༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

brilliant, beautiful, humble | she/her

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A bomb squad was checking a suspicious backpack, and this dude got fed up with waiting

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

In Austria, The Austrian Power Giants project aims to transform transmission tower into giant animal figures.

[hani @crucifynisis]

do i weird you out or have i weirded you in

[Carl Jung Archive @QuoteJung]

casually reading some Carl Jung and then he hits you with this:

[🪩🎲🍒 @expired_grl]

maybe your cat is meowing bc it wants a cigarette

[antifa honeypot @mformorphine]

when it gets to 2pm and the €18 cocktails start whispering to me like this

[julia @juumelo_]

you’re on thick fucking ice. I love u

[derpina ☘︎ @orchifae]

one of my favorite dancing lady orchids. a tiny sunfire nymph masquerading as an orchid, guarding a hidden spring in an enchanted forest. she only likes to dance when no humans are watching… but i caught her mid dance..

[‏ً @itsnwts]

I was today years old when I learned
If you feel it in your chest it's fear
If you feel it in your stomach it's intuition
If you feel it in your head it's anger
If you feel it in your muscles it's anxiety
If you feel it in your mouth it's disgust
If you feel it in your throat it's sadness
If you feel it in your face it's shame
If you feel it throughout your body it's happiness

[julia @juumelo_]

is this psychosis or am I just so back

[໊ @wynavira]

life would be sooo good without my curse

[𝓐 ⭑ @ayojoestar]

my music taste diverse as fuck. you can call me polyjammerous.. shit, you could even call me genrefluid

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet."

Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution.

Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer.

The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss.

The wool is then:
- Naturally flame-retardant
- Naturally antibacterial
- Moisture-wicking
- Biodegradable
- Renewable, annually
- Carbon-storing while in use

The replacement, in performance fabrics:
- Polyester
- Polyamide
- Acrylic
- Polypropylene
- All petroleum-derived
- All shedding microplastics on every wash
- All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce
- All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years

A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals.

A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years.

The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic.

The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer.

The polymer also has not been asked.

Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made.

Brian is selling it at a loss.

The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical.

Reject plastic. Wear wool.

Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

[Mads @europemaxxed]

busy weekend

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your brain recognizes the shape of a tree in 50 milliseconds, way before you're consciously aware of what you're seeing. And within seconds, your stress levels start to drop, not because of fresh air but because of the shape itself.

Trees are what mathematicians call a fractal. The trunk splits into branches, those split into smaller branches, those into twigs. Same pattern, every scale. You see this design in coastlines, rivers, clouds, even the blood vessels in your own lungs.

A physicist at the University of Oregon named Richard Taylor has been measuring this for years. He hooks people up to brain-wave monitors, shows them different images, and tracks what happens. Trees win. When people look at the kind of fractals you find in branches and bark, stress drops by up to 60%. A Swedish researcher named Caroline Hagerhall found the same thing: fractal images trigger alpha waves in your brain, the wave pattern your brain produces when you're calm but still awake.

The swaying matters because your brain runs two attention systems. One is involuntary, stuff grabbing your focus whether you want it to or not. The other is directed, the one you actively control when you concentrate or resist checking your phone. Directed attention is a limited resource. It drains. City life burns through it fast: every notification, every ad, every car you dodge crossing the street. Tree branches moving in wind hold your involuntary attention just enough to be interesting, kind of like watching a campfire, but not so much that your directed system has to engage. One system stays gently occupied while the other recharges. Psychologists call this "soft fascination."

People at the University of Michigan tested this in 2008. They had volunteers walk for about an hour through either a tree-filled park or through downtown streets, then retake memory and attention tests. The park walkers improved their scores by 20%. Downtown walkers showed zero improvement. Walking on a treadmill didn't help either, so the benefit came from the trees, not the exercise. In 2015, researchers at Stanford went further. They scanned people's brains before and after 90-minute walks. Nature walkers showed less activity in the brain region that controls rumination, when your mind gets stuck replaying the same negative thoughts in a loop. City walkers showed no change in that region at all.

The dose is small. A 2019 Michigan study measured cortisol (the hormone your body pumps out when you're stressed) from saliva samples. Just 20 to 30 minutes in any place that felt natural, a backyard, a park, anything with some green, dropped cortisol 21% per hour beyond its normal daily decline.

You don't even need to go outside. Roger Ulrich published a study in the journal Science back in 1984, tracking 46 surgery patients across nine years of hospital records. Patients whose bed had a window facing trees recovered almost a full day faster than patients facing a brick wall (7.96 days vs 8.70), needed less pain medication, and got 3.5 times fewer negative notes from nurses. Stress-related illness costs the US over $300 billion a year. A window with a tree outside it costs close to nothing.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Orcas eat great white sharks. They hunt seals, dolphins, and baby whales. They have never killed a single human in the open ocean. Not once, in all of recorded history.

An orca's brain weighs up to 15 pounds. Yours weighs about 3. They have roughly double the brain cells we do in the regions that handle complex thought. A neuroscientist at Emory named Lori Marino put an orca brain in an MRI and found these animals can tell different species apart underwater. They do it by sending out clicks that bounce off everything around them and come back as a kind of 3D sound map (this is called echolocation). From 500 feet away, an orca knows you're a human and not a seal. It skips you on purpose.

The answer is culture. Orcas around the world are divided into at least 10 separate populations, each with its own food rules, its own language, and its own way of hunting. All of it learned from their mothers. One population eats only fish. Another eats only marine mammals like seals and sea lions. These two populations can live in the exact same water and never swap a single meal. A baby orca learns what food is from its mother, and that list stays the same for life.

In the Pacific Northwest, one population called the Southern Residents eats almost nothing but Chinook salmon. Scientists have documented them killing harbor porpoises 78 times over six decades, carrying the dead porpoises in their mouths, and never once eating them. Even when the group was starving. A 2023 study in Marine Mammal Science looked at all 78 cases and concluded it was play. These orcas would rather go hungry than eat something their culture says isn't food.

Researchers studying whale behavior in 2001 found that orca cultural traditions "appear to have no parallel outside humans." Each family group has its own dialect, its own version of the language. Calves spend about two years just learning how to make all the sounds their family uses. Mothers will slow down a hunt on purpose so their young can watch.

In 2005, a 12-year-old kid was swimming in Helm Bay, Alaska when an orca came at him full speed. At the very last second, the orca seemed to realize it was charging a human. It bent its entire body in half and turned back to open water. In captivity, it goes differently. SeaWorld's Tilikum killed three people during his life in a concrete tank. Research from 2016, published in the journal Animals, traced it to psychological collapse from being locked away from the family bonds orcas need to stay stable.

I think calling this a "mystery" undersells the science. Orcas decide what to eat based on culture, not instinct. No orca mother has ever taught her calf to hunt humans, so no orca hunts humans. Only about 75 of those salmon-eating Southern Residents are still alive. Their pregnancy failure rate is 69% because we've destroyed their salmon runs. They won't break their food culture to survive. Whether we care enough to protect theirs is the part that actually matters.

[Chris @citehchris]

you are exactly the type I usually go for (derogatory)