Matilda's Lab Newsletter #57
This week we get horticultural. We have shape-shifting cells, talking elephants, wibbly-wobbly Martian sound and how algae is saving the world.
I’m amazed that I’ve managed to get a newsletter out this week. It’s been eventful.
What we’ve been up to
To clarify my opening remark. It’s my job that has been crazy busy this week. Because I deal with Health and Safety and Quality Systems, it means that I have to deal with our companies audits, and pretty much every type of audit that can occur has occurred in either the last few weeks or in the next few. I’ve had ISO 9001, UKAS at the lab, 4 Red Tractor audits and now a visit to France for a Tesco audit! Not to mention all the other normal elements of my job, which is more than normal anyway. Whilst the holiday that I reported last week was delightful, the loss of that working time hasn’t helped. So, I’m a bit snowed under at the moment.
Thankfully, I have home time to unwind. Last weekend, we finally took down our temporary greenhouse. I won’t be starting any more seeds and the frosts should be well and truly over. Now the veg patch is set up and looking great. Hopefully we’ll have some nice tomatoes before long and pumpkins come autumn.
We’ve paid some attention to the front of the house too. Regular readers may recall my long battle with creeping buttercups. I won that battle, and the grass is returning, but now that I’ve planted things all around the area, I can’t take a lawn mower to it and the grass, and other weeds, are growing much faster than any of the bee friendly plants that I was aiming for. So a new approach is required. The original plan was to build a wood bark path through the garden so that all areas could be easily accessed and managed. After Cat “refined” the idea, we’re now removing all turf and wood barking the entire thing, except where we want plants coming up. The job is started, but more work remains.
Not all horticultural news is good, though. I had a carnivorous sundew plant, which would capture small insects in its dewy buds. Ironically, it got overwhelmed by aphids last year. I’ve been here before, so I placed it outside. Nature took its cause that aphids were dispatched by predators. These plants also go through a dormant period, and I was delighted to see that it was making an excellent recovery. Excellent until it encountered an animal past that far surpassed its defences. Edison, the puppy. She must have been a bit bored, or inquisitive, and took that frustration, or curiosity out on my plant. A little while later, she’s back to looking like butter wouldn’t melt!
New Blog content
No time for that this week. Just a reminder about the newest single: The Nucleotides.
I’m due to release the next one soon. Hopefully my schedule won’t delay that too much.
From the Archive
I made sure to get at least one this week. It’s the Blue Shark: one of the prettiest sharks in my humble opinion.
Science News
The fact that I found some stories this week is one of the main reasons that I powered through to get this week’s newsletter done.
The cell is the basic building block of life. As simple as life gets, but not all cells are created equal. Bacterial cells are entirely different from plant and animal cells, which take on different forms from each other. But single celled organisms, with animal/plant type cells, are finding their own ways of being special. A case of cellular origami has been discovered. Where a single celled organism is able to dramatically length itself because the cell wall is folded in on itself: like the bellows of an accordion.
It turns out that giving people names may not be all that human at all. There are clues that various other animals have unique signals associated with particular individuals. Now there’s a new member of this group. Elephants appear to have names for each other that are communicated through low pitch rumbling sounds.
I’ve reported on a few interesting exoplanet discoveries from the deep heavens, but this may be the most dramatic to date. An exoplanet had been discovered which has a comet like tail. The tail is the planet’s atmosphere being stripped away!
I don’t discuss too much about climate change here, because I don’t want this newsletter to be depressing. I also don’t talk about algae much, which requires less justification. But I’m going to break both of those trends because it’s been discovered that algae help to cool the planet. And they make lots of oxygen for us to breathe. It appears that we owe a big debt to algae.
In space, no one can hear you scream. That’s because sound is a wave of pressure that needs to travel through something, like water or air. The thicker, the better, that’s why whales can communicate across vast oceans. Go the other way and strange things start happening. Mars has a much thinner environment than Earth, and this appears to be contributing to a new discovery; that the speed of sound on Mars varies a lot depending on exactly where you are and how warm it is.
Kicking back
Break time, yes, I need some of that:
Matilda’s lab endorses such use of boredom
Long COVID looks very different in the comics
It turns out that I’ve never seen pearls being harvested before.
That’s it for this week.
Please feel free to get in contact with any questions, suggestions or comments either via Substack or at matildaslab@gmail.com.
Please share this with anyone who you think will appreciate it. And remember to share with me any cool sciencey stuff that you find to make sure that I can pack this newsletter with the best new science content each week.
Until next time, remember that one person’s old news is another’s revelation; so explore. Sometimes it’s not about being the first up the hill. The view’s still going to be breathtaking, no matter how many people have seen it before you.