it’s sooo sad when u see all these research papers by the same 2 ppl and then u see 1 where only one of them is credited… where’s ur little buddy don’t tell me u broke up </3

titsay
cherry valley forever

oozey mess

Andulka

@theartofmadeline
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins
Three Goblin Art

⁂
d e v o n
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

roma★

Origami Around
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Kaledo Art

tannertan36
Cosmic Funnies

Product Placement
Claire Keane
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

seen from United States

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@never-trust-an-atom
it’s sooo sad when u see all these research papers by the same 2 ppl and then u see 1 where only one of them is credited… where’s ur little buddy don’t tell me u broke up </3
wow you gotta lot of other people’s papers cited in this bibliography huh. they’re not gonna fuck you you know
Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”
This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.
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
Haha looks like that relationship didn’t work out… didn’t work out et al.
Mother Whale's Funeral
just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees
They existed *before beetles*
Why is this sad? Why am I sad?
https://xkcd.com/1259/
Bee Orchid
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.
So that people don’t need to go through the notes:
- We have fossils of spider webs
- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of
- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa
- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)
If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.
We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.
We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
We know they had remarkable vision.
We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.
We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.
The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."
(Art credit Julio Lacerda)
Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.
(Art credit Vitor Silva)
This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.
We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.
We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.
We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)
We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.
As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.
If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)
Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of "thanks i hate it" and "stop ruining dinosaurs!"
Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health
@lusus--naturae
did u know that fire is shaped the way that it is bc of gravity and if it werent for gravityitd be an orb
yep! here's what a match looks like burning in microgravity, it's WILD
Out of all the cool stuff that mythbusters ever shot on high speed camera, shooting a soccer ball at 60mph out of a truck traveling 60mph is one of my favorites
Just look at it. It is the most perfect visual representation of Newton’s 2nd law of physics I’ve ever seen. The ball, which was shot out of a CANNON, drops straight down. Two equal and opposite velocities completely canceling each other out, leaving the soccer ball to drop to the earth with a net velocity of 0. Sir issac newton would be proud to tears of this gif.
And yet this “myth” is nothing more than basic physics at work. A 10 year old with an interest in science could have told us this is possible. 60mph in one direction minus 60mph the exact opposite direction is 0. Basic.
But what makes this so frieken cool is the fact that they went through all the trouble to actually demonstrate the invisible laws that govern the way our universe works. To get this shot both the soccer ball and the truck had to be moving at the exact same speed. Real world variables make that extremely difficult to pull off. It took them hundreds of attempts to get it right. They went through all that trouble to “prove” something we have known as fact for hundreds of years. And we get this amazing gif to watch as a result.
Mythbusters is incredible. Science is incredible. And the fact that this experiment in physics can be used in science classes for years and years to come to help children learn about physics is incredible.
Out of all the cool stuff that mythbusters ever shot on high speed camera, shooting a soccer ball at 60mph out of a truck traveling 60mph is one of my favorites
Just look at it. It is the most perfect visual representation of Newton’s 2nd law of physics I’ve ever seen. The ball, which was shot out of a CANNON, drops straight down. Two equal and opposite velocities completely canceling each other out, leaving the soccer ball to drop to the earth with a net velocity of 0. Sir issac newton would be proud to tears of this gif.
And yet this “myth” is nothing more than basic physics at work. A 10 year old with an interest in science could have told us this is possible. 60mph in one direction minus 60mph the exact opposite direction is 0. Basic.
But what makes this so frieken cool is the fact that they went through all the trouble to actually demonstrate the invisible laws that govern the way our universe works. To get this shot both the soccer ball and the truck had to be moving at the exact same speed. Real world variables make that extremely difficult to pull off. It took them hundreds of attempts to get it right. They went through all that trouble to “prove” something we have known as fact for hundreds of years. And we get this amazing gif to watch as a result.
Mythbusters is incredible. Science is incredible. And the fact that this experiment in physics can be used in science classes for years and years to come to help children learn about physics is incredible.
he was in the fridge!!!
ovbiously this person has done so much research and cares about their tortoise so much but…. the mf idea of having a live tortoise in a TUPPERWARE?! IN MY FRIDGE?? WITH ME FOOD? ahahahaha
the concept of opening someone else’s fridge only to find a WHOLE ASS TORTOISE in there… idk if I’d ever recover
@esperantoauthor when the food doesn’t come to Tesla, Tesla comes to the food
Reminds me of when I accidentally stumbled across this photo for the first time…
mutuals put me in your fridge
Back in 2015, I went over to a classmate’s house for group project work late in the fall, and in the middle of working on the presentation, offered to grab sodas for people but they were out of pepsi and Andrew whose house we were at said “Oh, there’s more in the basement fridge.”
So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It’s not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it’s apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.
“Hey Andrew.” I say, nonchalantly. “So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?”
“The what?” says the other member of the group project. I don’t remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.
“Oh! No, that’s Andrew Too.” he says. “His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays.”
“You named your tortise after you?” I ask.
“No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him ‘Andrew Too’. …Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He’s pretty cool when he’s awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn’t bark.”
“Oh!” Said Butterflies. “My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?”
“Oh no, Grandpa was with the Royal Air Force in World War Two. Andrew Too is going to be 70 this year! We’re going to make him a carrot cake!”
“is that for soup?”
“No, that’s my uncle”
It’s 2018 and I still have no clue how CDs work. It’s a shiny disc, how do they get data on that, let alone that much?? Magic
Like a vinyl disc, where a physical groove is marked into the vinyl, a laser marks the ink of a CD in a similar manner. A laser (your disc drive) can then look at the pattern in the ink and understand it.
There’s no grooves on a CD tho???
They’re just really tiny, hence the laser. The smaller grooves means that more info can fit on a disc of the same size.
Man how the fuck did they figure out how to make that
well they looked at a record and said “How do we fit more information on this?” to which the reply is “Well either you make the record bigger or the grooves smaller” and making the grooves smaller is way more convenient so they say “Well how do we make the grooves smaller?” and that’s when a total madman comes out with eyes flashing and yells “WITH A LASER!”
And that’s how the CD was invented
how did they figure out how to fit information in grooves in a piece of vinyl in the first place????
probably got some ideas outta this
Fucking mad lads
#the really wild fact is that even purely digital forms of storing information are basically just ‘count the bump’ technology really
US Elevation.
by @cstats1
man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh
The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.
I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…
They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.
There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.
That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.
The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.
see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?
those are over a billion years old.
that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?
algae.
those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.
so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.
The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.
not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:
the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.
show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.
[discovered]
[immediately mocked by scientists]
me as a discovery
How can you not include the video?
@lordcephalopod
THEY’RE ROASTING HIM
Nawww, I’m sure the scientists adore this little guy <3
thank you @agentliz
The Ocean created possibly the cutest creature ever
If you listen to the entire video, they definitely make some cooing noises, so I guarantee that the art is accurate if they could actually touch it.
Fucking superb you funky little cuddle fish
Do all sea explorations sound like the scientists are just on discord?
PhD group chat
“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!
Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”
- Sacha Coward
Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero
Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”
- @robinlayfield
Grace Hopper did more than coin the term “bug”. She invented the first program linker in the early 1950s, for the UNIVAC I. A program linker translates instructions from one language to another (for example, numerical codes that represent instructions translated to machine code that computers can read), which is the very foundation of how computer’s operate independently. she also pulled a steve rogers and tried to enlist in the military a bunch of times and was denied. then, an exception was made for her when she joined the navy reserves, and she ended up serving for over 40 years (half of which was active duty). she retired from the navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. she was born in NYC in 1906. Grace Hopper was a fucking badass.
also computing was typically a job for women (many of whom were black women that made incredible contributions) back in the day, so it’s absolutely fucking wild that straight white men think they are the foundation of computer innovation. men PUSHED women out and took the credit.
Reblogging to do what the failed education system never did.
let’s not forget the incredible women who made it possible for india to go to mars!
The BBC meets three Indian female scientists who prove that rocket science is not a male preserve.
THIS IS EVERYTHING THANK YOU SO MUCH MANGO FOR ADDING INDIA
A lighthouse and a warning, all at once.
A lighthouse monster, to greet all the ships at sea!