The Berenice pet cemetery is a pet cemetery in Berenike, Egypt, dating from the 1st–2nd century CE. It contains the remains of more than 580 individual animals including cats, dogs, and monkeys. It is among the oldest known animal cemeteries in the world. 🧵(1/5) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenic...

2,000-year-old animal cemetery in the Egyptian port city of Berenike that includes the remains of multiple macaque monkeys. In at least 36 cases, the bones belong to Indian rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). 🧵(1/4) www.popsci.com/science/roma...

"Ancient Greek philosophers Hippocrates and Plato described a (nonexistent) condition in which the womb “wandered” around inside a woman, causing emotional disturbances. Wandering womb later evolved into the even more popular diagnosis “hysteria” named after the Greek term for womb, hystera."

Happy #BatMas everyone! Follow this thread ⬇️ or check out the hashtag to find out about a new bat species everyday, for 25 days! 🦇🌎🧪 #BatSky🧵

In case you're not DEEP into science nerd lore, this is the SI wheel. A visual representation of the seven units that form the basis of our international system of units (known as the SI). MSL are the keepers of the SI here in #NZ (and I used to work at the UK equivalent lab!) 🧪⚛️

I work two days a week with the Measurement Standards Laboratory. Yesterday, we had a very fun Christmas lunch which included a quiz, a haiku competition, and a stealing secret Santa. The gift I brought was stolen the maximum number of times, so I'll take that as a compliment 😄 This was it:

“Researchers in Canada found we tend to blink less when we're listening to someone speak, especially when there's background noise.” #neuroskyence #scicomm www.sciencealert.com/want-to-know... 🧪

UNREMARKABLE POSTCARD SERIES, No. 104. Grand & Main. El Segundo, Calif. 1950s.

In 1865, when a British entrepreneur built a demonstration railroad near Beijing, Empress Dowager Cixi saw not progress but danger, had the tracks torn up & ordered that locomotive be replaced with horses. Within decades, imperial China would collapse. www.scmp.com/news/china/s...

The overton window shifted so far we now say Halo had simple graphics.

One of the UK’s most beautiful mushrooms to my mind, the Wrinkled Peach (Rhodotus palmatus) is much less rare than one might think. I’ve found it in at least 3 different locations. As appetising as it looks, and despite its name, this one is in fact not considered an edible - bitter and rubbery.

1) Bananas were first domesticated in Melanesia, especially New Guinea, between 7,000–10,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence from Kuk Swamp confirms early cultivation, with phytoliths showing deliberate planting of Musa acuminata 🧵(1/5) www.apscience.org.au/pbf_02_3/

Look up United Fruit Co. on Wikipedia and all you’ll see is “In addition to many other labor actions, the company faced two major strikes of workers in South and Central America, in Colombia in 1928 and the Great Banana Strike of 1934 in Costa Rica.”

Reading a book which is beating the thesaurus so bloody I believe the author should be charged with many crimes. They're not using the words incorrectly, and yet they're still using them WRONG!

These Pygmy Fruit-eating Bats are another one of my neighbors here at @casabentbill.bsky.social #CostaRica They cut along the midrib of banana leaves to make them collapse into a protected little house. And then they cuddle with each other and wonder why this strange man is looking at them. #bats

Cat in the Garden — Anastasia Trusova 2024 Acrylic on canvas

hi I just found out about planthopper nymphs

Daily sketch 🪾🍂🥷🐈‍⬛️ Can you spot the cat ? #art #artsky #ink #sketch

Have you been watching Cheetah Cub Cam (Smithsonian)? The babies are so huge now! Mom is so patient! 🧪

The burial mounds at the archaeological site of Vysokaya Mogila, a necropolis with a series of high-status burial mounds scattered across 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) was in use between the 4th & 3rd centuries B.C., & a number of artifacts have been discovered both in the burial mounds & outside them.

Moment Hawaii volcano eruption engulfs camera. 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

A study in Communications Earth & Environement reports that aluminum-rich float rocks from Jezero crater on Mars likely represent some of the wettest intervals of Mars’ history. go.nature.com/4ryEOCc 🔭 🧪

Smugglers, money launderers and sanctioned people once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork. Now, criminals have a far more practical alternative: stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar that exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/t...

I find these brief mini-fads to be fascinating. Sexy Algerians were on the rise around the same time and I wonder how different the Roaring Twenties would have been if, instead of flappers and sheiks, there had been flappers and veliki župan.

THE BEAUTIFUL UNKNOWN (1915) was part of Hollywood's brief craze for Balkan romances. Universal tended to skirt on the very edges of censorship, giving trade magazine readers an eyeful as a free sample

MacKenzie Scott: *donates $50M every 10 hours° Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir: "I want to see people hang"

Artomyces pyxidatus, the Crown-tipped Coral or Candelabra Coral fungus, was not seen in the UK over the entire 20th century, its last record in 1886 until a spate of recent findings around 2022, which is when I found this specimen (in East Kent). Where did it disappear all this time?

Crochet mandala street decorations, a collective creation by women in Licata, Italy #WomensArt (via Howtofeelgood. net)

From the @wsj.com chief foreign correspondent

A couple of pastels from my archive of artwork photos. I think these have both gone elsewhere else ages ago. #softpastel #pastel #stilllife #flowers

dig this guy's taste in art IG casitamxhome

Spent last week in India for a wedding, with a little bit of free time for exploring... and now back to cold Britain and marking!

Other countries aren't the only ones affected by the shuttering of usaid. Americans are too. (🧵1/5) Many organizations relied on grants from the Department of Agriculture to distribute produce to schools & low-income communities, directly from local producers. www.cbsnews.com/news/usda-gr...

"Betteridge's Law of Headlines" states that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'. if publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they'd have presented it as an assertion. They avoid accountability this way. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridg…

415 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty in India between 2005-06 and 2019-21. The World Bank indicates that around 171 million people were lifted from extreme poverty (at the older $2.15 PPP line) between 2011-12 and 2022-23.

OK, who narced?

The Évian Conference (1938) was meant to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. The Australian delegate T. W. White noted: "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89v...

While pretty much what everyone knows about him is that he wrote 'meditations' & 'stoicism'; Many don't know/have forgotten, that he had a son, Commodus. Yes, THAT one. He renamed Rome “Colonia Commodiana” & styled himself as Hercules. 🧵 (1/11) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus

Morocco has bullet trains. 'Al Boraq' is a 323 km (201 mi) high-speed rail service between Casablanca & Tangier. It opened on 15 November 2018. It is the first phase of the country's planned 1,500 km (900 mi) high-speed rail network. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Boraq

Experience: I found an old Rembrandt in a drawer

The Sanskrit word for the Oleander plant (Nerium oleander) is 'aśvamāra' (अश्वमार); which translates to "horse-killer". Aśva: meaning 'horse'. Māra: meaning 'killing' / 'slaying'. Oleander is native to a wide area spanning the Mediterranean & tropical Asia & the Indian subcontinent. 🧵(1/3)

The new GDT Frankenstein was disappointing. Purely because I went in expecting it to be faithful to the book. I get the Miltonian vibe he went for, but it really missed out on the emotional beats and philosophy of the book. There's no romance in the book. Elizabeth is Viktor's wife. (1/2)

Absolutely

3 specimens of Culiseta annulata caught; 2 females & 1 male. The species is cold-resistant & can survive Icelandic conditions by sheltering through winter in basements & barns. Iceland is warming, at 4x the rate of the rest of the northern hemisphere. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

even outside its original context, "action absorbs anxiety" is a killer mantra

Nelson's Victory crew included a Brazilian and a Russian, 2 Indians, 2 Swiss, 2 Portuguese, 3 Danes and 3 Norwegian sailors. There were 3 Germans, 4 Italians, 6 Swedes, 7 Dutchmen, 9 West Indians and an African, as well as 21 Americans, 63 Irish, 64 Scots, 441 English.... oh, and 3 French men, too.

WELL HOW ABOUT THAT "A millionaire levy in Massachusetts has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing significant high-profile departures from the state." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I keep pointing out that by lowering the bar for prosecuting former FBI Directors, Kash signed his own arrest warrant, but under Trump, not AOC or whoever.