worldofwords

This poem is spillover from the January 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by janetmiles. It also fills the "Soup to Nuts" square in my 1-1-26 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the Big One and Mercedes threads of the Polychrome Heroics series.

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This poem came out of the January 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from fuzzyred and nsfwords. It also fills the "Cakes and Ale" square in my 1-1-26 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by janetmiles. It belongs to the series Fiorenza the Wisewoman.

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Christmas Cookie Inflation Index, 2025 Update

Cheaper sugar came at the cost of lower wages, fewer choices, and a community with less say over its own economic life. That tradeoff may not show up in national statistics, but it shows up clearly in places like mine.


In my locale, we lost JoAnn Fabrics, as everywhere did, making it much harder to do things like make your own if a needed item wasn't for sale commercially. We lost Big Lots, as most places did, which was the biggest and most diverse bargain store. We gained Michael's, which sells less craft supplies than JoAnn at much higher prices; Beal's and Five Below, which sell less bargain goods than Big Lots at similar prices. Two nearby towns got Ollie's, which is a big and excellent bargain store, but farther away and not quite the same stock as Big Lots. So yes, the economy is quietly collapsing toward a simpler state. That makes it much harder for people to adapt to pressures, because it's harder to find supplies -- especially things like fabric that aren't well suited to shopping online. :/

This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It fills the "In the Wilderness" square in my 1-1-25 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. It was sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred.

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thewayne posted this hilarious but astute quote:

"No one wants to go in there when a random f***ing tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country."
-- oil industry investor, about Venezuela

New form of 'artificial metabolism' converts CO2 into biological building blocks

Researchers built the Reductive Formate Pathway, called the ReForm pathway, to convert CO2 into acetyl-CoA outside living cells. Acetyl-CoA is a small but essential molecule your cells use to turn food into energy. When your body breaks down carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, it often funnels the results into acetyl-CoA. From there, acetyl-CoA carries a tiny chemical package called an acetyl group into the citric acid cycle, where your cells “burn” it. That process releases energy, and your body captures it to help make ATP, the main energy currency that powers cellular work.

This study shows how engineered enzymes, electricity-derived carbon feedstocks, and cell-free systems can be combined to recycle CO2 into useful chemical building blocks, while avoiding the limits of living cells and pointing toward new ways to make materials with lower carbon footprints.


That's good news for climate change.

However, it's also a step in most food replicator technologies, for those of you keeping an eye on that track.

This new imaging technology breaks the rules of optics

Scientists have unveiled a new way to capture ultra-sharp optical images without lenses or painstaking alignment. The approach uses multiple sensors to collect raw light patterns independently, then synchronizes them later using computation. This sidesteps long-standing physical limits that have held optical imaging back for decades. The result is wide-field, sub-micron resolution from distances that were previously impossible.


I immediately thought of how many species have multiple eyes. Vertebrates favor two, but invertebrates often have more.  Spiders run to 8.  Scallops can have hundreds.  Since eyes are delicate and expensive tissue, there must be a compelling advantage, specially for more than 1-2 of them.  I would suspect that greater detail is among the advantages.

A friend mentioned Belgian symbolism in art, and when I asked about that, recommended the work of Jean Delville. Fascinating. :D  I'd never seen it before, and it really does have a lot of symbolic imagery.