Will Hicks

I have 2 real fears. Vast amounts of open water. And fish touching me.

[Garage Beer @drinkgaragebeer]

RT for a chance to win a Lil Garage 🥶 (beer not included) (21+ to enter) (I’ll put a sticker in the box too)

[CANARY @dustyf1n1sh]

they should sell a 30 rack of 2mg THC seltzers but it also has a small amount of caffeine so you can go ape shitt

[gmoney.eth @gmoneyNFT]

holy shit, he's going to run for president

[trash jones @jzux]

me when my friends are having a bad day: that’s your anxiety talking. i promise it won’t always feel like this and I love you no matter what

me when i have a bad day: this time i have finally realized the Truth. that i am bad and my life will never get better

[𝑴𝒐 𝑴𝒐𝒉𝒍𝒆𝒓 @MoMohler]

The fact that a dog took this photo makes it even more impressive.

[WELCOME TO BLACK TWlTTER  @blacktwiterthrd]

That’s how a pancake should look.

[. @mrw1sconsin]

After your grandma dies your family becomes retarded.

[Will Hicks @willpower36]

@SheaSerrano you have done it again. What a genius. Never would have guessed that but love it even more because of it.

Where can I get a poster of the cover art?

[𝔎𝔦𝔪𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔩𝔶 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝔫𝔬𝔩𝔦𝔞 @kimandgo]

I know yr supposed to reach out or whatever but how do u say "hey I have depression do u wanna hang out w a depressed person"

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The fittest young people in America are dying by suicide. Male college cross-country runners have the highest suicide rate of any sport. Suicide deaths among NCAA athletes have doubled over 20 years, and suicide is now their second leading cause of death after accidents.

A major 2024 medical review pulled together 218 studies on 14,170 patients with depression. Walking, jogging, yoga, strength training, and dance all worked. For mild and moderate cases, the effect was about the same as standard antidepressants. Vigorous workouts helped more than light ones.

None of that science is about willpower. Roughly 40 to 50 percent of someone's depression risk is in their genes, based on decades of twin studies in Sweden and the U.S. If a parent or sibling has had depression, your lifetime risk is two to three times higher than average. That piece of the disease is biology you cannot run off.

For severe depression, doctors do not prescribe exercise on its own. The main treatment guidelines in the U.S. and the UK treat exercise as something added on top of medication and therapy. In a 2025 study, researchers added regular supervised workouts to standard treatment for people with severe depression. The result was no extra improvement, because only 22 percent of patients managed to do the workouts. Severe depression destroys the energy needed to exercise in the first place.

The framing that depression "loves a soft body and an idle mind" has the cause and effect backwards. Depression itself drains the energy that exercise requires. The inactivity that results gets blamed for the disease, and the people most affected get shamed for being too sick to fix themselves. Exercise belongs in every depression treatment plan. Moralizing about soft bodies and idle minds does not, and it pushes the people who most need help further away.

[Uzi @UziCryptoo]

me on my way to work because i'm not smart enough to scam people, too shy to dance on Tiktok, too old for a sugar daddy and too stupid for crypto

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

[Poptimist Prime @Dill_Wodd]

I learned in this piece that Steve Kerr’s mom, Ann Zwicker Kerr, is 90 years old and still teaching Middle Eastern studies at UCLA. She’s also giving a commencement speech at University of Arizona this year… his family is cool as fuck

[osama @0ba0sama]

Americans after finding that a group of fish is called 'school'

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

if you're The Onion writers do you just give up at this point

[e! @ethxooo]

it’s so crazy how literally everyone ever except for 4 people is in this photo

[I talk hoops 🏀 @trendyhoopstars]

ON THIS DAY thirteen years ago, Shoni Schimmel knocked down this iconic shot over Brittney Griner, helping No. 5 seed Louisville take down the defending champions, Baylor, 82-81 in the Sweet 16.

Schimmel finished the night with a game-high 22 points. ✨

[Kamikazius the Wizard @MadKamikazius]

This will go into ant history as a moment of divine punishment, utterly incomprehensible in scale and method. Entire ant religions will be founded on this.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred.

Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads.

So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks.

The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034.

Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt.

These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it.

A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

[Josh Billinson @jbillinson]

Being a minor ensemble character on a beloved long running sitcom must rock if you don’t mind being defined by it forever.

The show went off the air 13 years ago and they’ll still put you on the glass at a Flyers game so they can get a photo of you eating a pretzel. The dream.