hudebnik | Network

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-microbes-microplastics-ice-clouds-reveals.html

Tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics, are showing up everywhere, even in the water in clouds, rain, and snow—and they may be affecting our weather and temperatures. A study published in Environmental Science & Technology and led by Hosein Foroutan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, found that microbes living on microplastics dramatically boost their ability to trigger ice formation in clouds.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-microbes-microplastics-ice-clouds-reveals.html

phys_environment_feed

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-rivers-tidal-currents-microfibers-oceans.html

Every time we do a load of laundry, tiny fibers of polyester escape from our clothes and slip down the drain. These microfibers, so small they can be invisible to the naked eye, are among the most common forms of microplastic in the ocean. Yet, new research published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans shows that most of them may not make it that far.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-rivers-tidal-currents-microfibers-oceans.html

thesleepingbeauty posting in

fandom_icons

All icons are HERE at

little_mermaid. ♥️

Note: This post will only be open for a few weeks … after that it will be locked to members only, so please feel free to join/subscribe if you like my work. Thank you.

lydamorehouse

Once again, I have failed to post anything beyond once a week. Ugh, I suck. Sorry, everyone!

To be fair to me, Ramadan has only just ended (happy Eid to those of you celebrating today). Ramadan has meant several late nights for me, as I've been doing anti-ICE patrols--though one of my groups actually had people patroling in the wee hours of the morning--like, 3:00 am! I wish I were the sort of person who could have done that? I bet the Dispatch calls were fascinating. And, maybe it would have inspired a vampire story or two, who knows?

Part of me will miss this. In particular, I will miss the Night Owls.

The Night Owls (which actually start at the fully normal hour of 8 pm) are an interesting group. It's a group resistance Signal call for anyone up and about until dawn, no matter where they are located. So, I've had people on with me that were coming in from exo-suburbs and even nearby small towns.

The culture of a lot of the Signal calls is that commuters and stationary/foot/bicycle patrolers say pretty quiet and only turn their mics on to do a plate check. This varies from community to community, of course, with some dispatchers encouraging more back and forth or doing round-robin check-ins. It really depends on who your "Guy/Gal/Enby in a Chair" is. There's things specific to specific groups too? My hyper-local community always signs-off with "Have a great night, Fuck ICE" in the same sort of casual tone you might tell a partner "Love ya!" before hanging up. I joke that I can always tell people from my area when they show up on the larger calls because they still do this even when its not the culture of the call? Other dispatchers sound a little thrown to hear folks from my neck of the woods just casually signing off with a happy little swear. There are also cool acronyms that I'm not fully privvy to, like some folks from the other side of the river apparently say: SSFI for Stay Safe, Fuck ICE. I tried to say that today since there are lot of little ears around the mosque during Eid, but my dyslexia was like... UH GO SLOW... so totally outed myself as NOT one of the cool kids, after all. :-)

But the Night Owls are their own special crew. Their chat is actually vetted, but the call is open to anyone commuting, etc., late night. Once daylight savings time hit, my stationary patrols started at 8:30 pm so I joined the Night Owls. The Night Owl folks are just chattier? Largely, I think because it is often the same crew--people who do the late shift UberEats or whatever other driving gigs they might have.... people who are just up all night. They will talk about their favorite energy drinks or talk about the usefulness of jumper cables or sometimes even awkwardly attempt to flirt over Signal voice chat. Ocassionaly, someone will break in with a startled, "Y'all, I just saw the world's biggest rat run across west 7th! And I used to live in Mumbai!" There was a whole discussion that spanned several nights about the ICE agents on Grindr (a gay dating app).

I got invested, you know?

These people became some Real Life version of my own personal soap opera. I am going to admit that I have clearly formed some parasocial relationships with certain code names.

That being said, they were really there for me when I needed it. There was an incident that I haven't blogged about a couple of Wednesdays back where my plate check came back hot, or shall we say VERY COLD, possibly even icy if you get my drift. I was stationary (on foot), alone, and dispatch very kindly asked me if I wanted a drive-by from one of the other commuters in the area. This icy vehicle was also stationary? We had clocked each other? Like, they were parked and the three of us had made eye contact. So, my voice jumped an octave higer than I intended and I was like, "Uh, yeah, I would not hate that, dispatch. Thank you!"

Y'all, within MINUTES rescue arrived.

Rescue was a gender fluid person on bicycle patrol. This fully bearded, beautiful human being rolled up in 10 F/ -12 C degree weather in a skirt and Wicked Witch of the West striped tights. They had a high-powered telephoto lens camera with them and, I kid you not, the sight me--this tiny, fat lesbian on a phone--and this amazing person arriving on a bicycle caused my icy van to decide THE THREAT WAS TOO BIG (which, honestly, was the most ICE-like move they made). They fled. I reported that my sus van was on the move to dispatch and I could hear commuters everywhere leaping into action. I am sure my sus van had a tail before they turned on to the next biggest throughfare.

When I had to sign out, I heard the Night Owls making sure someone would continue to swing by to keep an eye on the mosque. I was so thrown by this experience that I didn't remember to text our contact inside the mosque until I got home, but I only live minutes away, so they got the word out for people to be extra careful that evening, too. I don't know, of course, for sure the folks we chased off were who we were afraid they might be, but I'm just as happy to have freaked out any other potential bad actors, you know? I swear that right now, in the Twin Cities, you do not want to be a "local, independent pharmaceutical entrepreneur" because some commuter has eyes on your business!

So, I think this is why I feel kind of connected. Like, these are my comrades in arms (or by phone, as in the case of the Minnesota Resistance).

Happy Eid, but good-bye my dear Night Owls! SSFI*!

====
I'll still be doing rapid-response work, but probably no longer at night.

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gececondu-of-kreuzberg

The Turkish term Gececondu literally translates to "placed overnight." It refers to informal settlements, shantytowns, or slums that emerge without official blessing—typically on the outskirts of major cities and often constructed from waste and makeshift materials. One might expect this in the Middle East, Africa, South America, or developing nations, but is such a thing possible in organized, straight-laced Germany—specifically in Berlin?

It is. However, the unique feature of the Berlin Gececondu is that it owes its existence to the division of the city and the Berlin Wall.

In 1963, Osman Kalin was part of the first wave of so-called "guest workers" who came to Germany following the German-Turkish recruitment agreement. In 1980, he moved to Berlin with his wife and six children, first to Spandau and later to Kreuzberg. Located directly against the Wall was a 350-square-meter triangular wasteland; the plot technically belonged to East Berlin but was located on the West Berlin side of the border.

Starting in 1983, having retired by then, he began clearing the site of rubbish to cultivate vegetables. In the shadow of the Wall, he built a hut out of wardrobe doors, bed frames, and hand-mixed concrete. Initially, East German border guards watched him with deep suspicion, fearing the construction of an escape tunnel. When two VoPo's, policemen from the GDR came to stop him, he was stubbornly pretending not to understand their language and that the land was his property for a long time.

After the fall of the Wall, the Gececondu—or "guerrilla garden," as it is also known—managed to survive for several reasons. On one hand, political leaders appreciated the cultural and folkloric anomaly as a tourist attraction and a symbol of a multicultural, open Berlin; on the other hand, a cash-strapped Berlin lacked the funds to fully restore the Engelbecken (a former canal basin) that once occupied the site.

Thus, Osman was able to grow kale, tomatoes, cherries, and cabbage here until his death in 2018. Today, his son Mehmet and another Turkish family tend to the plot. In writings about the family, one perceives a certain "Anatolian craftiness" and an Eastern interpretation of rules: sympathetic politicians are met with warmth, while inquisitive journalists are often charged a €50 "expense fee" for interviews. Mehmet plans to turn the place into a museum in honor of his father. He charges tourists E5 for visits and has even put up a fake street sign: Osman Kalin Plath 0,1.

The future of the Gececondu is unclear, yet it remains a Berlin curiosity and holds a permanent place in the city's Turkish diaspora.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gececondu-of-kreuzberg

ysabetwordsmith posting in

birdfeeding

Today is mostly sunny and quite warm. It's already 78°F outside. 0_o

I fed the birds. I've only seen a few sparrows and house finches, but lots of birds are singing all around the yard. I suspect they're more interested in foraging.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/20/26 -- I sowed 3 troughs with 'Sugar Ann' snap peas and 3 with 'Avalanche' snow peas. I put 2 peas in each end of a trough, leaving the middle open to plant other things. That makes 24 pea plants. These are bush types and did well last year.

.

Current Mood: busy

smallhobbit

Early in the week we visited Aberglasney Gardens in Wales. In the Ninfarium the Bird of Paradise plant was flowering.

sovay

How has this month been going? I woke up to spring and didn't even realize. It looks the part: the occasional crocus, a faint fluff of clouds in a harebell sky. Hestia is absorbing the sun-flood from my desk. I will be celebrating the equinox with an MRI. My major accomplishment of yesterday was successfully wresting a permit from the Parking Department. I am filing a request for an intercalary year.

Current Music: Boyracer, "Unknown Frequencies"

phys_environment_feed

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-western.html

A record early heat wave striking the west of the United States on Friday is a one-in-500-years type event and all but certainly the result of human-caused climate change, experts say.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-western.html

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-largest-coffee-cup-in-colombia

September 2019

Cocaine once reigned. But coffee is the king again in Colombia. And as many international tourists are making their way back to the more remote parts of this majestic South American country, the image of Juan Valdez, the “face” of the Colombia coffee grower, is who they want you to remember. Not Pablo Escobar, the face of a Narco industry which fueled a different kind of agriculture which tore this country apart for decades.

In fact, coffee tourism has become THE THING to do in Colombia now. Why? Well, it’s safe to go to the interior of Colombia where small family farms are located but were once riddled with fighting fractions on the left, the military and those just trying to protect their land from narco-trade.

In towns in and around Chinchina, Colombia many small family farms which struggled to survive over the last 30 years are seeing a resurgence of business by opening up their “Fincas,” or plantations/farms to tourists with a full-blown lesson of the production of coffee, a tasting, followed by the visitor getting to pick coffee beans just like the workers on the property. Your beans go into the Colombian “Collectivo,” for coffee production and some farms will even give you a certificate from the Colombian government showing your contribution to the coffee industry.

So proud are the Colombians of this economic stimilant to the region, that in the center of the coffee region they have erected what was at one time the world’s largest coffee mug. It is located at the Parque Principal in Chinchina.

The cup was unveiled for a Guinness Book of Records stunt in June 2019 to fill it with it with the largest cup of coffee in history. They were successful with 22,739.14 litres (5,001.91 UK gal; 6,007.04 US gal). Since it took fifty people and more than a month to construct the project, the cup remains in the plaza for all to behold. (In 2022, a larger cup was unveiled in Leon, Mexico.)

Colombians will admit they are not the largest coffee producers in the world. And their coffee isn’t the strongest. They don’t fetch the highest price on the market for their coffee either. But now that the aggressive years of left- and right-wing fighting seems to be behind them, Colombians may be the proudest of their coffee production. And they have one of the largest coffee cups in the world to prove it now.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-largest-coffee-cup-in-colombia

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/molamuseum

Mola fabrics on display in one of the rooms at the museum

The Mola Museum is a must-visit while exploring Panama City. Tucked along a quiet side street in the historic Casco Viejo neighborhood, this intimate museum celebrates the extraordinary textile artistry of the Guna (Kuna) people. Through thoughtfully curated exhibits, visitors gain insight into both the history of the Guna community in Panama and the intricate craft of their traditional textiles, known as molas.

The experience begins with a life-size video installation of a woman dressed in traditional Guna attire, offering a vivid introduction to the culture behind the art. From there, a series of rooms display stunning examples of molas, each accompanied by explanations of their symbolism and meaning. Inspired largely by the natural world around them, Guna artisans create vibrant, layered designs using a meticulous reverse-appliqué technique. Each piece, often composed of two intricately cut and stitched layers, can take anywhere from three days to a week to complete, with many designs telling rich visual stories.

The museum’s collection focuses primarily on works created before 1975, preserving an important chapter of Guna artistic heritage. In addition to the textiles, visitors will also find thoughtfully placed photography that adds further cultural context to this remarkable tradition.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/molamuseum

phys_environment_feed

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-vertical-gardens-effective-indoor-air.html

Researchers at the University of Seville have demonstrated the effectiveness of active vertical garden systems in improving indoor air quality in buildings. To do so, they worked inside a closed glass chamber installed at the Higher Technical School of Agricultural Engineering, where they found that after 24 hours, 96% to 98% of the pollutants used in the various experiments had disappeared. The work is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-vertical-gardens-effective-indoor-air.html

ribirdnerd posting in

birdfeeding

Friday - First day of spring - although it has felt more like winter most of this week.

Still the days are getting longer and the sun is brighter. We had a pair of Canada Goose come up from the pond to join the other regular visitors today.

atlas_obscura_places_feed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/salt-creek

Adit screened off with bat-friendly grate.

About 30 miles north of Baker, California, on State Route 127, is an unexpected occurrence: a flowing creek. Salt Creek rises in the Silurian Valley to the south, toward Soda Lake, and flows northward into the Amargosa River as the latter makes a hairpin bend into the southern end of Death Valley. Because the area is extremely arid, both Salt Creek and the Amargosa River flow mostly underground.

Except here, where shallow bedrock forces Salt Creek to the surface, where it follows a channel carved into the bedrock. This occurrence of surface water was obviously of extreme importance to wildlife, not to mention human populations. Indeed, Salt Creek was a stop on the Old Spanish Trail, which connected Los Angeles with Santa Fe (now in New Mexico) in the early 19th century.

Although Salt Creek has the occasional huge flood along it, its channel through the bedrock of the Salt Creek Hills nonetheless seems disproportionate to the size of the creek. It seems that at some times in the Pleistocene the Mojave River flowed through here and carved the channel. At present, the Mojave River is also normally dry. It currently ends at Soda Lake south of Baker. However, exceptionally large flows down the Mojave, such as would occur during extremely wet intervals, would cause Soda Lake to overflow northward into the Salt Creek drainage, and the Mojave would then become an active tributary to the Amargosa.

Until recently tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) trees were abundant along Salt Creek through here, as can be seen in some of the 2006 pictures. This tree is an exotic that has become established throughout the arid West. Because it competes with native vegetation, it is a subject of eradication efforts, and Salt Creek was cleared of tamarisk in the 2010s.

This area also holds the remains of some of the earliest Euro-American mining activity in the Mojave. In the early 1860s gold was struck in the Salt Creek Hills about a mile east of Salt Creek, but miners were driven off and killed by the local Paiutes. Amargosa House, said to be the oldest Euro-American building in the Mojave, dates from this era. It survives as a well-defined ruin today.

Mining had resumed by the 1880s, and a stamp mill (whose ruins survive) was even built. Intermittent activity continued till the early 20th century. Open shafts and adits remain from that era; they have been screened off for safety, but they have not been filled in. Instead they have been covered with coarse steel grates. This is to allow bats access, as abandoned mines have become important habitat for bats.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/salt-creek

phys_environment_feed

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-groundwater-contamination-poorly-paulo-metropolitan.html

The São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) in Brazil has approximately 22 million inhabitants and consumes an average of 61.6 cubic meters (61,600 liters) of water per second. Although nearly the entire public water supply originates from surface sources, it is estimated that about 18% of total consumption relies on aquifers through approximately 14,000 private wells. Aquifers contribute approximately 347 million cubic meters of water per year.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-groundwater-contamination-poorly-paulo-metropolitan.html

phys_environment_feed

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-deep-freshwater-reservoir-hidden-beneath.html

A potentially huge underground reservoir of freshwater beneath the Great Salt Lake is coming into sharper focus with a new study that used airborne electromagnetic (AEM) surveys to X-ray geologic structures under Farmington Bay and Antelope Island off the lake's southeastern shore.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-deep-freshwater-reservoir-hidden-beneath.html

james_davis_nicoll

If you love dice-rolling and superheroes, you're in for a treat...

Four New Superhero RPGs to Watch Out For

james_davis_nicoll

An assortment of stories from the author of Severance.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

andrewducker

1. Earth's first mass extinction may have been far worse than believed: (tags:extinction prehistory paleontology )
2. People using AI to give law advice finally reaches Scotland.: (tags:ai law scotland )
3. Denmark was preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland in January, with military support from France, Germany, and Nordic nations.: (tags:war usa norway germany france denmark )
4. This perfectly encapsulates why I won't surf the web without an ad-blocker: (tags:advertising web newspapers )
5. How *did* a multi-storey car park get built in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle?: (tags:edinburgh cars history )
6. Waymo self driving cars are 13x safer than humans: (tags:safety automation driving cars )
7. Police Scotland announce they don't want trans people to report any crimes: (tags:transgender LGBT bigotry OhForFucksSake Scotland )
8. The change that made lighthouses work much better - and why it drove the keepers mad. (Lots and lots of mercury): (tags:mercury light history safety ships )
9. Gen Z is broke, stressed and exhausted - but boomers won't accept it: (tags:stress society doom )

marcicat

(This isn't even one of the tabs I had open yesterday! They are still there, ~~taunting~~ tempting me!)

Mama's Boy, Mama's Boy, by WhimperSoldier

Shane's first mistake was going to talk to Ilya Rozanov before their game. His second was immediately, stupidly, meeting the eyes of Rozanov’s very much dead mother hovering at his side.

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hudebnik

March 2026

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Page Summary

phys_environment_feed - Microbes make microplastics more likely to form ice in clouds, research reveals
phys_environment_feed - Rivers and tidal currents keep 80% of microfibers from reaching oceans, study suggests
thesleepingbeauty in fandom_icons - 40 Multi-fandom icons
lydamorehouse - What? It's Friday?
atlas_obscura_places_feed - Gececondu of Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
smallhobbit - 2026 Photo #6
sovay - Shaking off the echoes of yesterday
phys_environment_feed - Record-breaking heat wave grips western US
atlas_obscura_places_feed - The Largest Coffee Cup in Colombia in Chinchiná, Colombia
atlas_obscura_places_feed - Mola Museum (MuMo) in Panamá City, Panama
phys_environment_feed - Vertical gardens prove effective in improving indoor air quality
ribirdnerd in birdfeeding - Birds
atlas_obscura_places_feed - Salt Creek and the Salt Creek Hills in California
phys_environment_feed - Risk of groundwater contamination is still poorly monitored in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area, rese
phys_environment_feed - The deep freshwater reservoir hidden beneath the Great Salt Lake
james_davis_nicoll - Four New Superhero RPGs to Watch Out For
james_davis_nicoll - Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 20-03-2026
marcicat - fic rec Friday

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