I think we've just had two of the great lessons in the botanist's life, live on the web.

Lesson 1: There's a reason that they teach us to use the flowers to identify unknown plants. While you can identify the plants you know from the leaves, they aren't all that reliable for unknowns.

Lesson 2: Once you're known as a botanist, one question people always ask is: what is it? (usually with a leaf or, as above, a portrait photo that doesn't show diagnostic details).

Some things that would help us:
1) flowers.
2) scale (they could be anything from a few inches to a foot tall).
3) pull off a leaf or two (all the way from the main stem) and photograph them against a neutral, light colored background. The shape of the leaves will help us.
4) Leaves come off stems at points called nodes. One critical question is whether the leaves come off one per node or two per node. Two per node is less common, but is characteristic of things like mints and basil. Which is it? If some plants are one leaf per node and some are two leaves per node, congratulations, you have two (or more) species.

Here's what it's definitely NOT:

1) Datura (I go past one every day on my way to work. Most of the cultivated Solanaceae (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, etc) have compound (or at least deeply lobed) leaves, and these leaves appear simple. It doesn't particularly look like a nightshade either.
2) Chard (in fact, I don't recommend eating it)

I kind of like the #42's comment on borage, but if it is a borage, it should be really fuzzy.

Speaking as a botanist (who obviously isn't omniscient), why don't you wait until those buds on the left have opened, and post a picture of the flowers. Then it'll be pretty easy to ID. So long as you yank it before it sets seed, it won't spread.

Depending on the range of surfaces over which this object rights itself, it might be useful for space probes or similar mechanisms that have to be oriented a certain direction after falling.

Now all we have to do is come up with a baked-bread version of this, so that we can butter the top and see if it will land butter side up, or whether it will hover spinning in midair :)

I'm still struck by the following conundrum:

1. Hawaii has to import all its oil.

2. Honolulu (at least) is running out of landfill space, to the point where it may be economic to ship its trash to a proposed landfill in Idaho (cannot cite sources, but this is reliable).

3. There are 3.5 million tons of hydrocarbon-rich material floating off its shore.

Why doesn't Hawaii get into the garbage-to-oil processing business? Given the cost of importing oil, the high cost of clean-up, and problems with existing landfills in Hawaii (i.e. they're filling up with no alternatives) it might be economical for them to do it, where it wouldn't make sense on the mainland.

Basically, I'd suggest either floating a refinery out in the trash patch, to pick up material and break it down into something that can be reused (i.e. hydrocarbons), or collecting it and shipping it to land-based plants where the same can happen.

Yes, where plastics are converted into hydrocarbons that are burned, this does add to global warming. While I dislike the threat of global warming, I think the threat of the garbage to marine life is far more pervasive. One real problem is when the plastic pellets get small enough to be eaten by plankton. At that point, they disrupt the entire food chain, and that's bad.

In any case, garbage-to-oil schemes might be cost-effective on other islands, not just Hawaii. It's not glamorous, but we've got to get used to making something out of the trash, not just throwing it away.

Otherwise, this geologic age will become known as the "Plasticene" for the biggest geological marker of human presence.

One thing I wonder about the terra preta research: why aren't any of them talking with the prairie soil researchers? Prairie earth is black, and part of the reason is that it burned every year (or nearly) for millenia, and it's ludicrously rich in nutrients. Or was.

A few months ago, I asked one of these people (Mike Miller from Argonne) about terra preta, and he was somewhat skeptical about the claims. In his prairie soil research, the carbon from charcoal doesn't get much about 10% of carbon in the soil. In prairies, plants dump a lot of carbon compounds into the soil as part of their normal working processes, so that drowns out the charcoal signal.

In any event, I do find myself wishing that the terra preta group would reach out to other soil researchers more, particularly in North America. The evidence that the Indians burned their lands is overwhelming and massively understudied from a soils point of view. While I believe Dr. Miller's numbers, I find myself wondering if the famous farm soils of the Midwest weren't originally built partially on char. If so, there are a lot of things we can do in the US to restore soil fertility.

With respect to Verafides above, I have to answer the "house on fire" comment.

Personally, I'd be happy to volunteer to go out with a linguist to help come up with vocabulary lists, especially for areas where I am familiar. I think a number of us would love to do that, and a number of us have done it.

Here's the question: what knowledge is valuable? Certainly, it's nice to know how people named the parts of their bodies, and how they organized their social lives. That's where most people live, and I fully understand that this is what most people want to pass on.

But what about the plants and animals? I would argue they are far more important, to a wider audience. The problem most conservation biologists face is total lack of knowledge: the species are poorly known, and they have only been studied for a short time. Traditional knowledge can be enormously helpful both in understanding natural history (how and where species live, what they do, etc.), and in understanding how conditions have changed in the lifetime of the informant. Typically, we biologists don't have that knowledge. And it matters, because we are now the caretakers of these areas, and it's hard to take good care when you don't know enough.

An example might help. I work in Southern California, and I work on habitat restoration. One of the hot areas around here is native grassland restoration. We know that native grasslands (which used to be very common) were pretty intensively managed by the local Chumash and Gabrieleno. We know little beyond this, and to my knowledge, the traditional management practices and terminology have disappeared. This is a huge problem for us restorationists, because many of the native plants we are trying to restore did well under some sort of human management regime. We don't know what that was, and since many weeds do well under our modern disturbance patterns, it's difficult to know how we can get the natives to grow without getting them swamped with weeds. I would give quite a lot to sit down with a Chumash or Gabrieleno elder who knew about the old practices, but to my knowledge, those people passed on two generations ago. Now, government agencies are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to rediscover that knowledge, and now it is done in the name of conservation, by people like me. That is the price of the loss of those languages and their technical lexicons. I don't know how to price the cost of the loss of philosophical terms, but I do know that the loss of lizard and plant knowledge can be very expensive.

In any case, I appreciate the work Verafides is doing, and I appreciate the correction--my knowledge is a lexicon, not a language. However, the central observation remains. Even if they are not languages, there are a number of endangered lexicons in our world, and that is a problem. Rediscovery is every bit as expensive as learning it the first time.

As a botanist, the article about endangered languages hits me in two different ways.

First, I would say that linguists themselves are responsible for the loss of information, particularly in hunter-gatherer languages. For instance, an elderly woman is the last speaker of a northern aboriginal language. A linguist sits down with her, and records names for three different species of blue-tongued lizard (presumably, three different species of skinks), or a term for fruits that grow on bushes on the sides of sandhills, or a term for a small, edible mushroom. Because the linguist had no biological background, these words will be lost, because the linguist has no way to determine the proper referent for them. A biologist, particularly one with some local knowledge, would know how to find the organism that fits the term, and either determine the name in scientific terms, or collect a specimen and name it. Biologists, particularly trained systematists, routinely create new names. Were life scientists to get involved in these efforts, much more of the knowledge encoded in these languages could be brought forward and properly valued.

My screen name, Heteromeles, is an example of this. Heteromeles is the genus for toyon, a large shrub in the rose family that grows in California. It's one of my favorite plants, but more importantly, it's the only major plant in California that still bears the name given to it by a native California tribe. All others have been renamed according to European conventions.

The second point is that there are a number of endangered languages in english. I have a PhD in botany, and I have spent over a decade learning the unique terms for plants and fungi. My particular specialty has only a few hundred trained people, which means, in effect, my tribe has only a few hundred fluent speakers. Currently, I am working as a consultant, and not working in my specialty (although, thankfully, I'm still a botanist). Unless I can get an academic job, I will probably not be able to pass on my language, and it will die with me (most botanist's children do not become botanists).

There are a large number of small sciences out there that are currently endangered by the science funding practices of the Bush administration and the desires of society at large. This number includes, by the way, ALL of the people who can deal with biodiversity, the naming, counting, and conserving of the species on this planet.

However, our society thinks it is more proper to fund additional studies on the dangers of erectile dysfunction drugs than it is to fund the people who know how to name and care for the myriad species of the world. This is true whether those people live on reservations, or in small offices in small colleges. Knowledge dies if it is not passed on.

Personally, I wish the scientists would be allowed to lock up the bones and send casts on display.

Now, I was lucky enough to have Dr. Tim White (one of Lucy's co-discoverers) as an anthropology prof, and we got to look at a really, really good copy of Lucy in lab. In fact, it was so good that I thought I was looking at the original (silly me). It was also under glass, much as shown above.

The point is, unless you can handle the bones, it's really difficult to tell a good copy from the original, especially if said fossil is under glass and you're standing several feet away. In fact, if Ethiopia has any brains, they've sent out a copy, and the original fossil is still quietly locked up.

So far as the public is concerned, it's very difficult to determine the authenticity of a fossil display, unless you get to touch the bones. The only reason to send an original out is the cachet of originality, which is primarily intended to drive up ticket sales. Given the fragility of many fossils and their continued use to science, I'd be happier if they displayed copies, and kept the originals safe.

@Gryffin: Yes, I absolutely agree with the comments about Doug Ritter. I got a couple of his cheaper things (pocket survival kit and photon light) before I got the knife, and I haven't been disappointed.

@Joel Johnson: about carrying stuff. I live in earthquake country, which means that I'm roughly a minute from a catastrophic survival situation every day. Most days it doesn't happen though. I have a photon light (the size of a breath mint) on my keys, the survival pack (wallet-sized), a folding survival knife (all from Ritter), a leatherman, and gloves in my work bag. The only thing that doesn't get used regularly is the survival kit, for obvious reasons. Because I don't want to lug around a lot of junk, I appreciate small, tough tools that are useful in daily life.

I'm glad Gextyr is using his SLP2--it's not a bad tool, if you're right handed. Try opening it left-handed and you'll see why I'm not so fond of it. That's one thing I really like about Ritter's knife--it's one of the few folders that's perfectly ambidextrous.

Yeah, I got something similar, although it had a diamond sharpener instead of the fire steel. It is cute.

Thing is, it's sitting in a box at home, unused. Here are the reasons:

1) I'm left-handed, it's not.

B) The steel is fairly soft (420 stainless, I believe)

III) I found something better.

My favorites (i.e. the stuff I carry with me every day) are designed by Doug Ritter (www.aeromedix.com). This is not a paid testimonial, but his knives and lights are way better. They're also much more expensive (US$107 for the knife, $20 for the light, $30 for the survival kit). On the other hand, the equipment is well-designed, tough, ambidextrous, and unlike most of the stuff I've bought, it works as advertised, every time. It's also really easy to carry.