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March 14 - March 20, 2022
by 1891, the Argentine Police had started fingerprinting criminals.
the greatest truth of all, that our bodies are but minerals, energy, and water.
Your dead body is a rich and vibrant paradise for microbes, a bounty for scavenging insects, birds, rodents, and other animals, some of which will come to your body to feast upon your mortal remains, and some of which will come, like the tinkers and traders exploiting a ‘gold rush’,
the Triads are vicious outfits whose activities have serious consequences.
‘calcifuges’ (plants that hide from calcium)
Yemenis routinely doused the dead with engine oil and then buried them in the sand.
virgin birth exists even in the vertebrates as well as invertebrates!
Ötzi,
fungi include mildews, moulds, blights, yeasts, lichens, rusts, smuts, slime moulds, and, of course, mushrooms.
Like animals, they can only survive on food that has already been made, mostly by plants or organisms that have, ultimately, fed on plant material.
digestion of their food occurs outside their bodies.
Like all animals, in order to grow and reproduce, fungi need to feed on the living or dead tissues of other organisms.
Plants build up and fungi break down.
Fungi are the principal agents of the degradation of plant material.
they are the only ones that can break down the lignin, the complicated polyme...
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Our own bodies, and most mammals, are covered in yeasts, such as Malassezia,
fungi are more closely related to us, and we share some of their sensitivity to certain toxins.
Lichens are the ultimate survivors and have survived space rockets that have crashed to the ground in flames, and a specimen of Xanthoria attached to the outside of the International Space
for all the lost years when we could have been friends.
I had never seen anything pre-packaged
you must not have jealousy or boastfulness
demeaning jokes about the Irish, Scots, and northerners, and even those from the West Country
Welsh to the English and English to the Welsh. That is the fate of an immigrant.
No disaster or misfortune would ever have the same impact, or ever hurt me as much. Since that day, I have been magically protected from being hurt by anyone.
amphibians get the poison from the ants they eat and, presumably, the ants get it from the plant material they gather.
Tomato, potato, aubergine, pepper, and chilli are all valuable foods, but they are all in the same family as deadly nightshade, with its tempting black berries, and Datura (jimson weed), with its beautiful white flowers.
alkaloid solanine and, although even some supermarket managers do not realise it, the greening of potato skin heralds the production of the poison. Solanine is a potent pesticide and it protects the plant from being attacked by pathogens
Strychnos, native particularly to southern India.
the most poisonous have no remedy, and many of these are in the fungal genus Amanita.
One of the most potent plant poisons of all comes from the seeds of the castor oil plant, which contains high intensities of the toxin ricin.
Even Santa Claus, flying with his reindeers in his red and white suit, might be related to stories originally told by followers of the cult of this fungus.
clinical depression, it may be the over-efficient removal of this hormone by our own bodies that creates the problem.
the novelty of having arrested a shaman had clearly impressed him.
several of my peers and I find the whole forensic scene in the UK somewhat depressing.
is easy to see how some innocent person could be implicated in a crime.
I was not a ‘learner’, I simply amended what I already knew.
Queen’s Counsel
It is the QC who leads a case and has the responsibility of influencing a jury to give a verdict of innocent or guilty.
In the UK, the US, and much of the Commonwealth, the legal system is adversarial.
it never fails to amaze me that, in many cases, the barrister has not been particularly well prepared at all.
The sad thing for me is that I will not be able to know about any of it.
