Here are a few stories, posts, and resources I’ve read and enjoyed over the past month.
Hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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Save the date!
For gardeners in the United States, National Seed Swap Day is January 25, 2025. In addition to their seed swap in Decorah, Iowa, Seed Savers Exchange is partnering with Edible Communities to host 10 seed swaps in Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia and seven other locations.
None of the seed swaps are near me, but folks in southeast Michigan may be interested in the free winter sowing workshops at Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan on January 18 and 19, 2025.
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Whoa. The iron making process typically takes five to six hours with traditional blast furnaces. But China’s new iron-making process reduces that time to three to six seconds, boosting productivity 3,600 times.
…by eliminating the need for coal entirely, it would help the steel industry achieve the goal of near-zero carbon dioxide emissions.
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Was the whale confused? Or was there another reason a humpback whale took an 8,000 migration journey across three oceans?
Marine researchers thinks it’s the longest distance traveled by a humpback whale.
Another fact I learned from the story: there’s a HappyWhale citizen science website where folks around the world submit photographs of a whale’s tale, I discovered whale’s tails are called flukes.
Turns out flukes are unique, with distinct marks and patterns which allows individual whales to be identified.
The HappyWhale database contains 900,000 photographs of whales’ tails from 109,000 whales. Which is how researchers were able to track the journey of this particular humpback whale.
Amazing!
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Announced in early December 2024, Detroit joins a short list of US cities with a Michelin Green Guide.
Woohoo! Detroit is the 10th US city with a Michelin Green Guide.
Orain revealed Michelin three-star rated sites, including Cranbrook Educational Community, Detroit Institute of Arts, Downtown Detroit, Guardian Building and The Henry Ford Museum, a rating equal to the most famous attractions in the world such as the Louvre in Paris.
Many people know about Michelin guides for restaurants, but Michelin’s Green Guides focus on the culture and overall travel experience, highlighting art, music, architecture, and neighborhoods.
Proud to say I’ve visited all the three-star rated Detroit sites. And volunteered at one of them for over three years.
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Another step forward for open access.
A free toolkit is now available to cultural institutions and organisations around the world who want to share their collections online.
Developed with 24 galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) around the world, the new Open GLAM Toolkit helps organizations identify, prepare, and publish their digital collections for public reuse.
The toolkit helps organization’s support staff with:
- Process of clearing copyright in the collections object
- Digitization and metadata
- Determining which images are appropriate to publish in open access
- and more
As of December 2024, 1,600 organizations participate in Open GLAM.
