FYI iPhone users!
Oh… oh that’s disgusting.
For emphasis - YOU HAVE TO TURN THIS OFF FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL APP
You can get to all these faster (marginally) by going to Settings > Siri > Apps.
FYI iPhone users!
Oh… oh that’s disgusting.
For emphasis - YOU HAVE TO TURN THIS OFF FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL APP
You can get to all these faster (marginally) by going to Settings > Siri > Apps.
Museum of the Earth faces extinction under “imminent” threat of foreclosure - The Ithaca Voice
If you have ever been tempted by a Paleozoic Pal, like a a stuffed trilobite or a full size eurypterid body pillow, now’s the time to buy one, before they and a really lovely little museum are gone for good 😭😭😭
This was the museum I went to often in my childhood. I’m no longer able to visit unless I visit family, but this place holds a special place in my heart.
As stated in the article, they hold around 7 million artifacts- many of which are orphaned fossils, with the museum taking in collections that otherwise would have been trashed.
Please consider buying a Paleozoic Pal, but I’ll also leave a direct donation link as well.
THE GIANT EURYPTERID BODY PILLOW IS BACK IN STOCK
It’s really gratifying to see people sharing this and commenting about buying/donating; the Museum of the Earth really is a gem and the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) that runs it does critical work in collecting and preserving “orphan” fossil collections. To explain/expand on a couple things, the financial straits they’re in started a couple years ago when a $30 million donation fell through for reasons unknown. They severely restructured and downsized in 2023 to keep things going (including dramatically reducing staff and re-homing about 70 animal ambassadors from the Cayuga Nature Center which is also run by PRI, to ensure the animals got consistent care), but they are now in a critical spot with the mortgage and may be foreclosed on soon.
If you’re at all in the Finger Lakes area, I recommend dropping in on a weekend - they’ve got an incredible mastodon skeleton, a new Blaschka glass specimen exhibit, and a full right whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling; they do Fossil ID Saturdays where you can bring in what you’ve found and get an expert opinion, and they do mask-required days regularly as well.
From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 25-27:
Dispersals across the Pacific are more daunting still. Some species do exist on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, as we have seen. Marsupials live in the Americas (opossums and shrews) and in Australasia (kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, etc.). Intriguingly, a tiny arboreal marsupial from South America known as the monito del monte is more closely related to Australian marsupials than to its American cousins. Could this be the first terrestrial mammal to cross the Pacific? Recent research shows that marsupials originated in South America and migrated to Australia tens of millions of years ago, when there was a land connection via Antarctica or at least great proximity among these three landmasses. The same holds true for other lineages distributed on both sides of the Pacific, including birds, frogs, and turtles.
…
The only terrestrial vertebrate that seems to have survived a transpacific passage of six thousand miles is an iguana. The vast majority of iguanas are indigenous to the New World. Yet one genus called Brachylophus lives in the South Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga. How did it get there? A passage from Central or South America would have taken a minimum of six months and more likely a year or more. Like geckos, iguanas are well suited for oceanic dispersals. They are able to obtain water from the plants they eat and possess nasal salt glands and thick skins that protect them from dehydration. Their presence not only on the American continent but also on many surrounding islands demonstrates their ability to travel across stretches of ocean. The Galápagos Islands, for instance, lie about six hundred miles away from the coast of Ecuador and are home to no fewer than three species of land iguanas as well as one marine iguana that lives on land but dives into the ocean to procure food, foraging on seaweed and reaching exposed rocks completely surrounded by water.
Still, it is one thing to drift on logs for a couple of weeks and quite another to endure a six-thousand-mile passage. After several months adrift and no food left, any voyaging iguana would have perished. Nonetheless, some biologists have proposed a possible solution. The stowaways may have spent much of this journey as eggs. Brachylophus has an unusually long incubation period of seven, eight, or even nine months, one of the longest of any iguana. It is possible then that thirty or forty million years ago an unsuspecting group of iguanas, some in the form of eggs, may have dispersed by means of an epic rafting passage in which everything went right. Yet even if Brachylophus was somehow able to cross much of the Pacific, few other terrestrial vertebrates ever did until humans began making inroads in far more recent times.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the
fruitsvegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this
We need to appreciate our ancient food scientists
Everybody say thank you ancient food scientists!
I’ll start with the good news: These are the best years of your life. That’s right. You are currently at your overall happiest, most attractive, and most employable. (You were better looking in your twenties, but you were also a total nutcase.) This brings us to the bad news: Seriously, these are the best years of your life.
Go ahead. Take a long, hard look at your thirtysomething face in the mirror while you consider all that you have—but mostly have not—accomplished up until this point. Not exactly what you had in mind for your so-called prime, was it?
You thought by now you would have figured all your shit out and evolved into a superior version of yourself. A more financially and emotionally stable You. (You 2.0, if you will.) Someone who lives their passion every single day, has resolved all their childhood trauma, and is at least on their way to becoming debt- and mortgage-free.
Yeah, not quite. Instead, you’ll have to settle for working a job you barely remember applying for while being only slightly wiser and less neurotic than you were as a young adult, mostly because you no longer have the energy to give a shit about half the stuff you stressed over in your twenties. Also, switching from alcohol to edibles has helped.
Another way of looking at it is that your thirties are the least worst years of your life. Sure, you finally have some financial independence, just not the type where you can do things like travel out of state or fix your Camry’s leaky radiator. (Also, you still drive a Camry.) Most importantly, your thirties are when you start to figure out who you truly are as a person, even if you’re not exactly thrilled with what you find.
Your personal relationships are never going to be better than they are right now either. Which is a tough pill to swallow, considering you’re an absolute mess in that department. Just not as big a mess as you were when you first ventured into the confusing world of post-college dating, or will be once the mounting demands of middle age make it increasingly difficult to maintain friendships and devote quality time to your partner.
Yep, this right here is as good as it gets, sadly. Not that you don’t enjoy yourself from time to time. After all, you have your little hobbies, like hiking and napping. Nothing screams “I’m living my best life!” like staying in on a Friday night to watch YouTube videos of a guy eating expired military rations. Still, it must be disappointing to find out that the dials on your excitement meter barely make it past mild mirth, even at your zenith as a human being.
As underwhelming as it may seem, you better savor every mediocre moment of it because it could—and soon will—be worse. Think about what you have to look forward to next: your forties. The age at which all your bad habits become cemented as character traits. You’ll spend the entire decade trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you’re still “young of mind” while your rapidly declining body makes it abundantly clear that you’re on the back nine of your life. More like the back six if you factor in your family health history and poor lifestyle choices.
After that, it’s all downhill. Unless you make enough money—or, more realistically, inherit your parents’ money—to retire early to some beachfront location and turn back your biological clock by getting stem cell injections and testosterone replacement therapy. In which case, your fifties will be the best years of your life.