santhereal-blog

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Slumber in Technicolor

Here my eyes scream as my tresses

   crack the tightly bound air.

Bloodstained Leaves of autumn

   abandon the trail, blown bare.

*

That I believed the tempest might be

   quelled by the summery sky.

The foolishness of youth will forever be

   our lullaby.

*

Kiss the fluttering lids, the clanging

   shutters of my being.

As Sun meets the horizon, tonight

   we’ll surrender all seeing.

*

Speak to me the way that words cannot,

And I will write for you the color of my thought.

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Pictures from the Vagina Monologues today at the Capitol in Lansing, Michigan…wish I could have made it. 

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How Just 3 Vaccines Can Save Us $63 Billion [Infographic]

Vaccines don’t just save lives. They save money.

(From FastCompany)

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Pay equity, his and hers.

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A revolution in women’s health

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There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?

Read the article here. 

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Getting weird with season 1 all day. It's what rain was made for.

Yeppppppppppppppp.

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Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn

Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?

First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.

If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).

With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.

This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!  

(via Discover Magazine)

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