Doomscrolling Save Point

hey relax for a second and watch the cat

[ID. Video of a woman recording an opera performance when her cat, fluffy and with bulging eyes, hops into frame. She stops singing and tries to push the cat slightly out of the way, but on her next cue the cat starts meowing before she can sing. The woman starts laughing as the cat continues meowing to the music, as though it was singing as well. End ID.]

More evidence that cats bond with us by mirroring us.

I’ve read accounts here on the Tumblr of a trans man whose cat lowered the pitch of their meow, after he started taking T. So I suspect this woman sings a lot around the house, and her cat is like: “That’s just how we do things in this clowder.”

you are not unloveable you are just sad and a little bit angry. let’s go have some soup

When talking to toddlers, you have to be extremely, explicitly clear about what you say, cover every possibility you can think of in which they might misunderstand it, and with trial and error and experience, you'll learn to also cover the possibilities that wouldn't have crossed your mind. If you tell a toddler, "whatever you do, do not touch that electric wire. Not even with your pinky finger, because if you do, you will die" and once you're finally sure they understood that, you'll turn your eyes away for two seconds

and they're right at the wire, trying to see what happens if they'll touch it with their pinky toe instead.

You don't usually have to do this with adults. An adult who is allergic to pineapples can hear someone say, "eating pineapple is good for you", evaluate this piece of information, conclude that this is probably true for people who aren't allergic to pineapple, shrug it off and carry on with their day.

Unless you're on tumblr. Tumblr posts must be worded like toddler talk, cover every possibility in which someone might misunderstand it, remember to mention people who do not have this problem you are talking about, cannot employ this solution, or who otherwise have nothing to do with this conversation.

You can't just say "eating pineapple is good for you", you'll have to make sure to specify "eating pineapple is good, unless you are allergic to pineapple, in which case do not eat pineapple". And then get promptly informed that you you forgot to mention people who suffer from some extremely rare cliantro-soap-gene that makes pineapple taste like ass, and consequently offended someone who still ships Harry Potter Characters.

Science.

I can’t tell what my favorite part is, but it’s either

OR  E. All of the above.

BUT WAIT THERES MORE!

Can mantids wear and see in 3D glasses? YES

THEY PUT LITTLE GLASSES ON MANTIDS

Do honey bees suffer from sleep deprivation? YES

Here is the BEE INSOMNIATOR.

They put MAGNETS ON BEES  and WIGGLED THEM TO KEEP THEM AWAKE

How do scales help snakes move?

Well they put SNAKES IN LITTLE SHIRTS to find out!

SHRIMPS ON A TREADMILL

biology is the greatest

bad and naughty children get put into the bee wiggler to atone for their sins

The best thing about the ant one is that somebody clearly was like “Oh well ants probably count their steps” and that was just like… a thought that came into their head.

THE BEE WIGGLER

This demonstrates that discovery requires madness.

gravity was discovered because Newton just so happened to have an apple fall on his napping ass what do you think science is

This is a cool post but AAAH I need to talk about the ants.

Not just any ants–desert ants!  See, most ants lay down scent trails to find their way around.  But in the desert the damn ground blows away constantly.  So how do desert ants find their way around?  Maybe they count.

Okay but like.  Ants can count.  Ants have teeny teeny tiny brains and they can count.  Do you know how teeny an ant brain is?  Because I have spent time dissecting them out and let me tell you it is one of the most ridiculous occupations I have ever engaged in.  They are like period sized.  <–these things here at either end–>. 

And the really cool thing about finding out that a teeny tiny brain can do a thing, is that the brains are simple enough that we actually might have a shot at figuring out precisely how they efficiently encode the ability to count.  And then we can apply that to things like math and computers and living human brains, which we aren’t allowed to dissect very much because reasons.

Also, this was an awesomely clever experiment because do you want to know the budget for gluing stilts on ants to see what happens?  Really small.  Like ant brains.

Their names were Matthias Wittlinger, Rudiger Wehner, and Harald Wolf, and the stilts were boar hairs!  Also there was a second part of the experiment where they trimmed the ant legs to make them take shorter steps, but no one ever talks about that part because it’s less cute and more morbid. :O  (It’s… slightly less morbid when you know this kind of thing happens naturally to ants with age and high temperatures.  Life is hard for ants.  But they are excellent at counting.)

I know right?

but why shrimp on threadmill? what was the science here?

Can shrimps get swole?

Oh!  I have answers!

This one is also SO IMPORTANT TO ME because it came up a while back when people were complaining about National Science Foundation funding and trying to cut budgets for research.  (It was a whole big republican thing, look it up).  And one of the examples was “egghhhh, scientists are wasting our money building treadmills for shrimp” with, I guess, the assumption that scientists do things for shits and giggles and to film sweet youtube videos, and that any project funded by a government agency hasn’t gone through an intense screening process to demonstrate scientific & public merit.

Alright, so I haven’t even looked up the paper and I can tell you off the top of my head that treadmills are a great way to measure:

which are traits that we very often want to measure in a diversity of organisms.

Here are some important questions you could address with shrimp treadmills:

Okay, so those are just what I brainstormed right now.  I don’t actually know what the hot questions in shrimp are.

Now I’ll look up the actual study by  Dr. David Scholnik. So:

Thus: Science. :D

feels like a good call, Turkmenistan!

:(

Keep it open!!!

Jokes aside, extinguishing this thing might actually be bad or at the very least extremely complicated.

If you don’t know anything about Turkmenistan it’s an oppressive dictatorship in the same ballpark as North Korea. The Gates of Hell is one of its only tourist attractions and the way it came about is pretty weird actually.

Sources vary because this thing happened in the Soviet era so record keeping wasn’t great but it seems like the most likely story is that geologists were digging in the area when they hit a natural reserve of methane. And if you don’t know, methane is many many times worse then carbon dioxide for the environment.

So whoever was digging out there set the methane leak on fire, probably figuring it would burn up and only release carbon dioxide into the air which is like, bad but it’s not as bad as a buttload of methane and they probably expected it to just burn for a few days.

But here’s the thing, guys. It’s been burning now for almost 50 years. 50 years this methane leak has been burning up in a giant hole in Turkmenistan. And nobody knows when it’s gonna stop burning. The methane could run out tomorrow, or it could run out a hundred years from now. But leaving it burning is the safest bet because it’s keeping the methane at bay and it’s one of the country’s only tourist attractions.

Enter Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. A dictator, and, as most dictators are, an idiot. But he’s even an idiot by dictator standards. He does things like recite love poems about horses on national tv and try to sterilize public places against covid by burning a bunch of grass in them for some reason? But anyways, this guy announced he wants to extinguish the gates of hell which honestly seems like shooting himself in the foot for a multitude of reasons including the health of his country’s tiny tourism industry but what’s even wilder is he claims he wants to put it out because it’s a “danger to the environment”

I mean, YEAH, but you know what’s worse for the environment? However much methane is in there. And nobody knows how much is in there! If he really wants to extinguish that thing it’s gonna take a small army of scientists to do it safely, if it’s even possible! And Turkmenistan is already one of the world’s top polluters per capita when it comes to methane! If this thing was the real gate to hell that would honestly probably be less wild.

I though this was a picture of enchiladas

Here’s a screenshot of the idiot dictator himself doing donuts in a car next to it

reblogging to teach people random shit they didnt need to know

For my non uk followers wondering wtf is going on:

- prime minister is a cunt. Had like a bajillion scandals

- latest one was apparently one two many. Two extremely important cabinet members resigned within minutes of each other

- within the next 24 hours about a third of the government resigned

- one resigned live on tv. Five resigned with the same letter to save time

- previous record for government resignations within 24 hours was 6 and it it was in the 1930s. We are, as I’m writing this, on 45 resignations

- Michael Gove, another cunt who is hated by all, was going to resign but was sacked instead in what appears to be the prime minister going “you can’t quit you’re fired!”

- government meetings are being cancelled because there is literally nobody in those departments anymore

- despite literally everyone begging him at this point to leave, including his most loyal little evil henchman, prime minister is refusing to resign in disgrace as is traditional for British prime ministers

- prime minister genuinely seems to be in complete denial anything serious is happening

- people are calling for Larry the Cat, no. 10’s chief mouser to be the next prime minister. When asked for comment, he licked his arse on live television