Trick-or-ween

Fungal tissues – the fungal mantle around the root tip and the fungal network of tendrils that penetrates the root of plants, or Hartig Net, between Pinus sylvestris plant root cells – in green. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi help trees tolerate drought and boost the productivity of bioenergy feedstock trees, including poplar and willow.

Via Berkeley Lab: The sclerotia are in the soil!

More: How Fungi Help Trees Tolerate Drought (Joint Genome Institute)

Image of the Week - December 26, 2016

CIL:38938 - http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/images/38938

Description: Scanning electron micrograph of the inside of a cancer cell. This cell originates from a squamous cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer. The cell has been frozen and split open to reveal its nucleus.

Author: Anne Weston

Licensing: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 UK)

The First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber is Covered in Feathers

Anatomical Illustrations from Edo-Period, Japan.

Japan’s second human dissection, 1758 // First human female dissection, 1759

In 1758, a student of Tōyō Yamawaki’s named Kōan Kuriyama performed Japan’s second human dissection (see illustration on left). The following year, Kuriyama produced a written record of Japan’s first dissection of a human female (see illustration on right). In addition to providing Japan with its first real peek at the female anatomy, this dissection was the first in which the carving was performed by a doctor. In previous dissections, the cutting work was done by hired assistants due to taboos associated with handling human remains.

December 17, 1972 – On the return trans-Earth trip back home, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan tries a little zero-gravity dining.

(NASA)

Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days. A purpose.

Cernan was the commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972 – the last lunar mission and one of the final Apollo flights. When Cernan stepped out from lunar module “Challenger” he became the 11th person to walk on the moon. His lunar module pilot, Jack Schmitt, was the 12th. But as commander, Cernan was the last to re-enter the lunar module it give him the designation of being the last person to walk on the lunar surface.

His words would not become as famous as Neil Armstrong’s first sentence spoken from the moon, however, Cernan’s final goodbye to the moon was just as poetic. “America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow, and as we leave the Moon, we leave as we came and, God willing we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17"

R.I.P Commander Cernan 1934 -2017                       More here and here

Me at work: wow I can’t wait to go home and take a shower and make some food and wash my clothes and learn advanced biology and apply for NASA and make a breakthrough in modern physics Me: *Gets home and falls asleep on the door handle*

Our irrefutable improvement in the last two hundred years. For data source, interactive graphics and details in the data processing see below:

Max Roser (2016) – ‘A history of global living conditions in 5 charts’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org.

High-res

The solar eclipse of December 22, 1870. Observed from Syracuse, Sicily, by Captain G. I. Tupman, R.M.A.