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ANTIMATTER LENSING. “It has been reported by M.R.S. Hawkins that light from quasars appears to have been bent slightly, many times, in its path to us by many invisible concentrations of mass.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

Persimmon pudding with Jack Daniels laced whipped cream tops off Thansgiving Day. View in LinkedIn

ZERO EMISSIONS FACTORY. “The subduction factory processes raw materials such as oceanic sediments and oceanic crust and manufactures magmas and continental crust as products. Aqueous fluids, which are extracted from oceanic raw materials via dehydration reactions during subduction, dissolve particular elements and overprint such elements onto the mantle wedge to generate chemically distinct arc basalt magmas.” https://lnkd.in/dz8gj2C5 View in LinkedIn

POORLY DEFINED. “It is our view that both holobionts and biofilms are so disunified as classes that no general resolution of such claims can reasonably be expected. The focus of the now quite heated debate around the widespread use of ‘‘holobiont’’ and ‘‘hologenome’’ is most often on claim (3) above.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

Agave americana has remarkable hydrophobicity of its cuticle, whose macro structure beaded drops of rain magnify. View in LinkedIn

MICROBIAL ECOSYSTEMS. “A similar set of ideas informs research and philosophizing about biofilms, structured microbial communities embedded in an extracellular matrix, not necessarily associated with an animal or plant.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

1927, THERE IS MORE THAN JUST THE MILKY WAY. “John Gribbin, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University, summarizes the importance of Big Bang cosmology in this way: “the discovery of the century, in cosmology at least, was without doubt the dramatic discovery made by Hubble, and confirmed by Einstein’s equations, that the Universe is not eternal, static, and unchanging.” https://lnkd.in/dEak6krm View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on the startling consequences of promiscuous horizontal gene transfer in microorganisms, creating the planet’s largest gene pool. These tiny creatures, so long overlooked, are the Atlases that drive immense biogeochemical cycles of matter. Professor Doolittle ingeniously suggests that their tiny metabolisms cog with these great cycles of matter as functional units of natural selection, rather than their rather meaningless species designations. https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

BLUNT FORCE. “But it is arguably the case that abandoning any requirement for holobionts to be units of selection and/or to reproduce collectively, is, for all intents and purposes, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

MICROBE-MACROBE. “O’Malley (forthcoming) envisions that the emphasis on collective community function will fade as more individual microbe–macrobe interactions come under mechanistic scrutiny; we suspect she is right.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn