Dr. Pepper Slurpee.. eff yeah!
npr:
Ooooo.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive. Drive.
The Weight of Love via dlewis.net
From 1968 until 2001, Fred Rogers was an important part of the morning routine of many of America’s young children. The host of the iconic television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Rogers had some routines of his own, too. On the show, he’d come into his “home,” take off his coat and hang it up in the closet, put on a zippered cardigan, and change from dress shoes into sneakers. In real life, he was also a creature of habit: according to writer Tom Junod, Rogers woke at 5 A.M. each morning and, before starting his day, prayed, studied, swam, replied to fan letters, and got on the scale.
And every day, Fred Rogers weighed in at 143 pounds.
As Junod wrote (as retold by mental_floss), from his mid-40s until his death at age 75 in 2003, Rogers had a neat daily goal — keep his weight exactly the same. His generally trim physique was part and parcel of his suite of healthy habits — Rogers was a non-drinker, non-smoker who, for most of his adulthood, was vegetarian. But there was more to it than that. The affable Mr. Rogers wished to see his best traits — his compassion, warmth, and kindness — reflected back at him. For Rogers, there was something magical about the number 143. To him, it stood as a symbol of love, or, more accurately, of the phrase “I Love You.” ”I” has one letter, “Love” has four, and “You” has three. 143.
