American Woodcock demonstrates "distal rhynchokinesis," the ability to flex the end of its bill. This allows it to grab earthworms it encounters when probing in soil. Other shorebirds, including Dunlins & Sanderlings, can bend their bills in this way. 😃
@todaysbird this is so cool! I didn't know they could do that.
im happy for them and yet seeing them flex their beaks makes my brain go “No, No, NO. That should Not happen”
marine biology is so scary because it’s such a small field. i was giving a talk on cetaceans and afterward a woman approached me with her husband and she said, “you did very well. [husband’s name] actually pioneered the research and published the first paper on that. We were very impressed by you.”
Which is such a scientific interpretation/public education win I will cherish forever but also for the rest of my life any time I give a talk I will be haunted by the knowledge that the world’s leading expert who literally discovered/invented the topic might be in the room,
which is like, the opposite of what you’re supposed to do for stage fright. In fact I never used to experience stage fright but now I will.
There are limitations to the benefits of being a marine biologist
once I was telling a visiting biologist I very much respected and admired while showing off my colony about the cool manuscript I had just submitted and she told me "oh, yes! I reviewed that! It was very good" and I got to writhe internally with the knowledge that the nicest most thorough Reviewer 2 was one of my science crushes
I went to the library to borrow some DVDs we're planning to watch, but when I handed the librarian my card, it took me a solid 15 seconds to register that I handed her my fucking weed card.
Me, fumbling to swap it out: "OH MY GOD, I AM SO SORRY, I was on total autopilot!!"
The librarian: "It's all good, I just assumed it was a flex."
#did the exact opposite of this the other day when I handed the cashier at a book store my library card instead of my credit card#and we both just stared at in confusion for a solid 15 seconds before I went oh fuck I can’t use that here#and she said ‘oh I’m glad that was unintentional bc I thought I was gonna have to explain some hard truths about bookstores to you’ fhshsgag via @formereldestdaughter
we are the same, u and i.
official library post
official library post
guy sitting in front of me in class was vandalizing wikipedia and i kept reverting his edits as soon as he made them and he couldn't figure out why it was happening
absolutely
everyone should be weirder about their ocs more.
fake movie posters and comic book covers. visual novels. rpg maker games. fics. websites dedicated to your ocs. custom oc merch to wear or decorate your house with. surreal art that some old guy from the 1600s woulda painted. i want to see it ALL
This is just called "making original media." Nothing is weird about making original art with original characters. That is the norm. What has fandom culture done to you people
"I know it's cringe but I'm writing this book about my OC that hates whales" - Herman Melville, probably
so someone asked me “at what temperature does genderfluid become gendersolid and that got me thinking
Assuming they were referring to GeNdEr (germanium neodymium erbium) as gender it is technically possible to calculate the temperature needed to become gender solid
Because GeNdEr is a chemical that had not been tested for its freezing point, we are just going to use the number 1162.73333333333 C which is the average of all three freezing points for Ge, Nd, and Er
The ancient egyptians said the soul was composed of the life force, the personality, the identity, and the true name. Im going with Identity (akh) for this so the amount of GeNdEr present would be 10.5 kg (the average amount of water in an adult human x 0.25)
With a weight of 10.5 kg of GeNdEr we know that there is 0.02733371 mols present, which then dividing by 42 gives us 0.0006508
Multiplying this value by the freezing point of GeNdEr at that quantity we get 0.7567099 C as our freezing point depression
In conclusion, a gender fluid person would need to have their internals cooled to -0.7567099 C in order to become gender solid (keep in mind a person dies at 35 C and the average body temperature is 37 C)
PS I know im probably wrong about alot of this but its just a silly lil thing :3
no more beekeeping or gardening as cas hobbies. he gets into the skyrim modding scene
he has so many incompatible mods and his load order is a nightmare but somehow it all works due to angel magic. unfortunately this also causes weird glitches. he posts on r/skyrimmods like "I get a sudden framerate drop and my character starts glowing and falls halfway through the floor whenever I do the pillar puzzle in shroud hearth barrow, does anyone have any ideas what could be causing it?" and posts his modlist and everyone's like "dude you have jk's skyrim and cotn and the great cities and immersive citizens and ai overhaul and none of the patches that can even begin to make them work together" and he's like "everything's fine in cities and that has nothing to do with my problem" and people are like "you have a bunch of landscape mods and HD retextures and grass mods and ulvenwald and seasons, of course your framerate is dropping" and he's like "my framerate is fine the vast majority of the time it's only this one puzzle in this one dungeon" and after several rounds of "you're lying"/"no I'm not" he finally posts a video of his heavily pregnant altmer spellsword casually wandering around solitude in winter, big tits jiggling in her bikini armor, with no problems or even the slightest stuttering whatsoever, offers absolutely no explanation as to how he did it, politely tells everyone how unhelpful they've been and disappears.
you know that mario speedrun where a cosmic ray hit a bit with an ionized particle at just the right moment to cause mario to warp through the ceiling? that's cas's entire gaming life
dean learns enough about hardware to build him a bitchin gaming rig but watching cas cheerfully rp as a sexy scantily-clad lady makes him deeply uncomfortable in ways he does not have the vocabulary for so he makes a fond, albeit slightly patronizing joke, then goes out to buy a bunch of new parts with stolen credit cards in order to build cas another, even more bitchin gaming rig. he buys gpu after gpu and the computer store people all think he's mining bitcoin and hasn't planned it very well. but he's actually just building cas a new rig every time he looks at cas's dragonborn (who is just called "prisoner") and has that unsettling simultaneous double-thought combo of "god I want to fuck her" + "god I wish that were me"
cas's single foray into making his own mods is to create one that renames all the dragons in the game after members of the garrison
kissing you on the forehead
with tongue?
with tongue. 🥰
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"
Reblog if it's the same year as it was yesterday, 2024
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
requested by anonymous:
Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.
Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’
They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.
Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’
They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.
Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’
The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.
Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.
“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’
The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.
It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.
Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’
Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.
Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’
… @todaysbird ??
yeah they’re just like that
information that is also important
For those that are going to miss the eclipse on Monday, I have created a simulation of what the eclipse will look like along the path of totality
Something that literally changed my life was working with a friend on a coding thing. He was helping me create an auto rig script and was trying to explain something to me but his words were just turning into static in my brain. I was tired and confused and there was so many new concepts happening.
I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”
It broke me.
Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.
When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.
I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!
“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.
Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?
I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”
He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.
Take breaks. You’re allowed. You don’t have to slam into problems over and over and over, let yourself rest. It will get easier. Take. Breaks.
i always think abt my cousin in greece who's like obsessed with american culture, bc ill say that im going to a barbecue and she'll be like "wow.... a real life american barbecue... will there be red cups?" you bet your ass there'll be red cups. take my hand. have a hot dog. all your dreams can come true here at the real life american barbecue
if i was a perfume i'd never give a girl a headache
Completely sober in the club googling worst medieval executions
beautiful drawing I saw in the women's bathroom last night at the bar
genuinely one of the saddest parts of this new era of the internet is how hard it is to rick roll someone now. with people's attention spans shortening so much, they wouldn't even get through the first few bait seconds before clicking off the video. like i saw a comment that ended with "btw i made all of this up" and the replies kept treating it so seriously because none of them finished the entire 4 sentence comment. and We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I (do I) A full commitment's what I'm thinking of You wouldn't get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
