1. French architect Vincent Callebaut has come up with a design
for an "amphibious garden" which could roam the waterways of the world. Plants on the roof filter the river water, while power comes from photo-voltaic cells.
He describes Physalia
as
an architectural prototype that
aims at meeting the need of the mutualisation of the knowledge in terms of
sustainable management of the water resource. It is a half aquatic and half earthly
amphibious vessel, a floating agora which has not only the objective on a
geopolitical scale to deal with ecology ad water saving, but also on a European
scale, to elaborate strategic solutions to animate the fluvial network
...and so on over three screens - but when one combines "French"
and "architect" one expects nothing less.
On a more modest scale, already on the Thames beyond Richmond I noticed that one
houseboat appeared to have a floating garden anchored a little way down-river -
fenced in presumably to keep the geese off:
With London's
allotments way over-subscribed, and not much land available for more, Will
fluvial horticulture be big in 2010?
3. What makes a plant a plant? You might think the ability to
photosynthesise via chlorophyll was a defining characteristic. But it turns out
a kind of sea
slug can also manufacture chlorophyll, using genes nicked from algae - so sparing
it the bother of having to eat. It even looks quite leaf-like:
4. My wife and I were struck by this strange stuff on several branches
in a frosty woodland in the west Highlands of Scotland.
Turns out it's hair ice - so called because the ice strands grow
out of pores in dead wood, much like hair from follicles. It's not on English
Wikipedia, while the German page
says only that "the formation of the rarely-seen hair ice has so far been little
researched scientifically".
5. Still on things German, how would you feel if the grave of your
nearest and dearest was under the control of Hades? But such is the name of Germany's
leading (only?) graveyard management
software package.
"Hades", though associated with Greek mythology, also appears in the Bible - in
some versions at least. According to one commentator:
Hades is generally associated
with death and the grave while hell is generally associated with burning and
punishment. For all practical purposes... there is no real major distinction
between the two. They are both characterized as places we don't want to go.
6. We
reported
a couple of weeks ago that
turquoise
will be this year's hot colour, according to those Masters of the Colour
Universe
Pantone.
It sounds like an improvement on 2009's hot tip,
mimosa
yellow, anyway.
I wonder if we're getting more colour-literate. The
Crayola crayons
of our childhood originally numbered just eight when they were launched over a
century ago. Now they're up to 120 and counting. Blogger Stephen Von Worley has
created
this
handy infographic to show this evolution:
7.
Bird care products have been one beneficiary of the cold
snap - Haskins Garden Centres have been selling "
vast
amounts" - but so far no one has thought of harnessing visiting birds for musical
purposes:
Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot brings his installation "The
Curve" to London's
Barbican
Centre next month.
8. On exotic birds, I remember as a child seeing a documentary
about what were probably
sparrow
weavers - builders of huge multi-occupancy nests on the African savannah. In
the doc, one such nest, the product of years of avian diligence, goes up in
flames due to a fire supposedly started by the sun's rays being focused onto the dry straw by a
single drop of dew.
I remember thinking the film crew were stretching credibility (as well as
ethics) a bit there. Now according to
one
research group: "Claims of
fires induced by sunlit water drops on
vegetation should...be treated with a grain of salt."
More of this sort of thing
here,
here and
here.
