Try These New Seasonal Drinks at Starbucks Before the Fall Lineup Drops

Just because the weather is cooling doesn't mean that we have to stop using our patios. In fact, sometimes it's even more enjoyable to spend time outdoors in the crisp autumn air. So if you have a patio, why not make the most of it all year long? 

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

These are the tea bags I buried in the garden in July for the Tea Bag Index, a citizen science project investigating soil health. I dug them up a couple of weeks ago, and they have been drying on the dining room table. There are accompanying soil samples to go with each tea bag. It’s time to send them all off to Tea Bag Index HQ, so they can become part of the national and international data set. It will be interesting to see the results in due course.

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: Geoff Caddick/EPA

This is Hellboy*, he’s a very special chilli pepper. He’s part of the Space Chile Grow a Pepper Plant Challenge, which is run by Jacob Torres (who gets name-checked in episode 12 of Gardeners of the Galaxy).

Four new plant experiments launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on the SpaceX CRS-24 cargo mission: APEX-07, MVP-Plant-01, Plant Habitat-05 and Veggie PONDS-03R.

Header image: Macromitrium microstomum is found throughout New Zealand on the trunks or branches of smooth-barked trees, or on rock. Silvia Pressel, Author provided