Megan "Cryptic" Danvers

Imagine, after decades of your world becoming colder and colder, you are saved. A single Eridian, the only one of twenty three to survive, arrives in an alien ship, accompanied by a creature you can barely conceive.

Everything about the alien is so loud, hinges formed from tissue thumping and stretching in constant movement, even while unconscious. Completely organic, reliant of oxygen and hydrogen. Instead of a protective carapace, it regrows its damaged tissues. It has senses you do not, and technology so unlike your own, both able to utilise a force you have never heard of. The same force that killed almost your entire mission team. Highly adaptable, able to teach itself how to fly its ship in under a week, able to become fluent in the engineer's dialect in less than four years.

And if Erid's best engineer is correct (and there's no reason it wouldn't be), this creature not only managed to breed a predator of the warmth-taker to survive in various atmospheres, including Threeworld's, but also turned around to provide aid when it discovered that the predator could escape xenonite.

And you think: Surely, this creature which protects itself without a carapace, which sleeps so lightly and knows so much and learns so quickly, which saved two planets at the cost of ever returning to its thrum, surely, a creature so extraordinary must have a name to match

And you think: Perhaps it is strength, Mountain-Base or Lonsdaleite-Carapace. Perhaps it is intellect, Diamond-Claw or Lockpick-Mind. Perhaps it is courage, Song-Through-Silence or Path-Carver

And you think: None of these names hold the true weight of what this creature is to them. How do you describe something like that, which aids without expectation of anything in return, which risks its own life for the sake of a species it cannot touch, which performs miracles simply because it was asked.

But anyway cotton can be grown in lovely natural shades of greens, reddish-brown ochres, and browns, all of which deepen with a good boil in water with a bit of washing soda thrown in.

Anyway, scientists DID figure out how to grow colored cotton. They genetically engineered it to be bright fuckin pink, and they didn't "just find out" about it, they already knew which is literally what inspired them to attempt the thing they just accomplished. Begging y'all to stop pretending that scientists don't know things, don't have interests, don't grow up in farming communities or have family who taught them this. Scientists are people. Do you seriously think people who use genetic engineering to make eco-friendly pink cotton don't know anything about textiles?

Anyway. Bright pink cotton without dyes, because science is awesome

Yes. CSIRO scientist Doctor Colleen MacMillan led the team that figured this out. They used tobacco plants for testing because of the genetic similarity. Basically if the tobacco leaves produced colors when injected with a bit of the experimental genetic material, the scientists on the team already understood that the color change would affect cotton bolls as well.

They grew bright red and bright yellow in a petri dish.

And yes, Doctor MacMillan knows lots of things. Here's a list of some of her publications.

@csirogram on Instagram

link to the specific video from the screenshot above here:

it's part of their series "A People's History of Native America," playlist link here.

and while I'm here I'll plug some other channels because PBS does solid work. also, iirc they are (...were? I'm not actually sure what applies to them now that they've been defunded) legally required to include captions and they actually do that, so you won't run into auto-generated nonsense.

I haven't checked out PBS Documentaries yet, but they have some stuff tackling similar topics. (I am adding things to my watchlist as we speak.) channel link here.

PBS Terra doesn't pull punches on climate change. channel link here.

PBS Eons has some super cool videos on the history of life on Earth, channel here, and Storied does awesome work on linguistics and mythology, channel here.

aaand while we're talking about defunded USA public media that doesn't pull punches when critiquing our history and government, I am once again going to plug a couple NPR podcasts. Throughline does deep-dives on history, culture, laws, and so on (link here); I'm especially partial to their We the People miniseries, which covers our rights from the Amendments. Code Switch covers culture, focusing on race and minority groups, and has been doing some especially good coverage on what the Trump administration's fuckery means on a practical level (link here). (these aren't the only NPR podcasts that talk about this stuff, but they're the big ones afaik.)