No one's faster than my cat

I don't like to cook.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

One of the most beautiful turtle photos

[📸 Philip Waller Photography]

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A New York subway sign accidentally satisfies two of the hardest constraints in experimental literature at the same time.

"Do not hold doors" is a snowball sentence. Each word runs exactly one letter longer than the last. 2, 3, 4, 5. Wordplay obsessives have hunted these since the 1960s, and the famous specimen stretches eleven words, ending on doctors' illegible handwriting.

It's also a univocalic, a text where a single vowel does all the work. Poets have built entire books on that one rule. Christian Bök wrote Eunoia with a chapter for each vowel, A through U, using no others. It took him seven years and became one of the best-selling poetry books in Canadian history.

Georges Perec went further and wrote a 300-page French novel that never uses the letter E. His English translator then matched him, producing a full translation that also never uses E.

Constrained writing works because scarcity forces word choices you would never reach otherwise. Which makes the subway version funnier. A transit safety department trying to keep trains moving produced, for free, the kind of sentence Oulipo members spent whole careers engineering.

Bök needed seven years to master one vowel at a time. The MTA did it by accident and bolted it above a door.

[explore.org @exploreorg]

Yearly bear cam maintenance staff reporting for duty.

[🤠 @heavensbvnny]

The other day I was watching a space documentary (can’t remember which one), and it said:

“When you’re lying on the grass on a clear night, looking at the sky, you may get a strange feeling… that you’re not actually looking up. You’re looking down. Beneath you is an endless abyss of empty space, and the only thing keeping you from falling into it is gravity holding you to the Earth.”

I’m telling you… I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO STOP THINKING ABOUT IT.

Had you ever heard that before?

[cats with jobs 🛠 @CatWorkers]

Master goalkeeper. ⚽️

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Costa Rica has outlawed recreational hunting, solidifying its role as a worldwide leader in animal protection and a safe haven for the remarkable 5% of global biodiversity it hosts.

Home to an astonishing proportion of Earth's plant and animal species, Costa Rica stands as one of the planet's most vital biodiversity hotspots. Yet this extraordinary natural heritage faces ongoing threats from human activities—including unsustainable wildlife tourism, illegal wildlife trade, domestic animal neglect, and organized animal fighting.

As encounters between people and wildlife grow more frequent, the country's fragile ecosystems require proactive safeguards to protect their most vulnerable residents.

Costa Rica has responded with groundbreaking animal welfare laws that reflect a deep national commitment to conservation. Building on its landmark 2012 nationwide ban on sport and trophy hunting, the country introduced stringent anti-trafficking measures in 2017 to combat poaching and biodiversity loss. By imposing mandatory prison sentences for animal cruelty and creating a national registry of offenders, Costa Rica demonstrates that effective conservation demands strong legal enforcement alongside widespread societal resolve to safeguard all living beings within its borders.

[woahh mann @ashhhhhhole]

just found out that walruses like to stick their tusks out of the water and hold on to the ice and just float

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

Beach vs shore

[Freyy @Freyy_is]

respectfully… why did nobody in my bloodline lock in and secure the generational wealth before i got here?

[🦂 @sloungerie]

“with all the coke in the world, why is your nose in my business” wise words from my 50 year old gay coworker

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐞🪽 @soulful_indigo]

Birds only sing when they feel safe, thus signaling on a deep, cellular level that you are safe too. Their frequencies calm the nervous system, lowering cortisol and anxiety. Birdsong is nature’s medicine.

[goma @soigomaa]

And no lies were told.

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

This is so insane😭😭😭

[No one's faster than my cat @noonesfaster]

@davidsupercat He was so baby 🥹

[No one's faster than my cat @noonesfaster]

@davidsupercat I’m so very, very
sorry 😢

[Rajvi @rajvishah30]

today someone in office said that “worrying is the worst way to use your imagination” and that’s easily the best thing Ive heard all week

[Black cats are not bad luck @blackscats]

"Sir, a second bird is at the feeder"

[🍓 @leshaami]

“women’s adoption of AI is 40% less than men”

yes bc we’re still using our brains

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

A bird gets crowned by a perfect raindrop in the rain — pure magic captured in one flawless moment!

Shot by Lee Schofer