bone-eating snot flower

No, not me, silly. But an amazing creature found off the Swedish coast. The more science fiction I read, the more astonishing I find the range of Earth creatures--what they look like, how they take nourishment, reproduce, everything. And this one's a lot prettier than the name above--or even "zombie worm"--would suggest.

In other damn, but I love science news, scientists have discovered that they can grow collagen much faster if they remove the water from the starting medium. Cutting down the time from weeks to minutes. Conceivably this would make it possible to grow replacement tissue in the operating room. As the proud owner of grafted tissue, you can see why I'd think this cool. Now if they could just figure out how to do cartilage, and fix my friend True's knees, that would be excellent.

Speaking of snot, I woke up at 5:30 this morning having terrible dreams that I couldn't swallow without pain. And guess what? Awake, I couldn't either. I'd felt this sore throat coming on yesterday, but nowhere near as bad as it was this morning. I used everything I had available--gargled with salt water, made "throat coat" tea, and then had a zinc lozenge for good measure. Gourmet combination, let me tell you. Yuck. At least I didn't have any work scheduled today, and my crepuscular phone voice was enough to convince my catering supervisor that I really shouldn't work tomorrow either, so I'm going to try to ride out whatever this is on the Good Ship Indri's Bed. Ahoy, indeed. Boarding parties bearing soup and ice cream welcomed with open cutlasses.