5 Intriguing Things
1. What caffeine does for plants.
"Caffeine evolved long before sleep-deprived humans became addicted to it, probably to defend the coffee plant against predators and for other benefits. For example, coffee leaves contain the highest levels of caffeine of any part of the plant, and when they fall on the soil they stop other plants from growing nearby. 'Caffeine also habituates pollinators and makes them want to come back for more, which is what it does to us, too,' says Victor Albert, a genome scientist at the University of Buffalo in New York, who co-led the sequencing effort." (nature.com)
2. The rare I-took-a-break-from-technology-story that isn't annoying.
"I don’t plan to swear off social media. Unlike some disconnectionists, I don’t view online relationships as toxic or inauthentic. I benefit from them enormously. But I do want to keep that ping time corralled, so it doesn’t smear into everything else. That means turning off all push notifications and checking e-mail and social media only when I’ve decided to, not when they buzz at me. The ideal cycle, in my hopeful imagination, is a period of singular concentration, followed by a limited period of pinging, followed by a period of rest, exercise, or social interaction, away from screens. Four or five of those cycles add up to a productive day, with rhythm and variety." (outsideonline.com)
3. Town secretly becomes beer ad. 1000 young attractive people flown in to populate Whatever, U.S.A.
"On Friday, the company will fly in 1,000 young adults for a weekend of spring-break-style revelry, a stunt designed to publicize Bud Light. The town’s main thoroughfare, Elk Avenue, has been adorned with outdoor hot tubs, a sand pit, concert lights and a stage. Restaurants and hotels have been stripped of many local markings and given beer-branded umbrellas and signs instead. When the filming starts, drinks will be unlimited, access to the main street will be restricted to people with company-issued bracelets, and beautiful, mountain-ringed Crested Butte will be rebranded as 'Whatever, U.S.A.' (nytimes.com)
4. Nerd truism: the deep sea is filled with amazing creatures.
"In the dark of the ocean, some animals have evolved to use bioluminescence as a defense. In the animation above, an ostracod, one of the tiny crustaceans seen flitting near the top of the tank, has just been swallowed by a cardinal fish. When threatened, the ostracod ejects two chemicals, luciferin and luciferase, which, when combined, emit light. Because the glow would draw undesirable attention to the cardinal fish, it spits out the ostracod and the glowing liquid and flees." (fuckyeahfluiddynamics.tumblr.com)
5. The Brookings think tank has a new report out on Our Cyborg Future.
"As cyborgization progresses, we will therefore be faced with constant choices about whether to invest the machines with which we are integrating with some measure of the rights of humans or whether to divest humans of some rights they expected before they developed machine parts. The construction we have traditionally given this problem, that of the rights of human in the use of machines, will break down as the line between human activity and machine activity continues to blur. The person who carries a smartphone we might still construe as using a machine. And perhaps we might even think that of the person who wears an electronic insulin pump. But an eyeborg or a pacemaker?" (brookings.edu)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
clime is distinguished from climate (1) in being more suited for poetic & rhetorical use; it occurs, however, in ordinary prose also, with the limitation that (2) it means always region (often with reference to its characteristic weather), & never, like climate, the weather conditions themselves; we say strangers from every clime, but never the country has a delightful clime.
Before They Developed Machine Parts