The Biology of Bonsai Trees: The Science Behind the Traditional Japanese Art Form

The art of bon­sai orig­i­nat­ed in Chi­na. As sub­se­quent­ly refined in Japan, its tech­niques pro­duce minia­ture trees that give aes­thet­ic plea­sure to peo­ple all around Asia and the wider world beyond. This appre­ci­a­tion is reflect­ed in the cou­ple-on-the-street inter­view footage incor­po­rat­ed into “The Biol­o­gy Behind Bon­sai Trees,” the video above from Youtu­ber Jon­ny Lim, bet­ter known as The Back­pack­ing Biol­o­gist. Not only does Lim gath­er pos­i­tive views on bon­sai around Los Ange­les, he also finds in that same city a bon­sai nurs­ery run by Bob Pressler, who has spent more than half a cen­tu­ry mas­ter­ing the art.

Even Pressler admits that he does­n’t ful­ly under­stand the biol­o­gy of bon­sai. Lim’s search for sci­en­tif­ic answers sends him to “some­thing called the api­cal meris­tem.” That’s the part of the tree made of “stem cells found at the tips of the shoots and roots.” Stem cells, as you may remem­ber from their long moment in the news a few years ago, have the poten­tial to turn into any kind of cell.

The cells of bon­sai are the same size as those of reg­u­lar trees, research has revealed, but thanks to the delib­er­ate cut­ting of roots and resul­tant restric­tion of nutri­ents to the api­cal meris­tem, their leaves are made up of few­er cells in total. Lim draws an anal­o­gy with bak­ing cook­ies of dif­fer­ent sizes: “The com­po­nents are exact­ly the same. The only dif­fer­ence is that bon­sais have less start­ing mate­r­i­al.”

Hav­ing gained his own appre­ci­a­tion for bon­sai, Lim also wax­es poet­ic on how these minia­ture trees “still grow on the face of adver­si­ty, and they do so per­fect­ly.” But as one com­menter replies, “Why recre­ate adver­si­ty?” Claim­ing that the process is “crip­pling trees for just aes­thet­ics,” this indi­vid­ual presents one of the known cas­es against bon­sai. But that case, accord­ing to the experts Lim con­sults, is based on cer­tain com­mon mis­con­cep­tions about the process­es involved: that the wires used to posi­tion limbs “tor­ture” the trees, for exam­ple. But as oth­ers point out, do those who make these anti-bon­sai argu­ments feel just as pained about the many lawns that get mown down each and every week?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art & Phi­los­o­phy of Bon­sai

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

What Makes the Art of Bon­sai So Expen­sive?: $1 Mil­lion for a Bon­sai Tree, and $32,000 for Bon­sai Scis­sors

The Art of Cre­at­ing a Bon­sai: One Year Con­densed Con­densed Into 22 Mes­mer­iz­ing Min­utes

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

A Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion Com­pares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bon­sai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Ergonomics Experts Explain How to Set Up Your Desk

Ergonom­ics aren’t a joke, Jim. — Dwight Schrute, The Office

Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions are snow­balling faster than ever in the third decade of the 21st-cen­tu­ry. A home office set-up that would have been cause for pride in 2019 seems woe­ful­ly inad­e­quate now.

Just ask any­one whose desk job piv­ot­ed to vir­tu­al in March of 2020.

So, per­haps don’t take phys­i­cal ther­a­pist’s Jon Cinkay’s near­ly three year old advice in the above Wall Street Jour­nal video as gospel, but rather as a chance to check in with your carpal tun­nels, your aching neck and back, and your favorite refur­bished office fur­ni­ture out­let.

Cinkay assumes that your desk is a stan­dard 29 — 30” tall, which is not the case here, but okay…

Our bod­ies’ unique dimen­sions mean that no desk can be a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion, and Cinkay makes a robust case for mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions:

1. Adjust your desk chair

Cinkay rec­om­mends adjust­ing the seat height until your elbows are bent at a 90-degree angle when your fin­gers are on the key­board. (As of this writ­ing, key­boards have not yet become obso­lete.)

In a 2020 arti­cle for the Hos­pi­tal of Spe­cial Surgery, he also rec­om­mends mak­ing sure your chair’s arm­rests can fit under your desk to avoid pos­tur­al com­pro­mis­es when reach­ing for your key­board or mouse.

He also wise­ly advis­es look­ing for a chair with a min­i­mum 30-day war­ran­ty so you don’t get stuck with an expen­sive mis­take.

2. Con­sid­er a foot­stool

If crank­ing your desk chair to the per­fect height leaves your feet dan­gling, you’ll need a foot­stool to help your knees main­tain a prop­er 90-degree bend. If you can’t invest in a high tech adjustable foot­stool, a ream of paper will do in a pinch.

Tech expert David Zhang, who we’ll hear from soon below, rests his cute striped socks on a yoga mat.

Who among us does not have dozens of things that could be pressed into ser­vice as a foot­stool?

I am left to pon­der the fate of the dec­o­ra­tive needle­point­ed foot­stools my late grand­moth­er and her sis­ters scat­tered around their liv­ing rooms.

Can an actu­al foot­stool be con­sid­ered a foot­stool hack?

3. Adjust the height of your mon­i­tor 

To avoid neck pain, use a mon­i­tor stand to posi­tion the top of the screen lev­el with your eyes. If you’re work­ing with a lap­top, you’ll need a stand, a sep­a­rate key­board and and a mouse.

Cinkay’s mon­i­tor stand hack is — you guessed it — a ream of paper.

Mine is 5000 Years of the Art of India which is about the same thick­ness as a ream of paper and was in easy reach at the library where I work.

To judge by some of the com­ments on Cinkay’s Wall Street Jour­nal video, his key­board dates to the Stone Age.

What­ev­er his key­board vin­tage, the afore­men­tioned arti­cle did sug­gest gel wrist rests to relieve pres­sure on the sen­si­tive carpal tun­nel area, but watch out! Zhang is not a fan!

4. Get a Head­set

Leav­ing aside the fact that the phone in ques­tion appears to be a land­line, a head­set allows you to keep your head on straight, thus min­i­miz­ing neck and shoul­der pain.

5. Remem­ber that you’re not chained to your desk

Of all the ergonom­ic advice offered above, this seems like­li­est to remain ever­green.

Take a snack break, a water break, a bath­room break, and while you’re at it toss in a cou­ple of the stretch­es Cinkay rec­om­mends.

(The Mayo Clin­ic has more, includ­ing our favorite shoul­der stretch.)

Zhang’s desk-cen­tric video was uploaded in 2017, when key­board trays were already becom­ing a rel­ic of a bygone era. 

As men­tioned, he’s anti-wrist rest. If your wrists are in need of sup­port, and they are, get a palm rest!

Zhang’s also crit­i­cal of draw­ers and — unusu­al for 2017 — stand­ing desks though like Cirkay, he’s a big fan of stand­ing up and mov­ing around.

His video descrip­tion includes some com­mon sense, ass-cov­er­ing encour­age­ment for view­ers with irreg­u­lar symp­toms or pain to seek pro­fes­sion­al help. We think this means med­ical pro­fes­sion­al, though unsur­pris­ing­ly, ergonom­ic assess­ment is a fast grow­ing field. It’s expen­sive but pos­si­bly costs less in the long run than rush­ing out to buy what­ev­er a stranger on the inter­net tells you to.

To that end, we appre­ci­ate Zhang’s trans­paren­cy regard­ing his channel’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Ama­zon Ser­vices LLC Asso­ciates affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram.

Caveat emp­tor!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Why Sit­ting Is The New Smok­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Expla­na­tion

Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

Behold the Elab­o­rate Writ­ing Desks of 18th Cen­tu­ry Aris­to­crats

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Did People Do Before the Invention of Eyeglasses?

You remem­ber it — one of the most heart­break­ing scenes on TV. A man longs for noth­ing more than time to read, to be free of all those peo­ple Sartre told us make our hells. Final­ly grant­ed his wish by the H‑Bomb, he then acci­den­tal­ly break his glass­es, ren­der­ing him­self unable make out a word. Oh, cru­el irony! Not an optometrist or opti­cian in sight! Sure­ly, there are “Time Enough at Last” jokes at eye care con­ven­tions world­wide.

Moral­i­ty tales wrapped in sci­ence fic­tion might make us think about all sorts of things, but one of the most obvi­ous ques­tions when we wit­ness the fate of Mr. Hen­ry Bemis, “char­ter mem­ber in the fra­ter­ni­ty of dream­ers,” might be, but what did peo­ple do before cor­rec­tive lens­es? Were mil­lions forced to accept his fate, liv­ing out their lives with far­sight­ed­ness, near­sight­ed­ness, and oth­er defects that impede vision? How did ear­ly humans sur­vive in times much less hos­pitable to dis­abil­i­ties? At least there were oth­ers to read and describe things for them.…

In truth, the Twi­light Zone is not far off the mark. Or at least near­sight­ed­ness and read­ing are close­ly linked. “As long as pri­mates have been around, there’s prob­a­bly been myopia,” says pro­fes­sor of oph­thal­mol­o­gy Ivan Schwab. But Schwab argues in his book Evo­lu­tion’s Wit­ness: How Eyes Evolved that the rise of read­ing like­ly caused sky­rock­et­ing rates of myopia over the past three hun­dred years. “Though genes and nutri­tion may play a role in near­sight­ed­ness,” Natal­ie Jacewicz writes at NPR, “[Schwab] says edu­ca­tion and myopia seem to be linked, sug­gest­ing that when peo­ple do a lot of close work, their eyes grow longer.”

As the His­to­ry Dose video above explains, the old­est image of a pair of glass­es dates from a 1351 paint­ing of Car­di­nal Hugh of Saint-Cher. The paint­ing is an anachro­nism — spec­ta­cles, the nar­ra­tor tells us, were invent­ed 23 years ear­li­er in Pisa, after the car­di­nal’s death. They “grad­u­al­ly spread across Europe and trav­elled the Silk Road to Chi­na.” (The old­est sur­viv­ing pair of glass­es dates from around 1475). So what hap­pened before 1286? As you’ll learn, glass­es were not the only way to enlarge small items. In fact, humans have been using some form of mag­ni­fy­ing lens to read small print (or man­u­script or cuneiform or what-have-you) for thou­sands of years. Those lens­es, how­ev­er, cor­rect­ed pres­by­opia, or far-sight­ed­ness.

Those with myopia were most­ly out of luck until the inven­tion of sophis­ti­cat­ed lens-grind­ing tech­niques and improved vision tests. But for most of human his­to­ry, unless you were a sailor or a sol­dier, you “like­ly spent your day as an arti­san, smith, or farm work­er,” occu­pa­tions where dis­tance vision did­n’t mat­ter as much. In fact, arti­sans like medieval scribes and illu­mi­na­tors, says Neil Han­d­ley — muse­um cura­tor of the Col­lege of Optometrists, Lon­don — were “actu­al­ly encour­aged to remain in their myopic con­di­tion, because it was actu­al­ly ide­al for them doing this job.”

It was­n’t until well after the time of Guten­berg that wear­ing lens­es on one’s face became a thing — and hard­ly a pop­u­lar thing at first. Ear­ly glass­es were held up to the eyes, not worn. They were heavy, thick, and frag­ile. In the 15th cen­tu­ry, “because… they were unusu­al and rare,” says Han­d­ley, “they were seen as hav­ing mag­i­cal pow­ers” and their wear­ers viewed as “in league with the dev­il, immoral.” That stig­ma went away, even if glass­es picked up oth­er asso­ci­a­tions that some­times made their users the sub­ject of taunts. But by the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, glass­es were com­mon around the world.

Giv­en that we all spend most of our time inter­act­ing with small text and images on hand­held screens, it seems maybe they haven’t spread wide­ly enough. “More than a bil­lion, and maybe as many as 2.5 bil­lion, peo­ple in the world need but don’t have glass­es to cor­rect for var­i­ous vision impair­ments,” notes Live­science, cit­ing fig­ures from The New York Times. For many peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in the devel­op­ing world, the ques­tion of how to get by in the world with­out eye­glass­es is still a very press­ing, present-day issue.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Old­est Sur­viv­ing Pair of Glass­es (Cir­ca 1475)

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Japanese Researcher Sleeps in the Same Location as Her Cat for 24 Consecutive Nights!


Cross cat nap­ping with bed hop­ping and you might end up hav­ing an “adven­ture in com­fort” sim­i­lar to the one that informs stu­dent Yuri Naka­hashi’s the­sis for Tokyo’s Hosei Uni­ver­si­ty.

For 24 con­sec­u­tive nights, Naka­hashi for­went the com­forts of her own bed in favor of a green sleep­ing bag, unfurled in what­ev­er ran­dom loca­tion one of her five pet cats had cho­sen as its sleep­ing spot that evening.

(The choice of which cat would get the plea­sure of dic­tat­ing each night’s sleep­ing bag coor­di­nates was also ran­dom­ized.)

As the own­er of five cats, Naka­hashi pre­sum­ably knew what she was sign­ing up for…

 

Cats rack out atop sofa backs, on stairs, and under beds…and so did Naka­hashi.

Her pho­tos sug­gest she logged a lot of time on a bare wood­en floor.

A Fit­Bit mon­i­tored the dura­tion and qual­i­ty of time spent asleep, as well as the fre­quen­cy with which she awak­ened dur­ing the night.

She doc­u­ment­ed the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of this exper­i­ment in an inter­ac­tive pub­lished by the Infor­ma­tion Pro­cess­ing Soci­ety of Japan.

She reports that she eager­ly await­ed the rev­e­la­tion of each night’s coor­di­nates, and that even when her sleep was dis­rupt­ed by her pets’ mid­dle of the night groom­ing rou­tines, bunk­ing next to them had a “relax­ing effect.”

Mean­while, our research sug­gests that the same exper­i­ment would awak­en a vast­ly dif­fer­ent response in a dif­fer­ent human sub­ject, one suf­fer­ing from ail­uro­pho­bia, say, or severe aller­gies to the pro­teins in feline sali­va, urine, and dan­der.

What’s real­ly sur­pris­ing about Nakahashi’s itin­er­ant, and appar­ent­ly plea­sure-filled under­tak­ing is how lit­tle dif­fer­ence there is between her aver­age sleep score dur­ing the exper­i­ment and her aver­age sleep score from the 20 days pre­ced­ing it.

At left, an aver­age sleep score of 84.2 for the 20 days lead­ing up to exper­i­ment. At right, an aver­age sleep score 83.7 dur­ing the exper­i­ment.

Nakahashi’s entry for the YouFab Glob­al Cre­ative Awards, a prize for “work that attempts a dia­logue that tran­scends the bound­aries of species, space, and time” reflects the play­ful spir­it she brought to her slight­ly off-kil­ter exper­i­ment:

 Is it pos­si­ble to add diver­si­ty to the way we enjoy sleep? Let’s think about food. In addi­tion to the taste and nutri­tion of the food, each meal is a spe­cial expe­ri­ence with diver­si­ty depend­ing on the peo­ple you are eat­ing with, the atmos­phere of the restau­rant, the weath­er, and many oth­er fac­tors. In order to bring this kind of enjoy­ment to sleep, we pro­pose an “adven­ture in com­fort” in which the cat decides where to sleep each night, away from the fixed bed­room and bed. This project is sim­i­lar to going out to eat with a good friend at a restau­rant, where the cat guides you to sleep.

She notes that tra­di­tion­al beds have an immo­bil­i­ty owing to “their phys­i­cal weight and cul­tur­al con­cepts such as direc­tion.”

This sug­gests that her work could be of some ben­e­fit to humans in decid­ed­ly less fan­ci­ful, invol­un­tary sit­u­a­tions, whose lack of hous­ing leads them to sleep in unpre­dictable, and inhos­pitable loca­tions.

Naka­hashi’s time in the green sleep­ing bag inspired her to cre­ate the below mod­el of a more flex­i­ble bed, using a polypropy­lene bag, rice and nylon film.

We have cre­at­ed a pro­to­type of a dou­ble-lay­ered inflat­able bed that has a pouch struc­ture that inflates with air and a jam­ming struc­ture that becomes hard when air is com­pressed. The pouch side soft­ly receives the body when inflat­ed. The jam­ming side becomes hard when the air is removed, and can be firm­ly fixed in an even space. The air is designed to move back and forth between the two lay­ers, so that when not in use, the whole thing can be rolled up soft­ly for stor­age. 

It’s hard to imag­ine the pres­ence of a pussy­cat doing much to ame­lio­rate the anx­i­ety of those forced to flee their famil­iar beds with lit­tle warn­ing, but we can see how Nakahashi’s design might bring a degree of phys­i­cal relief when sleep­ing in sub­way sta­tions, base­ment cor­ners, and oth­er har­row­ing loca­tions.

Via Spoon & Toma­go

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A 110-Year-Old Book Illus­trat­ed with Pho­tos of Kit­tens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

The New Herbal: A Masterpiece of Renaissance Botanical Illustrations Gets Republished in a Beautiful 900-Page Book

We’ve all have heard of the fuch­sia, a flower (or genus of flow­er­ing plant) native to Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca but now grown far and wide. Though even the least botan­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate among us know it, we may have occa­sion­al trou­ble spelling its name. The key is to remem­ber who the fuch­sia was named for: Leon­hart Fuchs, a Ger­man physi­cian and botanist of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry. More than 450 years after his death, Fuchs is remem­bered as not just the name­sake of a flower, but as the author of an enor­mous book detail­ing the vari­eties of plants and their med­i­c­i­nal uses. His was a land­mark achieve­ment in the form known as the herbal, exam­ples of which we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture from ninth- and eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­land.

But De His­to­ria Stir­pi­um Com­men­tarii Insignes, as this work was known upon its ini­tial 1542 pub­li­ca­tion in Latin, has worn uncom­mon­ly well through the ages. Or rather, Fuchs’ per­son­al, hand-col­ored orig­i­nal has, com­ing down to us in 2022 as the source for Taschen’s The New Herbal. “A mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance botany and pub­lish­ing,” accord­ing to the pub­lish­er, the book includes “over 500 illus­tra­tions, includ­ing the first visu­al record of New World plant types such as maize, cac­tus, and tobac­co.”

Buy­ers also have their choice of Eng­lish, Ger­man, and French edi­tions, each with its own trans­la­tions of Fuchs’ “essays describ­ing the plants’ fea­tures, ori­gins, and med­i­c­i­nal pow­ers.” (You can also read a Dutch ver­sion of the orig­i­nal online at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.)

Nat­u­ral­ly, some of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in these near­ly five-cen­tu­ry-old sci­en­tif­ic writ­ings will be a bit dat­ed at this point, but the appeal of the illus­tra­tions has nev­er dimmed. “Fuchs pre­sent­ed each plant with metic­u­lous wood­cut illus­tra­tions, refin­ing the abil­i­ty for swift species iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and set­ting new stan­dards for accu­ra­cy and qual­i­ty in botan­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions.” Over 500 of them go into the book: “Weigh­ing more than 10 pounds,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert, “the near­ly 900-page vol­ume is an ode to Fuchs’ research and the field of Renais­sance botany, detail­ing plants like the leafy gar­den bal­sam and root-cov­ered man­drake.”

Taschen’s repro­duc­tions of these works of botan­i­cal art look to do jus­tice to Leon­hart Fuchs’ lega­cy, espe­cial­ly in the bril­liance of their col­ors. It’s enough to rein­force the assump­tion that the man has received trib­ute not just through fuch­sia the flower but fuch­sia the col­or as well. But such a dual con­nec­tion turns out to be in doubt: the col­or’s name derives from rosani­line hydrochlo­ride, also known as fuch­sine, orig­i­nal­ly a trade name applied by its man­u­fac­tur­er Renard frères et Franc. The name fus­chine, in turn, derives from fuchs, the Ger­man trans­la­tion of renard. The New Herbal is, of course, a work of botany rather than lin­guis­tics, but it should nev­er­the­less stim­u­late in its behold­ers an aware­ness of the inter­con­nec­tion of knowl­edge that fired up the Renais­sance mind.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Space Sex is Serious Business: A Hilarious Short Animation Addresses Serious Questions About Human Reproduction in Space

Back in the late 80s, there was a rumor float­ing around that Earth Girls Are Easy.

40 some years of sci­en­tif­ic and social advance­ment have shift­ed the con­ver­sa­tion­al focus.

We’re just now begin­ning to under­stand that Space Sex is Seri­ous Busi­ness.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk achieves his goal of estab­lish­ing a per­ma­nent human pres­ence on Mars.

Sure­ly at some point in their long trav­els to and res­i­dence on Mars, those pio­neers would get down to busi­ness in much the same way that rats, fruit flies, par­a­sitic wasps, and Japan­ese rice fish have while under obser­va­tion on pri­or space expe­di­tions.

Mean­while, we’re seri­ous­ly lack­ing in human data.

A pair of human astro­nauts, Jan Davis and Mark Lee, made his­to­ry in 1992 as the first mar­ried cou­ple to enter space togeth­er, but NASA insist­ed their rela­tions remained strict­ly pro­fes­sion­al for the dura­tion, and that a shut­tle’s crew com­part­ment is too small for the sort of antics a nasty-mind­ed pub­lic kept ask­ing about.

In an inter­view with Mens Health, Colonel Mike Mul­lane, a vet­er­an of three space mis­sions, con­firmed that a space­craft’s lay­out does­n’t favor romance:

The only pri­va­cy would have been in the air lock, but every­body would know what you were doing. You’re not out there doing a space­walk. There’s no rea­son to be in there.

Short­ly after Davis and Lee returned to earth, NASA for­mal­ized an unspo­ken rule pro­hibit­ing hus­bands and wives from ven­tur­ing into space togeth­er. It did lit­tle to squelch pub­lic inter­est in space sex.

One won­ders if NASA’s rule has been rewrit­ten in accor­dance with the times. Air lock aside, might same sex cou­ples remain free to swing what het­ero-nor­ma­tive mar­rieds (arguably) can­not?

This is but one of hun­dreds of space sex ques­tions beg­ging fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion.

Some of the most seri­ous are raised in Tom McCarten’s wit­ty col­lage ani­ma­tion for FiveThir­tyEight, above.

Name­ly how dam­ag­ing will cos­mic radi­a­tion and micro­grav­i­ty prove to human repro­duc­tion? As more humans toy with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of leav­ing Earth, this ques­tion feels less and less hypo­thet­i­cal.

Mag­gie Koerth-Bak­er, who researched and nar­rates the ani­mat­ed short, notes that Musk por­trayed the risks of radi­a­tion as minor dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 67th Inter­na­tion­al Astro­nau­ti­cal Con­gress in Guadala­jara, Mex­i­co, and breathed not a peep as to the effects of micro­grav­i­ty.

Yet sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies of non-human space trav­el­ers doc­u­ment a host of repro­duc­tive issues includ­ing low­ered libido, atyp­i­cal hor­mone lev­els, ovu­la­to­ry dys­func­tion, mis­car­riages, and fetal muta­tions.

On its web­page, NASA pro­vides some infor­ma­tion about the Repro­duc­tion, Devel­op­ment, and Sex Dif­fer­ences Lab­o­ra­to­ry of its Space Bio­sciences Research Branch, but remains mum on top­ics of press­ing con­cern to, say, stu­dents in a typ­i­cal mid­dle school sex ed class.

Like achiev­ing and main­tain­ing erec­tions in micro­grav­i­ty.

In Phys­i­ol­o­gy News Mag­a­zine, Dr. Adam Watkins, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Repro­duc­tive and Devel­op­men­tal Phys­i­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham, sug­gests that inter­nal and exter­nal atmos­pher­ic changes would make such things, par­don the pun, hard:

First­ly, just stay­ing in close con­tact with each oth­er under zero grav­i­ty is hard. Sec­ond­ly, as astro­nauts expe­ri­ence low­er blood pres­sure while in space, main­tain­ing erec­tions and arousal are more prob­lem­at­ic than here on Earth. 

The excep­tion­al­ly forth­right Col Mul­lane has some con­tra­dic­to­ry first hand expe­ri­ence that should come as a relief to all humankind:

A cou­ple of times, I would wake up from sleep peri­ods and I had a bon­er that I could have drilled through kryp­tonite.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, per­son­al­ly, still require con­vinc­ing on that point, just have a look at Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, the draw­ings of Ernst Hein­rich Haeck­el, Eliz­a­beth Black­well’s A Curi­ous Herbal, and Nan­cy Anne Kings­bury Woll­stonecraft’s Spec­i­mens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to men­tion the paint­ings of Geor­gia O’ Keeffe — all pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But those works con­cern them­selves only with plant life as it exists above ground.

What goes on down below, under­neath the soil? That you can see for your­self — and with­out hav­ing to pull up one of our fine flow­er­ing (or non-flow­er­ing) friends to do so — at Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty’s online archive of root sys­tem draw­ings. “The out­come of 40 years of  root sys­tem exca­va­tions in Europe,” says that site, the col­lec­tion con­tains 1,180 dia­grams of species from Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christ­mas tree) to Zygo­phyl­lum xan­thoxy­lon (a faint­ly scrub­by-look­ing native of the arid and semi-arid regions of con­ti­nents like Africa and Aus­tralia).

The site explains that “the draw­ings, their analy­sis and descrip­tion were done by Univ. Prof. Dr. Erwin Licht­eneg­ger (1928–2004) and Univ. Prof. Dr. Lore Kutschera (1917–2008), leader of Pflanzen­sozi­ol­o­gis­ches Insti­tut, Kla­gen­furt, (now in Bad Gois­ern, Aus­tria).”

Over the course of 40 years, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Erin Blake­more, Licht­eneg­ger and Kustchera “col­lab­o­rat­ed on an enor­mous ‘root atlas’ that maps the under­ground tra­jec­to­ries of com­mon Euro­pean plants.” Cre­at­ed through “a labo­ri­ous sys­tem of dig­ging up and doc­u­ment­ing the intri­cate sys­tems,” these draw­ings are “also art in their own right, hon­or­ing the beau­ty of a part of plants most nev­er give that much thought.”

Even the least botan­i­cal­ly aware among us knows that plants have roots, but how many of us are aware of the scale and com­plex­i­ty those roots can attain? “Root sys­tems allow plants to gath­er the water and min­er­als they use to grow,” writes Blake­more. “As the root sys­tem grows, it cre­ates more and more path­ways that allow water to get into the deep sub­soil, and fos­ter­ing the growth of microbes that ben­e­fit oth­er life. Strong root sys­tems can pre­vent ero­sion, pro­tect­ing the land on which they grow. And the struc­tures allow the soil to cap­ture car­bon.” Thus root sys­tems, nev­er a par­tic­u­lar locus of cool­ness, have the dis­tinc­tion of doing their part to fight cli­mate change. And thanks to Licht­eneg­ger and Kustcher­a’s draw­ings, they under­score the capac­i­ty of art to reveal worlds hid­den to most of us. View all of the images here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Inter­ac­tive Online Edi­tion of Eliz­a­beth Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants (1868)

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

The Social Lives of Trees: Sci­ence Reveals How Trees Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Talk to Each Oth­er, Work Togeth­er & Form Nur­tur­ing Fam­i­lies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

The impor­tance of a good night’s sleep has been fea­tured now and again here on Open Cul­ture. But were a medieval Euro­pean to vis­it our time, he’d prob­a­bly ask — among oth­er ques­tions — if we did­n’t mean a good night’s sleeps, plur­al. The evi­dence sug­gests that the peo­ple of the Mid­dle Ages slept not straight through the night but in two dis­tinct stretch­es. This prac­tice has come back to light in recent years thanks to the research of his­to­ri­an Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. “Both phas­es of sleep last­ed rough­ly the same length of time,” he writes in that book, “with indi­vid­u­als wak­ing some­time after mid­night before return­ing to rest.”

But “not every­one, of course, slept accord­ing to the same timetable. The lat­er at night that per­sons went to bed, the lat­er they stirred after their ini­tial sleep; or, if they retired past mid­night, they might not awak­en at all until dawn. Thus, in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Can­ter­bury Tales, Canacee slept ‘soon after evening fell’ and sub­se­quent­ly awak­ened in the ear­ly morn­ing fol­low­ing ‘her first sleep’; in turn, her com­pan­ions, stay­ing up much lat­er, ‘lay asleep till it was ful­ly prime’ (day­light).” Proof wide­spread “bipha­sic sleep” exists not just in Chaucer, but — for those who know where to look — all over the sur­viv­ing doc­u­ments from medieval Europe.

“In France, the ini­tial sleep was the pre­mier somme,” writes BBC.com’s Zaria Gorvett. “In Italy, it was pri­mo son­no. In fact, Eckirch found evi­dence of the habit in loca­tions as dis­tant as Africa, South and South­east Asia, Aus­tralia, South Amer­i­ca and the Mid­dle East”; the ear­li­est ref­er­ence he turned up comes from Home­r’s Odyssey. What­ev­er their era of his­to­ry, bipha­sic sleep­ers seem to have made good use of their inter­vals of wake­ful­ness, known in Eng­lish as “the watch.” Dur­ing it, peas­ants worked, Chris­tians prayed, and thieves thieved, “but most of all, the watch was use­ful for social­iz­ing – and for sex.” After a long day’s work, “the first sleep took the edge off their exhaus­tion and the peri­od after­wards was thought to be an excel­lent time to con­ceive copi­ous num­bers of chil­dren.”

Bipha­sic sleep and its atten­dant habits did­n’t sur­vive the 19th cen­tu­ry. The rea­sons, as Ekirch explains in the inter­view above, have to do with the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, that great dis­rup­tion of tra­di­tions fol­lowed since time immemo­r­i­al. Along with “the increas­ing preva­lence of arti­fi­cial illu­mi­na­tion both with­in homes and out­side,” he says, “bed­times were pushed back, even though peo­ple still awak­ened at the same time in the morn­ing.” Apart from intro­duc­ing new tech­nolo­gies, the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion “also changed peo­ples’ atti­tudes toward work,” mak­ing human­i­ty “increas­ing­ly time-con­scious: pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, effi­cien­cy were the hall­marks of the 19th cen­tu­ry.” We con­tin­ue to set store by them today, though we also han­dle the dis­rup­tion of sleep in our own, dis­tinc­tive­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry ways. Would any­one care to explain to our medieval time-trav­el­er the prac­tice of mid­night Twit­ter-scrolling?

via BBC/Medieval­ists

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Sleep Can Become Your “Super­pow­er:” Sci­en­tist Matt Walk­er Explains Why Sleep Helps You Learn More and Live Longer

Sleep or Die: Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Matthew Walk­er Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imper­il Our Health

How a Good Night’s Sleep — and a Bad Night’s Sleep — Can Enhance Your Cre­ativ­i­ty

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

The Pow­er of Pow­er Naps: Sal­vador Dali Teach­es You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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