#spacedaily
"Melbourne gave each of its 70,000 street trees an ID number and an email address in 2013 so residents could report dropped limbs, and instead the trees received thousands of love letters from around the world, which city staff sometimes answer in the voice of the tree.
What began as a municipal database became an unexpected outlet for human connection, as thousands of strangers worldwide started pouring their hearts out to inanimate objects."
(...)
They sent fan mail and thank-you notes. They sent confessions. They wrote to a favourite elm on the way to work to say it made them happy; they wrote to a gum they cycled past every day to say how much joy it gave them, in any weather. One writer told a tree the whole strange backstory of why it mattered — a driving instructor who smelled of cat food and peppermints had once named it his favourite. Another confessed, tree to tree, to having fallen in love with a different tree elsewhere in the city."
Aaaaw! :)
The oldest "Message in a Bottle" ever found (until now), from 1886:
"German sailors threw thousands of bottles overboard between 1864 and 1933 to chart ocean currents, and in 2018 a woman walking an Australian beach picked one up, 132 years after a captain logged it going over the rail — and the note's details matched the ship's journal exactly"
Fascinating story!
#SpaceDaily #MessageInABottle #Oceanography #Science #Hamburg