Moss

Our feet were for the first time on Alaskan soil, but we saw none of the soil.

Moss everywhere, and flowers, and wild strawberries.

It was a queer sensation to set one's feet down on what looked like substantial ground and sink a few inches to solid ice, crushing the flowers beneath.

I was all eyes and ears for what new birds might cross my path.

See that soft green carpet? That is moss.

In Greek it is called βρύο.

Βρύο.

I see it.

It looks so lush.

He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honor of a representative attitude, perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life.

Hawthorne, on the one side, is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world, on the other, is so vast and various and substantial that it might seem to the author of The Scarlet Letter and The Mosses from an Old Manse that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great civilization.

But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame, for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral.

This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.

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Early writings, part one.

The second volume of the Twice Told Tales was published in 1845 in Boston, and at this time a good many of the stories which were afterwards collected into the Mosses from an Old Manse had already appeared, chiefly in the Democratic Review, a sufficiently flourishing periodical of that period.

In mentioning these things I anticipate, but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of the two collections of Twice Told Tales at once.

It's too hard when it's everything is serious, and everything is a burden, and everything is cumbersome and responsibility-laden.

And so even though that sounds like [laughs] you know, having an adult den for a bed, um, is not necessarily the massive answer that people are looking for, it's part of it, you know? Yeah, so this is the Womb, and we've got the Mushroom, the Moon, the Dawn, Forest Spirits, The Wanderer, and the Mystic, and the Mosses.

I wanted to just bring in beauty for the people who are coming here to come and feel precious, to feel worthy.

But to be honest, when people get here, the majority of the time we're outside anyway.

the entertaining kind of accessible stuff.

And that's what his stories are.

And so, I don't think I said the year, 1846, he publishes Mosses from an Old Man's.

which later gets republished as Twice Old Tales.

I think he's one of the great short story writers ever.

And the descendants of those plants still live among us today.

They're the non-vascular plants, the liverworts, the hornworts, and everybody's best friend, the mosses.

Mmm, fuzzy.

Now, yeah, it's clear that these guys are less complicated than an orchid or an oak tree, and if you said that they were, you know, less beautiful, you probably wouldn't get that much argument from me.

They're multicellular, they have cell walls made of cellulose, and they use photosynthesis to make their food.

All the non-vascular plants are collectively referred to as bryophytes, and who knows how many different sorts there used to be back in the olden days, but we can currently meet three phyla of bryophytes in person.

The mosses in phylum Bryophyta, the liverworts in phylum Hepatophyta, and the hornworts in phylum Anthocerophyta.

Taken together, there are over 24,000 species of Bryophytes out there.

Right So the FBI didn't just need a spacial map ,they needed a biological stopwatch.

They needed a definitive timestamp on the excavation event which circles back to the second question the FBI initially posed to Von Konrad How long has this plant been buried? To comprehend how a botanist answers that we really have to delve into the unique evolutionary physiology of Moss In the Science Daily material von Conrad characterizes Mosse being a little bit freaky A little bit Freaky Which honestly is massive understatement regarding his metabolic resilience Well When i think of Plant death I just think of standard houseplant Yeah Like If you take vascular plant rip out off it pot and bury it total darkness eight inches underground the Biological systems collapse rapidly They do The cell walls rupture bacteria aggressively break down tissues and decomposes into soil relatively quickly Its rapid terminal event Vascular plants undergo catastrophic systemic failure when deprived of their fundamental inputs yes Hmm But bryophytes operate on completely different evolutionary paradigm Okay They possess characteristic known as poikilohydry Poikilohydry Yes They lack structural mechanisms regulate internal water content so moisture levels fluctuate passively with Their Environment Just adapt whatever around them Basically Right Survive evolved ability enter states extreme metabolic suspension dried out Deprived light Or Buried Do Not Undergo Immediate Systemic Failure Essentially entering biological stasis Light switch slipping more Battery slowly draining over Years Absolute key whole case Even buried complete Darkness crushed under Eight Inches Soil Minute Fraction Of The Moss Cells Continue Fire Wow Attempting maintain basic Metabolic Viability Decay Rapid Cliff Slow Measurable Linear Degradation What exactly Measuring Specific metric scientists used measure degradation curve Chlorophyll Really interesting challenge premise slightly measuring chlorophyll seems incredibly delicate Is Because chlorophyll pigment driving photosynthesis Captures light wavelengths convert chemical energy But if plant absolutely darkness photosynthesis ceases entirely Correct Engine Stops How Measuring Degradation Pigment Years Later Does Not Vanish Does Not vanish instantly No Molecular Structure Breaks Down Incrementally Chlorophyll molecules are essentially large rings.

They're called porphyrin rings, and they surround a central magnesium ion.

Okay, porphyrin rings.