Friday Links

I will have some real new things to post soon... but here are some of the cool things I've been reading on-line this week. (Let me know if you like these posts... I kinda have fun collecting things to share, but if you are totally bored, let me know)

Not garden related, AT ALL, but freakishly cool: The solar system to scale if the moon were one pixel.

This is a very inspiring video on the radical ways reintroducing wolves changes every aspect of an ecosystem.

And then... another, quite different take on the exact same subject from the amazing Emma Marris (her book The Rambunctious Garden is one of my favorites)

This is a cool announcement of an effort to sequence the DNA of soil microbes. Basically, this is just an announcement that they've figured out the technology to actually do this, but there should be some really fascinating data coming out of this soon, comparing the biology of soil which has been farmed to soil from a virgin prairie. Super exciting because soil is incredibly complex, notoriously hard to study, and of course fundamental to farming and gardening.

From Jessica Walliser over at Savvy Gardening, really terrific information on creating habitat for beneficial beetles in your garden. I love this because it goes beyond the usual advice to give you something very specific that has academic research behind it that will help you garden better with help from good insects.

And speaking of insects, this caught my eye, a new study found even higher levels of insect diversity in tropics than scientists had expected, and all thanks to incredibly complex relationships between flies and wasps.