Parachute’s New Featherweight Line Has the Lightest, Most Luxe Towels Yet

Using wallpaper to update your space brings in patterns and textures that plain old paint just can’t match. Especially with numerous peel-and-stick wallpaper options, you have various designs you can choose from without having to fully commit for years.

Header image: Lupinus albus (altramuces o chochitos), by Calapito via Wikimedia Commons.

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

Header image: Chimpanzee Ham with Trainers. Image credit: NASA

It’s time to shake the mud of 2016 off our boots, and to prepare the soil for 2017 (metaphorically speaking). I have the bones of a planting plan for next year, which will be subject to revisions, and we know which areas of the garden still need work.

Brain loves books. It loves libraries, it loves bookshops, and it likes looking through other people’s bookshelves. Sometimes it seems as though it likes having books more than it does reading them. Certainly, that’s what the ever-growing Unread ShelfPile (there’s a shelf, and it overflows onto the floor and then some) seems to be saying.

Header image: Artist’s concept of astronauts and human habitats on Mars. NASA

Header image: TheOldBarnDoor/Shutterstock.com

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

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.

Last weekend, as the temperatures soared, I found a certain amount of solace in learning more about how plants are being grown in Antarctica – the coldest place on Earth. 

Header image: Phil Sellens, CC BY