bsomerfield

I'm off to Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford in a week or so. Apart from the three cathedrals, obviously, what shouldn't I miss in each of the three cities? I won't be exploring outside of them to other places round about, so it's the three cities I'm really interested in. Thanks!

Weeping willows are technically a genetic mutation humans refused to fix. Every normal tree grows tension wood on the upper side of its branches. It's a specialized cellulose structure that contracts like a muscle, pulling each limb upward against gravity. That's how a tree stays vertical. Weeping willows can't do it. A mutation in the WEEP gene inverts the auxin gradient that tells a branch which side is up. Growth hormone accumulates on the wrong side. Cells elongate on top instead of reinforcing underneath. The branch bends the wrong direction and keeps going. Everything you find beautiful about the shape is a structural failure nature would normally cull. Humans saw it, liked the silhouette, and propagated the mutation across continents. Then it got weirder. The bark contains salicin, a glucoside your liver converts into salicylic acid. Johann Buchner isolated the compound in 1828 and named it from the Latin salix. Seventy years later Bayer acetylated the molecule so the stomach could tolerate repeated doses. They called it aspirin. Global production now runs around 40,000 metric tons a year. Over 100 billion pills. The most-consumed drug in human history came out of a tree whose defining feature is a failure of mechanical engineering. Every willow you see at night wrapped in fairy lights is a structural defect that happens to be a pharmacy.