The pollen has little barbs on it, if we look.

You can tell that from the little barbs on there.

Imagine trying to make friends covered with razor sharp poisonous barbs.

And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system.

They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs, and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia.

Evidently, a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin, it's sending a venom.

No one, however, will ever succeed if we obstinately hunker down in the here and now, ignoring reality and using our multilateral institutions to fling barbs and score points.

Then there is the long tradition of the court jester with license to criticize the despot by sweetening his barbs with jokes. The annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, where the president is lampooned by the press, is a relic of this custom.

Now, those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well, but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph, and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this, if it was the Earth.