Valsa

A very interesting instrument. The pedal notes especially are very resonant which adds a lot of character to the performance.

Legend has it Bach's favorite instrument was the lautenwerck aka the lute-harpsichord. They are similar to the clavichord but have a rounded body, which gives the instrument a much softer tone. Bach supposedly owned 4. Here's a short recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z31MbF89-8

Funny, I had the exact same thought process. It's a corvid! ...wait that's a funny bill. Figures it's something weird since it's from New Zealand.

Merriam Webster has this definition for liquidate: To do away with especially by killing.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liquidate

Maybe it's just me but Stentors look very juicy and tasty. I wonder what they taste like if you ate a bunch of them at once.

Don't all the big publishers do this though, or is Elsevier especially bad?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosoma_mansoni

Protists aren't a group I'm familiar with but could it be the genus Holosticha?

Neat. Another paper reviewing fungal bioluminescence just came out on New year's eve, and according to which there are 132 bioluminescent species known to date. More than I realized!

Link to the (open access) paper for anyone curious: https://www.mdpi.com/2309-608X/11/1/19

It's easy to confuse the two because of how morphologically simple they are. Fun fact (or not depending on how much of a nerd you are), fungi that produce sticky droplets of spores on long stalks like this are often dispersed by arthropods, such as mites or springtails, which bump into the spore droplets as they walk along.

This looks more like Acremonium to me because the conidiogenous cells (the stalks producing droplets of spores at the tips) are very irregularly arranged. In Verticillium, the conidiogenous cells should be in whorls.

http://website.nbm-mnb.ca/mycologywebpages/Moulds/Acremonium.html

This is really bugging me. The article claims the fungus is an edible mushroom, but Pestalotiopsis (the spores on the right) is an endophytic, microscopic ascomycete. Not a mushroom and certainly not edible. So why is there a picture of Pluteus on the left? I can only imagine the author googled "Pestalotiopsis mushroom" and grabbed the first picture that came up.