Engrammesi

19/12/2024

There Are More Trees on Earth Than Stars in the Milky Way
There are so many trees covering our planet that scientists had to figure out a new method to quantify them, and they’ve actually calculated that there are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.

Scientists have determined that the number of stars in the Milky Way ranges from 100 billion to upwards of 400 billion, but there is an estimated amount of 3 trillion trees on Earth. That’s a lot of trees! Even with all those trees currently on Earth, it is still very important that we continue protecting our forests and planting more trees!

16/12/2024

16/12/2024

16/12/2024

In Meru, a town in eastern Kenya, a lush, leafy plant sways over the landscape. Benjamin Mutembei, a Meru resident, is growing the Plectranthus barbatus plant – not for food, but to use as toilet paper. He started growing the plant in 1985. "I learned about it from my grandfather and have been using it ever since. It's soft and has a nice smell," he says.

Plectranthus barbatus is a leafy plant that can grow up to 2m (6.6ft) tall. Its leaves are roughly the size of an industrial toilet paper square and emit a minty, lemony fragrance. Covered in tiny hairs, the leaves have a soft texture. This plant thrives in warm tropical temperatures and partial sunlight and is widely grown across Africa, where it is sometimes used to demarcate property boundaries.

14/12/2024

Shy was not an impatient person, but even she struggled to keep her cool when I whipped out my phone to take what must have been the 100th photo of the same view. Shy – short for Shen Hong Yan – was my guide through Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in central China, and she knew there were better viewpoints up ahead. But I couldn't bring myself to move on just yet; the soaring sandstone quartz pillars of this forest were unlike anything I had seen anywhere else in the world.

Located in the north-western corner of Hunan province, Zhangjiajie is China's first national park, established in 1982. This forest is part of the larger Wulingyuan Scenic Area that was included in Unesco's list of World Heritage sites in 1992 and later given Global Geopark status in 2001. The name may be a tongue-twister, but there is an easier way to remember it – as the inspiration for the Hallelujah Mountains that featured in the blockbuster movie Avatar. In fact, before I visited Zhangjiajie, that was the only fact I knew about this place. Shy confirmed what I had suspected: that Zhangjiajie used to be an underexplored destination even among Chinese tourists before the movie catapulted it into their consciousness.