiyenagari1971]

सोयाबीन : खत व अन्नद्रव्ये व्यवस्थापन

✍🏻 सोयाबीन पिकाचे वाढलेले क्षेत्र आणि दरवर्षी घेतले जाणारे एकच पीक यामुळे जमिनीतील उपलब्ध अन्नद्रव्यांवर त्याचा परिणाम होतो आहे, कमी झालेले पशुधन त्यामुळे शेणखत व कंपोस्ट खत यांची उपलब्धता सहजासहजी होत नाही किंवा ते सामान्य शेतकरी वर्गाला परवडणारे नाही. दिवसेंदिवस जमिनितल सेंद्रिय कर्बाचे प्रमाण कमी होत आहे, आपण त्याकडे लक्ष देत नाही, परंतु आपण सोप्या गोष्टी करत असतो, त्यामुळे उत्पादन वाढ…

[indoorverticalfarmingnews]

Innovative Yield Trait Enhances Soybean Production: A Closer Look at Texas Crop Science's Breakthrough

Key Takeaways Yield Increase Reported: Texas Crop Science (TCS) announced a 21% increase in soybean yield due to its new yield trait, aiming to impact the agricultural sector significantly. Potential Revenue Growth: This development could lead to an additional $121 per acre for soybean growers in the U.S., based on current market values. Global Scale Impact: The yield trait by TCS is positioned…

[2023iagcroptour]

Day four of the 2023 IAG Crop Tour (final day)

Data from today. 270 miles driven. Average moving speed of 47.4 mph. Elevation min was 658ft, the max was 1120ft and we ascended and descended about 4k ft during the route. Our final tally is 24 crop stops and sampled nearly 50 fields of corn and soybeans.

A shorter day as we all got ready to split up and go home. We began in Kokomo, IN and headed east-northeast towards Ohio, and finally finished in south-central Michigan.

As we circled south and east of Fort Wayne, IN we started with exceptional yields that declined as we moved towards Ohio. We expect some potential was lost in northwestern Ohio generally due to early stress issues whether it be planting problems, compaction, or the dry June. Despite 3 corn samples from Van Wert, OH to Hudson, MI, our spot yield checks were consistent (from 190-200bpa). Soybeans were generally healthy but not as far along as what we had seen west of Indianapolis. As we turned North, we noticed pod fill was further behind. For the first time this tour, we found beans that need some finishing rains.

That’s it for tonight’s wrap up. Tomorrow we will start crunching the numbers and will have our final report out which a lot more details of the trip. This is the 2023 IAG Crop Tour, signing off.

[mariacallous]

This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of breadbaskets.

More than one-third of the world’s wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change.

That’s bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats—especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren’t occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy.

But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often.

“It’s not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “That’s the most weather-exposed sector in the economy.”

Farmers are doing what they can—testing different crop varieties that can better withstand changes in the climate, shifting the timing of when they sow, tweaking their use of fertilizers and water, and investing in infrastructure like water reservoirs.

The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep pace with warming. To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s. They specifically looked at how farmers have adapted to changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, and soybean. Combined, these crops provide two-thirds of humanity’s calories.

In the Nature paper, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow some crop losses due to climate change, but not all of them.

And the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day. That’s even taking into account how climate change can make growing seasons longer and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario—leading to between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—rising incomes and adaptations would only offset one-third of crop losses around the world.

“Looking at that 3 degrees centigrade warmer [than the year 2000] future corresponds to about a 13 percent loss in daily recommended per capita caloric consumption,” Hultgren said. “That’s like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.”

The researchers also mapped out where the biggest crop declines—and increases—are likely to occur as the climate warms. As the world’s most productive farmlands get hit hard, cooler countries like Russia and Canada are on track for larger harvests. The map below shows in red where crop yields are poised to shrink and in blue where they may expand:

Some of the biggest crop-growing regions in the world are likely to experience the largest declines in yield as the climate changes. Illustration: Springer Nature

The results complicate the assumption that poor countries will directly bear the largest losses in food production due to climate change. The wealthy, large-scale food growers may see the biggest drop-offs, according to the study. However, poor countries will still be affected, since many crops are internationally traded commodities, and the biggest producers are exporters. A smaller harvest means higher food prices around the world. Less wealthy regions are also facing their own crop declines from disasters and climate change, though at smaller scales. All the while, the global population is rising, albeit much more slowly than in the past. It’s a recipe for more food insecurity for more people.

Rice is an exception to this trend. Its overall yields are actually likely to increase in a warmer world: Rice is a versatile crop, and unlike the other staples, it benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. “Rice turns out to be the most flexibly adapted crop and largely through adaptations protected from large losses under even a high warming future,” Hultgren said. That’s a boon for regions like South and Southeast Asia.

Decreasing the available calories isn’t the only way climate change is altering food, however. The nutrition content can change with shifts in rainfall and temperature too, though Hultgren and his colleagues didn’t account for this in their study. Scientists have previously documented how higher levels of carbon dioxide can cause crops like rice to have lower levels of iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the food we will be eating in the future may be more scarce and less nutritious as well.

And while climate change can impair our food supply, the way we make food in turn harms the climate. About one-third of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production, just under half of that from meat and dairy. That’s why food production has to be a major front in how we adapt to climate change, and reduce rising temperatures overall.

[alexanderwales]

Polyculture is the agricultural practice of having two or more crops growing together to benefit both of them, as opposed to monoculture, which is when you have only a single crop.

Polyculture is just ... so awesome? It's legitimately one of my favorite things.

This is a fish-rice system, where the flooded rice paddy is home to a bunch of fish. The fish act as pesticides (eating bugs that are attracted to the rice) and herbicides (eating weeds) and fertilizer (by pooping). And then you can eat the fish!

But there's actually a third polycultural element here, which is invisible in most picture: rice paddies are home to cyanobacteria, which provides nitrogen fixing. The nitrogen cycle was unknown to humans for most of human history, but they had figured out that this goop was increasing yields, so they mixed mud from different fields to promote the growth of cyanobacteria, and planted some plants that had symbiosis with it.

You can also do this polyculture with other things too. Partly for cultural reasons and partly because of the water, it's done more often with rice than other crops, and you can add in some ducks to the fish. There are places that have shrimp instead of fish, and apparently a few examples of turtles being raised in the rice fields, but I haven't been able to find a picture of that.

I grew up in the Midwest, around what felt like endless fields of corn and soybeans. I worked on a farm in high school and learned how to drive a tractor. But I always hated how it looked, how sterile and samey it was.

The reason that monoculture has mostly won out, even as we understand biology and ecology better, is that our crops are largely planted and harvested by machine, and that's always going to be easier to do if you're monocropping. There are some forms of intercropping where you can still use machines, but there are expenses associated with it. Besides, all the things you'd use polyculture for like pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer can be sprayed over the crops using standardized machines.

But things like this, marigolds used as pest repellant for coconut trees, just makes me wish that somehow it made sense to weave crops together:

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 7: Tell Me That I Won't Feel A Thing]

A/N: Hello besties! Thank you for voting in the poll for Chapter 7. Below are your predictions...let's see how you did! 🥰

Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes, Jace is back yay!!!

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Give Me Novacaine” by Green Day.

Word count: 9.6k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🥰

Billboards ask you as the Tahoe flies across the flat emerald sea of Iowa: Have you heard the good news? Have you been saved? Where will you spend eternity? Are you struggling with same-sex attraction? Do you regret your abortion? Do you fear the Lord? Do you want to end up in Hell?

Aegon snickers, gnawing on a Slim Jim. The sun glare turns his wild hair to gold, etches crinkles into the ruddy skin around his eyes, murky like deep water, oceans you recognize from other corners of the world. “I thought I was already there.”

Jace’s Honda Rebel 300 is left on the shoulder of the highway with its fuel tank uncapped, drained to feed the Tahoe, prehistoric combustion, bottomless mechanical hunger. Rhaena takes over driving so Baela can sit with Jace, touch him, inhale him, convince herself he’s real. Aegon climbs into the passenger’s seat and skips songs on the CD player until he finds the one he wants: In Da Club by 50 Cent. The miles roll by so soft and so infinite that you can’t imagine ever feeling trapped again, warm July air unfurling down the darkest corridors of your lungs, hawks on lifeless power lines and fields dappled with white-tailed deer. And you think: Everything will be better now.

You cross the Missouri River and into Nebraska at Plattsmouth, which—according to a plaque mounted on the outskirts of town—the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed through over two centuries ago. Rhaena follows Aegon’s directions to cut between Lincoln and Omaha, avoiding the roiling wastelands of the cities and keeping well north of Cooper Nuclear Station, where in the absence of a successful manual or computerized shutdown before the power grid collapsed, rods of uranium are melting down and irradiating the surrounding area, anemia, cancer, heart disease, radiation sickness, an affliction that eats you alive.

Rhaena takes Nebraska State Route 66 north and then Route 92 due west, lush fields of corn and soybeans and sorghum planted before the dead began to walk, bones of devoured livestock. You stop for the night in a town called Broken Bow, the sky turning the colors of fire and rust and blood, the Tahoe exsanguinated like a man with a slit throat. Every vehicle you pass already has its fuel cap unscrewed; the farther west you go—the scarcer the resources, the longer it’s been since the world began to end—the less the earth will yield to you: less guns, less gasoline, less food, less human settlements scattered across what was once called the frontier. You commandeer a two-story house: white wood, wraparound porch, a long gravel driveway that winds like a snake. There is a small cornfield and a barn, both of which you sweep for zombies before making yourselves at home. You try not to think about what happened to the family that used to live here.

Helaena lights candles, Luke and Rhaena distribute bowls and silverware, Aemond and Rio gather kindling for the woodstove, Daeron keeps watch on the porch, Aegon picks all the Twizzlers out of a mixed bag of Hershey’s candy for Jace. There is a 12-pack of Ramen noodles in the pantry, gallons of water in the cellar, and a pot large enough to cook it all in one batch. Cregan takes Ice and disappears into the cornfield for half an hour at dusk—something none of the rest of you would ever consider—and reappears with an opossum that he’s nearly decapitated with his axe. He butchers it and you brown cubes of meat in a sauté pan placed directly on the glowing embers. The others are horrified and won’t eat a single bite until you do. It’s the first real food you’ve had since you left Saratoga Springs, and you feel satiated in a way you had forgotten existed.

In honor of Jace’s resurrection, some revelry is in order. There are bottles of Grey Goose vodka in a kitchen cabinet, and Aemond allows a two drink maximum for anyone eligible to participate: Baela is too pregnant, Daeron is too young, Aemond himself is too vigilant, too self-sacrificial, too indoctrinated into the religion of his own martyrdom.

“Daddy loved his screwdrivers,” Cregan says. “I remember being five or six and taking a big gulp of one thinking it was Sunny D or Tang or something. Lord almighty, was that a shock!” He guffaws, then inspects the pantry, scratching at the dark stubble on his cheeks. “We ain’t got nothing like orange juice though.”

“Mama made hers with Hawaiian Punch.” You point: there are several jugs of it on the floor between boxes of Pop-Tarts and Welch’s Fruit Snacks and Cheddar Whales, red like crushed blackberries or fresh blood.

Cregan grins at you over his brawny shoulder. “That’ll work, Miss Chips.”

Luke and Rhaena have first watch, Rio and Aegon will take the second. You are blessedly unburdened tonight. This house is big enough for you to get your own room; you climb the staircase with Grey Goose vodka burning in your throat, your head warm and dizzy, a sensation like freefalling as you lie down on the bed.

I left them, you think, the walls spinning around you, echoes of Mama’s voice through the phone as Rio stood there nodding, encouraging you to hang up. I left them and I never looked back. Can someone commit such an act of ancestral betrayal without incurring a curse?

You are still considering this when you feel Aemond’s weight on the mattress and fold into him, the world going dark and hushed and harmless.

~~~~~~~~~~

“I think it’s safe,” you tell Aemond between sighs, his lips on your throat, his hand between your thighs. Late-morning sunlight slants in through the bedroom windows; goldfinches and blue jays flap by chirping blithely. The dead pillage the misfortunate beasts of the earth, but creatures of the air and water are spared. You can hear geese honking from a distance, and the breeze through the cornfield, and calm indistinct voices beneath the floorboards. You can smell pancakes turning from white to gold in a pan sizzling with Crisco. Cregan must be cooking breakfast in the woodstove.

“How sure are you?” Aemond murmurs, his breath warm on your neck, those small teeth he’s always hiding nipping playfully, and if he leaves marks like stains of ballpoint ink you don’t care. He’s whisked every scrap of your clothing away. Beneath him you are bare and helpless and needing more.

“Like…eighty percent sure.”

“I’ll pull out.”

“Like Jace did?”

He laughs and kisses your mouth, not just ravenous but wild like a storm, and all the rest of the world goes quiet. Your ankles are linked around him, his hips rocking with yours. He is wearing only his boxers, black plaid from a looted Walmart, apocalypse chic. “Hopefully better than that.”

“Just try your best. I trust you. I’m willing to risk it.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s worth it to me.” I could be dead in nine months, he could be dead in nine months. I’m not wasting the time we have left.

“It’s your decision. You would be most affected by the consequences.” He draws away and glances down. “I want to look at you.”

“Ohhh.” You stall. “I’ve been trimming with scissors by candlelight. It’s a hack job.”

“I won’t mind.” He grins. “You don’t mind my hack job of a face.”

“I love your face,” you say as you skim your fingerprints down the length of his scar. And then, when he raises an eyebrow roguishly: “I didn’t break any rules. I didn’t say I love you, just your face. I’m totally using you for your face. Your personality is terrible.”

He snickers, kisses you goodbye, retreats to your hips and pushes your thighs apart as you cover your face and whimper, nervous, exhilarated. And then his lips are on you and the trepidation melts away, puddles pooling and then evaporating, and you have a vision of being home again, shivering and dripping in front of the crackling flames of the woodstove after playing outside in the snow and waiting for the fire to take the cold away. Now the fire is growing over you like ivy, tendrils snaking through veins and leaves opening in your lungs, bones vanishing, muscles turning pliant and weightless. You can feel Aemond’s fingers pushing into you, a fleeting second of tension and discomfort, and then a fullness that is delectable, irresistible, maddening.

“Come back,” you plead, and when he does you clasp his face with both hands, kissing him deeply as his fingers remain inside you, thrusting and bathed in your wetness. You’re finally ready for him, you have to be, you need him so badly: like you’re dying of thirst, like you’re running out of air. “Now, Aemond, please. I want all of you.”

And he wants it too. His boxers are gone and he’s positioning himself between your legs, his tongue in your mouth, one hand cradling your jaw as the other guides his cock to where you are slick and aching and aware of an emptiness that has never felt so dire.

He’s so big…

But you are determined to take all of him. You don’t care if there’s pain, if there’s fear. You want to feel what it’s like to be with him before it’s too late.

Aemond presses himself against you, rolls his hips cautiously…and nothing happens. He is a bit more forceful. There is immense pressure, then the beginning of a stretching that is sharp, searing, dreadful, unfamiliar in a way that is completely disorienting. You gasp before you can stop yourself; a wince ripples across your face too quickly to camouflage. Aemond shakes his head and climbs off you, settling beside you on the bed.

“Fuck,” you exhale in frustration, slapping a palm down on the mattress. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand why…why I’m like this…”

“Shh,” Aemond soothes, kissing you. “It’s okay, it’s fine. I’ll help you finish and then we can try again later.”

“Why isn’t this easier?”

“You’re just nervous,” he says gently, smoothing your hair back from your face, like it’s no big deal, like he’s pointing out a bird or a rabbit or the shape of a cloud.

“I don’t feel nervous.”

“It’s not always conscious, sometimes the body reacts without the mind even being aware of it. You tense up and things become…more challenging. But fortunately for us, the treatment is very enjoyable. We just keep messing around and working up to it until one day you’re so aroused and so relaxed that I can glide in without any discomfort whatsoever, and then your body adjusts to this glorious new experience and you aren’t so nervous anymore.”

“Can’t you just…you know…sorry, this isn’t very romantic, but like…shove it in?”

“I could, sure,” Aemond says. “If I was a horrible person. And then you’d learn to associate sex with pain, which would just exacerbate the situation.”

“The problem, you mean.”

He smiles patiently. “You aren’t a problem. We’ll figure it out, we have time.”

Do we? You stare morosely up at the ceiling, shadows of clouds, shades of wings. “I should have hooked up with that Marine at Corpus Christi. Then I’d have practice. I was so afraid of giving a man the power to hurt me or get me pregnant or otherwise ruin my life, but I didn’t know I’d meet you one day. And now I just want everything to be easy for us, and it isn’t.”

“Hey.” Aemond turns your face towards his. “For me, you are…” He struggles to decide on the words, his eye drifting to the window, sunlight turning the blue of his iris to a shallow, glass-clear river. “You’re like an island, and everything else is a sea of poison, and violence, and catastrophically fucked up situations, and when we’re alone together it all goes away for a little while. The world gets quiet. It’s never been like that for me before. I don’t mind if it takes time for us to figure this out. I just want to be with you.”

“What happens when we get to Nevada, and you’re supposed to turn south for the Bay Area while I go north to Oregon?”

Aemond shrugs, but his expression is contemplative. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe we’ll all stay together and go to one place, then the other. If Odessa is safe, I can bring my parents, Criston, and Grandfather there. If it isn’t, we can bring Rio’s family south and live in California in that beach house on the cliff.”

“I never thought I’d set foot in a mansion.”

“I never thought I’d eat opossum.”

You laugh and curl up against him, resting your head and a palm on his chest. “How was it?”

“Not too bad, actually. Kind of like dark meat chicken. A little gamey, but I like lamb and venison, so that’s fine with me.”

“Just wait until you try bear.”

“Bear?!”

There is a knock at the bedroom door. Luke’s bashful voice is muted through the wood. “Aemond?”

“Yeah?” Aemond replies impatiently.

This was not an invitation, but Luke doesn’t seem to know that. He opens the door, and as he does Aemond throws the blanket over you so you’re covered, leaving himself completely exposed.

Luke begins: “I’m really sorry, I didn’t want to bother you, but…” His eyes go wide. “Oh, you’re like, all the way naked.” He turns and stares at the wall to be polite. “If it’s a bad time, I could come back in five minutes. Do you need more than five minutes? Wait, that was rude, I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sure you can last way longer than five minutes…um…”

Aemond sighs. “What’s wrong, Luke?”

“Jace is sick.”

“Sick?” Aemond sits up straighter, his eye narrowing. “Sick how?”

“He’s been puking since he woke up.”

You and Aemond exchange a startled glance as you clutch the edges of a blanket patterned with wild horses. Illness, virus, plague, curse.

“He hasn’t been bitten or anything,” Luke says quickly. “So it can’t be…you know…that. And he and Baela don’t seem that worried. But you should probably take a look at him.”

Aemond nods, less alarmed now. “I agree. Can I get those five minutes first?”

Luke smiles. “Yeah. See you downstairs.” He leaves and shuts the door behind him.

You look to Aemond. “Why—?”

He yanks the blanket away and drags you towards him. “I said I was going to help you finish,” he says, grinning, a hand slipping between your thighs.

You bite at his lips when he kisses you and tease: “I don’t need your help.”

“No, I’m sure you don’t. But it’s better when I’m here.”

And he’s right; it is.

~~~~~~~~~~

Daeron is out on the front porch sharpening sticks into arrows and using goose feathers for fletching, attaching them to the wood with a tube of Gorilla Glue that Helaena found for him. Helaena herself is presently floating through the house—soundlessly, ethereally, traceless like a ghost—and partaking in what you all call “apocalypse shopping,” pilfering the clothes and accessories of the former occupants. She seems to know everyone’s sizes without needing to ask. Aegon, Rio, and Cregan are sitting in the living room and eating pancakes off paper plates, carelessly spilling Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup on hideous 1970s couches ornamented with scenes of pheasants and autumn leaves. Down on the Turkish-style area rug, Ice is merrily chomping her way through a stack of burnt pancakes.

“So Cregan,” Rio says, his bare feet propped on the coffee table. “What did you do before the whole zombie situation?”

“I was a lumberjack.”

“No way!”

“Yes sir. I cut down trees for the power company.”

“What a coincidence,” Rio says around a mouthful of pancakes. “I was an electrician!”

“Well how about that? We oughta go into business together once the world straightens itself out. Where’d you work?”

“All over. Wherever the Navy sent us.”

Cregan sets his fork down on his plate. “You were enlisted?”

“Yeah, me and Chips both. That’s how we met.”

Cregan, much to Rio’s surprise, seizes his hand and shakes it soberly. “Thank you very kindly for your service.”

“No problem,” Rio replies, then turns to Aegon. “No gratitude from you, huh?”

“I showed my gratitude when I let you have the last pancake, you ogre…”

In the only bedroom on the first floor, down a hallway and towards the back of the house, Jace looks worse than you expected. He is heaving into a reusable plastic popcorn bucket, gluey ropes of saliva dangling from his lips; his skin is pale and bloodless, his dark curls damp with sweat. Baela is perched beside him on the bed and holding a wet washcloth to the back of his neck. Rhaena and Luke are loitering anxiously in the doorway, watching Aemond to determine if they should panic.

Jace casts you a bitter glance. “You poisoned me with your poor people food.”

“There’s nothing wrong with eating opossum,” you say, somewhat defensively.

Aemond feels his forehead. “That wouldn’t give you a fever. And everyone else is fine.”

“Maybe I’m extra sensitive. My digestive system has higher standards. I’m built different.” Jace resumes retching into the bucket.

Baela tells Aemond: “He can’t keep anything down. There’s nothing left in him, but he’s still so sick…it has to be a stomach flu, right?”

“Who would he have caught it from?” Luke asks, and Baela doesn’t have an answer.

“Stand up,” Aemond orders Jace when his wave of nausea abates. “Strip down.”

“Aemond, he wasn’t bitten,” Baela says. “I saw his whole body last night. He doesn’t have any scratches or bruises or anything.”

“Fine. But I want to see for myself.”

Jace stumbles out of the bed, pushing away Baela’s hands as she tries to stop him. “Okay, Nick Fury. If you wish to gaze upon the goods, I won’t deny you. I’m not shy.” Aemond rolls his eye. You turn around to give Jace privacy. “What’s the matter, Chips? The only dick you’re interested in belongs to Mike Wazowski over there?”

“Jace,” Baela says, but she’s chuckling. Amused, you stare at a picture on the wall—a haloed Jesus guiding a flock of lambs—as Jace sheds his clothing and follows Aemond’s instructions: lift your arm, turn around, show me the bottoms of your feet.

“No bites,” Aemond confirms, deep in thought. “But the symptoms…”

“It’s not that, Aemond, I’m telling you,” Jace insists, rasping breaths between each clause. “Listen, I got sick when I was alone, before I found you guys again. My stomach, my head. Maybe it’s the same thing now. It didn’t last long, and I thought I was over it, but I guess not.”

“People don’t get better and then worse again after they’ve been bitten,” Rhaena observes softly. “They just get worse.”

Jace lies back down on the bed, his face crumbling with pain. Baela uses the wet washcloth to cool his cheeks and neck. “My head hurts so fucking bad…”

“Because you’re dehydrated,” Aemond says.

“Helaena brought pills, but every time I try to take one I throw it up before it can start working.” There is a gurgling sound in his guts, and then a horrified expression. “Baela, I gotta get outside again.” She and Luke immediately swoop in, grab one arm each, and usher him out of the bedroom, through the back door of the farmhouse, and into the cornfield to allow him some semblance of dignity.

Rhaena gives you and Aemond an awkward smirk. “Helaena found Jace a 24-pack of Angel Soft toilet paper in the basement. So there’s some good news.”

“He needs electrolytes,” Aemond says. “We can’t let him get so dehydrated that his kidneys shut down. IV fluids aren’t an option. Pedialyte would be the next best thing, Gatorade or Powerade if that’s all we can find.”

“We passed a pharmacy on our way here,” Rhaena recalls. “It’s only a mile back, I think.”

Aemond nods. “Then that’s where I’m going,” he says, and walks out of the room.

You say as you follow him: “I want to go with you.”

“No.” Aemond points to Rio, who is now playing Uno with Aegon on the coffee table in the living room. “You and I are going to a pharmacy to get Pedialyte for Jace so he doesn’t die.”

“Cool,” Rio says, standing and fetching his Remington shotgun from where he propped it against the wall. “What’s wrong with him?”

“We don’t know. Maybe food poisoning.”

Aegon says, a hand pressed to his heart: “Personally, I loved the opossum.”

You stare defiantly up at Aemond. “If Rio is going, I have to go too.”

“Aww, so you can protect me?” Rio teases fondly, patting your back with one monstrous palm, an unintentional battering.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Rio looks at Aemond. Aemond looks at you, touching his chin agitatedly. “You are stressing me out.”

“I’m the best shot. I want to be there in case anything happens.”

“Fine, okay, whatever you want. Just stay near Rio.”

“That’s the idea.”

“A pharmacy?” Aegon asks excitedly. “Can I go?”

“No,” Aemond snaps, and continues out onto the porch. In the gravel driveway, Cregan and Daeron are kneeling by the Tahoe and inspecting the front tire on the driver’s side. “What’s wrong now?” Aemond asks, exasperated.

“Got a flat,” Cregan says. “The little fella here noticed it.”

Daeron is mortified. “Please don’t call me that.”

Aemond peers around mistrustfully, out at the road, into the cornfield. “Someone sabotaged us?”

Cregan shakes his head and taps the tire. “Naw, we just ran over a nail yesterday. You can see it right here. A big one too, a masonry nail, I suspect.”

“Can you fix it?” Rio asks.

“I think so. I saw a jack and a lug wrench hanging up on the wall in the barn, now I just need a new tire, a real one. A spare wouldn’t do us much good, not with all the weight we’re carrying. It’d pop in twenty miles.” Cregan gestures to the main road, but westward, the opposite direction from the pharmacy. “Don’t remember seeing a tire place on our way in. Figured I’d try the other direction. I’ll walk ‘til I find a shop or a truck with the right kind of tires to steal from, whichever comes first. Can’t change a tire on gravel, though. I’ll have to drive the Tahoe out to the road and fix it there. I’m gonna need Rhaena’s keys.”

There is an uneasy lull as Aemond studies him. You, Rio, Daeron, and Aegon—who is lingering on the front porch, not yet ready to admit defeat—glance between them apprehensively. Ice is rolling around in the gravel, coating her grey fur with dust. “How do I know you won’t take off without us?”

Cregan’s face goes dark. His brow, heavy and furrowed, settles low over his eyes. “Look buddy, I’ve done a lot of things for you and your people that I didn’t have to. And now I’m fixing the Tahoe so it can take you west, someplace you decided we’re going. If you don’t trust me, do it yourself. Kill your own opossum. Change your own flat tire. But you can’t, can you? Just like I can’t shoot a zombie straight through the eye or tell you how to cure that sick boy in there. We’ve all got jobs here. Let me do mine.”

Aemond glowers at Cregan, knowing he’s right. Daeron averts his eyes; Rio, grinning, eats a handful of Cheddar Whales from a pocket of his cargo shorts. You lay a palm on Aemond’s forearm. “Aemond…he’s trying to help.”

“Sure,” Aemond replies crossly.

“You want collateral?” Cregan says. “Take my dog.” He whistles, and Ice scampers to his side. He points to you. “Go on, princess.” Ice obediently trots over to stand with you, shaggy ash-colored fur, bestial amber eyes like a rattlesnake’s. “She’ll look after you on your way to the pharmacy and back. And if the Tahoe and I have mysteriously vanished upon your return, you can eat her for dinner.”

“You don’t want a warning if you’re about to run into zombies?” Rio asks.

Cregan chuckles as he picks up his axe off the gravel. “Don’t you worry about me. We haven’t heard a peep since we got into town, and I’m just going a little ways up the road. Any less than ten of those abominations, and I can take care of myself.” He gives you and Rio a parting salute and strides into the farmhouse to collect the Tahoe keys from Rhaena.

Aemond turns to Daeron. “Stay here, keep watch. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Daeron nods, glancing to where his compound bow rests on the front porch. “Got it.”

“Aegon will help you.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Aegon says. “I want to go to the pharmacy too.”

Aemond is losing what remains of his patience. “No.”

“Please?”

“No!”

“Then can you at least bring me something back?”

Rio is confounded. “What do you need?”

“You know…” Aegon gestures vaguely. “Percocet, Vicodin, Oxy, maybe some of that cough syrup with the codeine in it—”

“Grow the fuck up,” Aemond flares, and Aegon falls silent. “You’re thirty years old. Take some goddamn responsibility for something, for anything. I have to go to the pharmacy, Cregan has to fix the Tahoe, someone has to stay here with Daeron to help protect Jace and Baela, and Luke and Rhaena, and Helaena too. Just shut up and do the right thing. You have to start acting like an adult. Who do you think is in charge if I get killed? I’ve never for a single day of my life had the luxury of making selfish choices, and now I feel like I’m not even allowed to die. Leaving everyone else with you would be like leaving them with nobody.”

Aegon gazes up at him, not offended but childishly, mortally wounded. His oceanic eyes are huge and glistening. “But you’re not going to die before me.”

“That’s not the point,” Aemond pitches back, cutting, caustic. Then he starts down the long gravel driveway towards the road. You give Aegon a small, apologetic half-smile and then follow after his younger brother, Ice loping alongside you.

Rio thumps Aegon encouragingly on one shoulder. “See you soon, Honey Bun.” And Aegon watches the three of you disappear, standing in the dazzling midday light with his arms folded over his chest and his hair in hie face, kicking at the gravel with the Sperry Bahama sneakers he once wore on yachts and golf courses.

“Please try to be nice to him,” you tell Aemond when you’re far enough away to be out of earshot. Rio is humming a song you don’t immediately recognize—probably Enrique Iglesias—and acting like he’s not listening. “You don’t know how much longer any of us have. And if that was the last thing you ever said to him, you’d feel awful about it.”

“You have no idea what it was like being his brother. Since I was born all I’ve done is try to plug the holes he blasts into ships. But there’s always water on the floor, I’m never done bailing it out. He needs to learn how to do things for himself.”

“Yes, he does. But he loves you, and he wants you to be happy. He would never intentionally take anything from you. He’ll grow into his purpose, whatever that is.”

“He needs to do it faster,” Aemond says harshly, and you walk the rest of the way without speaking, listening for snarling or lurching footsteps, hearing nothing but birdsong and wind whispering through leaves.

The pharmacy—a diminutive family-owned business, not a chain—has been ravaged. The glass of the large bay window has been broken out and the shelves looted, empty containers and wrappers littering the floor, crystalline shards threatening to gash, stab, infect.

“Stay out here with the dog,” Aemond tells you. Ice is panting calmly, her ears relaxed, her strange yellowish eyes taking in the scenery without any concern. “If she gets her paws sliced up, Cregan will have yet another accusation to levy against me.”

“You’re going to have to get used to him.”

“Not much of an adjustment for you, it seems,” Aemond says, then steps through the shattered window, glass crunching beneath his shoes. Rio gives you a wink and goes after him. They rummage through the remaining merchandise, strewn about randomly and interspersed among trash. Aemond peeks behind the counter where pharmacists once filled prescriptions and climbs over it, searching for any bottles or boxes that were left behind.

“Sorry guys, no condoms,” Rio announces, then laughs at his own joke.

“Be careful,” you urge from outside. “Look underneath, check the bottom racks. Rio? Rio, down low, check them!”

“Relax, ain’t nothing going on in here. It’s silent as the grave.” He laughs again. “Get it? As the grave.”

“Aemond?”

“I’m fine,” he tells you as he squints to read medicine bottles.

“Okay, okay,” Rio says, squatting to examine the shelves closest to the cluttered floor. “I’m checking all the racks. There’s nothing scary under the racks. Happy now?”

“Very. Helaena said something that freaked me out.”

“She can be a bit of an enigma,” Aemond admits. He is taking a tiny box from a drawer to keep.

“Oh, we got Pedialyte!” Rio says, yanking a jug of pink fluid from a pile of debris. “You think Jace likes strawberry?”

Aemond hurries over to help him hunt for more. “Yeah. It’s like a Twizzler, right?”

Ice noses your hand and whimpers softly. You look down at her. “What?”

She whirls and canters around the side of the pharmacy, then returns to make sure you’re keeping up. You go after her, slow and wary, a hand on one of your Beretta M9s. There’s nothing of note to be found in the narrow, shadowy alleyway other than an overflowing dumpster and two skeletons stripped of every shred of fabric and flesh; even the bones were licked clean.

You turn to Ice. “Did I need to see this?” She whines and shifts her weight from foot to foot, ears perked up. Something else? You look down the alleyway. Far behind the pharmacy and the shops that surround it is a church on a jade green slope, old-fashioned, white wood and a belltower. There is a cemetery beside it, and amidst the small grey blurs of headstones are… “Oh,” you breathe. “So that’s where the rest of the town is.”

The graveyard is full of limp, swaying figures that can only be zombies. You are far away and draped in shadows; you retreat back to the pharmacy without any indication that you’ve been spotted, Ice trailing close behind. Aemond and Rio are climbing out of the window just as you arrive. They are each carrying three jugs of Pedialyte in various flavors.

“Where the hell’d you go?” Aemond says; but he sounds more relieved than irritated.

“There’s a church about an eight of a mile away. And there are a lot of zombies in the cemetery.”

Rio sets his Pedialyte down on the sidewalk and reaches for the Remington 12 gauge hanging over his shoulder by its leather strap. “Okay, let’s go clear them out.”

“No, I mean a lot. Like a hundred.”

He freezes. “Oh.”

“We should leave town,” you say.

“While Jace is puking and shitting everywhere? You want to be stuck in a car with that?”

Aemond is thinking, toying with the little box you saw him pick up earlier. “We’ll leave as soon as we can.”

“What’s that?” you ask him.

He shows you the label. “Injectable morphine. All the pills were gone, but I found one vial of this, and I have syringes in my medical kit. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It should still be useable.”

“For Baela?” For when she delivers the baby?

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Just in case.” Then he looks at both you and Rio meaningfully. “Don’t tell Aegon I have this.”

“We won’t,” Rio promises. And Ice begins trotting back towards the farmhouse, as if trying to rush you along.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Tahoe is at the mouth of the long gravel driveway, still up on a hand-cranked scissor jack. The tire appears to be new, but the lug nuts haven’t been tightened, and the wrench is nowhere to be found.

“Cregan?” Rio says uncertainly, peeking through the cornstalks as they bend in the wind. “Hey, Cregan? Aemond’s sorry he was a bitch to you earlier. He wants you to return ASAP and do manual labor for him.” Aemond grimaces; Rio beams in reply. But Cregan does not appear.

You can hear them long before you reach the farmhouse, muffled chaotic chattering, raised voices and rushing footsteps. As you ascend the steps of the front porch, Rhaena bursts through the door.

“Thank God you’re back,” she says; there is blood on her hands. “It’s Jace, he…he…come look at him. Aemond, you have to do something. He’s sick, he’s really sick. He’s bleeding.”

“From where?” Aemond asks, urgent, bewildered.

“From everywhere,” Rhaena replies, and beckons for him to follow.

The bedsheets Jace is swathed in are blooming with crimson, flowers of doomed gore. Blood drips from his nostrils and his eyes; when he retches into the popcorn bucket, clots of pink and red spew out. Everyone is gathered around him and speaking at the same time, except Helaena. She is crouched on the floor of the hallway just outside his room, her arms wrapped around her bent knees and her face stricken. Ice curls up beside her.

Above the other voices, Baela screams at Aemond, a desperate horrified moan: “What’s wrong with him?!”

Aemond pushes by the others and feels Jace’s forehead, then grabs his wrist to measure his pulse. As Aemond’s fingers tighten, Jace’s skin rips beneath them, the top layer sliding off and leaving only glistening, raw pink. Jace howls, tears of blood streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t know,” Aemond says, his voice unsteady.

“What the fuck do you mean you don’t know?!” Baela shouts back. “You’re a doctor! Fix him!”

“It hurts, Aemond,” Jace gasps, fresh blood on his teeth. When Baela touches his hair, locks of it fall out into her hand.

“He’s turning, right?” Rio says to you. “This is what happened to Snowflake, the blood and the skin and everything—?”

“He wasn’t bitten!” Luke insists, positioned in front of Jace’s bed as if he’s guarding it.

“I don’t care if we can’t find a bite mark, he’s decomposing for Christ’s sake, what the fuck else could it be?!”

Daeron returns with more blankets and towels. Aegon grabs a strawberry Pedialyte out of Rio’s grasp and tries to help Jace drink it. Cregan is muttering: “I ain’t never seen anything like this…”

Decomposing, you think dizzily. He wasn’t bitten, but he’s falling apart…what else does that to a person?

Baela cleans blood from his lips, a towel turning from snow to rubies. “Jace, baby, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to help you…”

“Could it be rat poison or something?” Cregan is saying. “Rabies? Mad cow disease? Ebola?”

“How the fuck do you think he got Ebola?!” Aemond exclaims. “You think he took a jet to sub-Saharan Africa when he was on his own? Use your brain.”

“I’m just trying to come up with ideas here, doc, and I don’t see you with any bright ones!”

He’s decomposing. He’s decomposing.

And then you remember. You kneel down beside the bed so you can look into his face, so you can make him pay attention. “Jace, listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” he replies faintly. He coughs, wet and gurgling. Fresh blood paints his lips. There are blisters beginning to form up and down his arms, you see now, the skin bubbling and separating.

“Jace, do you remember Three Mile Island?”

“What the fuck.” He is baffled, dismissive. “Three Mile what? Huh? What are you talking about…?”

“You’re upsetting him,” Baela says fiercely, tears glittering in her eyes.

But you are determined. “Outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, after we left Fort Indiantown Gap. There were these huge concrete cooling towers. We saw them from the Wawa parking lot.” But he wasn’t there when we talked about radiation. He was still inside searching for guns. “Remember, Jace? Do you remember?”

Now Aemond and Rio are looking at you, petrified, realizing what you must be thinking. No one else understands yet. After a long pause, Jace nods feebly. “Yeah. I remember the towers.”

“Good,” you say, smiling to encourage him. “Okay, this is important. After we lost you at the river, before you found us again, did you see anywhere that looked like Three Mile Island?”

“Yeah,” Jace murmurs as he stares back at you with glazed, bloody eyes; and Rio sighs and shakes his head. “I drove right by it on the Honda. The sign said Byron.”

And it’s been over for him since that moment.

“Alright, Jace.” You want to touch him, to embrace him or cup his cheek. You know it will only make his suffering worse. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted to ask.” He begins to gag again, and Baela hurries to place the popcorn bucket so it can catch his liquefying organs. You turn around and walk through the doorway.

“What’s happening?” Aegon asks you, hushed voice, frantic eyes. He has followed you to the living room, along with Aemond, Rio, and Cregan. You nod to Aemond. He knows.

“It’s radiation sickness,” Aemond says, low and bleak.

“What?!” Aegon gapes at him. “I mean, are you sure…?”

“It fits all the symptoms. He was in close proximity to a nuclear power plant, something the rest of us have intentionally avoided. If there was a meltdown, there are miles and miles that are poisoned with radiation. Passing by on a motorcycle could definitely result in a lethal dose.”

“Poor guy,” Rio says. “Not a good way to go.”

“No,” you agree. It isn’t.

“So how do you treat something like that?” Cregan asks Aemond.

“It can’t be treated,” Aemond replies tersely. “Not here, not by me, not by anyone. Not even if the world was normal again.”

“What do you mean it can’t be treated?! Everything can be treated nowadays! Cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, hell, my cousin got testicular cancer and he was fine a month later, he even got to keep one of his balls!”

“Radiation sickness can’t be treated. He’s going to die.”

“But how is that possible when—?!”

“I need you to try to not be stupid for five minutes,” Aemond snaps.

You say quietly: “He’s not stupid, Aemond. He just doesn’t know about this.”

“You are always defending him.”

“Because not going to med school isn’t a character flaw.”

Cregan asks mildly, looking at Aemond: “Could you explain it to me?”

“It’s pennies in a jar, man,” Rio says. “Radiation stacks up and at a certain point it kills you. It destroys your DNA and your body falls apart. You can get it just by going near someplace contaminated, and you might not even feel it happen. And there’s no way to undo the damage. The pennies never leave the jar.”

Cregan raises an eyebrow at Aemond. “Was that so difficult?”

Aemond ignores him. “We have to tell Jace,” he says instead.

Back in the bedroom—a mineral stench in the air, coppery blood and the salt of sweat—Aegon sits on the edge of the bed and takes one of Jace’s swelling, blistering hands carefully in his own.

“Don’t hold my hand, you loser.” Jace mumbles, and Aegon respectfully releases him.

“Jace,” Aegon begins. “We think you have radiation sickness.”

Jace blinks up at him, wincing and disoriented. “Which means…?”

“Which means, um, it’s going to be…not great.”

“Why are you the person explaining this?”

“You’re right, I really shouldn’t be explaining it. Can someone else explain it…?” Aegon glances around hopefully.

“Jace,” Aemond says. “Those cooling towers you drove by were part of a nuclear power plant that melted down when the power grid collapsed. You received a fatal dose of radiation. It’s the only thing that explains what’s happening to you.”

“Fatal…?” Daeron ventures.

Rhaena gasps and reaches for Luke. Baela’s face is a mask of numb shock. Jace stares up at Aemond for a long time before he speaks. “Aemond, fix me.”

Aemond’s words are brittle and fracturing. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Stop fucking around, man, you’re a doctor. You can fix me. I know you can. You’re a genius. You’re a total freak but you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. Give me the pills, give me the shots. Cut me open if you have to. I won’t scream, I promise. Fix me. I trust you.”

“Jace, I can’t do anything. No one can.”

“I have to meet the baby, Aemond,” Jace whispers, scarlet tears bleeding down his cheeks. “I have to be here for Baela and Luke. Fix me, man. I’ll do anything you tell me to.”

“Jace,” Aemond says, his voice breaking. “I’m so sorry. I can’t help you.”

Jace looks to Baela, Luke, Rhaena, and at last back to Aemond. “How long?”

“Not very. A few days, maybe.”

“Days?” he echoes, dazed. “What happens?”

Aemond shakes his head. You don’t want to know.

“Yeah I do. Tell me.”

Aemond can’t respond; clear silent tears snake down the right side of his face. Rio answers for him. “You continue to bleed out of every orifice and the rest of your skin falls off. And eventually you die.”

Jace breaks down in sobs. “I was trying to find you guys.”

Suddenly, Baela turns to you and Rio and Aemond, wrathful, hissing. “This is your fault.”

Aemond pleads: “Baela, please don’t—”

“You made me leave him at the river. I knew he was still alive, but you forced me to leave him. If he’d been with us, this never would have happened. But he was alone, and it was because of you. You did this to him. You stole him from me.”

Rhaena tries to console her. “Baela, no one meant to—”

“I just got him back!” she screams, and then shelters Jace in her arms as he clings to her, the skin of his fingers and palms flaking at the pressure, holding onto her anyway. No one knows what to say; everyone has tears burning in their eyes and embers in their throats. “Get out,” Baela demands. “Leave us alone. This is the last time I’ll ever have with him and it’s your fucking fault. So get out.”

And you leave them to their final moments, failing flesh in a dying world.

~~~~~~~~~~

Only Luke and Rhaena flit in and out of the bedroom, carrying soiled linens and the plastic popcorn bucket to be periodically emptied. The rest of you are engrossed in a grim, thunderstruck deathwatch in the living room. You discuss the inevitable in hushed murmurs. It is cruel to let Jace suffer; it is unspeakably horrible to let Baela witness it. Ice alternates between receiving scratches from Cregan, Helaena, and Aegon, never trying to enter Jace’s room. You can hear Jace and Baela talking in there, his retching and groaning, her sobs.

It is not until dusk that Rhaena summons Aemond. Luke is weeping as he paces back and forth in the bedroom. Baela is still sitting on the bed with Jace, resigned now. She does not apologize, but she doesn’t have any more venom to spit either. The rest of you watch from the hallway, keeping a respectful distance. Ice nudges your hand with her nose, but you ignore her. Jace’s bloody eyes roll to Aemond.

“I’m keeping you here, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” Aemond replies. There’s no point in lying.

“And I don’t need to feel myself melting like this for days. I get the idea.” Jace looks at Aemond for a while. His voice is anemic but calm; there are fresh blisters on his face and neck. “What can you give me?”

Aemond opens his medical kit and shows Jace the vial of morphine. “I found this at the pharmacy today. It would be painless, like going to sleep and never waking up.”

“Why do you have that?”

“I was thinking a small amount might help Baela during labor.”

“Is it the only morphine in your kit?”

“Yes.”

Jace nods. “Save it for Baela.” His gaze drops to the Glock in the holster at Aemond’s waist. “Can I borrow that?”

Rhaena stifles a dismayed yelp. Baela closes her eyes, but does not protest. Aemond says: “I don’t think you want to do this.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Cyclops,” Jace says, smiling. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”

“It’s heavy,” Aemond warns. He clicks off the safety and gives the Glock to Jace. “Are you able to use it by yourself?”

“It’s a very simple two-step process. Barrel to skull, finger on the trigger. I think I’ll manage.”

Again, Ice bumps her nose against your knuckles; again, you barely notice. Baela kisses Jace on the mouth, her lips coming away bloody. Rhaena says goodbye to him, then Luke, whispered parting words you don’t try to listen to. Before Aemond exits, Jace grasps his hand.

“Take care of my family, Aemond.”

“I will.”

“Don’t let the zombies eat me afterwards.”

And then it becomes real. Aemond’s composure falters. “Jace…I’m so sorry…”

“Go,” Jace urges him. Then there is a coughing fit, fresh blood and pieces of stomach and lungs. “Right now. Before I lose my nerve.”

Baela is the last one to leave the bedroom; she shuts the door behind her. Almost immediately afterwards is a deafening bang. Baela sinks to the floor and wails, one hand on her belly, the other embracing Rhaena and Luke when they rush to her. Ice is whining and pawing at the floor, her nails screeching on the hardwood. Aemond alone returns to Jace’s bedroom and reappears with his Glock. He places it back in his holster, his scarred face vacant. There’s blood on his fingers, you see. Jace’s blood, the last he’ll ever shed. Aemond hasn’t noticed yet.

You reach for Aemond’s hand; he flinches away. You ask him, pained: “Do you think if you don’t touch me, it won’t hurt you when I die?”

“Please don’t say that,” Aemond responds in a hoarse, splintering whisper.

Ice yowls, and Cregan is abruptly aware of her. “Oh shit, the Tahoe is still up on the jack. I’ll go get it.” He opens the front door. Under the moonlight, there are upwards of a hundred zombies stumbling down the long gravel driveway. Everyone begins screaming. Cregan slams the door shut and shoves one of the couches in front of it. “What now?!”

“We go through the cornfield,” Aemond says as you are all frantically gathering your sparse possessions. “It will be more difficult for them to see us. We kill as many as we can and we make our way to the Tahoe. Cregan, how long will it take you to get it ready to drive?”

“Maybe a minute. But I’ll need someone to spot me while I tighten the lug nuts.”

“Sounds like my kind of job opportunity,” Rio says, pumping his Remington. Helaena gives you a flashlight. Cregan secures the lug wrench under his belt and picks up his axe. Rhaena has her Ruger out and is telling Baela to breathe, to stay focused, to let her and Luke lead the way.

Aemond comes to you and leans in close so the others can’t hear. “How many bullets do you have left?”

“Not enough. Maybe fifty.”

“Do what you can. Stay near Rio.”

“I’ll try.”

Now there are zombies at the front windows, beating their spongy swamp-colored palms against the glass. Baela, Rhaena, and Luke are leaving through the back door with Daeron; you can hear the whizzing of his arrows and the sick soft sound they make when they pierce rotting meat. Under the weight of so many hands, one of the living room windows pops from its frame and clatters against the floor. You open fire, bullets exploding skulls and spraying brains, corpses jolting and then diving to the ground. You shoot until both M9s are empty, then pause to reload, boxes of bullets that Cregan gave you back in Iowa.

“Let them in,” Helaena says.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” Aegon shouts at her. He’s firing his Marlin .22 beside you, quite poorly; Rio and Aemond are in the backyard killing any zombies that find their way towards the cornfield. “We’re not letting them get through the house!”

“Not through,” Helaena says placidly. “In.”

“Oh.” Aegon understands. “Oh! I get it! Trap them inside!” He races to the kitchen and tears the remaining bottles of Grey Goose vodka out of the cabinet, then begins spilling them onto the wood floor. “Helaena, give me a lighter.”

She places one in his outstretched palm and then leaves with Cregan as he escorts her away, leading her by her fragile hand. They vanish together into the cornfield, Ice on their heels.

“Time to go, Chips!” Rio booms; he can’t be far behind Cregan.

“We’re on our way!”

Zombies are pouring through the front of the house; another window has given way. You pull the trigger over and over again as you move with Aegon towards the backyard, his clear river of vodka drawing a path from one end of the house to the other. You hit the grass before he does, then wait for him by the edge of the cornfield. Aemond and Rio are shouting for Aegon to hurry up. He crosses through the threshold, flicks the lighter to life, and throws it into the house. His plan works—the farmhouse is abruptly aflame, cooking zombies like long-spoiled hams—but he neglected to realize that in his haste, he had also accidentally doused his own left leg and Sperry Bahama sneaker. The fire licks up over Aegon’s skin and blazes there radiantly. He shrieks and falls to the ground. Rio yanks his own shirt off and uses it to smother the inferno, then throws Aegon over one shoulder to carry him.

“Go to Cregan!” Rio tells Aemond, shoving him in the direction of the Tahoe. Rio will be slower now, but no one else could still run with Aegon’s added weight. “You and Daeron spot him until I get there!” When Aemond is gone, Rio glances back at you.

“I’m fine,” you say, felling zombies as they round the house. “Get Aegon to the car!” And Rio listens to you like he always does, vanishing with Aegon through the cornfield.

You weave through the leafy stalks, investigating each growl and rustling with the beam of your flashlight. Grotesque, fetid faces plunge through the greenery, and you demolish them. You’re in the rhythm now, wheeling for a target and locking in, squeezing the trigger and watching ghoulish faces disappear. And then you spy a zombie lurching towards you from fifteen feet away, a twenty-something in a red Nebraska Cornhuskers t-shirt making her way down the dirt aisle between two rows of corn; and when you pull the trigger, there is only a dry click in reply. Your other M9 is already empty. You’ve used all the ammo Cregan gave you.

“I’m out of bullets,” you say, but no one hears you; you are alone. Aemond always told you to stay near Rio and you never did. Too late, you realize what an oversight that has been. “Rio? Aemond?!”

There are human voices and gunshots, but reverberating from a distance. Far closer are snarls and groans of the dead. You click off your flashlight, drop to the earth, and crawl until you are as far under a row of corn as you can be, long leaves tickling the back of your neck and damp soil in your nostrils. Clumsy, lumbering footsteps trod by you. From the road, you hear the Tahoe’s engine start with a rumble.

They’re leaving.

You shake your head, here with no one to see you in the dark. Still, the thought persists.

They’re leaving. I left my family and now my family is leaving me.

“Chips, stay where you are!” Rio shouts. “We’re coming back, we’ll find you!”

You wait until they are within ten feet of you, Rio cracking skulls with his Remington—he must be out of bullets too—and Aemond firing his Glock. “I’m here, I’m here!” you cry, and they are lifting you up from the dirt and dragging you towards Tahoe, and Aemond puts his pistol in your hand knowing you can do more good with it. You fire ten rounds before the Glock is empty, and you think with terror: Do any of us have bullets left?

Then you are being helped into the Tahoe, and the second all the doors are shut Rhaena floors the gas pedal, heading west on State Route 92.

~~~~~~~~~~

“I got my drugs after all,” Aegon rasps as Aemond injects him with morphine on the floor of a laundromat on the edge of Merna, Nebraska, far enough to escape the zombies, not so far that the Tahoe risks running out of gas before you reach the next town. His left leg is burned from the knee down, and burned badly: skin, fat, muscle, blood-red scorched ruin. Even through the modest dose of morphine—Aemond is terrified of accidentally killing him—Aegon can still feel what has happened to him. He knows it’s bad. He knows it could be the last mistake he ever makes. “I’m so thirsty…”

“I got you, Honey Bun,” Rio says, and then uses the butt of his Remington to bust open the vending machines and bring him bottles of Powerade. Baela is sobbing in the corner with Luke and Rhaena. Helaena is shining a flashlight on Aegon’s leg so Aemond can see. Daeron and Cregan are keeping watch by the entrance. You don’t even know why. All the bullets and arrows are gone, Aegon can’t walk, the Tahoe’s gas tank is nearly drained. If you are descended upon now, what will you do?

Aegon sobs and clutches for you, links his arms around your waist, rests his head in your lap. You hold him and comb your fingers through his unruly hair over and over again, like a compulsion, like a ritual. You are so afraid to let go of him. You are terrified he’ll disappear.

I wish I knew what to say. I never know what to say.

He’s shaking uncontrollably as Aemond cleans his leg: peeling away dead skin, wiping down the raw flesh with disinfectant. Aegon’s eyes are wide and glassy. There is blood on the white tile floor, pinkish lymph fluid, bits of charred skin. Ice is whimpering, her muzzle propped on her paws and her eyes darting around the room. Aegon manages through the pain, a reedy, gasping whisper: “Tell me about all those places you went when you were in the Navy.”

You can see it like the miles-deep blue of his eyes: the Indian Ocean, the jewel-tone equatorial sky. “On Diego Garcia, they have these birds called red-footed boobies—”

Aegon barks out a weak laugh. “They do not. You’re making that up.”

“No, really, I swear! They’re like seagulls, but they have blue on their face and bright red feet, hence the name. They’re extremely stupid, and one night a few of us were hanging out drinking Guinness and playing pool, and a booby flew in through an open window. We panicked, it panicked, and then it was flying in circles and couldn’t get out. We opened all the doors and windows, and the booby still just flew around banging into the walls. And of course the whole time it was shitting and bleeding and getting feathers everywhere, we knew it was going to take hours to clean up. After thirty minutes of chasing this idiot bird around, Rio snapped, took off his boot, and smacked the booby with it. He was trying to fling it out the window, like hitting a tennis ball with a racket, but he accidentally hit the bird too hard and murdered it. Its beak literally separated from its body and flew across the room. None of us could believe it, we didn’t even know that was possible. Rio felt so bad he started crying. We took the booby—and its beak, of course—out to the beach for a Viking funeral. We made it a little raft of coconut tree leaves, set it on fire with a lighter, and pushed it out into the waves.”

Aegon is cackling. “Bryan Osorio, terrorizer of the homicidal undead and boobies!”

“What else?” Baela says, and you look over at her, startled. The flashlight incandescence turns you all to ghosts, phantoms, half-shadows. At first you don’t know what she means. “What else did they have on Diego Garcia?”

“Oh, tell them about the coconut crabs,” Rio prompts you. He’s settled down beside Aegon and is resting one broad hand on his trembling shoulder.

“Coconut crabs?” Rhaena asks you, wiping tears from her cheeks with her delicate, small-boned fingers.

You are abruptly aware that you have an audience. You can feel yourself shrinking beneath their gazes. “Rio should tell the story. I’m not good at it.”

“Sure you are,” Rio says, smiling kindly beneath dark, wet eyes. “Go on. Tell them.”

So you do.

[lostinhistory]

Heritage News of the Week

Discoveries!

The ship was part of a Spanish colonizing expedition led by the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who was voyaging from Mexico under the Spanish crown. In September 1559, a hurricane in Pensacola Bay wrecked several of the 11 ships, which had been anchored near the new Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse. Researchers found one of these wrecks, known as Emanuel Point II, in 2006. This shipwreck holds the remains of an adult and a juvenile domestic cat (Felis catus), according to the new study.

'Overkill' injuries on Bronze Age skeletons reveal fierce feuding in ancient China

A unique Bronze Age cemetery in China has revealed a high frequency of injuries suggestive of intense, violent interactions.

Hikers make stunning discovery of $340,000 gold hoard in Czech mountains

The Museum of Eastern Bohemia in the Czech Republic city of Hradec Králové has announced the discovery of a 20th-century gold trove worth more than $340,000.

2,300-year-old sword unearthed at necropolis in France

Two 2,300-year-old swords discovered in a Celtic Iron Age necropolis in France "have few equivalents in Europe," and one is decorated with tiny swastikas, the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research reports.

Mummy mystery solved: ‘air-dried’ priest was embalmed via rectum

Intrigue had long swirled around the mummified body stored in the church crypt of St Thomas am Blasenstein. The remains were rumoured to be the naturally preserved corpse of an aristocratic vicar, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, who died in 1746 at the aged of 37, gaining the mummy the moniker of the “air-dried chaplain”. Now experts say they have discovered the body was embalmed with the abdominal and pelvic cavities packed with wood chips, fragmented twigs, fabrics such as hemp and silk, and zinc chloride – materials that would have absorbed fluids inside the body.

Tw: Image of human remains at link

This facility once produced the ancient world’s rarest dye at a grand scale

Archaeologists in Israel have turned up the remains of a massive operation that once produced Tyrian purple.

'Groundbreaking' ancient DNA research confirms Pueblo peoples' ties to famous Chaco Canyon site

New genetic research confirms what the oral traditions of the Picuris Pueblo people of New Mexico have long described — that they're related to the Indigenous people of Chaco Canyon.

Ancient tomb of nomadic horse lord yields untouched treasures and weapons

A archaeological discovery near Grozny has unearthed an undisturbed Alanian tomb dating back over two millennia, revealing a wealth of exquisite artifacts including unique triple-edged weapons and elaborate horse adornments.

Egyptologist uncovers hidden messages on Paris’s iconic obelisk

Olette-Pelletier found seven crypto-hieroglyphs on the monument that could only be read by elites.

Unique lion-headed handles unveiled from a Roman-period cist tomb near Khirbat Ibreika

Beneath the ancient dust of Khirbat Ibreika in southern Israel, archaeologists have unearthed an unexpected enigma: four bronze discs, each adorned with powerful lion head reliefs and accompanied by functional rings, carefully extracted from a tomb dating back to the first and second centuries CE of the Roman Empire.

Neanderthals made the oldest bone spear tip found in Europe

The 3.5-inch object was made between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago and was likely fashioned out of a bison bone.

Mass grave of Black Union soldiers slaughtered during the Civil War may lie under a Kentucky soybean field, high-tech scans reveal

Archaeologists have identified two potential mass graves of Black Union soldiers who were targeted by Confederate guerrillas in the Civil War.

2,000-year-old garlanded sarcophagus unearthed in "City of Gladiators"

A remarkably well-preserved, 2,000-year-old sarcophagus adorned with intricate garlands has been discovered during ongoing excavations in the ancient city of Stratonikeia, in southwestern Türkiye.

New evidence suggests Scots may have invented the game of soccer

In what may cause major ramifications for the history of sports, The Times reports that a team of researchers may have identified the world’s oldest known soccer field—not in England, where the “beautiful game” was purportedly invented in the mid-nineteenth century, but in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland.

Numerous statue fragments unearthed at lost Apollo sanctuary in Cyprus

The Sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa, located near ancient Tamassos and lost for approximately 140 years, has been rediscovered through recent excavations.

Archaeological project maps historic boat sheds on Isles of Scilly

An archaeological project has highlighted just how crucial the agile, tough “pilot gigs” were for islanders by mapping 90 sites of sheds that housed the boats, the earliest believed to date back to the 17th century.

Unique column capital depicting a menorah unveiled in Jerusalem

The carved limestone block was originally discovered in 2020 in a 6th- or 7th-century CE. Byzantine house during excavations in Motza, outside Jerusalem. Yet archaeologists believe that the capital is centuries older, likely dating to the second or third century, and had been subsequently moved to this location.

Museums

A temporary restraining order was issued by the U.S. District Court to block the Trump Administration‘s dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Smithsonian Institution says it won’t remove anti-segregation exhibits

The Smithsonian Institution denied reports this morning, April 28, that its National Museum of American History and the National Museum of African American History and Culture intended to remove object displays documenting anti-segregation demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement.

Vatican museums, including Sistine Chapel, closed indefinitely for conclave to elect the next pope

The Vatican Museums, which includes the Sistine Chapel, has been closed to the public as Vatican City prepares for the gathering of cardinals who will vote to elect a new pope following the death of Pope Francis on April 28.

‘The eighth wonder of the world’: China’s terracotta warriors to march on Australia for blockbuster show

Perth will host huge exhibition of ancient treasures from first emperor’s tomb in June, with 40% of the artefacts leaving China for the first time ever

Trump fires Doug Emhoff and others from US Holocaust Memorial Council

Husband of Kamala Harris calls move political and decries turning historical atrocity into ‘a wedge issue’

Trump names eight new appointees to US Holocaust Memorial Museum board

Eight new appointees for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum board were announced by President Donald Trump in a social media post on Thursday night. These trustees will replace the board members appointed by former President Joe Biden that Trump removed just a few days ago.

Edward II’s coronation roll goes on display alongside King Charles’s

The two rolls, part of a tradition dating back at least seven centuries, are on public display for the first time in an exhibition at the National Archives that also includes works of art commissioned by the government to mark the coronation.

The Getty’s Provenance Index makes more than 12 million records publicly available

The Getty Provenance Index (GPI) initially launched in the 1980s to keep track of the ownership history of each artwork in the museum’s collection. Since then, it has become an integral part of the Getty’s research on provenance, collecting, and art markets. Today, the records included in the GPI extend well beyond the Getty itself.

Repatriation

Ancestral human remains taken by a "grave robber" and brought to Belfast almost 200 years ago have begun their journey back to Hawaii. The human remains were repatriated in an emotional ceremony held at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, attended by representatives from Hawaii.

A looted Greco-Roman statue goes on display before its return

After a months-long legal battle, the sculpture is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art ahead of its repatriation to Turkey, with newly added context about its provenance.

Heritage at risk

Ignorance appears to be no barrier as Trump seeks to grasp control of the US’s historical narrative in the run-up to next year’s landmark celebration of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence, also known as the semiquincentennial. Under an executive order issued in January, the president has started to churn out his own approved version of US history that professional historians fear will resort to the tried and tested authoritarian playbook of airbrushing out inconvenient and inglorious chapters that do not align with his vision of American greatness.

Famed Memphis church associated with Martin Luther King damaged by fire

A fire has severely damaged the historic Clayborn Temple in downtown Memphis, which is closely associated with the US civil rights movement and Dr Martin Luther King.

Odds and ends

Modern-day conclaves are steeped in mystery: cardinal electors swear an oath of secrecy – and so do the cooks, drivers, medics and others who support their deliberations. Before the conclave begins next week, the Sistine Chapel will be swept for electronic bugs, jamming devices will be installed, and special coatings will be placed on windows to stop laser scanners picking up anything audible. It wasn’t always this way: in the past, letters, diaries and other writings by cardinals and their attendants gave revealing accounts of what happened in the meetings convened in order to choose a pope.

How African popes changed Christianity - and gave us Valentine's Day

Now predominantly Muslim, North Africa was once a Christian heartland, producing Catholic popes who left their mark on the Church to this day.

The buried hoard: a story of treachery and greed

This is a story of treachery, secrecy and greed which led to two friends ending up in jail and a mystery about buried coins.

Pompeii aerial tour helicopters seized in safety investigation

Italian police have seized eight helicopters and are investigating four pilots associated with a company offering aerial tours of Pompeii’s archaeological ruins last week, alleging a laundry list of safety and operations violations.

Two men filmed felling of Sycamore Gap tree during ‘mindless’ act, court hears

Two men filmed themselves using a chainsaw to fell the famous Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall in an act of “mindless criminal damage”, a court has heard.

Titanic survivor's letter sold for £300,000 at auction

Colonel Archibald Gracie's letter was purchased by an anonymous buyer at Henry Aldridge and Son auction house in Wiltshire on Sunday, at a price five times higher than the £60,000 it was expected to fetch.Colonel Archibald Gracie's letter was purchased by an anonymous buyer at Henry Aldridge and Son auction house in Wiltshire on Sunday, at a price five times higher than the £60,000 it was expected to fetch.

How did Hitler’s film-maker hide her complicity from the world?

A new documentary delves into controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl’s private archive to uncover a director who spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine

[oh-he-grows]

Soil temps are over 60 and there's a big long rainy week ahead, it's BEAN time. About 100 Sq ft of just dry beans in the ground.

Mayocoba

Santa Maria Pinquito

Borlotti Stregoni

Ayocote Morado

Domingo Rojo

King City Pink Bean

Cranberry Bean

A nice mix of everything. Sown using the Wide-Row method, where I dig a furrow about an inch down and 16 inches wide, then spread loads of seed in the space, followed by a 16 inch gap and another 16 inch furrow of beans

The result is more beans in the same amount of space compared to a single row with 6 inch spacing, the crowded plants shade and mulch their own soil helping with water retention, and bunching together protects them from harsh hot winds.

From reading a few studies on commercial soybean cultivation, the 16 inch Wide-Row method for dry beans leads to higher per-plant yields than wider 30-inch rows and more plants per area than single-row, 7.5in rows, and broadcasted. Granted, this is a raised bed and not several acres of field, but it was definitely easier to plant than doing single straight rows all the way down. Fingers crossed! It's my second year of growing dry beans, and the only issue last year was constant rain when it was time to harvest, leading to moldy skin and soft beans.

[darkmaga-returns]

Big Agra giants are aggressively lobbying for sweeping legal immunity, aiming to shield themselves from lawsuits over the alleged mass poisoning of farmers and consumers through their toxic pesticides, mirroring the vaccine industry’s untouchable status. This push seeks to block accountability for those sickened or dying, as these corporate behemoths prioritize profits over human lives.

Insiders reveal that these agricultural conglomerates are funneling millions into political campaigns to secure legislation that would bar victims from seeking justice, despite mounting evidence linking their chemical products to widespread health crises.

Naturalnews . com reports: For decades, glyphosate — the key ingredient in Bayer’s herbicide Roundup — has been a staple on American farms, praised for its effectiveness in boosting crop yields. But now, thousands of farmers and agricultural workers allege it gave them cancer, sparking a wave of lawsuits and legislative battles. As Bayer pushes for legal immunity in multiple states, families like Ray and Margarette Bickel of Iowa are fighting for accountability, claiming Roundup’s unmarked risks cost them years of health and happiness.

Ray Bickel spent 14 years spraying Roundup (contains 50% carcinogenic glyphosate) across Iowa’s corn and soybean fields, trusting its safety. In 2017, he was diagnosed with two cancers — chronic lymphocytic leukemia and stage three rectal cancer — which his doctors linked to pesticide exposure. Now terminally ill, Bickel is among 181,000 plaintiffs suing Bayer, arguing the company failed to warn users of glyphosate’s risks.

“It didn’t have a warning about cancer,” Bickel said. “I assumed it was safe.” His wife, Margarette, added: “It’s taken years off his life. How can lawmakers shield the companies responsible?”

[iyemarathichiyenagari1971]

संशोधन दिल्लीतून नाही तर शेतकरी बांधवांच्या शेतातून ठरवले जाईल - शिवराज सिंह चौहान

सोयाबीनच्या चांगल्या पिकासाठी केंद्रीय मंत्री शिवराज सिंह चौहान यांच्या उपस्थितीत इंदूर येथे विचारमंथन नवी दिल्‍ली – केंद्रीय कृषी आणि शेतकरी कल्याण आणि ग्रामीण विकास मंत्री शिवराज सिंह यांनी इंदूर येथे भारतीय सोयाबीन संशोधन संस्थेत भारतीय कृषी संशोधन परिषदेचे वैज्ञानिक, शेतकरी, कृषी विद्यापीठांचे पदाधिकारी, कृषी विज्ञान केंद्रांचे (केव्हीके) तज्ञ, प्रमुख सोयाबीन उत्पादक राज्यांचे वरिष्ठ…

[xtruss]

Children Born Now May Live In A World Where The US Can Only Produce Half As Much of Its Key Food Crops

— By Laura Paddison | June 18, 2025

Storm clouds build above a corn field on August 27, 2024, near Platte City, Missouri. A new study finds US maize yields could plummet as the world warms, even as farmer adapt to climate change. Charlie Riedel/AP

Rising global temperatures are set to devastate food crops across the world, with particularly alarming impacts projected for the United States, where production of key crops could plummet 50% by the end of the century, according to a sweeping new analysis.

Of the many impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, damage to the global food system is one of the most terrifying. But the overall impact of climate change on crops — and how much it can be offset by farmers’ adaptations — has been hard to establish and hotly debated.

The new analysis, eight years in the making, is “the first attempt to really tackle both of those problems,” said Solomon Hsiang, a study author and professor of global environmental policy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

The scientists analyzed six crops — maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries. Together, these crops provide more than two thirds of humanity’s calories.

They also measured how real-world farmers are adapting to climate change, from changing crop varieties to adjusting irrigation, to calculate the overall impact of global warming.

Their findings are stark. Every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day, according to the study, published Wednesday in Nature.

This will push up prices and make it harder for people to access food, Hsiang said.

“If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast,” he said. The world is currently on track for around 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.

Wheat, soy and maize — high value crops for a lot of the world — will be especially badly affected, the study found.

If humans keep burning large amounts of fossil fuels, maize production could fall by 40% in the grain belt of the US, eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; wheat production could fall by 40% in the US, China, Russia and Canada; and soybean yields could fall 50% in the US.

The only staple crop that might be able to avoid substantial losses is rice, which can benefit from warmer nighttime temperatures.

Climate Change Threatens Global Food Supply

Most of the world’s staple food crops are projected to suffer substantial production losses by the end of the century as global temperatures rise, even with farmers’ efforts to adapt to climate change, according to a new study.

Note: Data refects estimates in a high-emissions scenario. Source: Hultgren et al., Nature, 2025. “Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation.” Graphic: Matt Stiles, CNN

One of the striking findings of the study is that some of the wealthiest countries are likely to be hardest hit.

Poorer parts of the world, where climate conditions are already fairly harsh, tend to be more adapted and better prepared for the impacts of the climate crisis, Hsiang said. Agricultural systems in breadbaskets such as the US and parts of Europe, however, are optimized for the current temperate climate, he said.

Global warming will be particularly devastating for the US, where it’s projected to reduce yields by 40% to 50% for all staple crops except rice, Hsiang said.

“Places in the Midwest that are really well suited for present day corn and soybean production just get hammered under a high warming future,” said study author Andrew Hultgren, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future.”

Lower-income countries won’t escape effects, however. Yields of the subsistence crop cassava will fall in sub-Saharan Africa as the world heats up, a substantial threat to nutrition for some of the world’s poorest people, the study found. “One reason people grow cassava is because it’s pretty robust to droughts, but we see that it is actually still very adversely affected by extreme heat conditions,” Hsiang said.

Cattle rancher Brad Randel walks through his drought-stricken cornfield on September 12, 2022 in McCook, Nebraska. Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Shelby McClelland, a researcher specializing in climate change and agriculture at New York University who was not involved in the research, said the study reveals the importance of adaptation but also its limits. “The authors show that current adaptation decision-making is insufficient to ensure future food security,” she told CNN.

Erin Coughlan de Perez, an associate professor at Tufts University who specializes in climate risk management, said one of the study’s limitations is that it does not take into account two major climate adaptations: crop switching or changes to planting dates. In the US, for example, corn and soybean crops have moved northward. These changes could offset more climate impacts, she told CNN.

Ultimately, the findings add to a long list of alarming research about the global food system, said Tim Lang, professor emeritus of food policy at City St George’s, University of London.

“The data pile up. The politicians turn a blind eye… Land use is not altering fast or radically enough. Some pioneers do their best. But the net effect is that the global wriggle room diminishes,” he told CNN.

Hsiang hopes the study will provide more evidence for the urgent need to transform the energy system and the high costs of failing to doing so.

“This is a major problem. It’s incredibly expensive. As a species, we have never confronted anything like this.”

[unpickled-olive]

[Story about a knight slaying a dragon using a sword enchanted by the gods, love, and friendship]

[Story about a team scientists on Enceladus bioengineering a strain of soybeans that can yield more calories in a zero gravity environment]

Librarian: "these are the same genre"

[2023iagcroptour]

Day three of the 2023 IAG Crop Tour

First some data from today. 432 miles driven. Average moving speed of 56.4 mph. Elevation min was 466ft, the max was 925ft and we ascended and descended about 7k ft during the route. We now have totaled 19 crop stops and sampled nearly 40 fields of corn and soybeans.

We started today in southeastern Iowa and made our way back across the Mississippi River into central Illinois and then to central and northern Indiana. Our tour ended in Kokomo, IN which has significance only as to sharing the name of my wife’s favorite The Beach Boys song (and in my top 3 to be fair) but basically north of Indianapolis.

To begin, southeastern Iowa was basically the best yields we had seen across the entire state and the corn seemed to only improve as we crossed the River back into Illinois. Our two stops in Indiana so far were impressive although we had to opt out of an initial field because of replant which had no orderly rows for us to figure out how to sample. The field across the street sufficed. We are starting to see more experimentation with 20” rows of corn having run into two in our random sampling just today. Today’s takeaway for corn along our route is a lot simpler than yesterday. Without crunching the data we have collected, our impression is Illinois is an above average crop. We would also venture to say that it is possible that if it were not for likely stress the corn went through in June and early July, Illinois and the part of Indiana we have seen so far would be nothing short of earth shattering.

For soybeans, it was not uncommon to see fields beginning to turn. Pod fill is easily past halfway and often closer to ¾ or full. Topsoil moisture in the first few inches of soil remains dry but just 12” down, we seem to be finding plenty of water to support a decent finish. We did notice that the top of many of our samples was all stem, perhaps leaving some potential growing in late August on the table. At the end of the day, aside from that area in east-central Iowa, there were just not many problems in all the bean fields we have sampled. It is well known (and we have mentioned it here) that bean yields are basically a semi-educated guess, but basically the soybeans continue to fair better than expected.

Tomorrow we take our last leg through the rest of central Indiana and into far northwest Ohio with the goal of just getting a feeling of what the rest of the Eastern Corn Belt looks like. We end back in Detroit where we can start crunching numbers and will have a final report out Friday. This is the 2023 IAG Crop Tour signing off.

[applesjuice]

WAIT, does that mean that Kieran/Akari still captured legendaries?!!! When they're hearing Cinhtya talking about myths and legends of Hisui to see if there is a semblance of truth, and Akari just goes "Oh, ye." And just, sent Palkia/Dialga, darkrai (Lord of nightmare?!!!), GIRATINA (the fu-) and plenty others?!

...GOD?!

Pfffhehehe, it's just funny to think of the reaction the Poke-world could have to these XD. (Legend AU)

Yeah! They completed the pokedex and helped Laventon get the ball rolling in his research since everything got derailed thanks to a certain someone. I don't think they'd bring the legendaries back with them since like, they're literal gods who are worshipped. They captured them but they still do what they want, like showing up to work on the farm randomly or appearing to Kieran in dreams like they're the Virgin Mary descending to bestow a prophecy and its just Palkia or whoever wanting some attention. Kieran feels very bad for Giritina, and projects a bit on it like they did with Ogerpon, but I genuinely think Kieran is just a very empathetic kid.

The clans worship their specific pokemon like gods with carved figures in their homes that they make daily offering too. At some point Kieran makes one for Giritina and puts little hats on it when it gets cold and leaves berries and treats as an offering. Maybe the big baddie of the Distortion World is that way because nobody ever gave it a hug or tucked it into bed we dont know!

Kieran and Dawn in the future: maybe the real gods of creation are the friends we made along the way

I think there'd be pockets of people descended from the clans in modern Sinnoh who still worship Palkia or Dialga in their homes. Cynthia's family grew up with the church of arceus (and we all know why) but she loves theology and has so many questions because surely that one photo of the Big Three frolicing on a farm is some Ancient Alien level hoax and Kieran is just like: on no they just really like soybeans. I think they were competing to see whose plot got the highest yield.

Diamond and Pearl still happened so Dawn has current "ownership" of the Sinnoh legendaries but they have zero sense of time on a human scale so they'd be stoked to see their buddy Akari again but. But like, morally and ethically can you bring god to a pokemon battle? They'd probably enjoy battling for fun on the occasion but they're not normal pokemon and can't be treated as such. Im my mind there's a parctice of every generation or so since pokeballs became a thing, someone has to catch whichever legendary to keep it safe from your average nutjob drying to take over the world. Pokeballs are technology they're not forever and after a while they degrade and stop functioning. Or at least in my mind that's how it works. It would likely make sense to like. Just bury a legendary's pokeball somewhere and let it live its best life while there's ensurance for like 30 years some rando can't catch it.

Sorry this went on a tangent about my thoughts on religion in the pokemon world, but I see the Legendaries as being too Other and beyond our understanding to stick around on someone's team. I consider the various protagonists who catch them have gained their favor so they will pop in during their lifetime to visit because humans and pokemon need eachother to get stronger. Legendaries imo are just different in that they need exposure to that humanity to keep them grounded and present mentally. They have PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS, but itty bitty understanding of humanity, or like, the pokemon equivalent of it.

So yea Kieran doesnt bring any legendaries back with them but they'll still ask to see them occasionally to see if they're doing ok.