The life of a liverwort starts from the germination of a haploid spore to produce a protonema, which is either a mass of thread-like filaments or else a flattened thallus.
Kevin Rabinovitch stands straight and speaks in clear, clipped tones - more like a naval officer than a corporate quant - as, on the screen behind him, a daunting mass of threads and whorls illustrates the global flows of Brazilian soybeans from thousands of individual municipalities across Brazil, through specific exporters and importers, to countries around the world.
The capillitia (masses of thread-like sterile fibers dispersed among the spores) are branched, 3.5 6.5 µm in diameter, and hyaline (translucent).
Demonstrate this in costume form by wearing any garments you like, but slowly unravelling them as the night progresses, until you're eventually left, cold and alone, with nothing but a mass of useless thread and memories of how things were.
It's all apparently inchoate cornucopia, a mass of unexpected threads - Ezra Pound's "wilderness of broken mirrors".
In fact, I didn't watch it, but I did watch the subsequent furore unfold concerning the Prince's Barbour jacket: patched and mismatched, a messy mass of hanging threads and fraying seams torn apart and darned together until HRH declared he could barely move in it.
While mushrooms might be the most familiar part of a fungus, most of their bodies are made up of a mass of thin threads, known as a mycelium.
The wind carries the fungal spores of ergot to the flowers of the rye, where the spores germinate, infect and destroy the ovaries of the plant, and replace them with masses of microscopic threads cemented together into a hard fungal structure shaped like a rye kernel but considerably larger and darker.
Then, prototypes of a transducer and a pair of front mass with thread and straight grooves were manufactured for experimental purpose.
Round 1: the slings and arrows of "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary," with masses of plastic utensils and combs, old LPs, dangling eyeglasses, syringes, ladies' pumps, pieces of crockery and spools of thread.
