irawhiti

no tagging please lol

hey so uh. a little while back i was forced to leave where i lived for my own safety due to racist violence. i'm currently homeless living in an uninsulated caravan full of holes with my parents in the middle of nowhere (literally, it's over an hour to the nearest small town and 30 people live in an entire hour radius. i'm very remote.) with no electricity, water, or plumbing. we had a generator but it's been broken for several weeks now and we have EXTREMELY limited power because of it which means we have no heating at all. on top of that, since we have no heat or plumbing, if i want to take a shower i have to pay a minimum of $30 ish for petrol and the shower cost to get a lift into the nearest town and back. i can't really wash using a basin as often as i want to because of disabilities that are severely affected by cold and i'd have to wash out in the open in a field since we have no shed to wash in which is uhh... haha not ideal lol. as you can imagine. we don't really have any neighbours (they can still see us but they're not here right now) but it's extremely paranoia inducing. it also means i have to handwash all my clothes which has been causing issues with my disabilities too.

i hate to ask but could i please get some help to buy some warm clothes and bedding or something? several people on the block have contracted hypothermia in the past week and due to where we live we get hit with antarctic storms fairly frequently. i've been trying to stay positive but i'm honestly so fucking cold and getting increasingly malnourished, like i'm australian and all my clothes are only really good to keep warm if it's above like 15c/59f. it's also just very expensive just to exist here because it costs $40 in gas to get to the closest town we can actually buy groceries from + we need to buy and scavenge firewood wherever we find it because campfires are the only way we can heat up water or cook anything right now. i've been foraging and trapping invasive animals to supplement my diet but it's really not enough and i've been getting sick from malnourishment again. we also had e-coli in the household recently and three of us have gone into hospital (including myself) in the past month and i'm kind of at my limit. since we have no power i've had to pay a stupid amount for my phone bill and data also like everything is truly so fucking expensive.

pāypāl.me/hoodypet

please specify that it's for irawhiti, this is my friend's paypal. thank you so much if you can help me at all, i'm trying to take this shit in stride but i'm kind of absolutely fucked right now as much as i hate to admit it

irawhiti

if anyone needs proof here's my current living space

i mayn't have the means to donate atm signal boost please help them

puzzlingfrost

toonyballoony

our discord unanimously agreed that ratatouille is a mecha and I cried laughing after making this joke

oroichonno

More media like such organic mecha could be brought in, even outside ‘the west’.

subtly mecha other animal piloting a human

learnyouabiology

Fun Fact: Hagfish Suffocate their Predators with a Cloud of Slime!

(This week featuring my own art, bc I got a new thing and I wanna USE IT)

Sometimes, I come across an animal that makes me go: “Huh. That seems like a fictional monstrosity, fit only for tabletop roleplaying games and fantasy novels. Except I guess this one is real! Weird!”

The hagfish is one of those animals.

Hagfish are quite spooky to behold: Rather than looking like a fish, hagfish look more like scaleless, leathery-skinned worms with little tentacle-like things called barbells around what appears to be their mouth.

**Except the polite little opening that you can see in the drawing above is not its mouth. That’s its nostril.**

This is its mouth:

SCREAM

(~~ok that’s technically a tongue that has teeth on it, but it’s mouth-adjacent so I STAND BY MY STATEMENT~~). (drawing based on this picture from this paper)

THIS IS THE STUFF THAT NIGHTMARES ARE MADE OF (and I, for one, love it!)

You don’t need to worry too much about the hagfish’s nightmare mouth, though, since hagfish are pretty much only interested in eating things that are already dead (except maybe a few fish, so if you’re a fish, watch out, I guess).

Plus, they can go more than 6 months without eating and can survive without oxygen for 36 hours, so that’s nice.

(it’s hard to tell, but this is 2 hagfish eating a dead rockfish, plus a third hagfish possibly taking a nap. They’re having a lovely time!)

**These guys love a good whale carcass.**

Hagfish are a type of jawless fish which are categorised into the class Myxini. They are the only known animals with a skull but no vertebral column and possess 4 “hearts”: a systemic heart in the usual place, a portal heart that’s beside the 1st heart, a cardinal heart in the head, and a caudal heart near the tail. Technically, only the first 2 are considered “true hearts”, but Whatever! x

All of these things are very strange and wonderful, but the weirdest thing about hagfish, in my opinion, is possibly their most distinct feature.

They possess weaponized slime.

Remember that time a bunch of hagfish stole a car were dumped onto a highway in 2017? Everyone (human) was fine, but the slime was REAL (source: x).

This slimey car crash occurred because hagfish excrete slime when disturbed (they caused the slime part, I mean. The crash itself was something else’s fault). Considering the fact that a single hagfish can excrete a maximum of 24 litres of slime (given ideal circumstances) and that there were roughly *checks notes* 13′000 hagfish in the truck, you could end up with around *does some math*… 312’000 litres of slime!

For reference, that’s equivalent to approximately 1’560 bathtubs full of slime.

(my rough math can be found at the bottom of the post, if you’re curious).

That said, this crash probably didn’t feature 312′000 litres of actual slime. What the hagfish excretes is a relatively small amount of a substance which is a combination of mucus and long, thin proteins reminiscent of super-fine silk threads.

When this substance is mixed with water, it immediately expands 10′000 times its original volume!

The resulting slime is 99.996% water (source x). So, unless the truck was also carrying 312′000 litres of water to transport the hagfish in (which is doubtful), the slime probably wouldn’t have been able to reach that volume. (assuming they didn’t try to clean the mess up with water, which is… fully possible)

For my favourite demonstration of this, here’s an (admittedly old & grainy) video of someone transforming a beaker of water into a beaker of slime using a itty bit of mucus scraped from a hagfish.

(it’s cooler in the video, tbh)

What is all this slime even for? Well, mostly to protect the hagfish from predators!

Imagine if you bit into a sandwich and then 24 litres of slime suddenly exploded into your mouth. That would suck. A lot. You probably wouldn’t even finish the sandwich! Probably. I don’t know your life.

Understandably, predatory fish also hate to have a mouthful of slime, except it’s even worse for them, because the slime quickly gets tangled in the fish’s gills, which are important for gas exchange (aka being alive). It is for this reason that hagfish generally don’t get eaten, it seems!

(Ha! That’ll teach you to try to eat in the ocean! i love this paper tbh)

As far as I have been able to research, there are no recorded instances of hagfish being successfully eaten in the wild (though we have seen predators make unsuccessful attempts, resulting in them having an extremely bad time!)

(Thriving. Moisturised. In their lane. x)

While the slime sticks to the predator, the hagfish has an easy way to get the slime off its own body: they simply tie themself into a knot, wiping away the slime, and then goes about their day, unphased.

This has been Fun Fact Friday, bringing you nightmare fuel in this, the fine season of Halloween!

~~I know that it’s September, but if the dollar store can say that it’s already Halloween season THEN SO CAN I DANG NABBIT.~~

(bonus of that fish getting pwned, just bc I LOVE those pictures:

(Corrected) math under the cut:

Keep reading

olowan-waphiya

canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit

I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick

edgelessuniverse

She's right!!

Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."

But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.

People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.

But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.

Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.

You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .

canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit

Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!

mybigfatgaylife

There are many American chestnut trees still living outside their original natural range. Michigan, for example, has a large number of chestnut farms and is the biggest grower of chestnuts in the US. The species is listed as endangered but is not extinct.

spyderqueen

Where I grew up is considered oak/hickory forest now but was once oak/chestnut. Even the corpses of the chestnuts are gone now. It's a wood that takes a long time to decay and there was at least one fallen trunk still somewhat recognizable when I was a kid, but it too is just a mossy spot now. We're still seeing the impact of the loss on local wildlife.

If Darling 58 gets approved I'm going to have to see how many we can plant on the property.

olowan-waphiya

Reminder that the land the USA is on is stolen and colonized and that is why the chestnut tree nearly went extinct.

and that the chestnut tree was and is a big part of multiple indigenous cultures and that the people most likely tended and cultivated the trees for thousands of years.

nothing was an accident.

oroichonno

Let’s not forget oak trees & acorn kinds, which are just as important & versatile while having coexisted with the others above. Let’s bring back the chestnut kinds for more uses even beyond food & drink.

nuts & seeds will always be versatile as will their trees & plant parts the US civil war was abominable especially for what the south was really fighting for but it gave way to an interesting set of dishes & many coffee substitute kinds chicory coffee happens to be amongst them & is still popular even now chestnut & oak coffee anyone? acorn coffee also sounds pretty good ngl cultural learning indigenous conservation good news

science-for-the-masses

London Super Sewer gets underground flower garden

The artificial oasis 50m beneath London aims to reflect a healthier future for the River Thames once the new sewer opens.

BBC News

a W for London for once if true sewer garden underground garden if true a w for wildlife & possibly help cleaning sewers a little could help clean up sewers if real plants were to end up getting used as well

commajade

thegaymertrainer

That’s SO cool to see it explained

that's so cool omg cultural learning musical setups

commajade

daily-volcanology

It's time we decolonize the Cascadian volcanoes

daily-volcanology

If we can say Denali instead of Mt. McKinley then we can say Lawetlat'la instead of Mt. St Helens. The mountain is named Tahoma, not Rainier. Naming a mountain after Jefferson doesn't erase its true name of Seekseekqua.

One name tells of the thousand years indigenous history and culture of the tribes who live there. The other name tells me nothing but colonialism.

dustywave

Mt. Baker: Kulshan

Glacier Peak: Dahkobed

Mt. Rainier: Tahoma

Mt. St. Helens: Lawetlat'la

Mt. Adams: Klickitat

Mt. Hood: Wy'east

Mt. Jefferson: Seekseekqua

Three Sisters: Klah Klahne

ladyimaginarium

deenoverdami

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

evilscum

his name is Ibn Khaldun

inoue-takehiko

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

gettysburgaddress

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

badaam-buffness

I reblog this post every time I see it

kyraneko

We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?

deliriumcrow

In the middle ages, THE place to go for an education was the middle East, or, failing that, Spain. The Muslim world didn’t have the same limits placed on scientific inquiry that the Christian world did, and since they were willing to look at more than just Aristotole and actually compare texts to the observable world, they had some incredible scientific and mathematical advancements. And street lights and toilets. I mean theories and algebra are great and all, but street lights and toilets. In the 12th century. Also medical advancements, and fewer rules against women studying. Hell, women *should* be the ones studying the female body, would you rather a woman see your female relatives, or some old man? Would you rather have someone who lives in the same kind of body, or one who has no first hand idea what the parts can do?

mdmshakespeare

Europeans erased centuries of knowledge from the East because of fear. When we “rediscovered” it, we were still too egotistical to admit that non-whites could have been smarter, so we invented our own mythology.

Bring credit back where it’s due. Honor the true pioneers.

daarchini

It was also Muslim scholars who preserved and expanded upon the works of classic Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Socrates while Europe was in its dark ages. These Greek texts were widely translated into Arabic and made available to anyone who wanted to access them.

Europe would not have had its Renaissance or Enlightenment and ‘rediscovered’ art and philosophy and science had it not been for Muslim scholars and scientists.

in all honesty Southwest Asia was a vital bridge & foundation in many ways including for the STEM & HASS fields it still is so in different ways it's just plain ungrateful to be brushing off the real ones behind the studies & achievements

chippewa

penroseparticle

My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big

meduseld

“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner

burntcopper

A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’

‘…My school is older than your entire town.’

‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’

*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’

bedlamsbard

A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.

“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”

We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.

The answer. “Two hours.”

Oh.

derinthemadscientist

English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing

marzipanandminutiae

a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”

to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country

iguana-sneeze

China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.

ceescedasticity

My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone] tenth century addition.”

copperbadge

My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.”

blondegingersaxon

This post keeps getting better

kaimaciel

European problems include:

- Missing a turn and now you need to cross the border;

- Towns built 500 to 800 years ago with really small roads where cars can barely fit;

- That road/parking lot/etc they were building is gonna take twice the time to finish because they found Roman ruins AGAIN!

abz-j-harding

European problems extended:

WW2 bombs.

loverofmythology

I love this post but also hate it because people never acknowledge the structures of native and indigenous people in America and Canada. We literally have pyramids here in Illinois that are thousands of years old.

There is stuff here from the Aztecs, but since it wasn’t made by settlers people think that America is only as old as when Europeans came over.

The population that got wiped out and displaced by Europeans is still here and needs to be acknowledged. America and Canada aren’t “young” and have more history than most ppl acknowledge.

rivertalesien

RT only for the last post.

tackedtothewall

[Image description: headlines of WWII bombs either exploding unexpectedly in European towns and cities or being found during road works. /ID]

I went walking on some public footpaths in England and everyone was like “oh this one was a Roman roads, these are so ancient!” and I ended up cranky because there are ancient or at least hundred of year old roads in the Americas, we just don’t pay attention to them because Colonization.

To be clear - I don’t have any issue with OP’s statement (or even any of the reblogs). Im just cranky at the US educational system. And boomers, a little.