To Boldly Go

Marcus/Roomba, 26, he/him, ☭ #1 discovery apologist 🧡

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Love the 2300+ year tradition of humans putting our drinks in goofy little animal cups.

Bull-head rhyton, terracotta, Apulian, South Italy, ca. 330 BCE; Cow mug, ceramic, US American, 2024.

[wiltking]

so you're telling me the fifa world cup is all men? its all men's teams? and so is the superbowl? and all the sports teams that states are known for and make copious amounts of merch for are also men's teams? and only 5 women have ever entered formula one since its inception in 1950 and only two of them were able to compete? and this is normal? its acceptable?

[chillyfeetsteak]

there should be more options than suffering via employment and suffering via unemployment

[omegaversereloaded]

Age regressing to 22

[dduane]

KOSA again, with a different name… and they’re trying to sneak it past you before July 4th. CALL YOUR REPS!

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation p

Like the man said…the shadow takes another form and ruses again. Time to make some calls and let them know we’re watching.

[fremedon]

Just called my senator and the aide said "Yeah, you're not the first person we've heard from about this today." It is 9:45 in the morning and she already had that weary tone.

So keep calling--the needle is moving!

[boccher]

penis poll

ball

dick

ball

Voting ended onMay 25

[wetterroomba]

Just worked 13 straight days at a gas station on closing shift

We're inventing new types of tired

[uptownthots]

white people will literally be like if u arent nice to me Im going to become a nazi. and think they’re making a great argument

[trumpetsbyjasonderulo]

it’s been ten years and i can confirm that everything still happens so much. happy anniversary king

[waytooobsessedwithmcyt]

"I'm a boy" "I'm a girl" Ok? I'm Stan and I was wrong, I'm singing the Stan wrong song. I shouldn't have taken that chance, now here's my remorseful dance?

[view-from-up-here]

[fawnar]

queue this post when it’s your birthday and be surprise

[wetterroomba]

I'm trying to schedule with a local shop to get the pink opaque symbol tattooed on me this month as a birthday gift to myself and I'm coming out of my skin waiting for someone to contact me

[criptochecca]

^ is a zionist

[room429]

[contemptible-scoundrel]

fuuuck I could use a mysterious benefactor right now

[vetchtibbles]

I wish they made it even marginally possible to get a job like I’m so fucking sorry I don’t have a rare but also highly demanded skillset, an agreeable disposition, and the ability to survive off of three nickels a week I’m soooo sorry

[haunteddollsgeorg]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.