What helps exploding pods disperse

Pods of certain plants such as gorse and  pansies have a way of flinging their seeds when ripe in every direction with considerable force. The thing that helps these seeds disperse is first and foremost the mechanical force itself used to catapult the seeds.

 As they ripen, the seed pods gradually lose moisture, building up tension in their cells and subsequently in the pod as a whole.   The structure inevitably fails gradually and during a hot day it gives way altogether due to heat stress and triggers an explosion firing the seeds with appreciable force away from the parent plant almost like a projectile for up to 100m (300 ft) away.

It is important to note that  plants which use this explosive method or ballistic dispersal as it is also called tend to have seeds that are generally large and too heavy to be carried by the wind unlike those of plants such as dandelions which are light enough for wind dispersal. Therefore gorse and suchlike plants employ ballistic methods to ensure their seeds travel as far away from the parent plant as possible.

Science27 of the most iconic, jaw-dropping photos of the earth and the moon from spacedave mosher  oct 1, 2018, 11: 13 am etnasa/flickrapollo 11 astronauts took this photo of earth on july 20, 1969.from the ground, earth looks like a boundless fertile plain that beckons to be explored and exploited.but astronauts would beg -  and even plead  - to differ."you realize that people often say, 'i hope to go to heaven when i die,'" jim lovell, an astronaut who flew on the apollo 8 and apollo 13 missions to the moon, previously  told business insider. "in reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you're born."lovell has seen first-hand that we live on a tiny rock hopelessly lost in the void. he's also quick to tell you it's the only one we've got - a  fragile spaceship  for more than 7 billion people: "you arrive on a planet that has the proper mass, has the gravity to contain water and an atmosphere, which are the very essentials for life. and you arrive on this planet that's orbiting a star just at the right distance - not too far to be too cold, or too close to be too hot - and just at the right distance to absorb that star's energy and then, with that energy, cause life to evolve here in the first place. in reality, you know, god has really given us a stage, just looking at where we were around the moon, a stage on which we perform. and how that play turns out is up to us, i guess."humanity has recorded photos of earth from hundreds, thousands, millions, and even billions of miles away, some of them taken by lovell himself.these images not only scientists study our dynamic world, but also understand how a habitable planet looks from afar, which aids the search for  more worlds. most importantly, however, the images underscore our peculiar existence on  a mote of cosmic dust.take a moment to ponder 27 of the most arresting images of earth that humankind has ever captured from space.a