SWISS ARMY MAN (2016), Dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

SWISS ARMY MAN (2016), dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

So I guess you’re going to die now. I’m sorry. It feels like its my fault.

batman lucky there was a glass between them cause this mf would try to kiss him

Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

“(…) the God-sized hole in me was so big and vacant, voracious and spacious, it was like I was running some kind of desperate toddler’s shape-sorter game, trying to find something that fit to plug into it. I’d stuff anything in there, regardless of whether the shape coincided with the opening.”

— “Transparent Things, God-Sized Hole“ by Dana Roeser (via deformititties)

if you have no hope for humanity that sucks for you i guess. but i was buying melatonin at the corner store and the stranger behind me in line said everyone they knew had been having trouble sleeping recently and maybe it was the cold weather. and the cashier swore he was a chronic insomniac before he met his wife but he hadn’t tossed and turned in 10 years. and when i left we told each other to sleep well tonight. and that’s enough hope to sustain me for at least a few months.

Plants have been grown in lunar soil for the 1st time ever

In a landmark first, scientists have grown plants in lunar soil using samples collected during the Apollo missions to the moon. This is the first time plants have been sprouted and grown on Earth in soil from another celestial body.

The study could lay the foundation for growing plants that supply oxygen and food on the moon, a timely consideration as NASA’s Artemis program looks to land the first woman and the first person of color at the lunar south pole later this decade.

But the experiments also reveal just how stressful it is for plants to grow in lunar regolith, or soil, which is wildly different from natural habitats on Earth.

A study detailing the plant experiment published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.

Different types of plants, including food crops, have flown on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. Plant samples have even been used to prove that lunar samples aren’t harmful to life on Earth.

“Plants helped establish that the soil samples brought back from the moon did not harbor pathogens or other unknown components that would harm terrestrial life, but those plants were only dusted with the lunar regolith and were never actually grown in it,” said study coauthor Anna-Lisa Paul, research professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Paul and study coauthor Rob Ferl, distinguished professor of horticultural sciences at the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, wanted to take things a step further and see if seeds would grow in lunar soil…

Thale cress, [also known as Arabidopsis,] is an attractive plant specimen to researchers because it is well studied and its genetic code has been mapped – which allowed the researchers to study how the alien soil affected the plant’s gene expression.

The Arabidopsis sprouts… showed signs of struggle as they adjusted to the lunar soil.

The seedlings were smaller, grew slower and varied in size compared with plants grown in Earth soils. The roots were stunted. And the plants took longer to grow expanded leaves than the Arabidopsis plants grown in volcanic ash. Some of the lunar soil plants showed reddish black pigments in their leaves, an outward sign of stress.

On a genetic level, three of the smaller, darker plants expressed more than 1,000 genes that were largely related to stress.

“At the genetic level, the plants were pulling out the tools typically used to cope with stressors, such as salt and metals or oxidative stress, so we can infer that the plants perceive the lunar soil environment as stressful,” Paul said.

“Ultimately, we would like to use the gene expression data to help address how we can ameliorate the stress responses to the level where plants – particularly crops – are able to grow in lunar soil with very little impact to their health.”