Science funding is important, people

Scientific research is important. Scientific research takes money. A lot of that money comes from the government (unless we can come up with more creative ways of funding it, see my link here.)

This deserves much more time and attention than I can spare at the moment (writing a dissertation will do that to you), so I'm going to let Carl Zimmer do the talking for now and add my two cents later: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/25/ducks-meet-the-culture-wars/

Rescue plant

Awhile back, I noticed someone left a large potted plant by the dumpster in my building. It was actually more like a tree, since it is about as tall as I am (5'6"). The leaves were yellowing a bit, but I thought, hey I could use a tree as a houseplant. After all, what's the point of tall ceilings if you don't fill up the vertical space? And of course I like plants and want green things in my home. So I adopted the plant.

It took me a little while to figure out what it was, because lots of tropical plant leaves look alike--but at least I knew it was tropical, so that narrowed it down to you know, one of hundreds of thousands of species. I realized it had little shriveled up fruits hanging off it, and I cut into one to find...coffee beans. Now, coffee berries as they are called are usually red, but these were dry which is why I didn't recognize them at first. It turns out coffee plants are commonly sold as houseplants but are not always labelled.

Coffee is tropical (originally native to northern Africa, now grown all over the tropics), so growing it indoors can be a wee bit challenging. As far as I can tell, most people who have this as a houseplant are growing it in Florida, and mostly outside. I got a humidifier for it and gave it plant food and lots of love, and slowly the plant became greener and greener. Now I won't say it's growing gangbusters or anything, because I feel like it's still a little touch and go--it's probably way too dry, even with the humidifier, and definitely not as warm as the poor coffee plant would like. So imagine my surprise this morning when I found flowers on the tree! A bunch of flowers were open, and they smell delightful! 

I'm not expecting to have a bumper crop of coffee beans--even if I got some, I think there might be enough for about 1/4 cup of coffee. And roasting coffee beans sounds labor intensive. But hey, it's the first step in my urban farm. Not the virtual kind of farm, either.