Interesting Links for 24-08-2023

[andrewducker]

1. When did galley slaves become common, and why?

(tags:history boats war sea europe slavery viaDanielDWilliam )

2. Would *you* like to know about the racist birth centrifuge?

(tags:childbirth gravity history patent viaPatrickHadfield )

3. LEGO officially offers Braille Bricks for sale for the first time

(tags:blindness lego )

4. It's Getting Too Hot for Tropical Trees to Photosynthesize

(tags:trees plants doom globalwarming )

Comments

[nancylebov]

2. You can call it racist, but it would have put white women at risk rather than women of color.

_The Frailty Myth_ has it that upper class Victorian women were expected to move so little that they had trouble giving birth, so special lightweight exercises were invented for them.

Shades of Heinlein: I think it was _Time Enough for Love_ which had the idea of a pulse of high gravity (artificial gravity on a spaceship) to get the baby out.

[bens_dad]

Took me a while to think why you need language-specific Braille bricks.

[liv]

4. A friend of mine who is a grass specialist has been involved in experiments that found empirically that parts of Africa are now regularly too hot for important crop seeds to germinate. That's not as devastating as no photosynthesis because it's not that hot constantly so there might still be a window in which you can get germination. But it's an experimental result, not just modelling. And there's nothing you can do about altering conditions other than temperature to compensate for, it's too hot to germinate.

[armiphlage]

4. With respect to survival (and thriving) at high temperatures, plants using C4 photosynthesis cope better than plants using C3 photosynthesis. Unfortunately, only a few trees (all from Hawaii) use the C4 pathway. Either we have to massively seed tropical rainforests with currently-endangered Hawaiian trees, or they will turn into grasslands.

https://www.llifle.com/Encyclopedia/TREES/Family/Euphorbiaceae/28967/Chamaesyce_olowaluana