Best Of MetaFilter

(69/365) :: Cooking spree! by chispita_666 (cc by)

I worked for a seed company in the 1980s. Back then I would've bored you to death with incessant lectures on sweet corn genetics and the wonders of modern plant breeding

mhh5 asks for corn that is starchy and chewy and not particularly sweet, and Lunaloon serves up the (fascinating!) inside line on common corn before "the discovery of the sugary and sugar-enhanced corn genes led to the extra-sweet and super-sweet sweet corns that have replaced the old-style sweet corn"

hexagonal cross-stitch symmetry sampler by Craig S. Kaplan via isohedral.ca

Rethinking seeds, from the ground up: "no one had ever asked him to select for flavor" | Rethinking the rectangular weave cross stitch grid: Mad weave is triaxial | Rethinking procrastination: "Procrastination has nothing to do with self control" | Rethinking the "gold standard" for assessing scientific truth: Scientists rise up against statistical significance

DP2M3705 Tomato from the Dacha Garden by carlfbagge (cc by-nc-nd)

Why are so many tomato varieties and cultivars from Russia? in Ask Metafilter

Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium by paukrus (cc by)

Some great recent posts on the natural world:

A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey: gorgeous images and bio info on early entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian

The inner life of the fig: documentary on the sycamore fig tree, focusing on the intricate mutualism between a fig tree and its fig wasp

A tree grows in Israel: an extinct Judean Date Palm is grown from an ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists

My hovercraft is full of Petromyzon marinus: science, lore, and more on the fearsome sea lamprey

Satan Put the Kettle On: the mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls' vanishing waterfall