I really cannot say how relieved I am to be able to post this as a positive news story, because when the outbreak first started it looked like it might be the end of the kakapo.
This year 82 kakapo chicks hatched, a record-breaking number that was a massive victory for a species with only 142 living adults. Then, in what seemed a cruel twist of fate, the kakapo population was struck with a devastating aspergillosis outbreak.
In the end, the disease only killed two adults and five chicks. Thirteen birds remain sick but are recovering with treatment.
This could have been so, so much worse, and the reason it wasn’t was due to excellent adaptive management of the developing situation by Kakapo Recovery staff as well as Auckland Zoo (and Wildbase Recovery Hospital and Dunedin Wildlife Hospital) staff going above and beyond their typical duties to offer intense, round the clock care to sick birds.
When conservationists posted on social media that their regular budget was not prepared to handle this unforeseen tragedy, members of the public donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to help via crowdfunding.
“The outpouring of support struck Digby (head of Kakapo Recovery), who recalls how a 9-year-old in the United States asked their friends to donate to the cause in lieu of bringing birthday presents to their party. ‘Here’s a child who’s probably never going to see a Kākāpō in their life,’ he says, ‘and they care about them enough to give up all their birthday presents.’“
This year will still likely see a net increase in the wild kakapo population. Against all odds, the big, green, flightless parrots are going to be ok.
King Tutankhamun’s dagger is out of this world – literally.
“The nickel and cobalt ratio in the dagger blade is consistent with that of iron meteorites that have preserved the primitive chondritic ratio during planetary differentiation in the early solar system.”
When archaeologist Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb, he described the knife as a “highly ornamented gold dagger with a crystal knob.”
The weapon, which is on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was made from a non-rusted homogenous metal with a gold handle.
Killer Crocodile will be released on Blu-ray on August 27 via Severin Films. The 1989 Jaws imitator is presented in its native Italian with English subtitles.
Severin is carrying an exclusive two-disc edition for $34. Limited to 4,000 units, it includes the 1990 sequel, Killer Crocodile 2, plus the exclusive slipcover pictured above.
Fabrizio De Angelis (Thunder) directs from a script he co-wrote with Dardano Sacchetti (The Beyond, Demons). Richard Anthony Crenna, Sherrie Rose, Thomas Moore, and Van Johnson star.
Killer Crocodile has been scanned in 2K from the original negative. Special features are listed below, where you can also see the standard artwork.
Here’s some sketch commissions I did at GFest this year! A huge thanks to @astoundingbeyondbelief , @kinggaydorah , @herr-kroenen and everyone else for commissioning me and/or coming to visit my table, it really meant a lot to me! 💚💚💚
A store-bought bag of topsoil, a roll of landscaping fabric, or a bag of cedar chips doesn’t go very far if you have a large garden or a very limited budget. Here are some ways to create the materials you need for a beautiful, organic, productive garden, by both re-directing household waste, and foraging in your local area. I use a lot of these tricks in my garden to make it almost completely free for me to continue growing new things, and expanding the workable area every year!
For soil
Save your food scraps to create a rich compost for growing veggies and amending your soil. There are numerous options for every size of dwelling and yard. Small space solutions such as Bokashi and vermicompost work indoors and don’t produce bad smells, so you can keep them underneath the sink.Worm towers, compost heaps, and outdoor compost binsare a great solution if you have more space. The more you add, the more rich, nutritious material you can make for your garden. I like composting because it means I don’t have gross smelly garbage bags to deal with, because food waste is diverted. It seems like a lot of work at first, but it actually saves time, money, and transportation.
There are three things that are essential for plant growth. These are nitrogen for leaves and vegetation (N), phosphorus for roots and shoots (P), and potassium for water movement, flowering, and fruiting (K). Commercial fertilisers will give the relative concentrations of each of these compounds with and “NPK” rating. Plants like tomatoes also need calcium to produce healthy fruit. You can create amendments for your garden and soil at home so that you do not have to purchase fertiliser.
Human urine contains 12% nitrogen, and it’s sterile. Dilute before adding directly to plants.
Legumes such as beans, clover, peanuts, and alfalfa fix inorganic nitrogen into the soil with mycorrhizal organisms and nodules on their root systems. Plant these crops every few years in rotation with others to renew the soil organically.
For phosphorus
Human urine is also a great source of phosphorous and trace amounts of potassium.
Many plants are particular about what the soil pH should be.
To make soil more acidic: add oak leaves, pine needles, leaf mulch, urine, coffee grounds or sphagnum.
To make soil more alkaline: add wood ash, shell, or bone.
Mulch
Mulch is decomposing organic matter that adds nutrition to the soil, while simultaneously keeping out weed growth and retaining moisture. It also attracts worms, fungi and other beneficial creatures to your soil. Free sources of mulch include:
Leaves
Garden waste
Grass clippings
Straw (often straw bales are given away after being used for decoration in the fall. You can also plant vegetables directly in straw bales using a technique called straw bale gardening).
Wood chips (if you can borrow a wood chipper after you’ve collected some wood you can have attractive wood mulch for free)
When mulch isn’t enough to keep the weeds down, many people opt for landscaping fabric. It can be quite expensive and inorganic-looking. Free solutions that both attract worms and can be replaced in small segments as they break down include:
Newspaper*
Cardboard*
Egg cartons*
Printer paper, looseleaf, etc. in thick layers*
*try to make sure you are using paper that has vegetable-based dyes, so you aren’t leeching toxins into the soil.
Soil density/drainage
If your soil is compacted and you have plants that require low levels of water, or excellent drainage, add sand. I don’t recommend stealing it from the beach, but ask around and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to get for free. Sawdust also improves drainage. Adding organic matter and mulch encourages worms, who also till and aerate compacted soil.
If the area still needs drainage, dig a hole and fill it with bricks or rocks to create a “dry well”
For drainage in pots, add crushed bricks,terra cotta pot fragments, packing peanuts, small stones, marbles, orsand to the bottom under the soil layer. I find these in construction sites, on craigslist, or at flea markets.
Pots and growing containers
If you have space, raised beds are a great no-dig way to establish growing space. If you are pressed for space (like working on a balcony) there are many cheap or free options for container gardens.
Creating raised beds allows you to build up the soil without digging. Free ways to do this include using rocks or lumber (like my DIY “lasagna garden” made with the sheet composting technique), using the “wattle“ method with sticks and posts you have found, using discarded straw bales, old bricks,paving stones,cinder blocks or really anything else you have lying around.
Hugelkutur raised beds, which fix carbon and provide drainage, can be made by stacking sticks and untreated wood, and then piling soil or compost over it. (Thanks milos-garden)
Rubber tire gardens retain heat in the night and allow for great drainage. They can also be painted in fun ways.
Herb spirals (here is mine: 1, 2, 3) can be built with stones, bricks, and other found materials.
I often use old cooking pots, barbecues, teapots, or other found objects as planters.
If you can track down peat moss, cement, and vermiculite, you can make an easy Hypertufa planter in whatever shape you would like, provided you have a form in which it can dry.
Paving often requires a foundation of sand or another stable and well-drained substrate, and a covering of stones, bricks, or other weatherproof elements. Slowly collect stones over time, or free paving stone fragments to create a mosaic-type walkway. Often people give these things away on craigslist. I made a patio and fireplace out of free salvaged bricks, for example.
Save seeds from foods you like from the grocery store: consider growing peanuts, ginger, garlic, peppers, or a walnut tree: all of these and more can be planted from store-bought produce.
Learn to take cuttings. There is a tonne of info on the web about basic cutting propagation, layering, (like I do with rhododendrons) air layering, and numerous other techniques to take clones of plants you like. This saves going to a nursery and shelling out big bucks for all the variety you want.
For cuttings, willow tea and honey are great rooting hormones/antiseptics/anti-fungal agents, which can save you $40 if you were thinking of buying commercial rooting hormone.
I hope this helps you build your garden outside of the usual capitalist channels! It can be a cheap or free hobby if you are willing to think outside the box, and maybe put up with things that don’t look as clean or crisp as a hardware store catalogue.
If you have any further ideas, please add them! The more information the better.
Another source for pots: Your local garden center (even some at the big name big box stores) may have many, many, MANY used pots they will sell for pennies or possibly even give away.
Yes, and I thought the same thing too, but please understand… They’re taking about wet-bulb temperature, which I had to look up.
Here’s a YouTube video that explains it too…
So from my limited understanding it would have to be really hot and humid to get a wet-bulb reading of 95°. On the National Weather Service Heat Index, at 80% humidity 95° feels like 136°
Not to panic though. We still have time but I really think it’s up to our youth to take control. Politically and environmentally. Trump just proposed to cut billions of dollars to NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, AND the National Cancer Institute. These old rich bastards probably won’t even be alive when it goes down so they don’t care.
I live in Texas. Temperatures above 100-101°F (i.e. 38°C) aren’t uncommon in summer but our humidity is often below 40%. In 2009 I was very habituated to the heat, young, fit, and healthy, and I saw forecasts for Taipei, where I’d be traveling, were going to be not higher than 99°F (37°C).
What I did not count on was a typhoon (Morakot) keeping humidity in the 95-99% range.
I had to sit down every minute I walked, even under a cloudy sky. It’s like trying to suck air through a towel soaked in bathwater. I was pouring sweat and it wasn’t evaporating at all because the air was saturated, which is the point of wet bulb temperature readings: if there’s no evaporation, sweating doesn’t cool you. At that temperature, neither does water; everything you drink is the same temperature you are. Staying still, not exerting yourself at all, only keeps it from getting worse; it does not get better. And the environment I was in only went to body temperature and cooled off to the high eighties (30°C) at night: as long as I didn’t move I’d be fine. We also had the privilege of functional technology, iced drinks: in a brownout that’s not an option.
You should absolutely be afraid of this. We must absolutely prevent this happening. We must move now, because humans will assuredly die, are already dying, and because we aren’t the only ones on this planet with the right to live.
Wet bulb temperatures (which are basically combined humidity and temperature conditions) over body temperature can be thought of as the point where the methods mammals use to regulate body heat just Stop Working. Every motion you make, every breath, every heartbeat, every nerve impulse heats you up and there’s nowhere in your environment you can dump that heat, so you just get hotter and hotter until you reach a temperature where your organs can’t function and you die. There’s nothing you can do to survive that other than ‘get colder’. And as the article pointed out, that may not be possible when heat impacts the power grid.
THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING
Bad news: much of our populace and most of our leaders won’t believe this can happen until it does happen.
