#root systems

[noosphe-re]

Solanum tuberosum Root system drawing Wurzelatlas (Lore Kutschera, Erwin Lichtenegger)

[your-beast0fburden]

Pretty neat root systems

[glassfullofsass]

Root Systems might be...not my favorite episode because that's Off Air, but definitely one of my favorite episodes.

Violet mixing cough suppressant into coffee, which audibly terrifies Arkady, then the equally audible relief in Arkady's voice when Violet instantly sounds better.

The heart to heart between Arkady and Sana.

Krejjh watching their shipper dreams come true before their very eyes.

"being an outlaw is so boring"

Sana realizing the truth of the "mole", doxing Ricky Q, then giving the "Lenny" speech.

[adragonsfriend]

Accidental Star Wars Fungi Headcanon???

Ok so i'm doing Big Edits for Yoda's chapter of This Story Can Kill You, and it's set in the room of a thousand fountains, aka the giant garden on a city planet, so I got to writing about plants.

I fucking love writing about plants--like so much, you don't even know--it's addictive, they should put a warning on it idk--

Obsessions aside, I started talking about grass and moss and clover and then I was like fungi are here too. So then I was like mycelium and symbiosis obviously. And then I just wrote a line all casual, as one does,

Their roots are tended by fungi gardeners in a relationship half as old as the Force itself.

Based on the vague idea of the Force coming from life. But then I was like i need to fact check that to be satisfied with it, because I am not an evolutionary biologist but I am a nerd.

and like according to wikipedia numbers,,, I was wrong,,,but not that wrong:

Life started on earth ~3.7 bya (billion years ago), and fungi emerged 1.2-1.5 bya o, and the first plants about 0.8-1.0 bya. The first land plants and land fungi, as well as this specific symbiotic relationship (probably) evolved out about ~0.5 bya. That's about a seventh as old as life, not a half, but it's still a significant fraction.

Anyway the head canon part of this comes from the fact that “half as old” sounds better than “one seventh as old,” and obviously none of these numbers are technically relevant to SW anyway. Fungi themselves are about half as old as life itself, so let's say water plants and water fungi had a similar relationship to their land versions on whatever planet first developed life in the SW universe. Then the relationship would be about a third as old as life going by a proportionate time line, and the title of the chapter is literally "A Poet at his Work," so Yoda can be afforded a bit of poetic license and say half. He's cool like that.

How does Yoda know about how old the fungi are? The Force told him obv. He couldn't give any answers about it that would make a biologist happy he just knows the Force things fungi are neat and likes to share facts about them. He also probably wouldn't give those answers if he could. He would say something cheating and the fungi prefering to be mysterious anyway.

Side note: Also in the process of these edits I have learned that giant sequoias (eg the real big tall trees it takes like 10+ people to hug) don't have tap roots??? (tap roots are the biggest root a lot of trees have and they typically grow like straight down looking for water, unlike other roots that are much closer to the surface) Apparently their stability is achieved with super wide but shallow root net works instead? I mean I've been to a giant sequoia forest and there sure are a lot of roots to trip on but that's still insane to me.

Sources (all wikipedia)

plants

fungi

specific fungi-plant relationship: mycorrhiza

land plants & land fungi emerge

Anyway is there a fungus side of tumblr? i feel they should explain everything I'm getting wrong here

i'm gonna go try and find some fungus people brb

Edit: (15 min later) ok I've harassed (politely asked) four different fungus people so we (just me) are really just waiting to see if I was funny enough in their asks to be noticed

[iffeelscouldkill]

So the other day I was struck by the urge to relisten to an episode from season 1, and of course it had to be my all-time favourite, Episode 7: Root Systems. (I'm sorry, Parallel, I know I used to say you were my favourite, but I have to give up and admit it's actually your successor). The building drama of the race between the IGR agents' search and Sana's max-speed drive back to the Rumor is just so good, and then of course the defiant getaway followed by the agents' despondency - so I decided to turn it into a fan comic.

Yes, in my head no matter how completely impossible it might be Krejjh is standing in the doorway to the ship flipping off the Agents on the ground as they make their farewell. "But how are they piloting the ship?" you ask. WITH THEIR MIND, next question. Krejjh's second pair of eyes are of course underneath their goggles. (I originally drew Krejjh wearing suspenders and then I was like NO. NEON GREEN LEG WARMERS).

(I don't really have a consistent mental image of Krejjh in my head (though I always imagine the multiple arms and eye-pairs) but this version of them is definitely influenced by @rjmccabe's!)

And then at the bottom we have chibi McCabe comforting a very sad Park. Don't worry, Park, I'm sure your day isn't about to get any worse.

[isomorphismes]

It's easy to write down explicit equations for many Calabi-Yau 3-folds (those with SU(3) holonomy), but very difficult to explicitly cast a manifold with holonomy metric G₂ or Spin(7). Robert Bryant wrote out an explicit Spin(7) and an explicit G₂ manifold in 1987: it took 49 simultaneous nonlinear PDE’s to exhibit the symmetry.

Jacob Gross

[nyxbarb]

“Fingertips pressed on lychee skin, our version of prayer. Not to mention, the way you taught me to pick apart until we found tender. How we knew somehow together, there could be sweetness.”

— by Kay Ulanday Barrett; Root Systems.