May 14-18, 2018
To start the week, Emma has some good news: butterflies are adapting more nimbly to the Anthropocene that some might have thought. This happy ending surprised the researchers. “Our mindset in 2014 was simply to reconfirm the extinction, and we were very surprised to find larvae,” they write. To be fair, ecologists are often unprepared for good news.
Michelle reduxes a post about the taxonomically-frustrating caribou—and a collaborative study about these animals. When he explained to them that Polfus was asking whether residents would be willing to collect caribou scat in exchange for gasoline gift cards, they thought at first they had misunderstood; then, they burst out laughing.
Abstruse Goose is back! Hooray!!
Cassie has a pain in the ankle, and ends up accidentally getting a reflexology treatment that sets off her skeptic alarms . . . and a surprising sense of hope. I lay quietly and tried not to grimace or yelp or giggle as J– pressed her fingers deep into my feet while saying things like “your breast area feels great,” “your kidney is tense,” and “you have so many ribs out,” a phrase I find totally baffling.
At the end of the week, Rebecca takes us to the moon, where a Lunar Library may be installed in 2020—a moon landing that is a different kind of giant leap. It is a reflection of our most fundamental desire, the deepest ache in all our hearts that ties us to everyone who has ever lived. It is a way for us to send versions of ourselves into the future.
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Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
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