On New Show 'Honest Renovations,' Jessica Alba Helps Transform Family Homes

In Issue 181, we got to know some of the plants that grace Mt. Cuba Center’s hot, sunny South Garden during the spring and summer months (10 Great Natives for a Sunny Border). The garden had been recently redesigned to showcase a collection of borderworthy natives that can take the heat of the Zone 7 summers in Hockessin, Delaware.

There are areas in our homes that tend to be common storage areas, such as attics or basements. But just because a space can hold a stack of boxes doesn't mean it should. Before you stash a box of clothes or holiday decorations away, consider the ways in which factors like temperature, moisture, and household pests might affect the items you're storing.

Invasive Plant Species in New York pose a significant ecological challenge. These non-native plants disrupt local ecosystems, outcompete native species, and threaten biodiversity.

Whether you made a New Year’s resolution to cut your carbon footprint, or the credit crunch is putting pressure on your food budget, now is the perfect time to try growing some of your own vegetables. You don’t need a lot of space, or expensive kit, to get started – and it doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time.

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

Header image: Brooke Lark/Unsplash

This year’s Show the Love campaign has a theme of ‘noticing change’. The idea is that, for Valentine’s Day, hearts are turning green to #ShowtheLove for everything we care for that’s under threat from climate change, from fluttering butterflies to walks in ancient woods.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

Header image: Glenn, in the NASA mailroom, received letters from fans of all ages. John Glenn Archives, The Ohio State University, CC BY-ND

An extraordinary apple tree in a garden in Lincolnshire is 400 years old. It inspired Sir Isaac Newton to think about gravity, and in 2015 British astronaut Tim Peake took its pips into space. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Jeremy Curtis, Head of Education and Skills at the UK Space Agency, about sending Newton’s apple seeds into space. She finds out what’s happened to the space saplings and has a close encounter at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Header image: Prof Shuo Wang/Shi et al., 2022, Author provided

Header image: The Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a flyby of the Moon. NASA