A Bottled Garden, 66 Years Strong

On Easter Sunday in 1960, British hobbyist David Latimer placed a few cuttings of spiderwort (Tradescantia) into a globular ten-gallon glass carboy with a bit of compost and a quarter-pint of water. He sealed it with a greased cork stopper and set it near a sunlit window.

In 1972, twelve years into the experiment, Latimer opened the bottle to give the plant its second and final drink of water. He sealed it again, and it has stayed that way ever since.

More than 66 years after planting, the carboy remains the world’s longest-living closed terrarium (Tropical Glass, Wikipedia).

Does It Still Exist?

Yes. The sealed bottle garden continues to thrive. Aside from occasionally rotating the vessel so all sides receive indirect sunlight, Latimer has left it completely untouched.

He has noted plans to pass the heirloom down to his children, or donate it to the Royal Horticultural Society so it can continue to be preserved and studied.

The Science of a Closed World

The carboy requires no fresh air, no fertilizer, and no added water. The only external input is light:

• The Water Cycle: The plant drinks through its roots, releases moisture through its leaves via transpiration, and lets condensation gather on the glass walls to rain back down into the soil.
• The Carbon Cycle: Photosynthesis produces oxygen and sugars by day. At night, plant respiration and soil bacteria breaking down fallen foliage consume oxygen and release carbon dioxide, feeding the next morning’s growth.

It is a complete, self-regulating biosphere running on a continuous loop.

From the Moss & Fog Shop

From the Shop

Things we would keep for ourselves

Visit the shop →

Rose Quartz Marimo Moss Ball Terrarium $26 Pocket Terrarium / Self Sustaining Miniature Ecosystem $11

If you want to bring a small, quiet world to your desk or windowsill, a few living favorites from our shop:

• Pocket Terrarium: A complete self-sustaining micro-ecosystem built with real living moss, layered mineral sands, and nutrient-rich substrate sealed inside glass.
• Rose Quartz Marimo Moss Ball Terrarium: Velvety green botanical spheres resting over raw rose quartz in corked glass jars. They live in water and ask for almost nothing beyond gentle indirect light.

Browse the full collection at the Moss & Fog Shop.

The post This Living Garden Has Been Sealed for Decades appeared first on Moss and Fog.

Criminals are hacking into public Wi-Fi devices—at hotels, conference centers, and so on—around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials.

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

Link: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing…

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Link: corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap…

Amazon is buying printed books in bulk, cutting the bindings off, scanning the pages for AI training data and discarding the paper, according to a 404 Media investigation published on 17 August 2026. Reporter Emanuel Maiberg confirmed the operation by hiding an Apple AirTag inside one book in a 1,000-title order and tracking it across the United States.

The tracker's final stop was LAS8, an Amazon warehouse in north-east Las Vegas, Nevada. The book-scanning unit inside LAS8 is called VGT3, and the logo at its entrance is a Tyrannosaurus rex holding an open book.

What the AirTag Investigation Found

The 1,000-book order was placed through Biblio, a rare and used book marketplace that keeps buyer identities anonymous. An anonymous bookseller working with 404 Media planted the AirTag, which moved through several states before arriving in Las Vegas.

Amazon employees describing VGT3 on worker forums said their entire job is receiving pallets of books, scanning barcodes and cutting bindings so the pages feed through scanners faster. Amazon told 404 Media it "purchases books through commercial channels" to improve its products, and named no model. Secondary coverage of the investigation has tied the data to Amazon's Nova model family; Amazon has not confirmed that.

Why AI Companies Want Printed Books

Printed text published before 2022 is the scarcest training resource in AI right now. Much of it was never digitised, so it escaped the web scrapes every large model has already consumed — and nothing printed before 2022 can contain AI-generated text. That second point matters because training a model on other models' output degrades it, a failure researchers call model collapse.

Booksellers told 404 Media the buyers scan every ISBN (the serial number unique to each edition), which supports their theory that AI firms are working through printed books by serial number.

How Amazon Compares With Anthropic's Project Panama

Amazon is not the first company to do this. Court exhibits in Bartz v Anthropic PBC described an internal effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world", codenamed Project Panama. Judge William Alsup ruled that scanning lawfully purchased books to train a model was transformative fair use, partly because the printed original was destroyed rather than resold.

What This Means in India

No Indian court has ruled on destructive scanning. On 24 July 2026, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court refused ANI Media an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding on a prima facie basis that storing news content to train a large language model falls under the fair dealing exception in Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957. India's exceptions are a closed statutory list rather than the flexible US fair use test, and the physical destruction of a copy was never at issue there. The main ANI suit continues.

Quick Answers

Which Amazon facility scans books for AI training?

LAS8, an Amazon warehouse in north-east Las Vegas, Nevada. The scanning unit inside it is called VGT3.

Does Amazon destroy the books it scans?

Yes. Workers at VGT3 told 404 Media the bindings are cut off to speed up scanning, which destroys the printed copy.

Is destructive book scanning legal in India?

No Indian court has ruled on it as of 18 August 2026. The Delhi High Court's July 2026 interim order covered AI training on text, not the destruction of physical books.

The bookseller who worked with 404 Media put the objection plainly: "They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together."