Botany

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Southern Finland. I've found these and some more bluish ones. They are fairly small (the flower itself is about 4-6cm) and have these long, pretty thick leaves. It isn't visible in the photos, but the petals have this glittery look on them. Here's one of the blue ones, in a vase: I've mostly seen them near yards or gardens, so I think they aren't native.

Plant vision?

Guide to ID UK buttercups: https://botsocscot.wordpress.com/2020/06/06/three-of-our-common-buttercups-telling-them-apart/

A wonderful guide for long car rides.

Pythagoras’s aversion to beans, though, always got a lot of attention, even from ancient writers. According to Pliny, Pythagoreans believed that fava beans could contain the souls of the dead, since they were flesh-like. Due to their black-spotted flowers and hollow stems, some believers thought the plants connected earth and Hades, providing ladders for human souls. The beans’ association with reincarnation and the soul made eating fava beans close to cannibalism. Aristotle, writing earlier, went much further. One possible reason for the ban, he wrote, was that the bulbous shape of beans represented the entire universe. Nevertheless, other Greeks ate plenty of fava beans, and Pythagorean beliefs were mocked. The poet Horace tauntingly called beans “relations of Pythagoras.”

Flowers are “giving up on” pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them as insect numbers decline, researchers have said.

Produced by the MAdLand consortium and made publically accessible via Zenodo. The series was presented in exhibition form in several botanical gardens across Germany this summer. Only this German version exists, unfortunately.

Apologies for the silly clickbait headline.

"The conservation of the genetic resources of old trees is crucial to their ecological role but is extremely difficult, especially for oak species (Quercus spp.) displaying recalcitrance in seed and vegetative propagation methods. Our study aimed to assess the regenerative potential of Quercus robur trees of different ages (up to 800 years) during micropropagation. We also aimed to determine how in vitro conditions can influence in vitro regeneration responses.[..]"