I don't know whether the story about tibetan spaniels and tibetan mastiffs working together is true or not, but I find it way too fucking funny. Like imagine being a burglar who's broken into a monastery to do burglarly things, and then you hear a noise and you're like "oh shit I'm caught", but then you turn to look and it's just this tiny dog who looks at you with mild disgust and wanders off.

So you sigh in relief and continue with your robbery before you hear another noise, and immediately become aware of three things: The little dog came back with a friend, the new buddy is the size of one metric Fuck You, and you are about to find out which afterlife is real.

Adding this for people who don't know these breeds

Tibetan spaniel

Tibetan mastiff

clint and bucky are so fucking funny

Krampus 🐐❄️🎅🏼

This website will never cease to amaze me

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don’t have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there’s the kea, straight-up titled “clown of the mountains”, that has a specific vocalization for “playtime!”. Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go “great idea, disembodied voice! it’s TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!” and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he’s shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

It’s your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.

So there’s this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or “Plexin”, right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human’s increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., “language learning”. Super cool, right?

Humans aren’t the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like… ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT’S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans’.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop’s fable test with flying colors. They’re so goddamn cool, I love them so much. The kea really said: “I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time” and that’s so powerful honestly

guess who just found out the difference between wax paper and parchment paper the hard way

wait what’s the difference?

one you can use in the oven safely and the other you can also use in the oven if the thing you are trying to make happens to be fire

Re: the last post, the article mentions that some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.  

The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors.

Edit: check out this documentary trailer : https://vimeo.com/408820791

God Bless Our Troops

They hot glued a spring to a clam and gave it full control over the water supply

No of course not, that would be ridiculous.

They hot glued springs to eight clams and gave them collective control over the water supply.

No of course not, hot glue would kill the clams.

The used silicone adhesive to attach springs to eight clams and gave them collective control over the water supply.

love this so much

Read more here:

Friendly reminder that GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and it’s 100% free. Fuck DRM and the license culture, we have plenty of open source options available to us as a consumer.

If Adobe is going to be greedy shitheads, then fuck ‘em. Don’t use their stuff. Freeware can be just as good, if not better, than Adobe CC.

reblog to save a digital arts major

Reblog to save an artist.

oh jEEZ

For music:

black widow v8 #5

ok but if bruce wayne somehow came upon zuko fresh out of banishment he would lose his mind.

black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

bruce, vibrating with excitement, already pulling adoption papers from his utilility: that’s terrible. how do you feel about capes.

Zuko: Do you mind if I wear this blue demon mask?

Bruce: *sniff, tear in his eye* Not at all.

*Zuko fighting the Joker*

J: "wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s"

Z: *rips off mask* i don't give a fuck

I’m still stuck at the “batman has adoption papers in his utility belt”.

“Quick, it’s time to use the Bat-adoption papers!”

Bat-option papers

Okay, but you’re missing the best part of this.

Alfred and Iroh complimenting each other on tea while they discuss their overly dramatic children.

iroh: once, i told zuko that he needs to work on his inter turmoil. he screamed at me that he had no such inner turmoil, and then proceeded to go to a cliff during a thunderstorm to scream at God to strike him with lightning

alfred: master bruce and i have that interaction at least three times per week.

@absentlyabbie​

I see your "Alfred and Iroh as tea bros" and raise you "Alfred and Iroh as tea rivals"

Consider

(later)

excellent addition

hey bruce spent a lot of his bat-study abroad in the far east and has kind of a weeb weapon collection so proposal, what if Bruce appreciates Iroh’s tea

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

further fueling their dad-figures’ passive-aggressive rivalry?

You had me at Zuko vs. Joker, I was crying by the Eastern vs. Western tea service

Wait a minute. Batman and Zuko have the same arch-nemesis.

Mark Hamill

Saw the last comment and my brain would not rest until it happened

this post has everything

this was an enjoyable ride. i liked the scenery very much. smooth suspension, nice height, several fascinating loops. 10/10 would go again.

mark hamill??? LUKE SKYWALKER???

he's dp undergrowth, he's the gf shapeshifter, HE'S FIRE LORD OZAI, HE'S (a version of) THE JOKER-???

Oh yeah I forgot Mark Hamill was in Gravity Falls

Curious Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) standing upright and looking through porthole into the kitchen of arctic expedition ship M/S Stockholm in Svalbard, Spitsbergen, Norway by Andy Rouse               

Hahaha that’s great. By the way, this is the picture of him with his head in.

Some thoughts about teeth and fast food franchises. The absolutely remarkable otter skull in the beginning belongs to Mitch Evans. Thank you so much for the photos. Dentists and Vets following me, have you guys ever seen anything like this? 

Other places I post more aggressively at: INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER      

Peter: I am decaying. My lungs are full of thorns and mildew. My bones are held together by vines. I am fragile. Be gentle with my corpse.

Tony: get out of bed you’re going to school whether you like it or not.

Peter: I refuse.