( Backdated Spam for Alex )

[Public Video]

[Charles is in the garden, which he still has very reliably looking after since Ivy's departure with the assistance of several others. There's not much to do with most of the ordinary outdoor plants right now, what with it being January, but it's still a nice place to come and think and make sure the snow hasn't hurt anything too badly.

He's been out here for a while, properly bundled up with a wool coat and fingerless gloves, but his cheeks are red and his skin's pretty pale, so obviously it's still pretty cold outside. Still, he looks cheerful and genuinely excited when he launches into what he has to say.]

While farmers and herders had understood the benefit of selective breeding for thousands of years, the actual mechanisms governing inheritance were almost completely unknown. After people began to develop more sophisticated microscopes and started studying cells, they became more interested in discovering how a trait is passed from parent to offspring, and the first man to get it more or less right was a relatively unknown monk named Gregor Mendel. He crossbred pea plants, and his work helped scientists finally understand how hereditary actually works. [So basically, it's awesome.]

I know it's a bit early to plant peas out in the garden, but I thought it might be fun to try and recreate his experiment in the spring, if anyone's interested in seeing some very basic genetics in action. We could start a few plants in the greenhouse, first, and move them out here once it gets warmer.

[Private to Steph]

[This message comes after he's come back inside, and he's more or less gone from enthusiastic science geek/teacher to calm, supportive voice of reason. He wears many hats.]

I'm sure you're aware, but Dr. Banner asked me to touch base with you after the holidays if I hadn't already heard from you per your agreement to begin speaking to a therapist. Since I hadn't, I thought it might be time to touch base.

[Private to the Admiral]

May I have a set of keys to the greenhouse, please?

[Public]

Since Ivy's left, [Vanished, really, he probably shouldn't use the euphemism even though it's impossible to know if this is permanent or not.] I've asked the Admiral to give me keys to the greenhouse. I hope no one minds.

[He doesn't... actually know all that much about gardening from a first hand perspective, but he feels like someone owes it to Ivy to make sure the plants are well cared for.]

[Spam for the Garden]

[The problem with this plan is that Charles doesn't really own clothes that are good for gardening in. He's got clothes he wears to run in, and spar and fight in (which is still sort of strange to think about, because he still hasn't really made peace with the idea of being a fighter), and the rest of his wardrobe pretty much screams frumpy professor or at least "I haven't gone shopping for clothes since the 1950's" to any modern observer.

So he's kneeling in the garden pulling weeds after he makes his brief announcement, wearing a borrowed pair of gloves and getting dirt all over an old pair of slacks, but he doesn't really care. It's good, to be outside doing something productive and methodical, and it helps make the recent losses and the lingering presence of the flood easier to bear.

He knows he should be checking in with people - his family especially, because it seems like they've been hit particularly hard recently - but at the moment, it's easier to carefully uproot the weeds and replant them somewhere where they won't choke the life out of the other plants.

Considering how much Ivy had cared about everything that grew here, he doesn't want to kill them if he can help it.]

[Hi, Barge, someone else really doesn't want to talk about the flood, so Charles is taking this opportunity to talk more about science. Everyone loves science, especially when it's a distraction from things like promising your best friend you'd come rescue him from Auschwitz and sincerely meaning it because you're a telepath and can pretty much do what you want. :\

Science is generally easier to talk about than feelings. :c]

I'd imagine most of you are familiar with the concept of mass extinctions, wherein the population of all living things on Earth is decreased by over fifty percent. It is, after all, what helped propel mammals into being the dominant life forms on Earth after the dinosaurs went extinct. But despite the widespread devastation each time, some species do survive, and can remain largely unchanged since they originally evolved. The horseshoe crab, for example, is virtually identical to its relatives that have been preserved as fossils from several million years ago.

Others are considerably less well known and familiar to us, and some potentially have yet to even be rediscovered. Although it's quite rare to rediscover a species after it's been thought dead for thousands if not millions of years - for example, it's highly unlikely that a Brachiosaurus has escaped the attention of modern science while roaming the woods of North America - it has happened before.

One such species was considered extinct by the scientific community until December 23, 1938. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer - a museum curator in South Africa - told local fishermen that if they ever found anything unusual in their hauls to call her in immediately. On this particular day, she was called down to the docks to investigate a captain's haul and discovered a five foot long fish with navy blue scales and white spots that looked like nothing she'd ever seen before. After hurrying the specimen back to the museum and preserving it as best she could after the local morgue refused to help preserve the body, she began to go through her books trying to locate the fish, but couldn't find any information about it. When a friend from Rhodes University was finally able to come look at the specimen, he immediately recognized it as a coelacanth, an ancient fish thought to have gone extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. A population of fish had apparently been living on the east coast of Africa for potentially millions of years, largely unnoticed by human populations because they spend most of the day very deep under water. Occasionally a fish would be caught by a fisherman, but as the flesh is incredibly oily and often makes people sick, they were often tossed away as trash without a second thought. A second population was more recently discovered in Indonesia.

There are plenty of other examples of so called "living fossils", and Lazarus taxa, both plants and animal, but a discovery like this is generally unheard of, especially considering the coelacanth is generally considered to be a step in understanding how land based animals developed locomotion, as fossil evidence suggests that tetrapods evolved from fish whose fins eventually developed into legs and allowed them to walk out of the water and onto dry land. I've often wondered if another similar discovery might be made with further exploration. Living things are, after all, incredibly resilient, and we still haven't mapped the entirety of our planet's surface.

[Private to Steve]

Do you have a minute? There's something I need to discuss with you.

[Private to Jean]

Merlin tells me you two have been experimenting with the limits of your abilities.

So much of what we just accept as a given about our physical characteristics is the direct result of adapting to better fit the environment we live in. Some of it's fairly obvious - having a roughly symmetrical body makes things like movement easier and vision more useful, that sort of thing - but some of the adaptations humans have made since the first homo sapiens was born are a bit more complicated to find specific cause for.

For example, eye color is generally considered a polygenic trait, which means that more than one gene pair is involved, versus just one, but blue eyes are the result of one very specific genetic mutation that occurred less than ten thousand years ago. That means there was one founder mutation that gave rise to everyone in Europe with blue eyes.

The trait spread rapidly across the European subcontinent, and while DNA generally gets shuffled and reshuffled each time a new generation is born, people born with this mutation not only have a remarkable number of other genetic markers in common, but this particular stretch of DNA remains so similar suggests that not only are blue eyes a relatively modern mutation, but also that evolutionarily speaking, the mutation had something to offer, otherwise the rapid spread and preservation of the DNA sequence probably would have been less pronounced and perhaps not even have been preserved to the modern era.

It's next to impossible to know what happened ten thousand years ago that made this trait beneficial to early Europeans, but it did, at some point, apparently have some desirable to offer evolutionarily. [He pauses for a moment, chuckling a little.] Or perhaps early Europeans just found blue eyes attractive.

[Private to Erik]

What do you think of David? [He isn't lying in a heap in a hallway somewhere, is he. :|]

[Private to Merlin]

Have you spoken to Arthur?

[Private to Arthur]

I have a favor to ask.

[Private to Barbara]

Do you have a moment?

[Private to Tony, backdated to the end of the flood]

I'm afraid I'm going to need my wheelchair back, Mr. Stark.

[Private to Morgana, present dated]

Are you alright?

[Private to Erik, present dated]

I'd like to speak with you, please. [He doesn't sound angry or disappointed or too depressed, really, he just wants to talk to you re: his encounter with Wanda during dat flood. :|]

[Public, present dated]

[Charles has holed himself up in his room with a couple books for a while, because man, that flood was intense and he needs a break from everyone. :| But he's had some time to wind down and feels like saying something, so, good afternoon, everyone.] I've always enjoyed watching people try to put science in perspective to things that are a bit easier for most people to wrap their mind around. It grounds it, and does make it a bit more approachable for those with only a casual interest in the subject.

Because while I could bore you all for hours with scientific jargon, it never hurts to have a few interesting factoids on hand to catch people's interest instead of just letting them drift off to sleep in the back of the classroom wishing they were still enjoying their lunch period.

For example, while there are differences in the total number of cells in a human body, the number should be around 100,000 billion, and if the entire DNA from all nuclei in the human body were to be arranged lengthwise, it would measure around 180,000 million kilometers. The DNA length would thus be a thousand times greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

It's interesting to think about, that within each of us, there's something that - in theory, obviously - could stretch that far. [He's quiet for a moment, almost a little distracted or maybe considering switching off the feed before continuing.] If anyone has some interesting facts they'd be in the mood for sharing about their own world, I'd appreciate it. It doesn't have to be about science if there's something they'd rather discuss.