Down a microscope, a lichen looks like a loaf of ciabatta: it has a stiff, dense crust surrounding a spongy, loose interior.

Wonderful story of curiosity and a willingness to follow the evidence.

As the talking point of the show, the sculpture became the receptacle of all kinds of theories, fears and longings. This being the age of Freud, a gastro-sexual interpretation was inescapable: the spoon was phallic, the cup vaginal, the hair pubic. For some, the tongue-shaped spoon brought to mind unpleasant sensations of a furry tongue.

Fascinating story.

You’ve seen evolutionary maps before. Even Charles Darwin used the metaphor, envisioning an earlier species that gave rise to new ones, each new species splitting off as a branch of an ever-growing tree.

That's where this piece of ignorant schadenfreude in Wired lost me. To suggest that Darw...

In fact, 21% of Iowa farmland is owned by people who do not even live in Iowa. What is particularly rankling about these figures is that some 40% of that corn is grown to feed piston engines. This is a travesty especially now that gasoline is so cheap. Everyone I talk to except corn farmers them...

Glenn Greenwald lays it out, in The Intercept:

So now, with yesterday’s WSJ report, we witness the tawdry spectacle of large numbers of people who for years were fine with, and even giddy about, NSA mass surveillance. But now they’ve learned that they themselves, or the officials of the foreign country they most love, have been caught up in this surveillance dragnet, and they can hardly contain their indignation. Suddenly, privacy is of the highest value because now it’s their privacy, rather than just yours, that is invaded.