copernicium-armor

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You wouldn't download 16 basil plants

So, you know those spindly basil plants you can get in the supermarket that are all leggy and pale, and you put them on the window-ledge and pick a few leaves from them and then they die?

Here is the hack for

turning it into a healthy plant and

making an army of clones from it so that all your friends can have one too

You will need

one parent plant

scissors for cutting the stalks

enough pots for however many seedlings you want to make

compost

one or two empty bottles

Method

Have a look at your parent plant. You'll see that each bundle of leaves comes out from a knobbly bit in the stem. That knobbly bit is called a leaf node.

Gently take hold of the very top set of leaves and count the leaf nodes on that particular stalk, counting down from the top.

If there are more than three nodes, cut the stalk just below the second leaf node.

The bit that you have just cut off is called a cutting, and it will become a new plant. To do this, we have to get it to grow roots.

Take your cutting and remove all the leaves except the four at the very top.

Fill your bottle with water and insert the cutting into the top of the bottle, with the stem completely submerged in water, and the leaves outside in the air.

Now repeat until you've taken about six cuttings, or you've taken all the cuttings available. Put them all in water-filled bottles. (I use milk bottles which hold about four stems at once with enough space for their leaves to get the sunlight, but if you're using wine bottles it might be fewer.)

Put the cuttings/bottles onto a sunny window-ledge and wait. Within about a week you should see roots beginning to grow. Keep the water topped up to the top, and let the roots grow until they are two or three inches long.

When the roots are 2-3 inches long, fill your pots with compost and water them well. Shove your fingers in the wet compost to make a space for the cutting's new roots and gently insert the cutting into the hole. Put a little bit more compost on top and firm it down, move on to plant the next one.

Providing all your cuttings get over the shock of transfer (and they probably will) you will then have 8 little basil plants like the smallest ones in my picture.

Put them back on the sunny window-ledge to let them get established and begin to grow. Congrats, you now have 8 basil plants plus the parent plant.

The parent plant

When you're taking the cuttings, you must leave at least one leaf node on every stalk. The plant can't create leaves without the nodes, and if it has no leaves it's basically going to die.

You want the plant to create new leaves and thicken up. If a stalk doesn't have more than two nodes, don't make cuttings from that stalk at all. Leave that stalk to grow.

Taking your cuttings will stimulate the plant to grow, and lower nodes which may not have had leaves on them when you got the plant, will now begin to produce them. This will make the plant bushier and stronger, but it will need a bit of extra food to help it put the extra effort in. So give it a new layer of compost on the top, water it, and put it back on the sunny window-ledge as well.

First batch cuttings

Let your first generation of cuttings grow undisturbed for a few weeks. (Water only when the soil feels dry.)

When they start looking long and thin, you want to encourage them to create side-shoots and begin bushing out. You don't want a long thin plant. It will fall over in the wind.

Look at the very top of the plant where you will see two tiny baby leaves developing. If you let them develop, the plant will continue to grow long and thin, but if you take them out it will encourage the side shoots to grow. Pinch out the tiny baby leaves right at the top of the cuttings, and very soon you'll see they start to grow outwards instead of upwards.

Second batch cuttings

After a few weeks your cuttings will look like the larger plants in my picture, and your parent plant will have grown enough to have added extra nodes. Which means that you can now take another batch of cuttings and start the process all over again.

You can pretty much keep this going all summer if you want.

Give plants away, eat fresh basil all summer and fill your freezer with bags of basil leaves for the winter :) Happy cloning!

[copernicium-armor]

Food AND lawns

Very much in agreement with this post that says that people who don't have time/spoons/resources to turn their lawns into a food garden shouldn't feel obliged to do so, and I didn't want to derail it by making this comment under the post, so I'm here making a new one of my own.

Sometimes you don't want to dig up your lawn and start market gardening because it's a fuckton of work and honestly a second job all in itself.

But what if you don't have time to do all that, but you do still want to grow at least some food?

Perennials are the way to go.

Perennials are plants that you plant once and then they just carry on growing and getting bigger without you having to do much, if anything to them.

Say you've got a small garden with a lawn and a few flower beds. What can you do to grow food without changing the format of the garden at all?

Plant a couple of fruit/nut trees. Your plum/cherry/pear/peach/whatever trees will be covered in pink blossom in the spring. Your neighbours and your local pollinators will love you.

Don't worry about the tree getting too big - plant a dwarf variety and when it reaches a height you like, prune it back to that height every year.

In your flower beds, plant

globe artichokes (very decorative, have lovely flowers and sculptural foliage.)

rhubarb (colourful edible stems.)

wild garlic (edible cloves and leaves, beautiful white star shaped flowers)

walking onions

perennial kale

chard

perennial salad plants such as Salad Burnet, Miner's lettuce etc

Jerusalem artichoke

Mashua (a perennial relative of the nasturtium - you can eat the tubers like potatoes and the leaves in salad. Has lovely red nasturtium like flowers.)

Yakon (small sunflower-like flowers, big tubers that taste faintly of pear.)

Potatoes (honestly, they have lovely white flowers and as long as you don't dig all of them up this year, more will grow next year.)

Fennel (lovely lacy edible foliage and the root is also edible.)

any other perennial plant that might grow well in your area.

Remember that all of these plants will come back every year bigger than they were the year before. You should only need to plant them once and then leave them to get on with it.

There are loads of obscure perennial vegetables and fruits you can discover with a bit of research.

I recommend How to grow Perennial Vegetables by Martin Crawford as a great book to start with. It's a huge list of edible perennials, with details of where they like to grow, what you harvest from them, potential problems, and how to cook them

Also in your flower beds, plant

fruit bushes and fruit vines on pergolas (raspberry, blueberry, goji-berry, kiwi etc)

Now you've got some vegetables, salads, nuts and fruits growing in your flowerbeds, you can think about what to do to improve your lawn.

The lawn

The great thing about getting an eco-friendly lawn is that it all involves inaction - doing less work

Stop weedkilling

Stop watering the lawn. If it survives, great! If it doesn't survive, replace with native grasses that can.

Get some native wildflower plug plants and plant them into the lawn, or

Get some native wildflower seeds and oversow the lawn with them.

This will give you a lawn full of native plants that will support your local pollinators.

Take part in No Mow May to allow your wildflowers to flower, or if you can get away with it, stop mowing altogether except for a single hay cut once a year at the peak of the flowering season.

Result

Now you have a garden where you don't need to do anything except mow once or twice a year, compost/mulch once a year, and pick the produce, and it will still look (more or less) like a normal suburban garden.

[copernicium-armor]

What happens when we stop applying human concepts to God in general? What if God doesn’t have a metaphorical voice? A metaphorical body? What is the effect of personified language when it comes to describing God, an entity that is not human. Is there a set of descriptors/metaphors in any language that may describe The grandeur of the universe in a non-human-centric way? What do we learn from that?

This is problem that has been looked at when talking about God since Plato - either the Phaedras or the Timeus, can't remember which. Human language and human capacity to understand God are both seriously sus. Gregory of Nanzianzus reverses a quote by Plato that originally stated something to the effect that God was difficult to know (i.e. conceptually understand) and impossible to describe (i.e. we cannot use words to talk about God. G of N changed it to the idea that an infinite God is impossible to know (or to conceptually understand) and difficult to describe.

Theologians in the Greek Tradition doing the work of describing God have used either positive terms - God is omnipotent, God is omniscient and so forth - or alternatively, they use terms to describe what God is not, unceasing, unbegotten, not-a-thing, spiritual not physical.

There is a whole branch of theology that deals with emptying one's self to understand God because God is so other. Cynthia Bergault, Thomas Keating are two of the more recent examples.

It is actually the Hebrew tradition and parts of the Christian tradition that emphasize the humanness of God or the use of human attributes of God. I enjoy doing so and find it deeply meaningful to suggest that God is not altogether alien, but God draws close to human beings. While all of these descriptions fall short of a full description, so does everything else human beings try.

[copernicium-armor]

I saw it!

Priya is fruity It’s canon and I will not be taking questions at this time

⚠️SPOILERS FOR TURNING RED⚠️

to anyone who’s watched turning red PLEASE tell me that you saw that scene in the party when priya and that other girl were dancing and mei and the others were like 😏👀

literally no one said they saw it im beginning to think it’s just me

[copernicium-armor]

when did we trade enjoying life for whatever the hell this is? when did we stop having festivals and sharing communities and borrowing books and trading art? growing gardens for food and for pleasure in a way that isn't grounded in consumerism? making jewelry and bread and wildflower bouquets? wearing the clothes we like to see rather than the ones we feel we have to be seen in? when did we decide to abandon the little things? i don't by any means argue that life doesn't naturally come with intense hardship, but why do we deprive ourselves of a balance?

[copernicium-armor]

the tension between my love of learning and my crippling fear of failure

[copernicium-armor]

This is Aine, and she’s a triton stars Druid in dnd 5e.

[copernicium-armor]

Ways to support Ukraine 🇺🇦

More than 500,000 people have already left Ukraine due to the invasion by the Russian Federation. The European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management estimates that roughly 18 million Ukrainians will be affected by the conflict in humanitarian terms, with 7 million internally displaced and 4 million seeking refuge elsewhere. To help those still in Ukraine, as well as Ukrainian refugees, we’ve compiled this list of resources.

HelpUkraineWin.org has a collection of vetted and trusted resources, charities, and organizations to help Ukraine.

Some additional ways to donate:

Vostok SOS provides immediate evacuation support.

Malteser International provides essentials for Ukrainian refugees.

Ukraine Crisis Media Center provides fundraising links and a list of tips for sharing information.

Misinformation spreads fast on social media. It is more important than ever to share accurate, verifiable news and information. Here are some resources to learn how to identify misinformation:

This link from the nonprofit WITNESS shares tips for identifying authentic video sources (available in English, Spanish, Ukranian, Russian, and Arabic).

These visual verification tips, also from WITNESS, provide information on verifying images and videos (available in English and Spanish).

This interview with NPR contains tips for identifying fake TikToks.

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Hi, guys!

As you may know, I am Ukrainian. I live in Kyiv. I have lived here since I was born and I love my country with my whole heart.

I see a lot of misinformation under the tag "Ukraine". Most of it comes from American people, who try to explain the conflict in their own words. They can't. It's impossible to explain if you haven't lived here. There are too many influences on this conflict. You keep looking from an american perspective, which is not crucial in understanding the conflict.

For example, have you ever had you language forbidden? Like straight up forbidden by the law? It happened to Ukrainian language a lot of times thought our history. And who did it? The Russian Empire. And it's not the end of it. The genocides, the assimilation, the deportation. Have you even researched Ukrainian history?

You do not uplift Ukrainian voices enough. And you should if you care about what's happening. If you don’t do it, you're just doing a performance of your support and activism.

Lucky for you, I am a Ukrainian person! And I am DYING TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS. I scored 191/200 points on my graduation exam in history, so you can suppose I know something about Ukrainian history.

If you stand for Ukraine, uplift Ukrainian voices. Educate yourself. Learn Ukrainian history. Ask Ukrainian people

[copernicium-armor]

Hi I just watched Eternals and I have thoughts about it. I only just watched it now because I heard it wasn’t that good. So without further ado, my rant:

The plot droned on, setting up potential arcs in the plot that would have been much more interesting than what we got. But that’s not even what I’m mad about. I’m mad about Sprite.

How can you look at this character and not see the ultimate they/themboss potential? But okay, I get it, Disney is still a little sussy about the girls gays and theys. So okay, Sprite can go by she/her, that’s alright. But aahhh come on, she cannot be straight. I mean LOOK AT HER CUTE GAY LITTLE FACE. In the scene where she’s staring at Ikaris and Ginko talks about the unrequited love, I legit rewinded it because I was SO SURE he meant she had the hots for Sirse. But alright. So she likes a guy, no biggie. She could be pan, or bi, or literally anything but straight. But NO. She had to pettily fawn over the most arrogant and self-centered guy for LITERAL MILLENNIA. This is a prime example of queer baiting taken to the absolute extreme, and I will not stand for it.

Anywho, gay rant over.

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[copernicium-armor]

Alright.

I am starting this blog on the lofty goal of learning as much as I can in the next year. I want to be like a Renaissance man, being an expert in all fields of science and arts, speaking several languages, and keeping my sanity through all of it.

I’m gonna speedrun as many special interests as I possibly can, and you’ve got a front seat to the spectacle.

I’m going to reblog well-researched bits of brain food, and I’m going to post little synopses of what I’ve been learning and researching, hopefully some of my fellow learning addicts can find this as a helpful resource.

Anywho, wish me luck! (because holy fuck I’m going to need it)

[copernicium-armor]

Scientists say active early learning shapes the adult brain

An enhanced learning environment during the first five years of life shapes the brain in ways that are apparent four decades later, say Virginia Tech and University of Pennsylvania scientists writing in the June edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The researchers used structural brain imaging to detect the developmental effects of linguistic and cognitive stimulation starting at six weeks of age in infants. The influence of an enriched environment on brain structure had formerly been demonstrated in animal studies, but this is the first experimental study to find a similar result in humans.

“Our research shows a relationship between brain structure and five years of high-quality educational and social experiences,” said Craig Ramey, professor and distinguished research scholar with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and principal investigator of the study. “We have demonstrated that in vulnerable children who received stimulating and emotionally supportive learning experiences, statistically significant changes in brain structure appear in middle age.”

The results support the idea that early environment influences the brain structure of individuals growing up with multirisk socioeconomic challenges, said Martha Farah, director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at Penn and first author of the study.

“This has exciting implications for the basic science of brain development, as well as for theories of social stratification and social policy,” Farah said.

The study follows children who have continuously participated in the Abecedarian Project, an early intervention program initiated by Ramey in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1971 to study the effects of educational, social, health, and family support services on high-risk infants.

Both the comparison and treatment groups received extra health care, nutrition, and family support services; however, beginning at six weeks of age, the treatment group also received five years of high quality educational support, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.

When scanned, the Abecedarian study participants were in their late 30s to early 40s, offering the researchers a unique look at how childhood factors affect the adult brain.

“People generally know about the potentially large benefits of early education for children from very low resource circumstances,” said co-author Sharon Landesman Ramey, professor and distinguished research scholar with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the Virginia Tech College of Science. “The new results reveal that biological effects accompany the many behavioral, social, health, and economic benefits reported in the Abecedarian Project. This affirms the idea that positive early life experiences contribute to later positive adjustment through a combination of behavioral, social, and brain pathways.”

During follow-up examinations, structural MRI scans of the brains of 47 study participants were conducted at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Human Neuroimaging Lab. Of those, 29 individuals had been in the group that received the educational enrichment focused on promoting language, cognition, and interactive learning.

The other 18 individuals received the same robust health, nutritional, and social services supports provided to the educational treatment group, and whatever community childcare or other learning their parents provided. The two groups were well matched on a variety of factors such as maternal education, head circumference at birth, and age at scanning.

Analyzing the scans, the researchers looked at brain size as a whole, including the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer, as well as five regions selected for their expected connection to the intervention’s stimulation of children’s language and cognitive development.

Those included the left inferior frontal gyrus and left superior temporal gyrus, which may be relevant to language, and the right inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex, relevant to cognitive control. A fifth, the bilateral hippocampus, was added because its volume is frequently associated with early life adversity and socioeconomic status.

The researchers determined that those in the early education treatment group had increased size of the whole brain, including the cortex.

Several specific cortical regions also appeared larger, according to study co-authors Read Montague, professor and director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, and Terry Lohrenz, research assistant professor and member of the institute’s Human Neuroimaging Laboratory.

The scientists noted the group intervention treatment results for the brain were substantially greater for males than for females. The reasons for this are not known, and were surprising, since both the boys and girls showed generally comparable positive behavioral and educational effects from their early enriched education. The current study cannot adequately explain the sex differences.

“When we launched this project in the 1970s, the field knew more about how to assess behavior than it knew about how to assess brain structure,” said Craig Ramey, who is also a professor in the Virginia Tech College of Science. “Because of advances in neuroimaging technology and through strong interdisciplinary collaborations, we were able to measure structural features of the brain. The prefrontal cortex and areas associated with language were definitely affected; and to our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence on a link between known early educational experiences and long-term changes in humans.”

“We believe that these findings warrant careful consideration and lend further support to the value of ensuring positive learning and social-emotional support for all children – particularly to improve outcomes for children who are vulnerable to inadequate stimulation and care in the early years of life,” Craig Ramey said.

(Image caption: A teacher guides a student through a task in this historical photo of the Abecedarian Project, an early education, randomized controlled trial that began at the University of North Carolina and has followed the participants since 1971. Now, Virginia Tech researchers including Craig Ramey, Sharon Landesman Ramey, and Read Montague have revealed discoveries about the lasting effects of that early education on brain structure)

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YY Hya - A new classification of Nebula

A star long known to be variable, over 1,460 light years from us, had a bit of anomaly, the distance recently measured by Gaia didn't match the expectation of it's classification, so when a group of astronomers led by the Department of Astro and Particle Physics at Innsbruck University (Austria) took a look, they discovered it was not just incorrectly categorised, but had a nebula around it that belonged to a whole new category.

Variable stars are stars that from Earth appear to change their brightness over a period of time, usually osculating like clockwork, and one of the reasons this can happen is it's not a single star, but rather, a binary system, with stars that orbit each other, and change apparent brightness when a star passes behind another.

But in the case of YY Hya, it turned out to be a small K type (orange) star (smaller than our Sun) and the remnant of a once red giant, a white dwarf.

The red giant had collapsed about 500,000 years ago, leaving a shell of gas that had pushed outwards into space, out to about 15 light years, and because one of the companions is a superhot white dwarf, it's bombarding the shell of gas with UV which makes it glow.

Now this isn't an uncommon occurrence in space, many nebula are emissions nebula, but after a star collapse, normally we see the shell of gas quickly dispersed out and lose it's visibility.

The astronomers say YY Hya is a Galactic Emissions Nebula, as the star system doesn't sit in the main body of our galaxy, but rather, just outside the main plane, meaning there's far less stars crowded around to disturb the gas, keeping the shell intact and illuminated as it expands around the two stars. Hence the term "galactic" in the name !

Source : https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2021/12/aa39787-20/aa39787-20.html

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A scientist in South Africa believes she and her colleagues have found a critical clue in solving the mystery of long COVID: microclots.

“A recent study in my lab revealed that there is significant microclot formation in the blood of both acute COVID-19 and long COVID patients,” Resia Pretorius, head of the science department at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, wrote Wednesday in an op-ed.

Pretorius writes that healthy bodies are typically able to efficiently break down blood clots through a process called fibrinolysis. But, when looking at blood from long COVID patients, “persistent microclots are resistant to the body’s own fibrinolytic processes.”

Pretorius’ team in an analysis over the summer found high levels of inflammatory molecules “trapped” in the persistent microclots observed in long COVID patients, which may be preventing the breakdown of clots.

Because of that, cells in the body’s tissues may not be getting enough oxygen to sustain regular bodily functions, a condition known as cellular hypoxia.

“Widespread hypoxia may be central to the numerous reported debilitating symptoms” of long COVID, Pretorius writes.

As many as 100 million people globally have or have had long COVID, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan in November.

A patient is diagnosed with long COVID when the effects of a COVID-19 infection persist for more than four weeks, according to the Mayo Clinic. While older people and people with serious medical conditions are the most likely to experience long COVID, many young and healthy people have reported feeling unwell for weeks or even months after their initial COVID-19 diagnosis.

Symptoms of long COVID vary between cases, but primarily include fatigue, brain fog, muscle or joint pain, shortness of breath, sleep difficulties, and depression or anxiety.

The Department of Health and Human Services in June released new guidance in which some symptoms of long COVID could qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In December, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued an update to its own guidance, which now considers an individual who has contracted COVID-19 disabled if any of their symptoms “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”