BlueBoxBeagle

Dog Artist┇American┇Gryffindor┇Computer Programmer┇
Expect random stuff. The best place to see all of my art and AU stuff is on my neocities

[🌸TøX🌸 TEAM MYSTERY @ToXieRat]

BrambleSquirrel and their horse faced children.

[Top Gear Quotes @topgear_quoter]

#TopGear

[nostalgia core @nostalgiacore]

Congratulations, you scrolled so far that you have found diamonds

[GOODPOP 🍭 @goodguylolypop]

I Wish You Luck 😊

[Tom Fitton @TomFitton]

Wonderful rendition of our National Anthem (with Tom Cruise singing along!).

[Finz_ @Finz_video]

Radiación grabada en cámara:

[PmAmTraveller @pmamtraveller]

Cow Abducting a UFO by artist Fer Martinez

[Young-Jacob 🇺🇸 @YoungJacobArt]

You can tell an artist's nationality from their art? Dunno about that. Bet y'all can't guess where I'm from.

[GOODPOP 🍭 @goodguylolypop]

Minecraft ultra realistic ✅

[unseen1 @unseen1_unseen]

After all the sweet primary victories of the last couple of weeks, I remembered this song for some reason today....

[RobLogic @RobLogic]

Dog learning the spatula trick....

[My love for dogs @Naturalwon57991]

The plan did not work out 👀👀

[Don Pettit @astro_Pettit]

In weightlessness, water can take forms that are not possible under normal gravitational conditions. One example being thin sheets, 500 microns thick, formed in a wire loop like in a soap film but here as pure water with no surfactant.

[Potato Man of MC @CagilMartin]

ITS SO AWESOME, GEYSERS THAT ARE 4 BLOCKS UNDERWATER CREATE GIANT GEYSERS, MOJANG YOU ARE SO AWESOME!!! Always bet on everything

[Shai'yra Tarkir | DS9 Pilled @ShaiTarkir]

It's really funny watching DS9 with the knowledge that Bashir is actually an illegal augment desperately doing what he can to hide it, but all of the foreshadowing for it was on COMPLETE accident by the writers, anyway here's a thread of all foreshadowing moments I know of:

[ThinkObjects @13StripesNStars]

@k_ovfefe2

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First details on ‘SPACEBALLS 2’:

• A Na'vi pissing while Dark Helmet watches with 3D glasses

• Multiple sequel trilogy jabs including BB-8 turned into a box

• Yogurt now has abs

• A slice of pizza as a baby Pizza the Hutt

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A pufferfish has no ribs and no pelvis. Its stomach can't even digest food anymore. It gave up all three just so it could blow up like a water balloon when a predator shows up. It also carries a poison over 1,000x deadlier than cyanide, and it doesn't even make it.

When threatened, a pufferfish chugs water as fast as it can and pumps it straight into its stomach. The stomach is lined with stretchy fibers that expand by 40% then snap rigid like a basketball. The fish goes from flat to a spiky ball in seconds, but the energy cost is brutal. Researchers at Australia's Institute of Marine Science measured it in 2014, and it's like sprinting as hard as you can. Their oxygen use shoots up to five times the resting rate, and some need hours just to recover. Scientists assumed for decades that pufferfish hold their breath while puffed up. They don't. They breathe through their gills the whole time.

The poison in their liver, tetrodotoxin, is so strong that the amount needed to kill a person is about 1 to 2 milligrams. That is roughly the weight of a single grain of sand. No antidote exists. You can't cook it out either. Boiling, freezing, drying, none of it breaks the toxin down.

In Japan, chefs who prepare pufferfish (called fugu) train for 3+ years, and roughly 1 in 3 pass the licensing exam on their first try. They fillet the fish in front of examiners and eat their own preparation to prove it's safe. Since Japan required these licenses in 1949, exactly one person has died at a licensed restaurant, a kabuki actor in 1975 who demanded the liver. Japan banned serving fugu liver 9 years later. Between 2008 and 2018, the country recorded 295 poisoning cases and just 3 deaths, all from people who prepared the fish at home.

Pufferfish don't make the toxin themselves. Bacteria at the bottom of the food chain produce it, and it builds up through the chain to the fish. Raise a pufferfish in a tank on clean food and it grows up completely harmless. Zero poison. But the toxin also protects them from parasites, so farm-raised ones without it get sick more easily and start biting each other from stress.

Their entire set of DNA is about 1/8th the size of yours but carries roughly the same number of genes, somewhere around 20,000 to 25,000. Your genes are spread across 3 billion letters of genetic code. A pufferfish packed all of theirs into 400 million. Fugu was only the second animal with a backbone to ever have its full genetic code mapped out, right after humans.

In 1995, divers off Japan started finding perfect 7-foot circles carved into the ocean floor. Ridges, patterns, symmetrical designs. For 17 years nobody knew what was making them. In 2012, a photographer caught the artist on camera: a male pufferfish, 5 inches long, sculpting sand with its tiny fins for 7 to 9 days straight. It was building a nest. The males line the ridges with bits of shell, and the whole structure funnels clean water toward the center where a female lays her eggs.

This balloon nails the design. The animal it copies has no ribcage, can't digest food, carries a poison 1,000x deadlier than cyanide that it doesn't even produce, crammed its genetic code into 1/8th the space yours takes, and spends a full week sculpting the ocean floor to get a date.

[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.