lis

[edgar bot @edgargonzelaz]

Today we do it for u sweet prince

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

That pinecone in your bathroom is completely dead. Not a single cell in the whole thing is alive. And yet, the moment your shower fills the room with steam, it closes up on its own. Dead wood, reacting to moisture, all by itself.

Each of those little wooden scales has two layers inside. The bottom layer soaks up water and swells by about 20%. The top layer barely moves. So when one side gets bigger and the other stays put, the whole scale bends upward and curls shut, same way a piece of paper curls when one side gets wet. Air dries out, bottom layer shrinks, scale drops open again. Pine trees have been running this exact design for about 390 million years, more than 150 million years before the first dinosaurs showed up.

It does all of this for one reason: seeds. If seeds fell during rain, they'd just land right next to the parent tree and fight for the same sunlight. So the cone seals shut and waits. When conditions turn dry and windy, scales open and lightweight seeds catch the breeze and travel way farther from home. Look closely and the scales sit in spirals, 8 going one way and 13 the other. Same pattern you see in sunflower heads.

I had to read this next part twice. In the 1960s, German coal miners pulled a few pinecones out of a coal deposit. Nobody thought much of it at the time. Decades later, a research team at the University of Freiburg got hold of them and figured out one was about 120,000 years old. Another was roughly 15 million years old. They soaked them in water. Both still closed up. Moved about half as much as a fresh pinecone, but after 15 million years underground with zero maintenance, the mechanism still worked. The coal had kept the wood flexible instead of turning it to stone.

Engineers looked at this and started copying it. A team at the Universities of Stuttgart and Freiburg made 424 tiny panels out of wood fiber, designed to change shape on their own when humidity shifts, copying the pinecone's two-layer trick. They stuck them on a building's south-facing window. In winter, the panels curled open on their own to let sunlight warm the inside. Come summer, they flattened and blocked it. The whole system runs without electricity, motors, or wiring, just wood fiber reacting to weather the same way it has for 390 million years. They published the results in Nature Communications after a full year of testing. Every panel still worked.

Your bathroom pinecone is a humidity sensor that predates dinosaurs by 150 million years, runs on dead wood and physics, and engineers are still trying to copy its homework.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

BREAKING: Just one day after an underpaid worker set a warehouse on fire in Ontario, California, another man tried to set the Ontario Mills Mall on fire.

This is what happens to a capitalist society that allows the rich to hoard everything as the masses struggle just to survive.

[Gerard Cortez @SoyGerardCortez]

Cualquier cosa menos amar a sus familiares lgbtq

[jolie @lunarbisou]

how it feels to be Mexican on the beach with a JBL

[Ashley Zavala @ZavalaA]

New:
Dolores Huerta writes lengthy statement following @nytimes investigation into Cesar Chavez.

Huerta says she had sexual encounters with Chavez resulting in 2 children.

“I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farm worker movement…”

[lee five @jnkamortage]

kaori sakamato passando a lâmina nos jurados

[Today Years Old @todayyearsold]

The fact they kept switching camera angles like it’s an actual Olympic event is sending me 😭

[gant @gantisdant]

bro just one more monkey on the bed i swear. nobody’s gonna bonk their head this time. just one more monkey bro please

[carl 🥦 @NightlifeMingus]

(Mouse in a conference call) hold on I’m gonna put you on squeakerphone

[lis @acuerdate77]

@gayassf00 Helllll yeah congratulations 💌💌💌

[lis @acuerdate77]

@N0Vl0 Muchachon

[Tori J. @torijacobs]

Pregame is a beautiful name

[johnny🪿 @kudosdunce]

im awake and im going to the gym

[🕊️ @dearlyfemme]

button covers

[Superstar⭐️ @superstar_finky]

card just declined on a $0.00 free trial

[bluntspork @heartmorgue]

I'll come back for you someday, Meringe Mice from the Frolicking Frog Cafe in Lilydale..... 🐁🩷

[Grace @gracecamille_]

bombing warehouse of prosthetic limbs after creating the largest population of amputees in modern history

[Pope Crave @ClubConcrave]

(BREAKING) HABEMUS MFIN PAPAM!!!!!!!!!!!