Chinese scientists to grow potatoes on the moon

Chinese space fries! 🙂

Chinese scientists will attempt to grow potatoes on the moon as part of a forthcoming lunar mission.

According to a report in the Chongqing Morning Post, the potatoes will be sealed inside a “mini ecosystem” as part the Chang’e-4 mission due to launch next year. They’ll be sharing a small cylinder on the surface of the Earth’s only natural satellite with silkworm larvae as part of a series of experiments, Professor Xie Gengxin of Chongqing University told the paper.

The goal is to see whether the insects and spuds will survive on the lunar surface, and the end result will yield important insights about the viability of a future human colony, China Radio International says.

Neat!

Hey, remember when the West used to go to the moon?

Neither do I.

But I’m told it happened…

Do Poets Write Verse this Good?

Old Life

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky, like the blue bell of a vacuum, lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city. (John Updike…

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