Keegan Masterson

pro naps

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

[Timothy Johnson @MiamiCanes1971]

The British being unprepared to perform on American soil has been a tradition since 1776

[Gerald McCoy @Geraldini93]

Man I’m in tears!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂

[Zion @zionszzn]

Getting older is crazy. One wrong pillow angle and your neck is disabled for the entire week. 😭

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your fridge runs 24 hours a day. Solar panels only work while the sun’s out. That mismatch is the entire reason this plant exists, and the fix is just hot salt.

The Dunhuang plant in China’s Gobi Desert uses 12,000 mirrors aimed at a single tower about as tall as an 80-story building. All that focused sunlight heats a mix of salts (the same stuff in fertilizer) to 565°C, hot enough to glow red. That liquid salt gets pumped into giant insulated tanks. The tanks are so well insulated they only lose about 1°C per day. When the city needs electricity at 2am, the hot salt boils water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and you get power. Same basic process as a coal plant. Just no coal.

Here’s what makes this different from regular solar: the storage lasts 11 hours. Sun goes down, plant keeps running all night. The big batteries that cities plug into their power grids right now? Those typically hold about 4 hours of electricity. Building batteries that last 11 hours is possible, but the cost balloons fast. A German energy storage study found that storing energy in hot salt costs roughly 33x less than storing it in the lithium-ion batteries we use today.

China has built 27 of these plants so far, enough to power roughly a million homes. They doubled that number in 2025 alone. Another 3,000 megawatts (enough for about 2 million more homes) are under construction right now, with 4,000 more in the planning stage. Beijing wants 15,000 megawatts by 2030.

The US tried this same technology once. Ivanpah, out in the Mojave Desert. Cost $2.2 billion. But they skipped the storage part entirely, so it could only make power while the sun was shining. It needed natural gas every morning just to start up. It’s now slated to shut down in 2026, thirteen years early, because regular solar panels got so cheap they made the whole project obsolete. China took the same idea, added the one part America left out, and is now building dozens of them.

One more thing worth knowing. The salt is made from basic industrial chemicals. No lithium mining. No cobalt. No rare earth metals. And it lasts 30 years of daily use before the tanks need work.

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

That was funny 😂

[g4far @lekan897]

Toyota Celica GR

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

ANOTHER WIN FOR USA OVER THAT COUNTRY UP NORTH

[Black Rifle Coffee @blckriflecoffee]

USA USA USA!!!!!

[Ben @MrGoodlyCooks]

I don’t follow hockey, but this had me tearing up. They brought their teammate’s (who was killed by a drunk driver) kids out onto the ice with their dad’s jersey to celebrate the moment. 🥹

[Pat McAfee @PatMcAfeeShow]

Our goalie decided we weren’t gonna lose today.. One of the greatest American sport performances of all time

🗣🗣 THANK YOU FOR STANDING ON YOUR HEAD CONNOR HELLEBUYCK

��🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[𝐃𝐔𝐓𝐂𝐇 @pr0ud_americans]

OMG, this is hilarious.🤣

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

BROCK PURDY TOYING WITH THE BEARS DEFENSE 😭🔥

(via @NFL)

[Lakers All Day Everyday @LADEig]

Luka flew over 26 HOURS roundtrip in a matter of a few days to Slovenia for the birth of his newborn daughter and came back to drop a casual 31-15-11…

This dude is the MVP on and off the floor 💛💜

[Bobbi @kittenaround_51]

Have you seen the new Desert Power Wagons by Dodge?
I'm kinda digging it, serious classic vibes from early 1900's.

[lisahsmithlhs @lisahsmithlhs]

😆🤣😂

[vids that go hard @vidsthatgohard]

We are cooked this year if Mike coming like this, it’s over😭