Jem

lifes rocky when your a jem

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Yes, cats really do clock the difference. The wiring behind it is mammal-wide and ancient, and Konrad Lorenz mapped it back in 1943.

Lorenz, an Austrian biologist, noticed that babies of pretty much every mammal look kind of similar. Big head, big eyes set low on the face, small nose, chubby cheeks. He called it the baby schema. Any face hitting those proportions trips a switch in the brain’s reward circuit. Same circuit that fires when you eat something delicious or hear your favorite song.

Oxford researchers nailed down the timing in 2008. Using a brain scanner that tracks activity down to the millisecond, they showed that adults’ reward circuits light up in roughly a seventh of a second when a baby’s face appears. All before you’ve consciously processed who you’re looking at.

It also works across species. Swiss researchers showed in 2013 that just looking at puppy faces for a few minutes shifts how cute adults then rate human baby photos. The brain is using the same wiring to judge cuteness in both. Stand baby chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and human babies side by side and they all share the same proportions: rounder face, bigger eyes lower in the head. Mammals are born with this response.

Now add sound. Cats hear high pitches that humans can’t reach. Their best hearing range happens to be where kitten distress calls live, and right where the harshest pitches of a human baby’s cry land. Both sounds pull on the same alarm. Researchers writing in Nature in 2023 traced the exact brain pathway in mice that releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone, when a mother hears her pups cry. The hearing region of the brain wires straight into the part that controls hormones, and similar wiring shows up across mammals.

So when a cat sits next to a toddler and stays calm, the explanation runs back hundreds of millions of years. Soft thing, big head, high-pitched noises, do not attack.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your car key costs $5 to copy at a hardware store. That little grey USB-stick-looking device clipped next to it on the same keychain could be worth more than your house.

That device is called a Ledger. It works like a physical key to someone's digital money. The money itself lives online, but you can only access it with this device or with a secret 24-word backup phrase you write down when you first set it up. Lose both, and the money is gone from the economy with no bank to call and no password to reset.

Bitcoin is trading around $68,000 per coin right now. If that Ledger holds even one coin, the $10,000 reward is a bargain. If it holds ten, the owner is paying you the price of a used Honda Civic to hand back the keys to half a million dollars.

A British IT worker named James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive in 2013 that contained 8,000 Bitcoin. At today's price, that's $544 million buried under a landfill in Wales. He spent twelve years fighting for permission to dig it up. Offered the city council millions. Proposed drones and AI-guided excavation robots. A judge dismissed the whole thing in January 2025 and ruled the hard drive legally belongs to the dump. German programmer Stefan Thomas has two password guesses left on a military-grade encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 Bitcoin, worth about $476 million today. He's already failed eight times out of ten. Two more wrong entries and the device erases itself.

Roughly 3 to 4 million Bitcoins are trapped like this right now. Sitting in digital wallets that anyone can look up online, fully visible, and permanently locked. That's about one in every five Bitcoins ever created. In just the first half of 2025, the security firm Hacken calculated that $3.1 billion in crypto was stolen or lost, and most of those losses came from individual wallets, not from major company breaches.

A $10,000 reward stapled to a telephone pole in Central Park is the most reasonable thing on that entire block. The owner knows if that Ledger holds $50,000 or $5 million. The person who finds it has no way to tell.

[Elorm Daniel @elormkdaniel]

Most transparent phone cases are made from a plastic called Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). Manufacturers use TPU because it’s flexible, shock-absorbing, cheap to produce, and good at protecting phones from drops. It’s a very practical material.

But TPU has a weakness: it naturally oxidizes over time.

When the case is exposed to UV light, heat, oxygen, and oils from your hands, chemical reactions slowly happen in the polymer chains. These reactions change the way the material absorbs and reflects light, which is what causes the yellow or brown tint you eventually see.

Even if you kept the case perfectly clean, it would still slowly yellow because the process happens inside the material itself.

Manufacturers do try to slow this down. Many cases include UV stabilizers and anti-oxidation additives, but these only delay the reaction; they don’t stop it completely.

Another material that stays clear longer is Polycarbonate, which is used in harder transparent cases. Polycarbonate resists yellowing better, but it has its own trade-offs: it’s more rigid, cracks easier under impact, and doesn’t absorb shocks as well as TPU.

So companies usually combine materials:
a polycarbonate back for clarity and TPU edges for drop protection. Ironically, the part that usually turns yellow first is the TPU bumper around the edges.

In other words, it’s not that engineers “can’t” make anti-yellow transparent cases. They can but those materials would either be more expensive, more brittle, or worse at protecting your phone.

[Mariia Kramarenko @KramarenkoMari3]

Not so fun fact, the organizers of the games were so unprepared for a Ukrainian to win gold that the ceremony was delayed for an hour.
They initially hung the Ukrainian flag upside down and realized they didn't even have a recording of the national anthem. After Ukrainian team refusing offers to play the russian or soviet anthem instead (!!!), a Ukrainian team official had to rush back to the Olympic Village to retrieve a recording found in the bag of fellow skater Liudmyla Mykhailovska for the Ukrainian anthem to be played.

[charlie @gonegirlfriend]

"young women have no concept of what being beautiful actually is."

[woo woo woman @witti_indi]

Ur brains have rotted if you can’t handle looking at normal people with normal unique faces that haven’t been altered with plastic surgery and Botox ozempic etc. An angel just lost its wings btw

[Éirevision Podcast 🇮🇪 @EirevisionPod]

We are Ireland. The country tied for the most wins, the only one to ever win three in a row and our capital city Dublin has hosted the contest the most times.

Sure Sweden may break our win record soon, and we aren’t as loved as Italy, but at least we leave with integrity.

[yammi @sighyam]

Hi. Thai here.

Almost nobody in Thailand uses the term “ladyboy” when discussing trans identity in Thai. The word is an orientalist construction and is a Western projection that exists only within English speaking contexts.

What these viral misinformed takes always leave out is that trans women in Thailand use feminine language in the exact same way cis women do, and they are addressed as women by almost everyone whether they are conservatives, men, women, children, monks etc.

Unlike Indonesia, very few people in Thailand spend time policing other people’s use of language, which restrooms they use and how they choose to live their lives.

These hot takes from people stems from one thing: the fact that most of you have never actually known a trans person, listened to a trans person, or opened your hearts to one in real life.

And you certainly don’t understand how Thai language functions either. In Thailand this is almost unthinkable as Trans people are normalised members of society.

You can’t avoid trans people in Thailand because they don’t need to hide. If their family doesn’t accept them, they still have friends and the larger Thai community to lean on.

They are doctors, nurses, business owners, entertainers, teachers, service workers, creatives, athletes, and more. While you’re all busy debating bathroom politics and indulging in religious and political hysteria, the world keeps turning in Thailand lol

I see this discourse often and it really does expose how colonial language hierarchies erase the nuance of non-Western gender systems - systems that, while imperfect and still evolving, have long recognised identities beyond the narrow Western binary and flatten them into stereotypes for global consumption.

I’ve said this before but social media algorithms amplify English-language content to the rest of the world while Thai opinions remain trapped within Thailand’s content ecosystem. That asymmetry is exactly why so many of you speak about Thais instead of with Thais and it’s why your understanding of Thai trans identity will always sound like a mistranslation.

[Soul @soullig]

u know back in the day I studied criminal justice in high school. My teacher was telling us about how he’d never break the law but then the convo got rly dark n serious almost when he said but if it came down to his son and having what they needed. He’d start stealing and do what he needed to do. And I never forgot that conversation because this is what happens. When you deny people a basic right, when you deny families and children of basic human needs it’s going to be a lot more stealing. It’s going to be a lot more violence. When people have nothing to lose and you’ve already stripped them of everything they had they stop fearing consequence. When you take control of every resource, deliberately make it inaccessible by price gouging, yet turn around and shame people who ARE working hard and still cannot afford resources that are a basic human right, people are going to become more and more angry. When it comes to taking food out of peoples mouths, they are going to start doing what they have to do to feed their families. If you show no regard for human life why would people show regard for yours. It’s only going to continue to get worse.

[Stacy Cay @stacycay]

Your wife is wearing a full beat and that’s ok

[MastaMunsta @MunstaMasta]

Good morning

[breezeh @briscoepark]

passed this cool looking tree

[Adam Carlson @admcrlsn]

Science-believers to antivaxxers:

[N @dearvotion]

The fact that each look could be deconstructed into two or three new looks!!!

[N @dearvotion]

The costuming for Chappell’s festival run, with all its historical references, has been absolutely blowing my mind.

[Ian Miles Cheong @ianmiles]

Black artist Bob Vylan gloats over the murder of Charlie Kirk at a show in Amsterdam.

"I want to dedicate this next one to an absolute piece of shit human being. The pronouns was/were. Because if you talk shit you will get banged. Rest in piss Charlie Kirk you piece of shit.”

[Jai Thee Unemployed ☺️ @DreadedJai]

“When we decline to speak ill of the dead, it’s because we have compassion for the living. In this respect, I am sorry for Kirk’s children. I don’t know if Kirk was a good father, but if he was, that does little to mitigate the damage he did to other people’s children.”

[toby @tobyprkr]

me according to axs trying to buy radiohead tickets