things that heal

she/her

[lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223]

Laziness Does Not Exist Devon Price

[awed-frog]

Today I learned oaks can talk with one another and collectively decide not make acorns for an entire year to try and starve as many squirrels as they can so next year’s acorns will have a higher chance of turning into trees, and my entire understanding of the world just shifted a little.

[mugwomps]

Underground revolt.

[butterflypeaflowertea]

every single day a sunset occurs & every single day i’m like oh my God this is the prettiest thing i’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing... & every single day it’s true

[norathebean]

the forest library🍄🐸

[sunsbleeding]

Again and again//

[adelicateculturecell]

"Well, scientists have attempted to create lichens in the lab by culturing the appropriate partners together, but with little success. And it turns out that that might be because we've underestimated the number of partners involved. In one study, scientists found that there was at least one other fungal partner in their lichens. And it could be that other species have many many other members involved, making them far more complex than we have understood thus far."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Moss & Lichen: Which One Is Actually a Plant?

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

[chenillecottage]

Okay, so here I am, a queer First Nations woman, and someone who is insanely in love with the cottagecore aesthetic.

Many see that as a huge contradiction. So here’s the thing: I see how problematic Western farming practices are, I see the exclusion of people of color, I see settlers cultivating a land that they do not own. There are many problematic things that many cottagecore aesthetic blogs do not recognize and do not want to acknowledge. I want to create a place where these issues can be recognized and fixed.

I think there are many aspects of the cottagecore community that are important. The idea of living the “slow life”, and therefore reducing environmental impact and living more sustainably is very freeing. I love the idea of the lack of participation in a capitalist society and I love that the community is mostly made up of queer folks, and more specifically, women who love women. I also love the strong emphasis on and celebration of handicraft, and in particular, types of craft that have been traditionally deemed to be “feminine”.

I think there is room to acknowledge the problematic aspects of the aesthetic, work to create a more inclusive space, and continue to emphasize the good aspects of it. Let’s make room in the cottagecore community for people of color, plus-size people, and disabled people, as well as anyone who does not feel included in the community for any other reason. We can create an inclusive place where we can all love flowers and gingham and peter pan collars and picnics. We all deserve those bits.

[museiums]

artist: miranda sofroniou

[architects-archive]

obsessed with this photo series about trans love by photographer landyn pan (source)

[battlechick]

this is literally the sweetest thing ever 🥺

[catchymemes]

[virgogreen]

Fun fact, this may actually account for many of the “imaginings” we have of extinct animals.

I had a molecular biology professor who referred it to “vacuum packing” where many extinct animals are rendered slimmer or muscular than they may have been, since things like body fat and fur are not preserved during fossilization. So our view of animals like dinosaurs may be entirely inaccurate.

There’s actually a book, All Yesterdays, in which the artist, CM Koseman, draws modern animals as we might have interpreted them to look if we found them extinct the same way do dinosaurs.

Fun examples include:

The manatee

An elephant

Swans

And literally the picture of the hippo

[the-cosmic-goddess-deactivated2]

Another funny thing to add to this…because of how fossils are formed, it’s possible we don’t know what type of dinosaurs were different species or the same species.  If we compare the skeletons to modern animals, snake skeletons often look pretty much the same so if all snakes were extinct we may believe they were all one species of animal instead of hundreds.  Meanwhile, all dog breeds are considered the same species Canis lupus familiaris (technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of Canus lupus, the Grey Wolf, but you get what I mean) despite their skeletons being drastically different from each other (compare a pug skull to a great dane and to a poodle…they’ll look different).

So, if all snakes were mistaken for being only a small handful of species and modern dogs could be mistaken for a BUNCH of unique different species…think about how that knowledge can reflect onto our current understanding of extinct animals.

[houseofthebattlegenie]

It goes deeper than that. A colleague of mine who’s a paleontologist was commenting on how for some extant species of birds, we can only tell species apart through behavior traits like song. You could have two perfectly preserved dead specimens of bird, but you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart because you need to hear their songs to tell their species apart. She said that she is sometimes kept awake by thoughts of the implications of this for species classifications in paleontology, and whether we collapse huge swaths of species in the fossil record into just one species because we can’t tell them apart just with the information we havd

[headspace-hotel]

This reminds me of how recently we found out that Nanotyrannus isn’t actually its own species, but just…a juvenile Tyrannosaurus

[thescottishmermaid]

@alternativeforensicscientist

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sindri42]

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

[wonkygal]

this one really gets me bestie

(meditations in an emergency, cameron awkward-rich)

[academicssay]

research articles explained | credit: XKCD

Types of Scientific Paper

Types of Scientific Paper

[paper-fairy]

“Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all on their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That’s why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.”

— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe 

[ultrafacts]

Hydrangea macrophylla flowers can change color depending on soil acidity. In acid soils, chemical reactions occur in the soil that make aluminium available to these plants, turning the flowers blue. In alkaline soils, these reactions cannot occur and therefore aluminium is not taken up by the plant. As a result, the flowers are pink.

(Fact Source) For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

[comicallymacabre]

I’ve always found this neat.

[pasarelas]

Steffie Baik for Jeffrey Campbell shot by Claudia Marin