Announcing "Suesa's Favorites" (+ Why you should lick your Research)

It’s hard for Steemains to get noticed. It’s hard Steemians to find good content from people they don’t know. Both those groups are being flooded by a never-ending ocean of spam and often resort to just scrolling through the trending tab. That doesn’t help the community flourish.

Because of that, I decided to do something I’ll call “Suesa’s favorites”!

First things first, no that doesn’t mean you now get one good and one annoying post a day. I don’t like posts that are like “Here, look at this list of users I made. Good, now upvote me!”. Those are boring and don’t add anything.

Instead, you will find at the bottom of every post (starting with the one after this) a short section where I will introduce a Steemian of my choice with a short description why I chose them, what their usual content is and maybe a link to an interesting post by them.

---

Guidelines for this Project

---

1. No additional posts (aside from this one), because my aim isn’t to increase my earnings but to help the community intertwine better.

2. I choose whoever I want. Reputation, payout, number of followers, it doesn’t matter. Their content matters.

3. I will start with people I already know and work my way through them. The point of time when I mention someone is not correlated to how much I like them as a person.

4. As soon as I’m done with the people I know personally (and there are a lot), I will accept applications. But you can’t just send me a link and say “please promote me”. I want personality I want willingness to engage with the community, I want effort!

5. Spammers, plagiarizers, trolls, etc. are excluded from the application process.

6. You can recommend people!

Please keep in mind that I’m not a fulltime Steemian. I still need to go to University each day, still need to study for exams and write lab reports. I won’t be able to read everything the moment you send me. I most likely won’t have the energy to do that most of the time.

---

And now, for something completely different

---

I don’t like making announcement posts without some good, fun content. So here you go!

Why you should sometimes lick your research

Geologists already know it, chemists and biologists still try to keep first semester students from doing it: Licking the stuff you’re currently examining.

Recently, some researchers from West Australia found a grass that tastes like … salt and vinegar chips (or crisps, for the British people among my readers. Looking at you, @mobbs ).

According to Dr. Barrett:

"Someone licked their hand at some point and tasted that flavour."

Wouldn’t that have been a loss for humanity if this ominous “someone” had followed proper lab etiquette?! A huge one for sure.

The grass belongs to the Triodia genus and is called Triodia scintillans. This grass is also referred to as spinifex which is a cruel joke to confuse non-botanists, because Spinifex is a different grass, usually found in coastal areas, while Triodia is typically found inland. _@suesa

Damn botanists.

But my favorite fact about triodia … or spinifex ? My sources seem to disagree with each other … anyway, my favorite fact about this weird family of grass is that it is used to make latex condoms stronger and thus thinner.

Nanocellulose, which is very, very thin plant fiber, is mixed into the latex and makes it a lot more durable.

Isn’t nature amazing.

---

Sources:

'Salt and vinegar chips' spinifex one of eight new plant species discovered by finger-licking scientists

Spinifex (genus)

Triodia (grass)

Queensland researchers make super-thin condoms using native spinifex grass

---

Picture credit:

First one from pixabay.com

Second one by Hesperian (It was scanned from the original 6x4 print.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

---

Got a scientific topic which you want to see as a story? Leave me a comment!
You want to support scientists on Steemit? You are a scientist on Steemit? Join the #steemSTEM channel on steemit.chat and connect with us!
STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

_{Monster GIF was made for me by @saywha and @atopy}