Dandelions’ Resilience

This blog bouta get So full of nature pics 🌱

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Purslane on July 4, 2025, ragweed on July 17, 2025, and the biggest purslane I’ve ever seen on July 12, 2026. All growing where stuffy humans tried to forbid them, which we stan (ragweed is classified as a noxious weed here, but at least this particular one made my work day a bit more pleasant, and happened to not go to seed anyway)

And in early July 2026, a million tiny purslanes came up from the one I planted (stole from the parking lot) last year, and the creeping charlie I stole from the roadside do be creeping! (I’m very carefully containing it to just two isolated containers)

There’s a very large, very blank wall in front of the couch where I spend most of my time, and I decided to decorate it. Inspired by @bug-lovers-island’s lepidopteran wall, I got out my paints and some cardboard; discovered I had a lot of white, grey, and black paint; and thought, “what’s an animal I like that’s mostly white, grey, and black?” Dolphins. As a kid I special-interested the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, hard. That has since expanded into orcas and other cetaceans, but I’m still partial to oceanic dolphins. Hence:

From left to right, they’re a narwhal*, dusky dolphin, orca, Pacific white-sided dolphin (which, in captivity, are only kept in two aquariums in the US!), spinner dolphin (so named for their love of doing barrel rolls), Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, common dolphin (the yellow one), spotted dolphin (the spotted one), and beluga*. They’re at approximately 1:12 scale to real life and roughly proportional to one another, going by the average of the average male and average female lengths.

*The narwhal and beluga are not oceanic dolphins like the rest, but instead the only living members of Monodontidae, despite both having more than one tooth - I can see why the narwhal was thought to have only the one (in fact it has two), but the beluga has a normal amount of teeth. Due to this and its similarity to, for example, the melon-headed whale, I personally think the beluga should be Delphinidae, so I included it as an honorary dolphin. And once I decided that, I couldn’t leave out the other monodont

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1. Solar generated record 25% of EU power in June with Germany, Spain and Poland leading the race

“For the first month ever, solar power provided a quarter of the EU’s electricity this June[...] ahead of coal, gas, nuclear, wind and hydropower. [...] Solar has grown by more than a fifth every year in the EU between 2021 and 2025 – the fastest growth of any power source. [...] In Spain [and Germany], solar generated over a third of power in June 2026 for the first time (34 per cent). [...] Spain did not use coal-fired power at all in August 2025.”

2. Portugal's last circus elephant finds refuge [as first resident] in Alentejo sanctuary

“After the ban on wild animals in circuses in Portugal came into force [in 2024], she remained in the care of her owner [… until she] found a suitable place to live[….] “Julie is not only Pangea’s first elephant, she is also the last circus elephant in Portugal; in fact, the last wild animal in any circus.” […] Covering 400 hectares and with capacity for 30 animals, the site is expected to welcome, later this year, Kariba, another African elephant, also captured in the wild and around 40 years old, who currently lives alone in a zoo in Belgium.”

3. Herring and Herons: Signs of the Charles River’s Vast Improvement

“By 1920, a state wildlife report found that the alewife fisheries in most of the state’s biggest rivers, including the Charles, had “disappeared.” […] A century later, [after] the federally-enforced cleanup of the Charles[,… volunteers] estimated a herring run of nearly 300,000 fish. Though historical data is scant, it was the highest fish count of its kind in recent memory.”

4. New York Becomes First State in the Nation to Pause New Hyperscale Data Centers

“[...A]pplications are pending for 39 more [data centers….] “This pause will remain in place for up to one year while New York establishes the strongest possible [regulatory] framework to protect our communities, guardrails to reduce the risk to our energy grid, minimize land disruption, noise pollution and protect our natural resources, especially our water supply,” Hochul said in remarks accompanying the executive order.”

5. Innovative projects explore ways to deal with extreme heat

“[One of the four grants] provided seed funding to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of a wearable personal cooling system. [...] Another MIT researcher [...] looked into the potential of subsurface wells with heat-absorbing materials[....] Meanwhile, Asegun Henry [designed an air conditioner that uses rubber] to obtain a cooling effect, and then uses plain water as an efficient heat transfer fluid. [...] And Gang Chen [designed one that uses] a completely different kind of chemical refrigerant that has no greenhouse impact.”