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This is not a place of honor

@cornsquatch / cornsquatch.tumblr.com

24/M/Taken/Poly
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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”
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cornsquatch

Can't wait until I pop one of these bad boys and can upgrade my subscription to Universal Autism

Source: news.ucr.edu
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i get so freaked out by like. pictures of really big rope

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clintwaffle

I’d like to say that’s normal but I’m a frayed knot

i’m so fucking annoyed at this, just for that you don’t get photos of the rope

i changed my mind, this is just too horrifying not to share

it’s called a Hawser and is the thick cable or rope used for towing/mooring a ship

in conclusion, i have nightmares beyond description

NO it would NOT be cool

well i fucken disagree

@scumrunner do you have any cursed facts about hawsers to share ?

As a fiber nerd, i am personally very enthusiastic about them….

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scumrunner

Ohhohohoho DO I EVER. Meet the “snapback zone,” not an area with cool hats, but instead the unintuitive range at which a hawser can kill you if it breaks under tension.

What if we kissed in the snap-back zone? 😳 😳 😳

I don’t think you guys understand how much force this is, a tow rope used to move a 20 foot boat snaps under tension with enough force to dent metal, shatter glass and seriously injure anyone in its way. A Hawser on the other hand… Well I’ve seen a concrete pier with a chuck the size of a sedan ripped out of it by a line failure, and anecdotally, I’ve heard of a 2 ton heavy cargo forklift being skidded sideways, then knocked over. These lines snap with enough force to noticably dent the hull armor of navy ships.

This is a line designed to hold in place a moving object that can be easily in excess of 10000 tons. AND THEY CAN BREAK FROM THAT TENSION ALONE.

THESE THINGS ARE TERRIFYING RUBBER BANDS FROM HELL.

Nope Rope

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cornsquatch

Had a customer supplied hawser (really just a mooring line for a 40' sailing ship) snap while towing them off a sandbar in front of the marina. Side pull from mid bow tied to our twin engine glacier bay. Relatively light line, turns out they'd dug deep in that sand bar, and that line snapping put a 2 inch deep dent in an 8 inch aluminum mast. This was like a 5/8-3/4 inch line.

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sealcontent

love how crocodiles evolved like tens of millions of years ago and then were just like "boom. got it in one. dangerous log. that's my thing" and have been kicking it ever since

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why is the metal community so pressed abt this it’s literally hilarious. 10/10. love it. i want it.

Metal elitists probably are, the rest of us think this is funny as hell. Also fuck yeah to making corpse paint easier to get and for relatively cheap

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reblogged

There's a really non-obvious consequence to all those "smart" appliances out there. Your average corporation lasts less than ten years before it's acquired, goes bankrupt, or is no longer doing the thing it first started out doing. However, all those internet-of-things gadgets still need someone to be paying the server bill, otherwise half of the features go "poof."

This is great for me: I get cheap appliances, tools, construction robots, and pseudo-sentient war machines because most of their functionality required a now-nonexistent web service to be working. For instance, this oven I pulled out of a ditch works perfectly fine to cook food, but the "Turkey Mode" that makes an obnoxious gobbling sound on Thanksgiving Day no longer activates on its own.

Not everything is as lucky. Lots of gadgets are just totally useless, so they get turned into other things. A lobotomized robot lawnmower quickly became a regular ol' human-operated lawnmower with the attachment of a Princess Auto two-stroke engine and a very, very long wood pole. And then there's the stuff that just gets plain weird.

A few weeks ago, I got a new microwave from the "gettin' spot." It was due to be recycled, to be turned into some other microwave. I figured it would still work perfectly fine, so I brought it home, plugged it in, and got ready to heat up some Pizza Pockets. Nothing doing: the screen had only one functional "app" remaining.

On its flickering high-dollar OLED screen, I saw the words "death prediction date." And, clicking on it, the microwave began to read out an entirely plausible date and cause for my personal demise. For a couple days after, guests to my house were also amazed by the microwave's chillingly reasonable projection of their inevitable fatal accident or terminal illness.

I'll never know why the Guangzhou Champion Home Appliance Company imbued the microwave with such an eerie memento mori, but I am grateful for it. The whole experience taught me that life is short, far too short to listen to some snarky-ass microwave that won't even cook a Pizza Pocket. If it's so smart, maybe it should have guessed that I was going to drag it behind my truck on the highway until the transformer – with its delicious, copper-rich windings – fell out.

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stardial

i’m writing a really dumb essay on why i think the metric system is so bad that it taints the entire concept of using units of measurement altogether and every time i mention any argument i make in it, one of my friends gets SO annoyed at me and it’s singlehandedly motivating me to finish it

the main argument literally boils down to “it’s french” but i’ve managed to pad it with enough bullshit that it sounds like an actual researched opinion

my personal favourite achievement is that i’ve managed to reference the tenure of kings and magistrates. which for context is a text from 1650 abt why regicide is okay

i’m not even against the metric system. i’m writing this purely to annoy my friends

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A Timeline

1850s: Some scientists notice the connection between dinosaurs & birds and think birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, given similarity between Archaeopteryx and many dinosaurs, as well as between dinosaurs and living birds  

1960s: Deinonychus is discovered. Scientists starting to realize birds did evolve from dinosaurs; other ideas become fringe hypotheses 

1970s: More dinosaurs are discovered that point to dinosaur behavior being more like birds than reptiles 

1980s: Scientists begin using evolutionary relationships (ie, cladistics) to classify life, rather than Linnean Taxonomy (Kingdom-Phylum-Class etc.), especially for extinct creatures, because it really doesn’t apply to extinct life like, at all. Coelophysis, an early dinosaur, is speculatively depicted with feathers. Some very bird-like dinosaurs are debated on whether they are birds or dinosaurs. 

1993: Birds are straight-up called dinosaurs in the famous film “Jurassic Park,” which is one of the first pieces of media to depict dinosaurs as extremely birdlike; changes public perception of dinosaurs dramatically  

1996: Sinosauropteryx, the first feathered non-avian dinosaur, is revealed to the public. Birds determined to have evolved from dinosaurs, full stop; BANDits (birds-are-not-dinosaurs scientists) now a backwards, on-par-with creationists group. Since we classify dinosaurs based on their evolutionary relationships, we start calling birds dinosaurs, because they evolved from dinosaurs. 

1999: Sinornithosaurus, the first raptor (ie, cousin of Velociraptor) dinosaur found with feathers, is described. Many other feathered dinosaurs are described as well, from all over the group closely related to birds. The Walking With Dinosaurs landmark documentary series calls birds dinosaurs. 

2000: Microraptor, a raptor dinosaur with full wings on its arms and legs, is described 

2001: Velociraptor is given… “feathers” in Jurassic Park III. Velociraptor also portrayed as more bird-like than ever. When Dinosaurs Roamed America, another groundbreaking dinosaur documentary, shows all members of the group closely related to birds (except T. rex) with feathers, including Deinonychus, all over their bodies. Also calls birds dinosaurs. 

2002: A specimen of Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur about as far away from birds as you can get, is described with quills on its tail very similar to feathers 

2004: Dilong, a small relative of T. rex, is found with feathers and display structures like modern birds 

2007: Many feathered dinosaurs are now known from the group most closely related to birds. A specimen of Velociraptor with feather attachment sites on the arms for wing feathers is now known. Velociraptor now known to be definitely, no question, feathered 

2009: Tianyulong, another dinosaur from a group very far from birds, is found with fluffy quills covering all over its back 

2012: Feathered dinosaurs now coming out many times a year. Yutyrannus, a large and closer relative to T. rex, found with shaggy feathers all over its body 

2014: Kulindadromeus, another dinosaur from the group very far from birds, is named. It has fluffy covering like that of Sinosauropteryx all over its body, rather than quills. Feathers determined to be mostly likely ancestral to all dinosaurs and lost secondarily in larger species (especially if fluff known on closest relatives, pterosaurs, is also feathers - see below). 

2015: Zhenyuanlong, a close relative of Velociraptor the same size as Velociraptor, is found with extremely large wings. Raptor dinosaurs inferred to have large wing feathers unless anatomy indicates otherwise (such as having short wings). Jurassic World comes out, making dinosaurs less bird-like than in the original Jurassic Park - with lizard-like tails and behavior, and no feathers at all. Essentially, a huge step backwards. 

2018: Branched fluffy covering very similar to feathers described now on multiple pterosaurs, the group most closely related to dinosaurs (think Pterodactyls). Fluffy covering considered ancestral to all members of the Pterosaur-Dinosaur group, if not all animals more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. 

We have known birds are dinosaurs since before many people reading this were born - since before I was born. We have known dinosaurs had feathers since the mid-1990s. We have known Velociraptor was fluffy and had wings since the mid-2000s. This isn’t news. This isn’t up for debate. Please grow up. Thank you! 

My question is, how do they find out that these dinosaurs had feathers? They only find fossils. What advanced technology are they using?

The fossils have feather imprints. 

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argumate

always have been

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adhoption

thank you

If I recall correctly, it was actually research for Jurassic Park that lead to a more widespread acceptance that birds were related/ descendants. Because when they asked scientists to help them model how they moved, everyone including the scientists went “wait. That looks like a bird”

see now my question is like….. Why wasn’t this more commonly told instead of so many depictions since then just being Big Weird Lizards because giant birds with claws and fangs fuck and would sell just as well as nude dinosaurs

Societal Biases

IE we are really invested in the narrative that humans Are The Ultimate Progression of Evolution, that evolution was always building to us, and that nature is favoring us as we speak

Part of that narrative is “dinosaurs went extinct because they were slow stupid reptiles; reptiles today are limited to all these small things because they LOST to us POWERFUL MAMMALS”

but the minute you realize dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they just exist as birds, and birds are doing **better** than mammals evolutionarily speaking (significantly more species - also, there are way more species of nonavian reptile than there are of mammals too…)

then suddenly it’s clear nature is just the lottery, over and over and over again. Random chance, random chance. Humans are here as a Fluke, nothing more. We are an accident

And it’s a lot harder for accidents to justify milking the planet and its resources for all its worth than it is for The Natural Pinnacle of Evolution to do so, isn’t it?

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pitbolshevik

leopard seals are my favorite seal species they're so fucking weird looking i love them

one of my servers had a conniption because we found this drawing by one of the guys who died on an antarctic expedition and we could not figure out what the fuck it was supposed to represent

and then we found this photo of a leopard seal and it was like oh okay the drawing isn’t bad the animal just looked like that

obsessed with the nefarious intentions radiating from that drawing

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