leafyskies

Clodsire and Quagsire cake to celebrate my birthday, happy birthday to me! 🎂🤎🩵

It's really nice to make something just for me, plus it's harder to feel existential dread when I'm smiling at how cute my buttercream Clodsire turned out, look at my boy 🥹

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

[image credit]

That's right - it's glacier mice. One of my favorite things maybe on the entire planet. Let's talk about these freaky fuzzy little rats!!

Glacier mice are balls of moss that live in large herds like this in a few select glaciers. They are moss all the way through, with a center consisting of dead moss matter, implying that they begin as small growths of moss and simply accumulate over time, like snowballs. However, their outside surface is alive and well on all sides. Glacier mice have been observed, through tagging and tracking, to roll across the glacier like a majestic herd of wildebeest, exposing all of their sides to the sunlight. They trundle along at a pace of about 2.5 cm per day. That's 30 feet in a year! They're really schmovin'! Certainly further than most mosses can claim to travel.

What's really exciting, though, is that they all move in the same direction, and we're not sure why or how. Scientists experimented to try and attribute their coordinated behavior to wind, sunlight, and the direction that their grazing ground slopes, but to no avail. They speed up, slow down, and change direction in unison, based on some mysterious moss code that we haven't cracked yet.

Cross-section of a glacier mouse. Note the dead moss matter inside, and the short gametophytes on the outside, adapted to harsh winds and sunlight. [image credit]

We have figured out how they roll, though - while the moss ball sits on the ice, it insulates the ice directly underneath it, protecting it from melting. This forms a little pillar of ice that the moss eventually rolls off of. The insulating power of glacier mice also gives it the wonderful ability to host all kinds of microorganisms that otherwise wouldn't survive the glacier's harsh conditions, and their ability to move makes it possible for microorganisms to spread from one habitable spot to another. They're like a bunch of little tardigrade passenger ships, braving the dangerous glacier to go where no water bear has gone before!!

Glacier mice have been found to consist of several moss species, most of which must reproduce asexually in order to survive in the dry climate. They've been observed to live for at least six years, but are projected to live much, much longer. I love them. So much. I hope they know that I love them!! I LOVE THEM!!!!

Okay, so, Labradorite.  Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are.  I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense!  (Once again, I’m not a scientist!  Correct me if I’m wrong!)

Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them - usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium.  Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless.  We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).

Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed.  They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone.  Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing.  We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).

But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things.  Labradorite is special.  It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored).  These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.

See, labradorite is actually just… grey.  From most angles, it looks like this:

You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”

Why just the one angle?  It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.

Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly.  Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction.  These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures.  Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.

When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect.  Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes.  The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on.  Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.

(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)

If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone.  But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors!  We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.

Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!

I was six. The school I went to had no air conditioners and was intolerable when it was above body temperature, so school was canceled for a "hot day." My mother worked at a very fancy job (a professor) and she had air conditioning. She had to go work and brought me. I got to be all grown up and be mum's little helper and run messages/errands around my mum's floor while my mother was frantic with end-of-school-year things.

My most important quest yet -- I'm supposed to get a signature from her boss. I thought his name was Dean, and he was so important, he was "The Dean" (I'd never met any Dean). So I go into The Dean's office, and there is a pug sitting on the chair behind the desk. I knew that dogs could work and had important jobs, ceremonial and otherwise. I thought that only working dogs were allowed at work. I am so pissed that my mother never told me her boss was a dog, but she's really busy right now.

I try for a minute to very respectfully ask for a signature on paper from this dog, who just sits and yawns. Luckily, I had just helped out at a wedding recently, and with everyone who was too young to write their name, they put their finger or foot on an ink stamp to sign the guest book. I knew how to help with that. So I found an ink pad, and lo and behold the dog had one black paw and three pink paws -- so the black one went into the ink, and onto the lines, and the document is signed. It goes into the pile, I remember to wipe the paw down, and I move on to the next thing.

Maybe a month later, my mother and I are at a barbecue with "Chris Potter," a family friend, who has brought his dog (and I recognize Chris Potter's dog is The Dean!). I joyfully explain to my cousins (some older than me) that this dog is my mum's boss. Chris Potter relates a story to the adults about how some poor student's important paperwork (post-doc appointment form) had been walked over by a dog so his signature wasn't visible, and he had been called by the money people (grant holder's department accountant) over normally un-interruptable three-week summer vacation, to confirm that he did approve of important mum-work things (research funding allocation).

On Weaponized Incompetence