ersatz

Quite possibly it is acceptable, from time to time, to fool Mother Nature. Either manifested as these great fly-swatters in the desert or as a non-descript kiosk about the size of a bank of public toliets, environmental researchers are developing a pretend tree of sorts--one that can snatch and sequestir stray carbon in the atmosphere. It doesn't seem like a great improvement from the original design, at first, since trees rather just happen and one only has to take care not to cut them down. These synthetic trees, however, grab carbon dioxide from any source (though it's not as if real trees are discriminatory and insistent on taking carbon dioxide only exhaled from the lungs they gave oxygen to) year round (trees only breath-in for half a year) and inside of producing wood pulp or fruit, the carbon collected can be compressed and liquified for other uses.

In other ugly plant news: the EU has lifted a regulation governing the aesthetics of produce on grocery shelves. The headlines read praise all-around for lifting the almost 20 year ban on wonky fruit and veg. Apparently, there was a law stipulating that 26 varieties of fruits and vegetables ought to be show-bread material, defining roundness and uniformity standards, while perfectly edible knobby carrots and lumpy tomatoes were wasted. This is a good thing, to not associate nutrition with the ideal apple or pear. Maybe shoppers were just averse to finding suggestive plant bits in their shopping carts--a great phallic cucumber or hinder-shaped apricots like H and saw at the super market, yesterday, just hours after the ban was rescinded.