I know dinner was going to be good when getting the sauce put together made me wheeze like an emphysema patient.
It was the best plateful of food tasting solely of coconut and hatred for all things good I’ve had in quite some time.
The only thing cooler than this female orb spider, Gasteracantha arcuata, is her male counterpart below. That’s right, the two spiders are from the same species, and represent an extreme case of sexual dimorphism.
Viking spider and her boyfriend Hellraiser.
Rare Cosplay: Sedusa and Him, villains from The Powerpuff Girls
NEW FAVORITE PEOPLE
:O
(via kateordie)
I never knew I needed this until this precise moment.
(Source: monstersatemyfriends, via shenanagin)
Characters: 11th Doctor & Amy
Series: Doctor Who
Nubia pics! I’m working on a new set of armor, going to be a completely different design based on her Action Comics #9 outfit. Can’t wait til Dragon*Con!! :)
Why trees can’t grow taller than 100 metres
TYPICALLY, the taller the tree, the smaller its leaves. The mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, it turns out, also sets a limit on how tall trees can grow.
Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, compared 1925 tree species, with leaves ranging from a few millimetres to over 1 metre long, and found that leaf size varied most in relatively short trees.
Jensen thinks the explanation lies in the plant’s circulatory system. Sugars produced in leaves diffuse through a network of tube-shaped cells called the phloem. Sugars accelerate as they move, so the bigger the leaves the faster they reach the rest of the plant. But the phloem in stems, branches and the trunk acts as a bottleneck. There comes a point when it becomes a waste of energy for leaves to grow any bigger. Tall trees hit this limit when their leaves are still small, because sugars have to move through so much trunk to get to the roots, creating a bigger bottleneck.
Jensen’s equations describing the relationship show that as trees get taller, unusually large or small leaves both cease to be viable (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/j6n). The range of leaf sizes narrows and at around 100 m tall, the upper limit matches the lower limit. Above that, it seems, trees can’t build a viable leaf. Which could explain why California’s tallest redwoods max out at 115.6 m.
Source: New Scientist.
Images: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4.
