Garden in a bottle

David Latimer first planted his bottle garden in 1960 and last watered it in 1972 before tightly sealing it shut 'as an experiment'

The hardy spiderworts plant inside has grown to fill the 10-gallon container by surviving entirely on recycled air, nutrients and water

David Latimer was a green-fingered genius. Truth be told, however, his bottle garden – now almost in its 53rd years, the last occasion he watered it Ted Heath was Prime Minister and Richard Nixon was in the White House.

For the last 40 years it has been completely sealed from the outside world. But the indoor variety of spiderworts (or Tradescantia, to give the plant species its scientific Latin name) within has thrived, filling its globular bottle home with healthy foliage.

The bottle garden has created its own miniature ecosystem. Despite being cut off from the outside world, because it is still absorbing light it can photosynthesise, the process by which plants convert sunlight into the energy they need to grow.

Photosynthesis creates oxygen and also puts more moisture in the air. The moisture builds up inside the bottle and ‘rains’ back down on the plant.

The leaves it drops rot at the bottom of the bottle, creating the carbon dioxide also needed for photosynthesis and nutrients which it absorbs through its roots.

The only input to this whole process has been solar energy, that’s the thing it has needed to keep it going. Everything else, every other thing in there has been recycled. That’s fantastic

He hopes to pass on the ‘experiment’ to his grown-up children after he is gone.

If they do not want it, he will leave it to the Royal Horticultural Society.

Glass Beach - Playa De Cristal

Glass Beach is a beach in MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg, California that is abundant in sea glass created from years of dumping garbage into an area of coastline near the northern part of the town.

History

In the early 20th century, Fort Bragg residents threw their household garbage over cliffs owned by the Union Lumber Company onto what is now Glass Beach, discarding glass, appliances, and even vehicles. Locals referred to it as "The Dumps." Fires were lit to reduce the size of the trash pile.

The California State Water Resources Control Board and city leaders closed the area in 1967. Various cleanup programs were undertaken through the years to correct the damage. Over the next several decades the pounding waves cleaned the beach, by breaking down everything but glass and pottery and tumbling those into the small, smooth, colored pieces that cover Glass Beach.

In 1998, the private owner of the property determined that Glass Beach should belong to the public, and began a five year process of working with the California Coastal Conservancy and the California Integrated Waste Management Board for the cleanup and sale of the property to the state. Following completion of the clean up, the California Department of Parks and Recreation purchased the 38-acre (150,000 m2) Glass Beach property, and it was incorporated into MacKerricher State Park in October 2002.

Tourism

The beach is now frequently visited by tourists. Collecting is not permitted on the park's beach, although sea glass can be found on other local beaches outside the park boundary and an annual Glass Festival is held annually on Memorial Day weekend.

Weather Update: Snow Storms

In other news, today: 2 feet of snow fell this morning...

Tornado of Fire

Caught on camera: The 30 metre high tornado of FIRE that whirled around Australian outback for terrifying 40 minutes

Fire tornadoes occur when a column of warm, rising air contacts with - or creates - fire on the ground

An astonished filmmaker is coming to grips with the moment he witnessed one of nature's rarest phenomenons - a tornado comprised entirely of fire- and lived to tell the tale.

Chris Tangey had been out in Alice Springs, Australia, scouting locations for a new movie.

After finishing the task, he went over to help workers at a cattle station when he was confronted by one of nature's most intimidating spectacles.

Old Trees

1400-year-old tree in South Carolina!

At 4,841 years old, this ancient bristlecone pine is the oldest known non-clonal organism on Earth. Located in the White Mountains of California, in Inyo National Forest, Methuselah's exact location is kept a close secret in order to protect it from the public.

The Most Colorful Tree in World

Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta)

Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta)

The Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta) or 'MINDANAO GUM' is the only species of Eucalyptus tree found in the northern hemisphere. As if that weren’t extraordinary enough, the up to 70-m tall tree also shines in the colours of the rainbow: its bark can take on a yellow, green, orange and even purple shading!

If you want to spot a Rainbow Eucalyptus tree live and in all its glory, you’ll have to travel to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea or Philippines, the tree’s only native places. However, it has been introduced worldwide as an exotic wood in South America, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, China and other countries.

Thunderstorming Tonight

Tonight we have been gifted with a lovely thunderstorm, thick clouds, shifting rain and tremendous crackling thunder and lightning. The sky lights up with each bolt of lightning, stupendous, you can look North, East, South and West and the sky in every direction turns white all at once.

I think I would enjoy living on some distant planet that is covered almost entirely in water, that way I would be able to enjoy storms so much more often. Wait a moment, this Earth is covered by 70% water isn't it. Why aren't I enjoying a wider array of weather more often? Sun up, sun down, up, down, up down, every once in a while a little rain and that's just about it. Maybe I should try living somewhere more tropical for a while, perhaps Hawaii, that could be nice, warm sunny days, black dark nights and storms so severe the ground trembles.

The Great Blue Hole

The Great Blue Hole

The Great Blue Hole is a large sink hole off the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of the Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 70km from the mainland. The hole is almost perfectly circular in shape, almost 1000 feet wide and about 410 feet deep. The site was made famous by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who declared it one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world. In 1971, he brought his ship, the Calypso, to the hole to chart its depths.

The Great Blue Hole is a part of the larger Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a World Heritage Site of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Eye of the Sahara

It looks like a surrealist painting, but it’s actually a photograph taken by NASA. It’s not a formation on a distant planet though, this beautiful landscape is right here on Earth. This is the Richat Structure, sometimes called the Eye of the Sahara. Initially interpreted as an asteroid impact structure because of its high degree of circularity, it is now argued to be a highly symmetrical and deeply eroded geologic dome. Despite extensive field and laboratory studies, geologists have found a lack of any credible evidence for shock metamorphism or any type of deformation indicative of a hyper-velocity extraterrestrial impact. The sedimentary rock exposed in this dome range in age from Late Proterozoic within the center of the dome to Ordovician sandstone around its edges.

Water Good

Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state (water vapor or steam). Water also exists in a liquid crystal state near hydrophilic surfaces.

Water is probably my favorite thing ever, some people think I drink too much (water) but I say if I was drinking too much it wouldn't taste as wonderful.

Water covers 70.9% of the Earth's surface, and is vital for all known forms of life. On Earth, 96.5% of the planet's water is found in oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, 1.7% in glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland, a small fraction in other large water bodies, and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation.

I wonder if any other planets have water or if they even have as much as there is on earth. And if another planet had it's own water, would it taste the same as Earth's?

Cool Pictures for Today

Asperatus Clouds

An "asperatus" cloud rolls over New Zealand's South Island in an undated picture.

This apparently new class of clouds is still a mystery. But experts suspect asperatus clouds' choppy undersides may be due to strong winds disturbing previously stable layers of warm and cold air.

Asperatus clouds may spur the first new classification in the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas since the 1950s, Gavin Pretor-Pinney said.

Since the last addition to the atlas, the emergence of satellite imagery has pushed meteorologists to take a much broader view on weather and focus less on small-scale cloud formations.

But "the tide is turning back again," in part because the humble cloud is seen as a "wild card" in climate-change prediction, Pretor-Pinney said.

LeMone agreed that clouds are a "big unknown" in climate change, mostly because climate-change models do not provide a high-enough resolution to determine what clouds' impacts will be on a changing world.

Grey/Black Asperatus Clouds

Gold Brown Asperatus Clouds

Blue/Orange Asperatus Clouds

Pillow Asperatus Clouds

Lava

Lava refers both to molten rock expelled by a volcano during an eruption and the resulting rock after solidification and cooling. This molten rock is formed in the interior of some planets, including Earth, and some of their satellites. When first erupted from a volcanic vent, lava is a liquid at temperatures from 700 to 1,200 °C (1,292 to 2,192 °F). Up to 100,000 times as viscous as water, lava can flow great distances before cooling and solidifying because of its thixotropic and shear thinning properties.

A lava flow is a moving outpouring of lava, which is created during a non-explosive effusive eruption. When it has stopped moving, lava solidifies to form igneous rock. The term lava flow is commonly shortened to lava. Explosive eruptions produce a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, rather than lava flows. The word "lava" comes from Italian, and is probably derived from the Latin word labes which means a fall or slide. The first use in connection with extruded magma (molten rock below the Earth's surface) was apparently in a short account written by Francesco Serao on the eruption of Vesuvius between May 14 and June 4, 1737. Serao described "a flow of fiery lava" as an analogy to the flow of water and mud down the flanks of the volcano following heavy rain.

Owls and Seagulls Unfortunately Die

I find the nature of the end of birds lives interesting, in particular those of the Owl and Seagull.

For starters when an Owl knows it is going to die, it will not dig a grave or make emends. An owl will perch itself upon a branch and fall to the ground when it dies. This is sad to me. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya it was believed that owls were harbingers of death. If one saw an owl or heard its hoot, someone was going to die.

Also seagulls have a unique way of dying. To my understanding what they do is fly out toward the middle of the ocean, as far as they can go and when it’s time to die, fall to the water and it's done. If this is true I do not know because we cannot ask them. Maybe they simply fly away from land where they live in search for food or following fishing boats for easy food but cannot make it back to land to rest. It could be their nature to fly out to the ocean to die, as a way of not spreading desease to it's fellow birds once decomposition begins or maybe it is done to prevent predators from eating their bodies once they have died.

Danxia Landform China

This is a unique geological phenomenon known as Danxia landform. These phenomena can be observed in several places in China. This example is located in Zhangye, Province of Gansu. The color is the result of an accumulation for millions of years of red sandstone and other rocks.

The Rain

I was just driving home in the rain, before I walked outside I looked out the window and it was pouring and I was taken by surprise. But very happy. I like the rain. The drops of water, the puddles, the thunder and lightning and everything in between.

The rain is wonderful, rain washes away the filth that builds up in the city. The garbage get washed away, dirt disappears and the trouble makers that lurk around at night, starting trouble and getting into no good, get off the streets in during the rain. The vulgar breeders are out of site and keeping to themselves for the time being.

Rain storms are a time of peacefulness. The more severity and duration of a storm makes it even better.

Lightning looks cool, and thunder sounds cool.

I think I enjoy thunderstorm during the dead of night in summers the most.