Honeybee historians - track changes in the UK floral landscape over the last 65 years, showing key changes in nectar resources. New paper in @CommsBio by the Science Team @walesbotanic @Zwickynova @abigailjayne26

We analysed 441 honey samples from throughout the UK using DNA metabarcoding to find out which plants honeybees use to make honey. We compared this to a survey of honey samples carried out in 1952.
In 1952 the most important plant for honeybees was white clover (Trifolium repens). This used to be abundant in grazed pastures but increases in silage production and use of inorganic fertilisers and herbicides means that there is less flowering white clover available in 2017.
With less white clover available, honeybees most important plant in 2017 was bramble (Rubus fruticosus). Commonly found on the edges of hedgerows and woodlands and other wild spaces.
The honeybees have also made use of a new crop, oil seed rape. Oil seed rape was first grown in the 1960s and now bright yellow fields of oil seed rape are common in spring. It is now an important honeybee plant and a source of honey (which I think tastes of cabbages).
Honeybees have also tracked the spread of an invasive plant - Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) was introduced by Victorian gardeners in 1839. It soon escaped and went rampaging across waterways across the UK, it outcompetes other plants and blocks watercourses.
but, honeybees love it and it's now an important source of nectar at the end of the season. You can tell when honeybees use it because they become covered in a white stripe of pollen on their backs - you can spot these 'ghost bees' coming back into their hives after foraging
Other important plants for honeybees are flowering trees such as apple and cherries
To help provide enough nectar for honeybees (and other pollinators) we need more species-rich grassland and hedgerows with bramble margins. But, the single thing that would make the most difference would be to increase the amount of flowers within improved grassland.
More about our paper here https://t.co/tCy0ozCShC and all about our research @walesbotanic on our website https://t.co/gSUl40Y9MZ

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.