All things Green and Dirty v2.0

[KichigaiNeko]

You have an embarrassment of Day lilies Savanahw! Beautiful!

---

Neil deGrasse Tyson:
"More bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

I know what you're thinking: we're smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all..."

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/univers...ive?page=2

Image source before editing:
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/...n-touch-2/

---

This is China's Turpan Depression, at the foot of the Bogda Mountains. It's an odd mix of salt lakes and sand
dunes, and the blue Aydingkol Lake down the bottom is 155 m below sea level, making it the third lowest place on Earth’s land surface after the Dead Sea and Africa’s Lake Assal.

Download the entire NASA ebook, 'Earth As Art', for free here: http://1.usa.gov/TqRZyR -- wit' Anish Limbu

courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=...=1&theater

---

This is the waterwheel plant, an aquatic carnivorous plant with just 50 confirmed populations worldwide. Similar to the venus fly trap, this plant has two lobes with sensitive trigger hairs inside. When a small insect brushes past these hairs, the lobes snap shut within milliseconds, closing the prey within.

Read more: http://bit.ly/95Py3z

Image credit: Barry Rice -- wit' Steven Steve, Yunia Cheenu an' Arulappu Thavishi

---